Black Duck Announces Open Data Initiative

Black Duck Software has announced key updates to Ohloh.net, the company’s comprehensive online directory of open source projects, contributors and code, as well as a new code-searching capability.

At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2012 in Portland, Oregon, Black Duck said that effective immediately, Ohloh.net data has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence. In addition, the company announced availability of a public beta version of a new open source code search engine, Ohloh Code.

Investing in open source

These updates continue the company’s investment in developer resources designed to speed the development and adoption of free and open source software (FOSS), Black Duck officials said.

“Visible metrics help open source project teams better manage the operations of their projects, track progress, recruit new members and share their progress with others,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, who was on-site at OSCON. “Black Duck’s decision to open up the data in Ohloh will make it easier for open source projects to be more transparent about the success and activity of a project.”

Licensing Ohloh data under the broadly used Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence supports Black Duck’s mission to accelerate open source creation and adoption, the company said.

Ohloh provides a single aggregate source of information about the world’s open source projects from over 5,000 repositories and forges including GitHub, SourceForge and Google Code, as well as open source foundation repositories including Eclipse, Mozilla, Apache, and Linux. By freely licensing the metadata on the more than 550,000 FOSS projects in Ohloh to the broad open source community, Black Duck takes an important step in proliferating open data, a key benefit of open source, by providing a means to analyse the world of open source, the company said.

“Licensing Ohloh data under Creative Commons offers both enterprises and the open source community a new level of access to FOSS data, allowing trending, tracking, and insight for the open source community,” said Tim Yeaton, president and chief executive of Black Duck, in a statement.

“The more, better data that is available on the thousands of open source projects today, the easier it is to identify new patterns, trends and insights on the evolution of open source itself,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with market research firm RedMonk, in a statement. “While we’ve partnered with Black Duck in mining Ohloh data in the past to inform our analysis, making the data more widely available will add thousands of eyes to the data, and allow for collaborative research in ways that we haven’t seen before.”

Ohloh Code

Meanwhile, the new public Beta of the Ohloh Code search engine provides access to more than 10 billion lines of open source code and adds new filtering capabilities to speed up code search and selection.

Ohloh Code also introduces new integration with Ohloh project metadata, enabling developers to easily evaluate both the code and the project that it comes from. Black Duck claims that this integrated analysis tool is the first of its kind in the industry.

Black Duck’s existing FOSS code search engine, Koders.com, will be transitioned into Ohloh Code in the coming months. Both the beta version of Ohloh Code and Koders.com will be available throughout the transition.

In addition to licensing Ohloh data under Creative Commons and creating and integrating the site’s new code search feature, other updates to Ohloh include: Redesigned project profile pages, enhanced project tagging, streamlined method to add projects, links to Facebook and Twitter from project pages, additional recognised languages, and numerous other performance and usability improvements.

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