SourceForge Acquiring Open Source Dev Portal Ohloh

At the market close today, SourceFourge announced that it is acquiring Ohloh Corporation and Ohloh.net, a privately held development portal that aggregates open source projects, offers community features around them, and more. The financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal is expectd to close in June. Ohloh's database of open source projects includes journal entries for each project, reviews, news, related links and more. You can see an example Ohloh page, on Xen, here.

Ohloh was founded in 2004, and the site's technology crawls "approximately 3,500 open source forges and gathers data on more than 300,000 open source projects and 300,000 open source developers," according to SourceForge's announcement. SourceForge has its own formidable database of projects, though, and what may be of most interest to the company is that Ohloh tracks open source activity and usage for projects, and provides data on them to leading technology companies. That kind of data is of value in advertising.

"We expect that the acquisition of Ohloh and the integration of its technology to significantly improve our insights about the open source development community and our ability to target advertising," said Jon Sobel, SourceForge's group president of Media, in announcing the deal. The acquisition is one of very few advertising-centric deals being made in this economic environment, and is evidence that open source continues to have momemtum during the downturn.

SourceForge includes SourceForge.net, Slashdot, ThinkGeek and freshmeat.net.