email article printer friendly

Make Intellectual Property Transparent
Palamida's automated software provides a clear picture of your code's adherence to intellectual property rights

June 8, 2005

Theresa Friday recalls the time some years ago when she had 20 software engineers searching line by line for copyright strings in their third-party code. An idea popped up: wouldn't it be great to have a software program that could automate this kind of tedious task? A few years later, she cofounded Palamida.

Palamida, an intellectual property integrity and management company, is pointed directly at organizations that might be using open source code, third-party components, or outsourced code. "The toolset helps companies ensure that they are acting responsibly. You might have thought you owned the code. You might not know there's a license attached. Or you know there's a license, but you don't know the terms," said Mark Tolliver, Palamida's CEO. "Now you can scan your code and get an accurate representation of what's in it—for example, the version, where it's from, the licenses associated with it."

Tolliver, a 30-year software veteran, most recently from 10 years at Sun Microsystems, said that most licensing and reuse issues have been handled in house or in an ad-hoc basis. Only Palamida and Black Duck have entered the competitive fray with an automated product.

"We see it as the next generation of governance," he said. "The remediation capabilities can open up institutions to more forward-thinking policy."

Friday said that there are three main use cases for a product like Palamida's IP Amplifier.

"In building systems, you can use it to audit nightly or weekly during regular compilation," she said. "In cases of merger and acquisition, large global companies use it to see what they're adding. And in legal transactions, when companies may at any time be involved in several complaints, regardless of merit, it can be used to provide the kind of information companies need to make decisions."

"Software should not make legal decisions for you," Tolliver emphasized. "But the software can give you more information from which you base your decisions."

Palamida's product works in several ways. It has a large database to search against so it can detect as much third-party code as possible. It searches in multiple ways—on source code, on binary files, and Java namespaces. It contains 36,000 unique Java namespaces and can do nested component tracking. In addition to finding matches, it also ranks code that is most relevant to the search.

The company decided to write its program in Java partly because so much open source software is written in Java. However, most of the use-case scenarios have so far involved commercial companies. "Most organizations have used it to track commercial code in partnership development contracts or to pay royalties," Tolliver said. "The whole goal is to make intellectual property transparent."