Black Duck Joins The Linux Foundation
BlackDuck joins Linux consortium to collaborate with industry’s leading open source legal experts
SAN FRANCISCO – September 10, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Black Duck Software has joined as a Foundation member. Black Duck provides solutions for software development teams and legal counsel to manage the hybrid software development process, which involves the assembly of internal software, open source software and other third-party code.
As more and more companies include open source in their applications, they are creating policies to manage the proper use of the code, taking into account legal obligations on copyrights. Black Duck will work with the Linux Foundation and its members to collaborate on legal programs that support software development including Linux and open source. The Linux Foundation is home to legal summits that provide an important vendor-neutral forum for leading in-house counsels from member companies HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat and now Black Duck, among others.
“Corporate counsels, outside law firms and internal software development teams have relied on Black Duck’s solutions for many years; indeed many very large enterprises have deployed Black Duck’s solutions to save developer time and reduce cost by providing a framework for hybrid development,” said Bill McQuaide, executive vice president of products and services at Black Duck Software. “For this reason, we look forward to lending our expertise to The Linux Foundation, which provides a forum for bringing users, vendors and developers together to discuss the evolving legal landscape in the open source software market.”
“Understanding the legal nuances of software has been an important topic for proprietary and open source software users and vendors for decades,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president, marketing and developer programs at The Linux Foundation. “But until now, companies didn’t have a neutral forum in which to discuss these seemingly sensitive matters. We’re happy to welcome Black Duck to participate in these valuable discussions.”
The next Linux Foundation Legal Summit will take place October 14 – 15, 2008 at IBM’s Hawthorne, New York facility. This event follows the Legal Summit in April of this year that took place at Motorola Customer Briefing Center in Schaumburg, Ill. The first LF Legal Summit was held October 25 – 26, 2007 in Boston and focused on effective ways to collaborate in the development of compliance, education programs, and evolving intellectual property rights policies optimized to support open development models.
For more details on this fall’s Legal Summit, please visit us here.
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. For more information, please visit www.linux-foundation.org.
###
Trademarks: The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Third party marks and brands are the property of their respective holders.