Microsoft Teams up With Black Duck Software

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by Peter Galli on May 18, 2009 03:30pm

Microsoft and Black Duck Software this morning announced an agreement under which projects from CodePlex will be fed automatically into Black Duck's open source KnowledgeBase repository, and which will also will be searchable through Koders.com, a search engine for open source and other downloadable code.

This means that those customers who use the Black Duck KnowledgeBase to leverage, manage and detect the use of open source components in software application development projects, will now get comprehensive coverage of CodePlex-hosted projects, many of which are Windows .NET based.

Developers will also now be able to use Black Duck's Koders.com search search engine for CodePlex projects. While not all of the 9,000 CodePlex projects will be searchable in Koders as of today, most are expected to be by the end of June.

You can read the news release here.

Given that Black Duck's KnowledgeBase is a useful resource for development managers tasked with managing open source code in mixed-source development environments, the addition of CodePlex projects makes this a more powerful development resource, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft's Senior Director of Platform Strategy.

Black Duck, which is a Microsoft Visual Studio Industry and Windows Embedded Partner, scours the Internet, collecting open source and other downloadable code into its KnowledgeBase, a searchable repository of more than 200,000 open source projects collected from more than 4,100 Internet sites. More than 40,000 new projects have been added to the KnowledgeBase since January 2009.

As CodePlex is one of the fastest-growing open source hosting sites, this agreement will make it easier and faster for Black Duck to manage the steady stream of new projects on the site, said Peter Vescuso, Black Duck's Executive Vice president of marketing and business development.

CodePlex currently hosts 9,000 projects and adds about 100 new ones each week. "By teaming with Microsoft, we are assured of comprehensive, ongoing coverage of CodePlex projects in the KnowledgeBase," Vescuso said.