License management still a big business
Palamida charges corporate IT shops $50-250,000 per year to track the legal status of their code, based on a spidered database. The company calls this "automated software intellectual property (IP) management and compliance."
Tolliver told ZDNet he saw the need for something like this while he was general manager and president of iPlanet, the Sun-Netscape alliance from 1999-2002. "We had a team see what was in there Netscape's IP, what the licenses were, and figure out how to deal with open source components. We wanted intellectual property up to snuff. And I had to sit in many reviews, saying there has to be a better way. There was no commercial tool for this."
Tolliver calls Palamida a "transparency mechanism" that tracks the ownership of algorithms and their license terms. It's both a database and a search engine, in that it spiders repositories of open source code, detecting binaries as well as source code, and categorizing them. The spider even looks inside Java namespaces. Palamida's code was written in Java, Tolliver says.
Palamida has many great opportunities in front of it, he adds. "Right now we’re focused on detection, helping with transparency. But as we look forward there will be a day where people will supply with their software some of these fingerprints, these signatures" proving originality which Palamida's spider can detect. "So if you want to embed my software in yours, I might ask you to run a scan and show me where my code is being used. There are opportunities of that nature going forward.
"As software development moves from in-house to a mixture of in-house, outsource, open source and vendor code, with many sources of code blended into the final product, you have to be concerned about acting responsibly toward the people who provided all that code," he concludes.
What do you think? How big does your shop need to be before something like this becomes vital? Let us know in TalkBack.