Today SourceForge has acquired Ohloh. We at Ohloh are pretty awed and excited at the opportunity (and challenges) ahead. I plan on blogging more deeply over the next few weeks but I wanted to give you some background on why this makes sense.
Most developers know that SourceForge is primarily a ‘forge’ (duh!) – providing open source developers free tools and services to help them succeed. However, for many less-tech savvy people, SourceForge is actually thought of as an open source directory. As a result, SourceForge has found itself in the middle of a lot of software-related activity, from downloading to source code management (and almost everything in between).
The service we’ve built at Ohloh has focused primarily on making sense of these types of activity. This has allowed us to gain insight into broad trends going on in technology. We are able to detect what software platforms, languages and licenses are gaining ground – from a “production” (ie: development) side, as well as “consuming” (ie: users). As a result, we’ve built a service to help companies gain insight and build strategies based on these combined open source metrics.
So, tying it together, the goal of the acquisition is to leverage Ohloh’s software development analytics to improve SourceForge’s insights about the open source development community and help SourceForge provide more relevant advertising.
As you see, Ohloh’s services will continue to improve and expand – and gain a lot more exposure by being part of the SourceForge brand. We’ve had a good opportunity to get to know the SourceForge team during the acquisition process and we’re thrilled at the chance to work with them.
