Microsoft has a funny relationship with open source. The company says it wants to be a good neighbor (or does it??), but then devours competing technologies and locks customers into its platform.
In what looks like a nod to the former, the company today has entered into an agreement with Black Duck Software to run the projects on Microsoft's hosted CodePlex site through the Black Duck KnowledgeBase repository. That repository lets users detect and manage the use of open-source code in application development projects. The deal also will let developers search the CodePlex site via Black Duck's Koders.com code search engine. So now, developers looking to reuse Windows and .NET code components from CodePlex can verify that the code does not violate any intellectual property rights or open-source license agreements before using them.