Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
...it shows a breakdown of commits by language; 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.
The Army reading list
Congratulations to SourceForge for their triumphant acquisition of Ohloh.net. Have some delicious and moist cake to celebrate with those of us still alive!
I was worried this was going to be yet another one of those useful openey sourcey things that was held back by a bad name. I guess bing was taken.
i've heard of a few companies acquiring other companies of late. the kind of acquiring where one company says to the other, we'll give you jobs because it saves you from going broke.
> announced today plans Congratulations my sincere!
Time to delete my info off of ohloh.
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.
Interesting. The ruby metrics gave me a laugh. A steady rise around 2008 and a steady decline afterwards. Of course it isn't scientific data, but it does seem to coincide with the surge (and subsequent apathy) over Ruby on Rails by many developers.
No offense to the rubyists out there ;)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root
(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.
Even AdBlock and NoScript may not be enough. I've read about a recent trend where adverts are hosted directly on the content server. So if your website "requires" JavaScript and/or people have whitelisted it, ads will get through because the scripts and images are hosted directly on your website. Bastards.
In case you are willing to do something about it:
the last of which is hosted by... SourceForge.
Oh noh!
I hope they finally start adding the popular feature requests. Like ignoring certain paths in a repository.
that one made me laugh..
(posting to clear downmod
stupid dropdown needs an undo)
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
Using Lines Of Code as an estimate of a project value is just complete bullshit, and Ohloh even provides a widget for spreading such bullshit.
I never heard of them. It looks like they are basically the same thing as freshmeat.net but with statistics tools for projects.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
ask for donations.
I've come to the conlusion that people HATE advertising hence all the blocking and hatred of content containing ads like 'adware'.
For 'small fry' not having large ad budgets to have ANY chance of earning money and not alienating your potential customers in this setting, 'tipware' seems to be the only way to go.
People are not interrupted by 3rd party advertisers and if the content offered has value and merit, people will support the creator financially.
If the audience pool is large enough, enough people will pay to make it all worthwhile. Otherwise make your offerings available free as advertising for YOURSELF -- someone could contact you with paid work later if what you make available to them for free is worth it to them.
If/(when?) the 'online advertising' bubble bursts and Google loses 90+% of their income tied up in their AdWords/AdSense programs.
To put it simply:
SourceForge delivers RESULTS in the form of hosted source code projects.
Google delivers PROMISES in the form of 3rd-party advertising delivered online through AdWords/AdSense. Take that away and Google wouldn't have the money easily available to keep their search engine and the USENET archive (Google Groups) going -- the only things of TRULY lasting value Google has when everything else there is gone.