Palamida: Sharing the Ingredients in Your Favorite Recipe

This is my week for really interesting client announcements.

Yesterday, Palamida made two significant announcements, one with customer GroundWork and one with partner CollabNet.

Palamida and GroundWork kicked off an appeal for vendors to publicly disclose what's in their code. (Think food labeling, only for software.) To support this suggestion, Palamida launched www.ipingredients.org, which is "devoted to providing information about the need for and benefits of intellectual property (IP) transparency in the software development process."

This is one of my favorite excerpts from the coverage (courtesy Jim Wagner at InternetNews):

What does software vendor Palamida and a box of cereal have in common? Both list their ingredients so its consumers aren't left guessing what went into the product.

While it may lag well behind Corn Flakes in the disclosure race, Palamida is leading the rest of the commercial software industry with the disclosure Wednesday of all the third-party intellectual property (IP) found in its commercial software product.

Why is this such a smart move? Because enterprise customers will increasingly demand it. Most are formulating more formal policies to ensure that the code they are bringing behind their firewalls fits under their overall IT, legal and purchasing game rules.

Take GroundWork, which is using Palamida's IP Amplifier to generate IP Ingredients reports listing all third-party code and the associated licenses. The reports help give customers confidence that they have a full view of the components and licensing implications involved when they bring GroundWork Monitor in the door. GroundWork, too, will disclose its IP Ingredients on its website.

Shifting gears: CollabNet, founded by Apache legend Brian Behlendorf, got its start with developer collaboration software that helped manage major open source communities such as OpenOffice.org and NetBeans.org. This expertise in collaborative software development is also of great interest to major IT organizations, so the company now counts companies like Motorola and Aventis Pharmaceuticals as customers too.

Palamida and CollabNet have agreed to integrate Palamida’s IP Amplifier into the CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager. Customers of CollabNet's product will be able to click on the tool bar to execute an IP integrity analysis and add the results to the project documentation, keeping compliance chiefs happy.

See Gavin Clarke's article in The Register for a lively explanation of how this works.

As the guys at RedMonk have been saying for some time, transparency is a watchword of our times. It started with the financial side of business, but it's extending to all aspects of industry. Disclosing IP Ingredients is the next logical step.