Black Duck Software acquires Koders.Com, Misses SourceKibitzer Opportunity

I’m sitting at McCarran International Airport, waiting for my red-eye to Boston. Last night I stumbled into Doug Levin of Black Duck Software at Mandalay Bay’s Starbucks. The first thing Doug told me was that “Next Monday we are announcing acquisition of Koders.Com”.

Doug’s fledging company now has a search engine for open source software source code at its disposal with all strings attached to it such as activity data. Doug did not disclose details of the transaction, but said “It was a good opportunity to move our business forward. We may buy more…”. Levin added that “business is doing well, and money is floating around.” Congratulations with a good buy, Doug!

With acquisition of Koders, Black Duck can solidify its positions as a market leader for open source intelligence, I believe it missed an opportunity with SourceKibitzer. The latter, led by Mark Hofman, received a small Series-A venture capital funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) and Serenda Estonia backed by Skype and Rate.ee co-founders.
SourceKibitzer has developed an advanced analytics solution, named EyeQ that provides transparency to anyone who is dealing with software development and allows automated day-to-day overview of development team performance. The service is targeted primarily at companies with software development teams that consist of at least 10-20 developers. By the end of 2008, the projected capacity of SourceKibitzer’s infrastructure will support simultaneous monitoring of 10,000 developers.

SourceKibitzer business model is similar to that of Black Duck’s. According to Mark Kofman, SourceKibitzer is currently offering three subscription plans, EyeQ LITE, EyeQ FULL and special pricing for those who are willing share feedback.

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Notes from Interop-Software 2008, Las Vegas, NV. Attendee Screams and Walks Out of a Session.

There was an open source panel at Interop called “Open Source Governance: Recognizing & Dealing with the Risks of Free Software “.  

Panel consisted from Brian Gentile of JasperSoft, Dominic Sartorio of Open Solutions Alliance,
Doug Levin of Black Duck Software and Ross Turk of SourceForge, with Daniel Kohn of The Linux Foundation moderating.

What I did not expect was to see an attendee scream “We’re not here for the benefits of open source. If you’re not going to take my question I’m going to walk out.”

Indeed, he did walked out! 

Last year the “Software Conference” was acquired by CMP Media (the producers of shows such as Interop, VoiceCon,
Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 Expo, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference).

I really liked the “Software” conference when it was independent. To me it lost its flavor with the crowds of Interop people, while outsourcers occupied the entire expo floor.

Overall, quality of the open source track was good. I think only two sessions were sponsored (about SaaS and virtualization). It would be great to see some real world customer stories at the show next year.

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