Palamida, Black Duck advance IP wares at LinuxWorld

Palamida and Black Duck Software, both of which provide intellectual property compliance services, are using the occasion of the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco this week to reveal product expansions.

Intellectual property compliance has become more critical, with companies using open source software and seeking to verify that they are not violating any use terms for code developed elsewhere.

Palamida is announcing Palamida IP Authorizer v1.0, which is a Web-based application to automate the process by which enterprises can incorporate third-party code into software development projects. The product features a multitier customizable workflow and a central system for developers to request permission to use third-party products and licenses.

“This is just a natural extension of what our company has been doing, which is a detection scheme,” said Palamida CEO Mark Tolliver. Palamida previously utilized a user’s own, often manual, code approval processes; IP Authorizer automates those processes.

With IP Authorizer, developers enter information such as the planned use of the product and implementation details, whereupon the software notes license and product details associated with the requested use, including a description, copyright notice, and other disclaimers.

New requests are compared to a database of previous requests and the company’s IP policy. Instant approvals or denials are furnished, with a detailed explanation and customizable use requirements. A customizable user interface is featured, as well as accommodations with standard corporate security requirements.

IP Authorizer verifies information by accessing Palamida’s knowledge base of information on more than 120,000 open source projects. A user’s corporate policies also are factored into the equation.

The product is available now, with prices starting at $15,000 for an annual subscription for small workgroup configurations. It requires 1GB of memory with a single 1.3GHz or dual 500MHz Pentium or equivalent processor, 36GB of hard disk memory and a DVD-R drive. A Web server also is needed; the software runs on multiple application servers.

Black Duck is announcing that its protexIP knowledge base has been expanded recently by more than 10,000 commercial product versions from more than 1,000 companies. Black Duck has added more than 30 million software component signatures, or “code prints,” which are comprised of a few lines of code, a code segment or a code tree for use in tracking the reuse of commercial software components.

Black Duck also has incorporated code prints of all source and binary code published by Dr. Dobb’s Journal and C/C++ Journal and added them to the knowledge base.

Black Duck also now can recognize code from CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network).

“During the first six months of 2006, Black Duck has added tens of thousands of open source components and now as a result of this announcement has added tens of thousands of commercial components,” said Doug Levin, Black Duck president and CEO.

In total, the Black Duck knowledge base holds approximately 71 gigabytes of code, Levin said.