Matthew Jacobs is the legal duck at Black Duck Software Inc., a business-to-business consulting and software company that focuses on free and open-source software (FOSS). The technology helps Black Duck’s corporate clients including SAP A.G., Thomson Reuters Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. save money and time by adapting FOSS to their own information technology systems.
Open-source technology is free software available on the Internet. It’s typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers develop and improve upon code and then share the changes. Open source is an alternative to Microsoft Windows, for example, which is proprietary commercial software.
