On Thursday SourceForge announced the acquisition of Ohloh!, an open source code and community directory that I have been following myself while Optaros were establishing and growing the enterprise open source directory eosdirectory.com.
While the Eosdirectory is a collection of what Optaros believes to be enterprise ready solutions that then get rated by Optaros and also independently by the community, ohloh! has a more automated approach to rating, that uses a metric that is focused not on what visitors say about a project but what active contributors actually do to the code. Ohloh! analyses the programming languages involved, can indicate the size of a community, when it has been established, how active it is also over time (e.g. Firefox has a “Decreasing year-over-year development activity”), and this provides useful hard data in addition to the qualitative commentary and discussions. Through the community platform you can identify and get in touch with individuals behind the projects with a reference to their other activities and thus a broader context.
As such and with it consistent and wide reach over more then 3ยด500 open source projects it is a great addition to the SourceForge portfolio supporting a business model that is primarily based on advertising.
“We expect 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.
This is a great success story. I hope that the acquisition will help SourceForge and the existing ohloh! community, as currently the two platforms are mostly complimentary.
Congratulations to the ohloh! team for a great effort since 2004 and to SourceForge for what I consider a good but also bold move.
The Eosdirectory is also an important place to watch. Check out the recent request for improvement suggestions for a soon to come re-launch of the platform.
