Yesterday, Palamida's Mark Tolliver was on stage with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Novell's Ray Lane to announce Microsoft's pact with Novell to support broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support. Here's an excerpt from an article in eWeek:
Mark Tolliver, chief executive of San Francisco-based Palamida, who was on hand at the news event to support Microsoft's play, said, "I think this just raises the idea that people who use software need to be informed customers."
Tolliver likened the situation to that of the world of processed foods, where consumers can find out the nutritional makeup of the goods they purchase. The same should be true for software, he said. And Palamida's software enables enterprises to gain visibility into their software code bases and find out whether there is open-source code present and which licenses apply.
Tolliver said the Microsoft deal with Novell makes plain that more enterprises will need to take stock of what exactly is in their code, and opens opportunity for companies like Palamida.
"We're moving into a zone in the software world driven by this mixed open-source/proprietary-source community, and with commercial software having to intermingle with this huge amount of open-source software," Tolliver said.
He said Palamida was invited to the announcement by Microsoft, which "has been one of our customers for some time," and that Microsoft asked Palamida to sit in as a domain expert. "Our role was to be on hand as a firm who spends all day everyday on intellectual property and license compliance issues."
Here's a description of the day's events from Palamida's blog.
