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Black Duck Software, a provider of products and services for managing the development and use of open-source software, has announced its acquisition of Ohloh.net from Geeknet.
The transaction, which closed on Sept. 30, is viewed as a boost for open-source software developers, as both companies focus on supporting the developer community. In essence, Black Duck says it will integrate Ohloh’s open-source software directory with Black Duck’s Koders.com site to promote expanded open-source adoption. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Ohloh was founded in 2006 and is among the largest free public directories of open-source software. It also hosts a vibrant Web community of software developers and FOSS (Free and Open Source) users. Ohloh’s directory contains information aggregated from more than 250,000 public code repositories, projects and forums. Black Duck, which has acquired all assets of the Ohloh property, will maintain and enhance the Ohloh Website, brand and project information for the Ohloh community, and will ultimately combine Ohloh and Koders.com to establish a comprehensive, free resource for developers to find, create, use and manage FOSS.
“With this acquisition, Black Duck is directly benefitting the FOSS community, by aiding developers’ ability to find and use open source,” said Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, said in a statement. “It’s a strategic acquisition that will continue Black Duck’s transformation into a leading open-source enabler, community member and FOSS champion.”
Indeed, Black Duck officials said the company plans to use this acquisition to help enhance and expand FOSS adoption by making it easier for developers to tap the huge body of high-quality code in open-source projects, and collaborate with their peers through the Ohloh community. By working with the FOSS community, including forges, foundations and other code repositories as well as individual projects and developers, Black Duck will expand and enrich Ohloh with improved data and new productivity tools. Black Duck will integrate Ohloh assets with Black Duck’s free code search site Koders.com, and will infuse it with a complete set of FOSS project data from Black Duck’s comprehensive KnowledgeBase, to create a single premier Web destination that developers can turn to as a trusted source of FOSS knowledge.
Black Duck’s KnowledgeBase compares codes and licenses of open source and third-party software components during the software development process.
“The acquisition of Ohloh demonstrates once more the growing value of data,” said Stephen O’Grady, industry analyst with RedMonk, in a statement. “With Ohloh’s database, Black Duck can ease the friction of commercial adoption of open-source technologies by commercial organizations and provide developers with more and better intelligence about open-source project health. This is a win for the company and communities alike.”
Black Duck will immediately invest in the current Ohloh Website and community. The company expects that enhancements to the site will begin rolling out within a few months, and will engage directly with the Ohloh community to define and implement these enhancements. Meanwhile, Ohloh.net already provides valuable free and unique data on FOSS trends. The company charts such things as the number of monthly commits made by source code developers, sorted by language.
“Koders.com and the Black Duck KnowledgeBase are tremendous and unique productivity tools, but individual developers have been asking for more freely available open-source content in one comprehensive resource,” said Tim Yeaton, CEO and president of Black Duck, in a statement. “With this acquisition we’ll provide the FOSS ecosystem and all developers using open source with a complete, trusted source of FOSS knowledge and insight, along with community and collaboration tools to engage with peers. Black Duck enterprise customers will benefit from Ohloh’s integration with the Black Duck Suite, making open source much easier to consume and manage in their enterprises and making their developers that much more productive.”
“Ohloh is the largest public source of data about open-source software, and we know this data is valuable to the open-source community,” said Scott Collison, chief product officer of Geeknet and an Ohloh founder. “SourceForge is in the forge business and not in the business of providing data on open-source software use. We decided to sell Ohloh to the pre-eminent FOSS data company in the world, Black Duck Software. We’ve had a relationship with Black Duck for years, and we are confident Black Duck will be the best steward of Ohloh’s data and community.”
Black Duck will maintain its long standing partnership with SourceForge, through which Black Duck gathers information about open-source projects hosted on SourceForge. That information is made freely available through the Koders.com code search engine and also is incorporated into the Black Duck KnowledgeBase.
“The developers Black Duck works with have asked for more freely available open-source content,” Black Duck’s Yeaton added, also in a statement. “The acquisition of Ohloh.net, when combined with our Koders.com free code search site and augmented with unique, additional content from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase of open-source project information, will enable us to provide all developers who use open-source code with a free, trusted and comprehensive source of FOSS information, as well as the community and collaboration tools needed to keep them engaged and productive.”