Black Duck Software recently published some summary statistics about free and open source software license adoption. Any of these conclusions might be reasonable if the 5% figure was meaningful, but Black Duck has given us no reason to believe it is; if anything, their own statements suggest it isn't.

C represents more than 40% of all code written for open source software. But this figure comes from counting lines of code. What about Java and PHP, or C++?

What's the most popular open source license currently in use? If you said GPL you would be right. But how did you know?

Black Duck has analysed its database of 200,000 open source programs to see which programming languages are most popular. The database is used by the company as part of their compliance and license management services.

Black Duck Software, a company best known for its services and software for the procurement and re-use of open source software, has acquired Koders, and with it the popular Koders.com search engine for free and open source software code (FOSS).

The cost of open-source software has been put at US$387 billion, a hefty sum that accounts for 200,000 projects and 4.9 billion lines of code, according to IP protection company Black Duck Software.

Since acquiring the Koders.com code search engine earlier this year, Black Duck Software has added more than 200 million lines of code to the Koders.com search repository. Black Duck says that an analysis of search requests reveals, "Ruby is now the fourth most requested language on Koders.com, after Java, C/C++ and C#." That's interesting information, to be sure, but what does it mean?

The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source ReportPDF. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software.

Bradley Kuhn, the technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) expressed dismay this week after learning that Black Duck Software was granted a patent that covers software methods for detecting and resolving open source software licensing conflicts.