†Protecode Inc., a provider of open source license management tools, announced the availability of what the company says is the industry’s first solution for real-time management of open source licensing and copyrights. Previously only available for the Eclipse Integrated Development Platform (IDE), the Developer Assistant is now being offered to the developer community worldwide, supporting all operating systems and software development tools. The solution operates unobtrusively in the background and requires no training for the developer, allowing them to concentrate on development rather than open source license management.
Developer Assistant is a real-time analysis solution that manages licensing and copyright obligations at the earliest point in a software development lifecycle. Operating directly at the developer workstation, it uses the code analysis services of Protecode’s Enterprise Server and compares the code structure of a file to signatures of millions of files stored in Protecode Global IP Signatures (GIPS). There, it identifies the licensing and copyright obligations of the file and provides instant feedback to the developer as the code is put together or brought in from the Internet, an external storage device or a corporate repository.
“Detecting open source licenses as soon as the code is brought in or put together reduces cost and time associated with fixing related problems later down the road. Developer Assistant is the only solution currently on the market to detect open source and other third party code in real-time,” says Kamal Hassin, Vice President of Product Management, Protecode.
Running in the background of a developer station, and in concert with other components of Protecode’s System 4 solution, the Developer Assistant allows developers to manage external content based on corporate license policies. Developers are notified if a software file contains unacceptable open source or other third party content; developers can fix the problem on the spot, choose to ignore the warning (knowing that the violations will be caught later in the process by other System 4 components), or attach a comment to the violating software file and continue with development. System 4 stores and manages all comments against the files and projects, maintaining a record trail of the events.
