Doug Levin, Jonathan "Jothy" Rosenberg

CEO/President, Black Duck Software / Director, US IT Ventures, Angle Technology LLC

Avoiding Pitfalls of Open Source Software Reuse
22 minutes, 10.2mb, recorded 2007-06-15
Topics: Open Source
Doug Levin & Jothy Rosenberg

Open source is the foundation of today's gift economy, but have you checked everything that comes inside those packages? Black Duck Software helped one company find and remove a surprising payload from such open source code before it could pop up on customers' screens. Find out what they found in this interview with Black Duck CEO and president Doug Levin and Black Duck customer and advisor Jothy Rosenberg. Levin also gives his perspective on Microsoft's recent series of agreements with Linux distribution vendors such as Novell and Linspire.


Doug Levin founded Black Duck Software in 2002 and has been its chief executive officer and president since its inception. Before Black Duck, Levin served as the CEO of MessageMachines and X-Collaboration Software Corporation, two VC-backed companies based in Boston. From 1995 to 1999, he worked as an interim executive or consultant to CMGI Direct, IBM/Lotus Development Corporation, Oracle Software Corporation, Solbright Software, Mosaic Telecommunications, Bright Tiger Technologies, Best!Software and several other software companies. From 1987 to 1995, Doug held various senior management positions with Microsoft Corporation including heading up worldwide licensing for corporate purchases of non-OEM Microsoft software products. Prior to Microsoft, Doug held senior management positions with two startups in California and served as an IT and financial consultant to an overseas development company. Doug is an adjunct lecturer of Entrepreneurship and Management (on leave-of-absence) at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds a certificate in international economics from the College d'Europe in Bruges, Belgium.

Jonathan "Jothy" Rosenberg, Ph.D., is director of US information technology ventures at Angle Technology LLC. In his current role, He is also an advisor to Black Duck Software. Rosenberg seeks out commercializable technology and inventions from universities and research labs that need more than just money but also need hands-on management and guidance to become a real company. Rosenberg provides both management as needed as well as funds invested from Angle's balance sheet to fill the growing gap that exists today around early-stage venture creation. Rosenberg is a former professor of computer science and a serial entrepreneur. In the last 10 years, he has founded four companies, two of which have had $100 million+ exits. Most recently, GeoTrust, an Internet security firm which Rosenberg started in 1999, sold to Verisign for $125 million. Rosenberg's most recent opreational role was vice president of software at Ambric, Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based fabless semiconductor startup company. Rosenberg was CEO and co-founder of Service Integrity, a Web services monitoring company. In other prior roles, Rosenberg was CEO of NovaSoft (rebranded Factpoint), and co-founder of Webspective, which sold in 2000 to Inktomi for $106 million. Rosenberg also held various executive positions at Borland International, including vice president and general manager of the enterprise tools division. Rosenberg was head of languages tools development, which included the Delphi, C++ and JBuilder product lines. Rosenberg's first startup was MasPar, a supercomputer company based in Silicon Valley. Rosenberg holds a B.A. in mathematics from Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. in computer science from Duke University where he was also assistant professor of computer science for five years. He is the author of the technical books How Debuggers Work (1996) and Securing Web Services with WS-Security (2004). Rosenberg holds five patents.

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