Open Source Code Search: a talk with Laura Merling, from Krugle
Large enterprises embracing Open Source software need to to put some structure around their use, and they need tools – like search engines such as google code search, koders and krugle – to locate and manage these resource.
Krugle Open Source Search, a search engine managing 2.6 billion lines of code, 600 repositories and over 100,000 projects, allows web users to search for open-source code on the Internet.
Finding a needle by Marion A’s photos
Also Internal open source teams, responsible for keep a collection of things used internally, need to make them available for others in the organization, and here comes a need for internal code search engines, like Krugle Enterprise Edition.
I asked Laura Merling, VP, Marketing and Business Development of Krugle, to tell us more about this area.
As the number of languages increase, the number of development “platforms” increase, and the amount of code increases in the enterprise (and the public arena). There are these large “development silos” of products and tools that have been created by developers, and search driven development is an emerging need.
Is the Enterprise Edition easy to sell?
We have been brought in by senior developers, dev managers and architects the pain they have is things like impact analysis: I am changing this code, who else is referencing it?
We have not had to encounter the CIO yet. The great part is that typically the people that bring us in have already written use cases they want it for and have already sold it up as needed. Most of them have a budget to some level, our target is mid-level management.
Are you wondering to invite users to produce use cases, may be giving prizes?
Absolutely – we did this last summer and got great responses – we really want use cases for the enterprise!
How the company was conceived?
Ken Krugler was working on the Chandler project with Mitch Kapor and was looking for code to some stuff he figured the code had to be out there somewhere. So he began “searching” for it he used regular search engines, went to repositories and nobody had anything that would help him find. What he already knew was out there so he decided to fix the problem and build a code search engine.
As he started talk to other developers, there was a strong desire to not only have it to find open source code, but their own stuff in the enterprise. Imagine how much code a 20 year financial services firm or how much code a telco might have!
Besides the Enterprise arena, Krugle DevNetwork powers also SourceForge.net, Yahoo! Developer Network, developerworks and now Amazon Web Services Developer Connection. So may be you are already using it and you didn’t know..
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