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SourceForge To Acquire Development Portal Ohloh.net

Posted by timothy on from the get-your-conspiracy-on dept.

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.)

23 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. I love slashdot, but... by religious+freak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:I love slashdot, but... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    2. Re:I love slashdot, but... by bencoder · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:I love slashdot, but... by Jamu · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

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    4. Re:I love slashdot, but... by Repossessed · · Score: 4, Informative

      400000 visitors, an hour.

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    5. Re:I love slashdot, but... by cartavio · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  2. Not a Good Thing by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
    1. Re:Not a Good Thing by eln · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!

    2. Re:Not a Good Thing by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    3. Re:Not a Good Thing by Shin-LaC · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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".

    4. Re:Not a Good Thing by TinBromide · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 gain anything by ignoring the best or the worst, but if you plan for rainy days but hope you never have to use the plan, you can sleep at night without nightmares.

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    5. Re:Not a Good Thing by bjourne · · Score: 2, Informative

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

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      Football Odds
    6. Re:Not a Good Thing by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Informative

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

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      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    7. Re:Not a Good Thing by Eil · · Score: 2

      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.

    8. Re:Not a Good Thing by Runaway1956 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

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      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  3. Ohloh's programming language chart is nice... by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...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.

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    The Army reading list
    1. Re:Ohloh's programming language chart is nice... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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++.

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      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Re:Congratulations! by legirons · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. Re:Congratulations! by 0racle · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
  6. Just curious .. by THEbwana · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Newsflash by Nezer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    (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.

  8. Re:Congratulations! by westlake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Mod Parent Up by furbearntrout · · Score: 2

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

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