Black Duck Unveils Ohloh Open Data Initiative, Launches Beta Code Search Capability

PORTLAND, Ore., July 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- OSCON -- Black Duck Software today announced significant updates to Ohloh.net, the world's most comprehensive online directory of open source projects, contributors and code. Effective immediately, Ohloh.net data has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. In addition, the company announced availability of a public Beta version of a powerful new open source code search engine, Ohloh Code. These updates continue the company's investment in developer resources designed to speed the development and adoption of free and open source software (FOSS).

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111013/NE85619LOGO)

Ohloh Open Data Initiative

"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 for the Eclipse Foundation.  "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 widely respected and broadly used Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license supports Black Duck's mission to accelerate open source creation and adoption. 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 the 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 analyze the world of open source.

"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 CEO of Black Duck Software. "We are constantly looking for ways to help the open source developer community and enterprise consumers of open source. We're proud to freely license Ohloh data under this respected license, and believe that making this resource more accessible will allow contributors and consumers of open source gain unique insight, leading to more rapid development and adoption."

"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 RedMonk. "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 Search

The new public Beta of the Ohloh Code search engine provides access to over 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. 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, updates to Ohloh also include:

• Redesigned project profile pages
• Enhanced project tagging
• Streamlined method to add projects
• Links to Facebook and Twitter from project pages
• Additional recognized languages
• And numerous other performance and usability improvements

For more information, please visit http://meta.ohloh.net. To access these new features, please visit http://www.ohloh.net, and for the Ohloh Code code search Beta, http://code.ohloh.net.

For more information about Black Duck, please visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

About Black Duck

Offering award-winning software and consulting, Black Duck is the partner of choice for open source software adoption, governance and management. Enterprises of every size depend on Black Duck to harness the power of open source technologies and methods.  As part of the greater OSS community, Black Duck connects developers to comprehensive OSS resources through Ohloh.net, and to the latest commentary from industry experts through the Open Source Delivers blog. Black Duck also hosts the Open Source Think Tank, an international event where thought leaders collaborate on the future of open source. Black Duck is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Mateo, St. Louis, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing. For more information about how to leverage open source to deliver faster innovation, greater creativity and improved efficiency, visit www.blackducksoftware.com and follow us at @black_duck_sw.

SOURCE Black Duck