SourceForge grows up - and out

SourceForge, a media services and e-commerce company that provides open source software downloads and development, is enjoying the best of both business worlds. It is one of the largest open source software repositories - the SourceForge Web site has more than 30 million unique visitors per month - and it reported more than US$40 million in earnings for its last quarter, with no outstanding debt. In March, SourceForge inked a deal with the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of the Linux operating system. That arrangement set the stage for more collaboration with open source developers and software users. Earlier this month, the company announced plans to close on an acquisition of Ohloh, an open source data and community service. Both of those moves are aimed at hitting the company's main goal: to significantly improve the usefulness of the forge to the community. To that end, a significant investment is under way, according to Jon Sobel, SourceForge's group president of media. "We want to move from the traditional Web site, where all the focus is on what happens within the site, to being a real modern Web platform, where we can serve the open source community and provide information and utility around open source software wherever it may be hosted," said Sobel. SourceForge, the parent company, now owns SourceForge, the repository, along with technology news site Slashdot and an e-commerce company ThinkGeek. The company is trying to become a company much more focused on serving the open source community and its e-commerce business.