Black Duck Software, a provider of software compliance management solutions, has announced that the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to the implementation of an extensible development platform, has purchased and deployed Black Duck's protexIP/development platform. Eclipse uses protexIP to review software submitted by committers and ensure it is in compliance with the specific software licensing requirements of the Eclipse Foundation.

Eclipse is a community of open source projects, each comprised of its own group of independent developers. The process of open source software development regularly involves the assembly of open source code with invented and reused components, and as a result, various licenses can govern various parts of an application. The open nature of Eclipse's projects elevates the need for Eclipse to evaluate the copyrights governing their code bases.

"Companies worldwide are capitalizing on applications developed by the Eclipse community, and many software vendors sell products that are dependent on Eclipse," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse Foundation. "For that reason, it is absolutely vital for us to analyze our code before we release it to our community."

protexIP compares software code to the protexIP KnowledgeBase, the most complete database of information on open source software components, code and license obligations available today. It contains information on tens of thousands of open source projects from more than 2,000 sites worldwide; and more than 650 open source and commercial licenses.
"The Eclipse Foundation represents some of the most innovative work in application development today, as teams of developers are working together to create tools and frameworks that will help build better business applications," said Douglas A. Levin, CEO of Black Duck Software. "Eclipse's purchase of protexIP makes sense given the decentralized and very successful nature of the community's process. Eclipse now has greater certainty that the licenses governing the code are in order."