Black Duck and VA Software Launch Integrated Compliance Management and Collaborative Development Solution

Black Duck Software, a provider of software compliance management solutions, and VA Software Corporation (NASDAQ: LNUX), a provider of software, information and community support for IT and development professionals, today launched an integrated product that includes Black Duck's innovative protexIP(TM) software compliance management system and VA's award-winning SourceForge® Enterprise Edition. By automating key intellectual property (IP) management and license compliance functions and integrating them within an agile global development environment, the integrated solution helps distributed teams improve their productivity through more effective use of open source code and licensed proprietary assets. The two companies are now jointly marketing and selling the integrated solution.

"The growing use of open source code and components from third parties in the software development process increases management complexity and can create business and licensing issues that put software assets at risk," said Melissa Webster, research director with IDC. "Corporations need the ability to automate effective reuse of internal or open source assets while ensuring compliance with license obligations -- key ingredients to maximum development efficiency."

"The open source community has created a great, collaborative way to develop software," said Doug Levin, Black Duck's president and CEO. "But to be ready for the business world, developers need to make sure that resulting projects do not have underlying IP problems or license compliance issues. We're very pleased to be partnering with VA Software to offer developers an easy way to ensure that their software solutions meet all relevant licensing obligations, and to offer development managers the ability to effectively manage valuable IP assets throughout their lifecycle."

"VA Software's customers can now minimize business risks and program delays across globally distributed teams," said Colin Bodell, CTO of VA Software. "This integrated solution makes IP management and compliance with both open source and proprietary licenses an integral part of the development process -- not an afterthought. Developers, development managers, executives and legal teams will be able to improve development efficiency and control over IP compliance."

VA Software's SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a secure, centralized, enterprise-grade solution for optimizing and managing distributed development. Whether teams are distributed across the building, the country or around the world, SourceForge provides an easy to use, web-accessible solution that improves development efficiency and empowers collaboration and innovation. SourceForge optimizes distributed development by helping organizations deliver higher quality software in less time and with greater manageability and consistency.

Black Duck Software helps enterprises, vendors, outsourcers, integrators and government agencies preserve the value of their software intellectual property by providing products and services for understanding and safely managing software licensing compliance. The company's protexIP product line brings developers, lawyers, and business decision-makers together within an automated system that supports both the accelerated pace of development and the heightened sensitivity to business controls required in today's business environment.

The combination of SourceForge and protexIP will:

-- Improve Visibility and Control -- When implemented with protexIP, SourceForge Enterprise Edition becomes a powerful tool for centralizing code and seamlessly integrating license compliance policies into the development process. Compliance analysis can be scheduled or performed as needed, and resulting summaries can be viewed without leaving the SourceForge development environment.

-- Facilitate reuse -- It is widely acknowledged that software asset reuse is an effective way to reduce costs and save time. protexIP employs advanced digital Code Print technology and an online KnowledgeBase of thousands of open source projects and their associated licenses to quickly and accurately identify matching open source code within software. It then evaluates associated software licenses and helps determine the licensing terms under which code may be used, as well as identifying conflicts and constraints on code use.

-- Mitigate Risks, Support Regulatory Compliance -- SourceForge can automate or facilitate many of the control activities involved with compliance, particularly the controls around planning/program management and change management. Combining this with the software compliance management capabilities of protexIP, organizations can mitigate the risk associated with software licensing, and provide the process controls and auditability IT organizations need to support Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as quality frameworks such as CMM or ISO.

VA Software and Black Duck will jointly present a free webinar on June 29 at 11:00 a.m. PT/2:00 p.m. ET, entitled "Managing Intellectual Property Across the Global Enterprise." To register, please visit www.blackducksoftware.com/news/events or call (877) 825-4689 (select option 1).