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]

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.

Not a Good Thing

[Bacon Bits]

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

[Shin-LaC]

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:I love slashdot, but...

[Jamu]

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:I love slashdot, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you checked out the prices on thinkgeek? There's your answer.

Newsflash

[Nezer]

(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:Congratulations!

[westlake]

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.