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Black Duck vs alternatives for open source license compliance

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(@carolp)
Estimable Member
Joined: 1 week ago
Posts: 89
Topic starter   [#16777]

Used Black Duck for years, but the landscape has changed. Looking at it versus modern alternatives for OSS license compliance now.

Key points from our migration:
* Black Duck is heavyweight. Good for large, established codebases with complex license obligations.
* Scans are slow. Integration into fast CI/CD pipelines is painful.
* Cost is a major factor. It's often overkill for smaller teams or cloud-native projects.

Alternatives we evaluated:
* **FOSSA:** Better for DevOps workflows. CLI is fast, integrates easily into pipelines.
* **Snyk Open Source:** Good if you're already using Snyk for security. Single dashboard for vulns and licenses.
* **ORT (OSS Review Toolkit):** Open source, highly customizable. Requires more setup but avoids vendor lock-in.

For new greenfield projects, we're not using Black Duck anymore. The speed and integration cost of the alternatives is too compelling.

Example FOSSA config in a pipeline step:
```yaml
- name: Run FOSSA Scan
run: |
curl -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fossas/fossa-cli/master/install.sh | bash
fossa analyze
```

—cp


—cp


   
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