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Exclusive Interview: Bill McQuaide, Black Duck Software

The Lucene Revolution is 10 weeks away. October 7th and 8th, 2010, to be exact. One of the companies participating is Black Duck Software. The company’s Open Source Resource Center http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss has been of considerably utility to me in my work on the Lucene/Solr centric conference AS HAS its code search Web site koders.com. Black Duck also offers a free version of its enterprise code search product, Code Sight. The company has a wide range of for-fee software products. If you work with open source, you will find that the firm’s Black Duck Suite may be indispensible to you and your development team for managing and controlling the myriad open source components in your code base. I wanted to know more about this company, so I contacted Bill McQuaide, Black Duck’s Executive Vice President of Products and Strategy. Mr. McQuaide has 20 years of technology experience and executive leadership spanning engineering, product management, marketing and business development. He comes to Black Duck after spending 10 years with RSA Security during which time the company experienced rapid growth. RSA Security was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2006. He most recently served as a Senior Vice President of the Enterprise Solutions Group and Corporate Development. His experience includes four years at Hewlett-Packard, where he led the Product Management and Channel Development teams for the company’s Technical Systems Division. The full text of our interview appears below:

Bill McQuaide, Black Duck Software’s Executive Vice President of Products and Strategy.

My logo is a goose. Yours is a black duck. What’s Black Duck Software?

There is a story behind the name of the company. It goes back to our founder, Doug Levin, who found and nursed a black duck back to health when he was seven. He raised the duck as a pet. Doug decided to name the company Black Duck Software. Of course black ducks are reputed to be very intelligent animals. They are hard to decoy and very aware of their surroundings.

A goose is definitely less intelligent than a duck.

Maybe, but we see the black duck as a metaphor for how we run the company. We pay attention to details. We are aware of the larger enterprise IT and open source communities in which we operate. And we work smart. We have smart people. We capture information about open source software projects being worked on by other smart people. And we design our products and services for smart companies.

You have an extensive background in commercial software? RSA, HP, and Data General, don’t you?

That’s right.

So why open source? That’s a radical departure, isn’t it?

It was a natural move. We needed to collect data about open source projects for our business. We help development organizations manage and control open source and other externally sourced software, and, of course, we use open source in our products.

Lucene/Solr?

Yes. I think it is pretty clear that open source software is a huge source of innovation. We track more than 250,000 open source projects from thousands of Internet sites, and we maintain a free code search engine, Koders.com, which tens of thousands of developers use every day to search for open source software and other Web-downloadable code.

Koders contains billions of lines of code written in over 30 languages,  code that’s available under at least 28 different OSS software licenses. Koders is a powerful tool for developers looking for reusable open source code, methods, examples, algorithms and more. Code re-use makes sense – why re-invent the wheel? And it makes developers more efficient, and lets them focus on more the interesting aspects of software development, the innovation their companies need to succeed.

What have been the payoffs from this business decision?

Our involvement with open source has many benefits. We build better products, our time to market and innovation are improved, and we are more in tune with where the industry is moving – what types of software are leading innovation (mobile, health care information technology, and cloud solutions, for example.)

Any special challenges?

There are those who think Black Duck sells fear chiefly because our products help companies identify OSS in their code bases. What we really do is help our customers do the right thing. We believe we do more to help corporate users of OSS comply with the license obligations than any other organization. Most people want to do the right thing, and that’s not about fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It is being pragmatic. Our products ensure customers know what’s in their code, and automate the management of OSS use, so companies can ensure they are complying with the terms of the various open source software licenses in their code. We “design in” compliance making it easier for companies to innovate using open source.

You have a number of high profile clients? Are you able to characterize a typical use case?

Absolutely. How about search?

That would be great.

Search is really about delivering on intent, as one expert has observed. Koders.com is a perfect example of open source search in action. Say a developer is working on an application. He or she needs a compiler, but why write yet another compiler? It’s potentially a waste of time and a distraction away from more critical work. The developer’s intent is to find a compiler that meets a set of criteria. Koders delivers by searching for a complier and returning results that meet the developer’s needs.

Search also has to be fast, return relevant results, be scalable, easy to use, and have access to many sources of information, in many formats. Lucene was originally developed to search text; the Apache Solr project extends Lucene with faceted search; other OSS search engines search for images, crawl, parse, or search within the firewall (like Black Duck Code Sight.)

I want you to look in your crystal ball for a moment. What do you envision as future uses of open source search at your company going forward?

My crystal ball is usually blurry.

Mine doesn’t work at all. What’s ahead in your opinion?

We have just released Black Duck Code Sight, a search engine that indexes code across an organization’s source code repositories to enable fast search and navigation at enterprise scale. Code Sight (which is available as a free download at http://blackducksoftware.com/code-sight/download or as an enterprise-scale offering), improves developer productivity and software quality, supports standardization, and enhances compliance. Developers can find code quickly and leverage existing and approved components within their code bases whether they are internally written, open source, or come from other external sources.

We think the Black Duck Suite provides the most comprehensive search capability possible for developers. Inside the company they can search all internal repositories and, catalogs. Across the Internet, they can search all known OSS projects and code search sites, searching source code and project information (metadata).

Search Improves the development process, because developers find what they need fast – they can search the Internet or do an internal search to quickly locate a project or file that contains the desired code; they can debug faster, because search makes it easy to find the same code fragments; they can find security problems like “password=”; and search helps breaks down information silos. Version proliferation can be controlled, because you can find duplicate bugs in branched code.

In your opinion, what makes open source a viable option for the enterprise or development world?

Open source is about freedom to use the best code to solve the problem at hand, and the power that comes from having a large community of coders supporting you. For enterprises, OSS means increased development productivity and velocity, and frees developers up to work on projects that are differentiating and valuable. As part of a multi-source development model – where OSS is combined with other externally sourced code and home-grown code – it’s hard to beat on a cost, time-to-solution or innovation level.

One final question, if I may? Where can a reader get more information about your firm?

Check out http://blackducksoftware.com <http://blackducksoftware.com/> . Make sure to visit the Open Source Resource Center, look into Code Sight, and don’t forget the  Koders.com search site.

Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2010

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