Black Duck gains three major benefits from the broad use of Ohloh data:
- If Ohloh data is valuable in helping people understand their communities better and drive more engagement and participation, then this data can help create better code, more active development communities, and greater adoption, all of which directly increase demand for Black Duck’s products.
- The CC-BY license requires those who use Ohloh data to attribute the data to us. Such attribution serves to build Black Duck’s reputation as a highly reputable source of the best intelligence about FOSS, enhance awareness of Black Duck and Ohloh, and demand for our products.
- We’re hopeful that as the FOSS ecosystem uses this data more, its value will help create an incentive for community members to join Ohloh and update information in the database to help improve it even more.
We maximize these benefits when we eliminate barriers to using Ohloh data, and so it makes a lot of business sense for us to give it away. By doing so, we solidify Black Duck’s position as a premier source of FOSS market intelligence.
Posted in: The What and Why of the Ohloh Open Data Initiative
