Happy days for Black Duck

With people losing their livelihoods left and right, it's gratifying to find someone with unalloyed good news to report, especially if they come out of the open source movement.

So let's hear it for the little black duck. No, not that one. Black Duck Software.  

• Bookings were up 42% year over year, and service revenues were up 65%.
• Black Duck has secured $9.5 million in new financing, including $4.5 million in loans.
• Black Duck recruited Tim Yeaton, once vice president for worldwide marketing at Red Hat, as its new CEO. He was given credit there for driving the acquisition of JBOSS, still one of the biggest open source merger deals ever.

Black Duck's business is tracking the use of open source, and complying with all licenses, in the enterprise. This helps break down one of the key objections to open source, by automating what would be a substantial legal hassle.

Black Duck also owns Koders, a database of open source code used by many companies around the world. This makes open source code highly attractive by making it highly available.

All of which, apparently, means money, profits, and jobs. Happy days. I know it's still mid-February, but I needed a little Christmas.