04.29.08 :: IT Business Edge - Black Duck Adds Koders.com to Its Arsenal

04.29.08 :: SDA India - Black Duck Takes Control of Koders 

04.29.08 :: SD Times - Black Duck acquires Koders code search engine 

04.28..08 :: Dr Dobbs - Black Duck Acquires Koders 

For the thoughts of Doug Levin, President and CEO of Black Duck Software, visit his personal blog at - http://bduck1.blogspot.com/2008/04/black-duck-software-acquires-koders-inc.html

Black Duck Software Acquires Software Code Search Leader Koders

Expands Portfolio for Open Source Search and Lifecycle Management
WALTHAM, Mass., April 28, 2008—Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, today announced it has acquired the assets of Koders as well as the company’s popular on-line search engine for open source software and other web-downloadable code. Black Duck will improve the free online search site and incorporate Koders’ search capability into its highly successful open source product portfolio. With the acquisition, Black Duck’s offerings will save software development teams time and money by accelerating their ability to find, reuse and manage open source software.

Over 30,000 developers each day rely on Koders.com to search over 766 million lines code written in over 30 languages and identified with 28 software licenses. Koders.com is a web site where software developers can find reusable open source code, methods, examples, algorithms and solutions. Reusing open source software frees developers from spending time “reinventing the wheel” enabling them to complete projects faster.

“The use of open source software as a way to speed development and reduce cost is transforming software development organizations. To realize the full potential of open source, developers require a solution for both search and management,” said Douglas Levin, President and CEO of Black Duck Software. “The combination of Koders software code search engine with Black Duck’s Code Center and protexIP products will allow us to uniquely meet developer needs.”

Black Duck will enhance the Koders search database with code and metadata from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, the industry’s most complete database of open source and third-party code, containing more than 520 million code files, representing many billions of lines of code.

“Black Duck is the ideal company to take over the Koders technology and our developer community,” said Darren Rush, founder and CEO of Koders. “Koders has attracted a larger and more loyal audience than any service of its type because of the quality of our results, and now Koders is strategically positioned within the larger context of open source component reuse. With this acquisition, we step ahead and become part of a comprehensive family of developer productivity solutions.”

Black Duck now offers the industry’s most comprehensive array of capabilities for incorporating open source software into application development.

• Code search: With Koders, Black Duck gains a powerful code search engine that can search for specific code functions or solutions in repositories across the Internet.

• Component search: Black Duck Code Center enables development teams to search a KnowledgeBase containing hundreds of thousands of open source components. Developers can internally publish a catalog of approved open source components to facilitate reuse within their own organizations. As previously anticipated, Black Duck Code Center was released in the first quarter of 2008 for general availability.

• Fragment/File search: Black Duck protexIP™ automates the review of code and finds unapproved code fragments, files or entire components that were integrated into a code base without adhering to a company’s open source review policies. This capability can be used to uncover licensing violations, security issues, unsupported open source and outdated code.

“Open source becomes a key resource as organizations become increasingly constrained financially given a difficult economy – yet this resource must be managed and governed well,” said Melinda Ballou, program director of the Application Life Cycle Management service at IDC, a research and advisory firm headquartered in Framingham, MA. “Combining an effective search engine with management capabilities to validate code quality, security and compliance helps to support effective open source usage, to supplement internal and outsourced development.”

About Black Duck Software

Black Duck Software is the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development and maintenance costs while mitigating the risks and challenges associated with open source reuse, including hidden license obligations, security vulnerabilities, unsupported open source and version proliferation. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, as well as distribution partners throughout the world. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

# # #

Black Duck, Know Your Code, protexIP, transactIP and the Black Duck logo are registered trademarks of Black Duck Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. exportIP and Koders are trademarks of Black Duck Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders

Press Contacts

Many Koders Enterprise and Pro customers are leveraging open source to improve productivity and build more robust applications.  However, legal issues can arise when composite applications which use open source are distributed.  As mentioned in the previous post regarding the GPL & GPL3 Affero, open source licensing issues can be a significant risk for your organization whether you distribute software or run web web-based services.

To help provide more visibility into what licenses your organization might be using, we’re providing the ‘Open Source License Usage By Project’ report as a free download for Koders customers (and free trial users).  The report shows a breakdown of open source licenses and number of affected files for each project you’ve indexed.

Links to the Koders Open Source License directory allow your team to research more detail on new or unfamiliar licenses.

In addition to helping your legal team assess potential risks, this report also demonstrates the power and simplicty of the Koders Extensible Reporting Framework.  With a few lines of XML and basic knowledge of SQL, you can create custom reports for your code base.  Click here to download and install the report here.

Is your organization dealing with open source licensing issues?
Click here to take the Open Source Hot Topics survey

Thousands of intelligent and hard-working technical professionals come to koders.com everyday to find, study, learn and use Open Source code in their ongoing quest to fix, improve and create great software. With such a fantastic audience, we thought it was only natural to provide another valuable service to our users. Visit jobs.koders.com and check it out.

We’re running a special during the month of January to our loyal users: 25% OFF all new job posts. Use promo code JA2008 when ordering up your post. Jobs.koders.com is fast becoming the best place for the worlds top developers to connect with great tech opportunities. Post your job today!

The GPL3 Affero License has finally been released.  Lora Bentley provides an overview of the license, you can access the text of the Affero here and of course there is a Wikipedia entry. 

Affero addresses a specific objective that, due to some debate, was ommitted from the regular GPL3 license.  In particular, Affero seeks to apply the copyleft provisions for distributed software to software run as a service over the network - this has been referred to as the “ASP Loophole”.  Prior to Affero, websites, SaaS businesses, and anyone who utilized open source software to provide service over the network but did not explicitly distribute software could avoid the source code re-distribution requirements of the GPL.  Now with Affero, if your website integrates Affero-licensed components, you are required by the terms of the license, to distribute your source code along with it.

Affero is designed to target SaaS firms, beneficiaries of open source such as Google and others whom the Free Software Foundation believes should be contributing to open source at a level on-par with their gains from it. 

Creating an Open Source Policy

There are relatively few open source projects using Affero today, but that number is sure to grow.  If you’ve not yet established a policy for your own firm’s use of open source, now is a good time to start.  Affero provides very clear objectives and most firms should be able to establish whether this is a compatible or in-compatible license for their teams to use.

If you’d like a framework for creating your own open source policy to share with your developers, you can start simply by grouping known licenses into 3 buckets: Approved, Non-Approved and Requires Approval.  You can even download this list of the most common open source licenses, color code them and paste it on the wall for your team.  Easy.

Of course as you and your legal team understand more about open source, your policy and implementation will likely get more sophisticated. 

For updates on new open source licenses and tips on managing open source in your application development, create a Koders account to join our mailing list.

 Does your team have a policy for open source that you’d like to share with the community?  Share it here.

For the second time in our company’s history Amazon is partnering with Koders – this time for code search. As of October 05 you can search Amazon Web Services (AWS) code directly here on Koders.com. Including AWS code in our index enables AWS to reach millions of Koders.com users who frequent our site to find reusable source code or to learn from others how to solve particular programming challenges. As an aside - for those of you who have been following our company for a while you might remember that Amazon’s A9 group selected Koders back in 2005 as one of the founding partners to launch OpenSearch, the standard for the publication of search results suitable for syndication.

Check out these AWS projects now searchable from koders.com:

Sample Applications in Ruby for Amazon FPS

VB.Net Library for Amazon E-Commerce Service

C# Library for Amazon E-Commerce Service

Java Library for Alexa Web Search

This ongoing collaboration with Amazon is very important to Koders in that it validates code search as a new category that simply did not exist on this scale when we first launched in 2004. Being selected by yet another major developer network speaks volumes as we continue on our path to helping you gain access to code – no matter where it resides. And for those of you who keep track; our work with Amazon goes hand in hand with our partnership with IBM developerWorks announced just a few days ago and our being selected to power code search for the EMC developer community at http://codesearch.developer.emc.com/

To wrap up; searching open source code clearly is important. But even more important is being able to quickly navigate and find reusable internal code, meaning code within your organization or within your team. In case you haven’t yet tried our Koders Pro Edition yet feel free to download it right here, and start searching your internal code in minutes: http://www.koders.com/gopro

IBM developerWorks (dW) code can now be searched by millions of Koders users, significantly increasing the reach of and access to dW resources.

Santa Monica, CA (PRWEB) October 8, 2007 — Koders™ Inc., the leader in open source and enterprise code search, today announced it has been selected to search source code from developerWorks, IBM’s premier technical resource for software developers. The inclusion of developerWorks code in the Koders open source index provides millions of Koders users with an additional resource and helps IBM to reach a previously untapped community of developers who are seeking reusable code for their projects and examples of existing solutions to programming challenges.

IBM developerWorks partnered with Koders because of Koders’ experience indexing large code bases in multiple version control repositories. The primary goal at dW is to empower developers with the resources they need to build and deploy applications across heterogeneous systems, and Koders is a critical component of this distribution strategy.

“By opening up dW resources to Koders users IBM once again demonstrates market leadership and innovation”, said Darren Rush, CEO of Koders. “We are honored that IBM selected Koders to search the developerWorks code and we look forward to helping IBM contribute to the open source community”. All of the dW code resources are now available from Koders, including high-profile projects such as End-to-end Ajax Application Development, Cook up Web Sites Fast With CakePHP, Ajax and XML: Five Common Ajax Patterns, and ClearCase: The Ten Best Scripts. For more information about the IBM developerWorks partnership with Koders, visit http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ondemand/koders

With the addition of IBM dW code, the Koders open source index now includes well over 700 million lines of high-value code aggregated from public repositories, corporate developer networks, and projects contributed by individual programmers. Koders recently upgraded its core search technology and navigation to help software developers find more relevant and reusable code; in addition to offering optional programming language and license filters, Koders search results are automatically parsed so that users may easily find interface, class and method definitions that address their immediate needs. Additional developer tools available from Koders include free IDE plugins for Visual Studio and Eclipse, free code search widgets that can search individual open source projects, and the Koders Pro Edition for individual developers and teams.

About IBM developerWorks
developerWorks is IBM’s premier technical resource for software developers, providing a wide range of tools, code, and education on AIX and UNIX®, IBM Systems®, Information Management, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, WebSphere®, and Workplace, as well as on open standards technology such as Java™ technologies, Linux®, SOA and Web services, XML, and more. By providing focused and relevant technical information for developers, we offer choices you can apply to building and deploying applications across heterogeneous systems. Using developerWorks, you can take full advantage of open standards and the IBM Software Development Platform in an on demand world. For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/developerworks

PRWEB Press Release

I think it’s safe to say that the revolution actually began when we launched Koders.com in 2004.  But today marks a huge milestone for our evolution as a company and for the advancement of code search.  With the introduction of Koders Pro Edition today, teams can expand the scope of code searches to include not just open source, but also the valuable code that exists inside the firewall.  As we reached the end of our beta period, I blogged about some of the feedback our team received from our users.  While the uses for Pro go well beyond our original vision for the product, one thing is very clear - Code Search is becoming a mandatory part of the software development tools stack.

At the core of this advance is recognition by developers like you, that great software is built when we leverage the knowledge and sweat of those who have come before us.  Being able to quickly identify, evaluate and integrate existing code, modules, and services is core to building great applications.  We believe that Koders Pro can help your team to build better software, faster, and with fewer defects than ever before.

To make sure that your team can benefit, we made sure Koders Pro integrates easily with some of the best development tools out there.  IDE plugins, version control adapters, widgets and web services make integration incredibly easy.  As our users come up with enhancements and additional integrations, we will be sure to post them here, so keep an eye out.

Koders Pro has lots of other goodies like auto-complete, web service APIs, and killer reports too, but I’ll let you pour over the details here.  And of course, it’s a free download so you you can try it out today.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank all those who helped make this release possible.  It takes a small army to get software out the door, and contributions from developers, editors, testers, reviewers, and support from our friends, family, peers, and most of all you - the members of the Koders Community made all this possible.  My special congratulations to the core team who invested so much of themselves in this effort: Ben, Dianna, Igor, Alex, Max, Phil, and Mike.

- Thank You,

Darren Rush
Founder and Chief Koder

Proven Code Search Technology Now Available As Software Plus Services For Private Code.

Santa Monica, CA (PRWEB) September 12, 2007 — Koders Inc., the leading provider of source code search solutions for software developers and enterprises, today released the Koders Pro Edition, a self-service solution for individuals and teams to search their private code bases.

Koders Pro Edition enables software developers to instantly find, reuse and share source code located on their computers and in networked version control systems. For development teams, Koders Pro creates unprecedented access to existing code assets and provides visibility into distributed code repositories.

Koders Pro is now available for download at http://www.koders.com/gopro. Once deployed, Koders Pro can be shared using email or instant messenger. By releasing Koders Pro as software plus services, Koders is empowering developers to adopt and distribute code search best practices inside the enterprise.

“Source code captures the collective intelligence of an enterprise, and effective search turns a code base into a knowledge base by breaking down barriers that hinder productivity and collaboration,” said Darren Rush, CEO and Founder of Koders. “With Koders Pro Edition, developers now have the means to navigate and leverage this collective intelligence.”
Koders Pro Edition enables software developers to:

• Instantly search multiple version control systems from Eclipse, Visual Studio or any web browser
• Easily share code with team members and colleagues
• Generate source code metrics across repositories
• Identify opportunities for reuse with comprehensive reporting and analytics

Koders Pro installs in minutes and is easily configured to index code in version control and file systems. It is fully functional without the need to provision any additional hardware or software. Koders Pro also includes APIs and web services that integrate with existing ALM tools and enterprise content search products such as the Google appliances and Microsoft SharePoint.

After a 30-day trial period, Koders Pro users can upgrade to annual support subscriptions for $99/year. Koders Pro is pre-configured to index CVS and Subversion, as well as any code in a file system. Support for IBM/Rational ClearCase, Perforce, Microsoft Team System & Visual SourceSafe, Serena Dimensions, SourceGear Vault, Borland StarTeam, and other repositories is also available.
“Koders Pro allows developers to get started with enterprise code search today,” said Rush. “Our suite now scales to meet the needs of any development organization.”

Thousands of developers downloaded Koders Pro during the beta test phase which concluded last week. Koders Pro Edition is built upon the same technology that powers the Koders Enterprise Edition, a code search engine used by Fortune 100 telecommunications, software and financial services companies.

PRWEB Press Release