A company offering intellectual property management tools is offering free access through the end of the year to a hosted code scanning service. Black Duck says ProtexIP/OnDemand can be used to identify open source software within intellectual property assets.

Black Duck is an early leader in the fledging market for open source software license management and compliance tools. It first announced its ProtexIP tools as a client-server software package aimed at corporate legal and development teams. The company has attracted considerable funding, and brought out code registry services, as well as custom license management services. Recently, the company adapted its ProtexIP tools to work with distributed development tools from SourceForge, and with cross-vendor development tools from the Eclipse Project.

Another vendor, Palamida, offers similar code scanning tools called IP Amplifier. Palamida is a much smaller company, and compared to Black Duck, appears focused mainly on tools for developers, rather than for both development and legal teams. Palamida recently won a big Cisco contract.

Black Duck says its free offer lets registered users securely scan projects up to 25MB in size. Registrants must be authorized to accept a limitation of service agreement on behalf of their company.

Black Duck says it is offering the free service in order to “encourage wider, legally-compliant use of open source software by enabling enterprises, governments, and other software development organizations and their legal counsel to accurately baseline their current use of open source.”

CEO Douglas A. Levin said, “[Free use of] our protexIP/OnDemand system will give companies a clear picture of what open source they are already using, and help them to set the stage for broader, compliant, and managed use of open source in the future.”

Additional details, including a registration form, can be found here.

 
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