Palamida Helps SETI Institute Launch Open Source Initiative

New Initiative Seeks to Expand Worldwide Community of Developers and Citizen Scientists

- July 21, 2010 - The SETI Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach with a mission "...to search for our beginnings and our place among the stars". Through their new initiative, setiQuest, individuals around the globe will be able to contribute their time and energy to assist with processing of the enormous amount of data that may contain a clue to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. As part of this new initiative, the SETI Institute will open source their data and analysis tools.

“In the future, we hope that a global army of open-source code developers, students and other experts in digital signal processing, as well as citizen scientists willing to lend their intelligence to our exploration, will have access to the same technology and join our quest”, said Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute .

As part of the initiative, the SETI Institute reached out to Palamida for assistance with their plan to open source their analysis tools.

“Our tools have evolved throughout our 25 year history”, said Avinash Agrawal, Director of Open Innovation for the SETI Institute. “Before releasing them, it was important to us that we fully understand their composition, so that we can comply with any software licenses obligations, as well as provide as much information as possible to our development community about what software components make up our tools”.

Palamida scanned the source code of the SETI Institute tools and in essence created a software bill of materials that detailed all of the third party software components (both open source and commercial) within each tool as well as their licenses and obligations. An analysis of this type is quite common for software development organizations today, particularly in view of the large amount of open source software that is typically used in development projects.

“We’re pleased that we could play a role in the setiQuest initiative” said Jeff Luszcz, founder and VP of Services for Palamida. “The fact that the SETI institute took this step is an indication of their intent to build strong and transparent relationships with open source development communities.”

About Palamida, Inc.

Palamida provides the industry’s first application security solution exclusively for open source software. The Palamida Enterprise Edition uses component-level analysis to quickly identify and track undisclosed code and associated security vulnerabilities, as well as intellectual property and compliance issues. Using Palamida, organizations can cost-effectively manage and secure mission critical Web and software applications.

For more information visit: www.palamida.com.

About the SETI Institute:

The SETI Institute is a non-profit scientific organization dedicated to research, exploration, and education in the field of astrobiology. This unique team of world class scientists investigates the origin and nature of life on Earth and its possible existence throughout the universe.