Doug Sweetser – In Memoriam

I heard through the grapevine that my friend and colleague, Doug Sweetser, passed away on December 10thdue to complications following a heart attack.

When I founded Black Duck Software in 2002, it was before the age of big data, data science and today’s resplendent AI and ML. Tools today make it far easier to scrape websites and do the requisite analysis that helps vendors and users understand composition binaries and source code. Without such tools back then, it had to be done the hard way. That’s where Doug and the "Spider Team” came in.

To get the venture going, I hired a group of engineers to build out the Black Duck platform. Soon it became clear that we needed some “spiders” to gather together the software licenses and source code that constituted the Black Duck Knowledge Base. At the time there was not a primary job description for a spider.

Doug Sweetser was hired in 2004 as the company’s ninth employee and the company’s first spider on that emergent team.  I found him through an ad placed in Craigslist. I interviewed and hired him on the same day. He worked at total of 19 years for Black Duck and later, Synopsys, its acquirer.

Most founders believe that their startups are about more than their codebases or business models. Doug Sweetser brought that “more” to work with him every day. He added soul to Black Duck’s early days and days thereafter.

Obviously, he and I had our first name in common. We discussed the origins of the name and our parents’ choice. We both liked the name a lot. Douglas is originally a Scottish name. Today the surname is given almost exclusively to boys, however, it was used as a girl's name in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the north of England. Linguistically, Douglas is derived from the Gaelic elements: dubh, meaning "dark, black"; and glas meaning “stream” or "green". (I personally love a first name is derived from something Homer Simpson might utter.)

Doug Sweetser was smart, kind, funny, and simply outstanding at his job. He never wavered, and was always willing and able to do all kinds of projects. He was the team lead who first put together reports on spider activity and always added something special to the analysis or new findings. Doug frequently took delight in working towards and meeting deadlines. He had a great attitude which naturally spread to the coworkers around him. Doug was a true positive force in the workplace that I have rarely seen matched in the many companies that I’ve been involved with since Black Duck.

I loved talking physics with him. Of course, he knew much more about the subject than I did, so I listened a lot. We developed, over lunch one time, a variation in the law of conservation of energy for software. The law explains that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another – like open source software. It was a fun exercise.

Doug was a truly special person who will be missed.

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