Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code, today announced significant growth of its industry leading KnowledgeBase of over 150,000 open source projects and a major expansion of the scope of data collected on each. Black Duck continuously searches more than 3,400 Internet sites, finding and adding new open source projects, files and versions. Black Duck users draw on this KnowledgeBase data to manage the safe and efficient search, selection, approval, validation and tracking of open source components used during software development.

Black Duck is demonstrating solutions based on the updated KnowledgeBase as part of its gold sponsorship of SD West 2008, which is being held March 3 to March 7 at the Santa Clara (Calif.) Convention Center. Black Duck is exhibiting in booth 208 at the conference.

With the recent enhancement, the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, which is regularly distributed to existing Black Duck customers, includes information on more than 485 million open source files. Additionally, Black Duck has expanded the breadth of data within each entry to include comprehensive functional, maturity, community and security data and more. The Black Duck KnowledgeBase contains information on over 29,000 known security vulnerabilities and also provides license information for each entry from its collection of over 1,200 unique software licenses. Black Duck also tracks multiple versions of projects and components that are published under more than one license.

“The Black Duck KnowledgeBase informs our customers and lets them make quick decisions based on company policies about whether specific open source code should be included in development,” said Bill McQuaide, executive vice president of product development at Black Duck. “Our mission is to help our customers accelerate software delivery schedules using high-quality external software, thus helping them achieve their business objectives.”

The KnowledgeBase is the “fuel” for Black Duck solutions, such as the recently announced Black Duck Code Center, which allows companies to accelerate software development by enabling the safe use of open source. With Black Duck Code Center, developers can quickly find useful open source components and efficiently obtain organization-wide approval for their use.

The KnowledgeBase is also vital to protexIP, which analyzes code for open source and third-party content and associated licenses, and transactIP, which is used during merger or acquisition due diligence to discover intellectual property ownership concerns ahead of a software asset sale. Black Duck shares real-time open source license adoption information, mined from its KnowledgeBase, at its Open Source License Resource Center available at http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss.

For additional information about Black Duck’s solutions, please see www.blackducksoftware.com.

About Black Duck Software
Black Duck Software is the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development and maintenance costs while mitigating the risks and challenges associated with reuse, including hidden license obligations, security vulnerabilities and version proliferation. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, as well as distribution partners throughout the world. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.