SourceForge To Acquire Development Portal Ohloh.net

SourceForge, Inc. (parent company of Slashdot, and the corporate overlord of SourceForge.net and ThinkGeek) announced today plans to purchase Ohloh, a three-year-old Seattle company that runs Ohloh.net, a software-development portal that specializes in the community aspects of distributed open source projects. The purchase will probably be final as of next month. (I hope no one requires that I show up to an office, just because one will be nearby.)

I love slashdot, but...

[religious freak (1005821)]

How the hell do these guys make any money? I mean, really... The ads don't pay that much. Good for them though, I'm hopeful they'll be able to keep it up.

Re:I love slashdot, but...

[Darkness404 (1287218)]

You'd be surprised how quickly ad money can add up on popular websites. Plus Thinkgeek sells a lot of things and has a nice markup on some items.

Re:

[Yfrwlf (998822)]

Um, the answer is it's not just ads, far far far from it. Look at the articles. LOOK at them. See all those words? It's propaganda, or insert your favorite word here, the nice term is "PR" but call it what you will. Companies try to bend consumer opinion about them by controlling/pushing/bending topics and articles and such to gain them favoritism, or to at least become more favorable towards them, or less unfavorable.

Why do you think companies sponsor conventions? *ahem*Microsoft*ahem* scewz me.

Re:

[Yfrwlf (998822)]

And, to add to where I was going, ultimately that means that owning sites like Slashdot or others which have large communities means that companies will pay $$$$$ to be able to push articles onto the site, or bend reviews, or whatever. That's where the real money comes from. (some call it 'kickbacks' btw)

Re:

[Yfrwlf (998822)]

aka it's when you "sell out", lol. That's the primary reason these sites exist, so that you will hopefully become big enough that you can one day sell out to corps with cash. Whatever intrinsic reasons for hosting a site like Slashdot are long gone, sorry. I'm sure many of them may feel they're giving their honest opinion about stuff still, but their overlords will slowly put an end to that, you'll see.

Re:

[Zapotek (1032314)]

And they've also added an option to disable ads on /. and I'm not a subscriber either. I already blocked them anyways...

Re:

[Samah (729132)]

Good for them though, I'm hopeful they'll be able to keep it up.

They just need to get someone to start a project called OpenViagra.
Either that or start reading spam emails.

Re:I love slashdot, but...

[Repossessed (1117929)]

400000 visitors, an hour.

Re:

[religious freak (1005821)]

Uh, I'd say that displays their high cost structure. You think they generate a ton of advertising revenue off of that? Maybe they do, but I'm pretty skeptical - how many people really click through on the florescent shower head ad?

Sure, they make a few bucks, I'm just saying they probably don't make much. But hell, either: 1) I'm wrong or 2) they're overextending themselves by making unneeded acquisitions, like plenty of other companies have done in the past. But like I said, I hope I'm wrong and they

Re:

[larry bagina (561269)]

At work, I browse (and troll) slashdot via links. At home, I browse (and troll) slashdot via Safari (and occasionally firefox to check if it handled their latest fuck up more gracefully). The sad truth is, slashdot often works better in links than in Safari or Firefox. Only once have they fucked up links (a few weeks ago when the front page was turned into an rss feed and anyone who mentioned it was modded down), oh make that twice -- currently, reading the full story (with the /seo-happy-urls) doesn't wo

Re:

[thetoadwarrior (1268702)]

I actually appreciate the service provided by Slashdot so I click on the ads relevant to me. I could block them but it seems a bit silly to take money away from something you like.

It's a bit like shitting on your mom to reward her for making you dinner.

I can appreciate that people on source forge could get upset when conflicting ads show up on their projects but, with Filezilla, it's such a good product I wouldn't be swayed by an advertisement. People with good software need to have faith in their pro

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit like shitting on your mom to reward her for making you dinner.

Wow, disturbing. How about, it's a bit like refusing to help your mom clear the table after she made you a delicious dinner. Or painting your mom white afterwards, whatever.

Re:

[bencoder (1197139)]

I don't see the problem. You can stop using the website, no? I only block adverts if they are flashing, noisy or make the page unusable (like the stupid flash ones that cover up the text before shrinking down). Other types of adverts I have no problem with and am happy to view to support my favourite sites.

Re:

[Jamu (852752)]

I block adverts where and because they're a vector for various types of malware. Flash adverts don't show because I block Flash.

Re:

[el americano (799629)]

I tried to allow ads on slashdot. They are in my whitelist for AdblockPlus, but the ads still don't come up, because NoScript is blocking scripts from doubleclick.net.

I was open to ads on this site, but I will not be unblocking doubleclick.

Re:

[cartavio (1562005)]

I use DNS level ad blocking. My DNS servers are set to 75.147.151.12 71.249.184.157 205.232.175.67 About 88% of the sites that I visits are free of ads. In fact these DNS servers even block the annoying ads on places like Hulu, Joost, fancast, and southpark.com. I usually get surprised at the amount of advertising out their when I am on a public computer, I'm so used to browsing sites without ads.

Re:

[DCstewieG (824956)]

Hulu and South Park have annoying ads? Come on, we finally get some sites actually attempting to give us what we want, when we want, for free, and you can't watch a 15 second ad here and there?

Not a Good Thing

[Bacon Bits (926911)]

I don't really see this as a good thing. In my experience many of the projects on Ohloh.net are there because the maintainers were unhappy or frustrated with problems they were having at SourceForge. FileZilla, for example, kept complaining to SourceForge that the ads that showed up would always include download links to sites charging for download of FileZilla.

I suppose such projects will move to Google Code, but it's important to remember that choice is a good thing, and not everybody is happy with SourceForge.

Re:Not a Good Thing

[eln (21727)]

I suppose such projects will move to Google Code, but it's important to remember that choice is a good thing, and not everybody is happy with SourceForge.

So SourceForge will just buy Google!

Re:Not a Good Thing

[TooMuchToDo (882796)]

All I could picture was the SourceForge accountants dragging a couple of barrels of pennies to the front door of the Google office in Mountain View, and a Roomba calling security.

Re:

[Raenex (947668)]

If/(when?) the 'online advertising' bubble bursts and Google loses 90+% of their income tied up in their AdWords/AdSense programs.

Google could probably afford a 90% reduction in ad income by cutting back to 1,000 employees. Seriously, they went on an incredible hiring binge of expensive high-tech employees. Hell, given that their search infrastructure is already built out, they could probably offshore most of it to India, China, Russia, Romania, etc.

SourceForge delivers RESULTS in the form of hosted source code projects.

Your post makes me laugh. So SourceForge gives away free hosting to open source projects. Now where do they derive income from? They sell ads, just like Google. They also offer paid-for s

Re:Not a Good Thing

[Shin-LaC (1333529)]

I had no idea that ohloh hosted open source projects. My only exposure to them has been in the form of those annoying animated GIFs that display ohloh statistics on some open source project pages (typically hosted elsewhere).
I hated those so much that one of the two explicit blocks in my Privoxy user.action file was "www.ohloh.net/projects/\d+/badge_js". To put that in perspective, the other block was for ".on.nimp.org".

Re:

[Runaway1956 (1322357)]

Never heard of nimp before. Being brave, I had to look. Just tell everyone it's goatse with a different skin, along with browser hijack.

Oddly - I visited from a Linux desktop, but the Windows VM alarmed about a virus attack.... hmmmmm I'm sure glad I didn't go there FROM Windows.

Re:

[Darkness404 (1287218)]

According to http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/nimp.org [siteadvisor.com] its apparently some virus site from the GNAA (yes, from that /. troll of the "Gay Nigger Association of America")

Mod Parent Up

[furbearntrout (1036146)]

that one made me laugh..
(posting to clear downmod
stupid dropdown needs an undo)

Re:

[TinBromide (921574)]

For some reason, (and i could be wrong) but it feels like the people who run thinkgeek, slashdot, and other sites under the umbrella may have a bit of autonomy as to how they run things. While yes, there will always be corporate mandates handed down from on high (DO THIS!), perhaps the ohloh.net managers will realize that how sourceforge does their ads was costing them big projects and would resist change as good nerds should.

Then again, I am an eternal optimist that likes to hope for the best, you don't

Re:

[Steauengeglase (512315)]

"I suppose such projects will move to Google Code, but it's important to remember that choice is a good thing, and not everybody is happy with SourceForge."

I was thinking the same thing. You see more and more projects (a lot of .NET stuff though) at code.google.com. I'm glad to hear that they have no intention of giving up the ghost.

Re:

[bjourne (1034822)]

Um.. ohloh.net doesn't offer project hosting. It is a tool for analyzing statistics and creating reports about projects hosted on other sites.

Re:

[Bacon Bits (926911)]

They absolutely do project file hosting, but, yes, they're mostly known for project analytics. I'm not sure if they do RCS hosting like SourceForge does, but file hosting absolutely. FileZilla, the project I mentioned, no longer consistently updates the SF.net site (if at all), and all download links on filezilla-project.org go to ohloh.net.

Re:

[Eil (82413)]

What I hate most about SourceForge is when you search for an open source project and get handed the link to its SourceForge page rather than its actual web page.

Gods damn it, if it wanted to browse the CVS or any of that crap, I would have found my way there eventually. Most of the time, I just want to find out what the application is all about and *then* go poking around the source or download the software.

Re:

[Bacon Bits (926911)]

This is complete nonsense, and the people who modded you +5 "Insightful" clearly have no clue.

As opposed to reading the thread to see if the point you made was asked and answered?

Ohloh's programming language chart is nice...

[tcopeland (32225)]

...it shows a breakdown of commits by language [ohloh.net]; interesting stuff. Of course, the sample is limited to the projects they're tracking, and the metric - number of commits - is affected by the source code mgmt tool's idioms. Still, nice AJAXy-ness.

Re:

[TinBromide (921574)]

Heh, its fairly interesting, but it reminds me of how my favorite languages (perl and C) are declining in general use and my programming skills will go the way of cobol and fortran.

Re:

[tcopeland (32225)]

> my programming skills will go the way of cobol and fortran

Nah, those Perl skills will translate to Ruby, and those C skills to, well, anything. Take heart!

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

I do, however, find it quite annoying when people write C in other languages. It would probably look fine in Perl, but it'd stand out like a sore thumb in Ruby.

Re:

[Sir_Lewk (967686)]

You programming skills going the way of Cobol could be a blessing in disguise. Have you seen how much old Colbol guys get paid these days!?

Re:

[TinBromide (921574)]

Well, one could expect those pay rates with 90 years of experience....

I kid, but yeah, the problem is that it might take them 8-9 months to find another job if they're disposed of when the system finally gets replaced by something that doesn't require a nice fat programmer maintenance salary. The salary, not the programmer being fat...

Re:Ohloh's programming language chart is nice...

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

It would be nice, except that the output is complete nonsense. It think, for example, that I am responsible for around 50K lines of Autoconf and 1K lines of D, when I have never committed anything in either language. My statistics for C and C++ are correct now, but for a while it was counting all of my Objective-C headers as 'C/C++' not as Objective-C, giving a widely skewed result. Because most of my Objective-C headers are documentation, it thought I had a comment ratio of almost 90% for C/C++.

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

It's not so much the Rails bashing, but the fact that Rails has existed since 2004. What was special about 2008 relating to Rails?

Re:

[PitaBred (632671)]

The publicity, really. Kind of like when Survivor was popular. Now it still exists, but has a much smaller audience.

Congratulations!

[MasterOfMagic (151058)]

Congratulations to SourceForge for their triumphant acquisition of Ohloh.net. Have some delicious and moist cake to celebrate with those of us still alive!

Re:Congratulations!

[legirons (809082)]

so what happens when a site known for its great features and well-designed user-interface gets bought by a company with a phobia of both things?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The site starts to look like slashdot.

Re:Congratulations!

[0racle (667029)]

They change the name so it doesn't sound like something chanted by an Age of Empires priest?

Re:Congratulations!

[westlake (615356)]

so what happens when a site known for its great features and well-designed user-interface gets bought by a company with a phobia of both things?

Mod this one up to +10.

There is no more unwieldy a site on the web to navigate than Sourceforge.

It doesn't matter what OS you favor. It doesn't matter if you are thinking rock-solid for the end user or bleeding edge for the inner geek. Trying to extract anything useful from Sourceforge has all the joys of root canal without anesthesia.

The public face of FOSS needs something more inviting, something more along the lines of Download.com.

Just curious ..

[THEbwana (42694)]

Where are their servers located ? .. would be interesting to know, due to various regional annoyances such as the DMCA, opposition to open versions of DeCSS etc.

Newsflash

[Nezer (92629)]

(I hope no one requires that I show up to an office, just because one will be nearby.)

Newsflash: We don't care. That's your personal fear and issue that really is best left off the front page.

Re:

[sgt scrub (869860)]

We don't care.
Not true. If timothy starts wearing ties, or worse [google.com], where does that leave the rest of us?

new features

[El_Muerte_TDS (592157)]

I hope they finally start adding the popular feature requests. Like ignoring certain paths in a repository.

freshmeat.net'ish site

[sgt scrub (869860)]

I never heard of them. It looks like they are basically the same thing as freshmeat.net but with statistics tools for projects.