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Quacking Through Licensing Complexity

Black Duck’s open source licensing solution tackles GPLv3

By David Worthington

August 6, 2007 — Think the latest version of the GPL is confusing? Just try to keep track of the software components that are governed by version 3 versus those that are not. If that doesn’t make one’s head spin, the task will be compounded by the presence of other open source license schemes, including the Apache, BSD and Open Source Initiative (OSI) licenses.

Black Duck Software claims it has the answer to the problem of staying in compliance with a flock of licensing requirements—whatever they may be. Black Duck released protexIP/development 4.4 on Aug. 6, approximately one month after GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) was finalized.

The 4.4 release is designed to help organizations incorporate code from open source projects and distinguish projects that have explicitly switched to GPLv3 from those that have not. GPLv3 is not wholly compatible with earlier versions of the GPL—most prominently, certain GPLv2 licenses—making it difficult to ensure that components’ licenses do not conflict.

Users may now add comments about specific license requirements and use LDAP directories to manage access to the system. The administration GUI has been updated and provides an overall view of protexIP server functions, including access and usage data.

BlackDuck CEO and president Doug Levin explained that the company monitors more than 3,500 open source sites on the Internet. Code from projects is entered into a central database and converted into smaller representations of the original code. protexIP identifies code in customer projects and links it to the license that governs it.

The technology centerpiece of protexIP is the company’s KnowledgeBase library that archives licensing details for more than 140,000 open source and vendor-added software components. Customer library repositories receive updates via the Web each month.

Specifically, KnowledgeBase includes entries on patent licensing grants, express provisions that provide patent licenses pertaining to the work, patent retaliation clauses, and anti-DRM clauses that prevent the use of code as a technical protection measure.

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