Black Duck Buys Koders

by Mike Gunderloy - Apr. 28, 2008Comments (2)

You may not be familiar with Black Duck Software - but if you're an open source developer, you're liable to hear more about them in the future. That's because they just announced their purchase of the Koders search engine, which currently searches over three quarters of a billion lines of open source code. I had a chat last week with management of both firms, and here's what's going on.

Black Duck's business is helping development organizations manage their software assets, with a specific focus on knowing what your open source content and licensing obligations are. They make products that can, for example, go through an existing code base (even a huge one) and report on what open source pieces it contains. There are a variety of use cases for this. For example, you can monitor your nightly builds to see what your developers have been up to, or you can inspect the code you're acquiring as part of a merger process to make sure you're buying what you think you are.

Black Duck also helps companies find, approve, and manage open source assets for use in their development process. Obviously, the fit with Koders is good here. Current Black Duck users should expect to find the Koders search engine tightly integrated into future revisions of their products.

And what about Koders? The news is good here for open source developers as well. Executives from both companies assured me unequivocally that Black Duck is committed to keeping Koders freely available to the community, and even enhancing it (for example, by incorporating some of the code and metadata from Black Duck's own extensive database) for the future.