'Software compliance management' is a new discipline that focuses on the intellectual property aspect of software development. Black Duck is in the forefront, offering a platform to the market in the form of an information service which it sells as a subscription, with two dozen customers already across the USA and internationally.

Black Duck president and CEO Douglas Levin talks to Roger Strukhoff, SYS-CON West Coast Bureau Chief, about Black Duck's ties to Red Hat, its membership of OSDL and the OSSI, and about its strategic alliance with SpikeSource.

View Levin Interviewed by Roger Strukhoff Live on SYS-CON.TV

Best practices in software compliance management involve developers, marketers, and lawyers working together to govern software assets without bogging down development or limiting its possibilities, says Levin. Black Duck, he adds "allows companies to proactively and confidently combine homegrown, third party, and open source software to build applications that meet internal or market needs - without putting assets at risk."

Open source is leading to a levelling of the world, Levin believes. Government agencies and small companies can have a competitive advantage by adopting open source by lowering their total cost of ownership, he adds.

From 1987 to 1995, Levin held various senior management positions with Microsoft Corporation including heading up worldwide licensing for corporate purchases of non-OEM Microsoft software products. So he knows all about proprietary software from the inside: "We sold a large quantity of software through the reseller channel."

View Levin Interviewed by Roger Strukhoff Live on SYS-CON.TV

Prior to founding Black Duck, Levin served as the CEO of MessageMachines (acquired by NMS Communications in 2002) and X-Collaboration Software Corporation (acquired by Progress Software in 2000). From 1995 to 1999, he worked as an interim executive or consultant to CMGI Direct, IBM/Lotus Development Corporation, Oracle Software Corporation, Solbright Software, Mosaic Telecommunications, Bright Tiger Technologies, Best!Software and several other software companies.

Black Duck is going to be a very successful company, Levin says, because it's getting great feedback from its customers. "Over the coming years we think that the open source industry will expand significantly - including SourceForge, which currently has 1 million members and more than 100,000 projects. We believe by the summer of 2006 there will be close to 200,000 projects and perhaps 2 million members. That represents sizeable growth."

"With respect to Linux, we are going to see a very significant adoption of Linux on the desktop in the coming years," Levin says, "not as immediate as Linux adoption on the server. When there is a really viable alternative to the incumbent - as we've seen with Firefox - companies and individuals adopt it in wholesale numbers."