Red Hat and Black Duck have set aside their color differences and will jointly offer intellectual property rights management software and services for commercial and enterprise Linux developers. The two companies will also collaborate on seminars discussing best practices for IP risk mitigation, will jointly offer risk assessment services.

Black Duck has launched two services to help commercial software developers, enterprise buyers, and Linux developers manage software intellectual property (IP). Black Duck's protexIP service is based on software that runs on customer premises to identify potential license conflicts by scanning source code for snippets of open source software (OSS). Black Duck's other service is a registry for source code that passes its OSS scan.

Red Hat's partnership with Black Duck is part of its Open Source Assurance program, launched in January. The program also includes an Intellectual Property Warranty — a promise to replace any code found to infringe copyright, to guarantee continuous use — as well as the Open Source Now Fund, a legal defense fund established in August, 2003.

Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said, “Red Hat is committed to preserving the creative spirit of developers, fortifying the confidence enterprise users have in Linux and open source, and increasing the value of Red Hat subscriptions.”

 
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