Israeli platform brings order to program downloads

Bintray, the system that brought order to the world of open-source binaries, is going commercial. Israeli development firm JFrog is releasing Bintray Premium, the commercial version of its popular software distribution platform, previously available only for open source software. JFrog does development in Israel and sales in California. Its success with Bintray – used for more than 150 million downloads a month – prompted the company to release the premium version, allowing commercial developers to take advantage of what has been an important force in keeping the Internet neat and clean.

Bintray’s journey from free platform for open-source software publishers to downloads to full-fledged commercial software distributor has been remarkably short. First released to the public in March of last year as a free, cloud-based platform for the distribution of downloadable binary packages that is, executable form/libraries, as opposed to source code, Bintray has expanded its reach and service to include almost any kind of downloadable.

In the heady world of open-source software, where organizations and individuals give away software and source code to the user community, provenance and record-keeping isn’t always a priority. The thought is, why spend time and effort to track something you’re not making money on? In a survey, 65% of developers said that poor documentation, a lack of clarity over who the legal owners of code are, and legal usage issues were major impediments to the distribution of open-source software. Those issues are exacerbated for binary files, since the documentation and code snippets are distributed as part of a package.

In steps JFrog, offering on-line space to organizations to use as a repository for their binary packages. Users on its original Artifactory and subsequent Bintray platforms could keep everything in one place, allowing vendors to check statistics for their downloads, and requiring licensing and documentation. The repositories are interactive, so users can “shop around” for binaries to use in their own software. Significantly, to encourage “neatness,” Bintray allows developers to integrate their repository with work they may have done on other project and repository management systems, including Maven, Gradle, Yum and Apt.

Bintray Premium builds on this foundation, said JFrog, by offering even more features. Developers can fully automate their software release and distribution process. Once their software is out there, said JFrog, Bintray offers full visibility on download stats including when, from where and which version is downloaded over any time frame. Essentially, Bintray Premium lets developers set up a fully streamlined cloud-based software distribution center — call it “downloading (or distribution) as a service.”

“Developers finally have a solution that serves them as a software distribution vehicle all the way from the development stage to consumer,” said Shlomi Ben Haim, CEO of JFrog. “None of our customers want to create and maintain a download center. In addition, they all aspire to have a fully automated software release process, and improve lifecycles and ROI (return on investment). We feel their pain — and Bintray was the next natural leap forward following Artifactory’s success. Soon the world will consume software the JFrog way,” he predicted.