Black Duck Software said it has acquired the assets of SpikeSource, once a high-flyer in the VC-financed open source boom of the last decade.
Terms were not disclosed, but when I read “acquired the assets” in a press release it usually means the underlying company was not worth buying.
In a press release Black Duck said it would add some SpikeSource tools, like SpikeInsight and its Developer Community Forum, to Ohloh, acquired from Geeknet, while moving SpikeForge-hosted projects like testgen4web to independent forges.
The deal was endorsed by Ray Lane, a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins and a SpikeSource director. He called the two companies complementary.
He probably should have added some praise for Black Duck management, which has the company growing at 58% per year. But it was a Black Duck press release and CEO Tim Yeaton is a modest man.
The deal also closes another chapter in the life of Kim Polese (above, from Wikipedia), who quietly left the position of SpikeSource CEO early this year and had been a sort of executive cover girl for the dot-com boom while CEO of Marimba.
When she launched SpikeSource a CNET profile called her a “computing industry veteran,” which for a man is always a complement but must have landed with a thud on her 1990s fans. Still, she wore the title well. I’m a fan.
My own view is that she’s the Bobby Valentine of tech. Valentine always had good looks and a hint of star power about him, but as a player he was a utility man and as a manager his only championship came with the Chiba Lotte Marines, based in a Tokyo suburb near Narita Airport. He’s now an analyst with ESPN.
Polese seems to be on a similar track, although tech CEOs don’t live in TV studios. (Nope, I don’t know if Howard Stringer has her on speed dial.) Instead she’s on the board of the Global Security Institute, Long Now Foundation and TechNet, which seeks to represent Silicon Valley in Washington.
Reads to me like the resume of a budding politician, but time will tell.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
