The number of open source vulnerabilities discovered each year never seems to stop growing, emphasizing the importance of developers addressing them quickly and efficiently. However, simply identifying vulnerabilities is insufficient; their sheer scale makes it necessary to have an intelligent way of understanding which ones need to be fixed first to decrease the risk of a breach. For development teams in this environment, remediation prioritization and broad vulnerability coverage are critical.

The recent SolarWinds breach highlights a new paradigm in the Software Supply Chain. When compared simply to the code itself without any additional tools, Proprietary Code is no more secure than Open Source. By contrast, many would argue that Open Source Code is more secure due to a faster fix/patch/update cycle and the pervasive access to source code (Clarke, Dorwin, and Nash, n.d.).

Whether you’re a developer or a security engineer, Software Composition Analysis—or SCA for short—is a term you will start to hear of more and more. If you haven’t already, that is. The reason for this is simple. Your company is increasingly relying on open source software and containers to develop its applications and by doing so is introducing risk in the form of security vulnerabilities and license violations.

Used by developers around the world, open source components comprise 60%-80% (and likely more) of the codebase in modern applications. Open source components speed the development of proprietary applications, save money, and help organizations stay on the cutting edge of technology development. Despite the widespread adoption of open source components, myths persist about its usage. The following are the top three concerns associated with open source use.

If you don’t know the state of your network and server health every second of the day, you’re like a blind pilot inevitably headed for disaster. Fortunately, the market now offers many good tools, both commercial and open source, for network and Windows Server monitoring. We’ve put together a list of best open source, free and paid Windows Server monitoring tools that have proven their value in networks of many sizes.

As this year comes to a close, it is a good time to take a look at the trends of open source license usage in 2020 and compare them to previous years. Our research team has collected information from the WhiteSource database, which includes more than 4 million open source packages and 130 million open source files covering over 200 programming languages, to learn which were the most popular open source licenses in 2020.

Stay on top of open source vulnerabilities and license obligations with discovery capabilities from Black Duck.