Summary: Black Duck “was founded [on] the idea … to keep GPL-licensed code out of corporate codebases entirely,” according to a new report

TECHRIGHTS has spent nearly a decade battling Black Duck. This schizophrenic-looking firm (trying to come across as pro-FOSS), Black Duck, is the very prominent (and well-funded) entity which has been a source of endless GPL FUD, claiming that the GPL is declining, that it is dangerous, and that it oughtn’t be embraced by businesses.

This new article from Jon Gold of the FOSS-hostile NetworkWorld happens to provide us with wonderful evidence of the roots and the original goals/raison d’être of “Black Duck” (black agent would be a more suitable name). The article is titled “Open-source’s former ‘police’ now helping businesses adopt” (the latter is pure marketing and acceptance of Black Duck’s claims at face value).

Black Duck, founded by a marketing guy from Microsoft (see the image above for highlights from LinkedIn), is mostly a marketing company. It was never ‘police’ and it was never an authority; it was a parasite pretending to be about FOSS while harvesting software patents, badmouthing Free software, and even ripping off companies like Palamida, which had done work — very time-consuming work — collecting usage figures regarding GPLv3.

Gold’s article is useful to us because of the very revealing part which says: “Executive Vice President and CTO Bill Ledingham said that when the company was founded the idea was to keep GPL-licensed code out of corporate codebases entirely.”

Right.

So Black Duck, which was founded by a guy from Microsoft, was acting more like a mole, nothing else. It was fighting copyleft adoption. No need for speculations or hypotheses anymore.

In a similar vein, Microsoft’s support for Cyanogen (do not be misled by retractions after getting caught) serves to show another mole-like strategy. This new article by Miguel Helft (to appear next month in Forbes magazine) reminds us of the real goal of Cyanogen. To quote the headline: “Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google”

This sounds exactly like what Microsoft itself has been trying to do to Android (often via or with help from proxies like Facebook, Nokia, or Amazon). Do not think for a moment that Microsoft never tried to derail and topple Free software from the inside. There is a long history to that effect and we covered many examples over the years. █

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