Acquiring open source geeks…

SourceForge (LNUX) announced that they will acquire open source network Ohloh, further adding to their already substantial presence in the open source space.

This is one of several major moves in recent months for SourceForge, whose flagship property, SourceForge.net, the hosting provider and online community hub for open source developers, has recently rolled out a new UI, deployed new approved tools for their users and added additional support capabilities through social tools like Twitter.

The acquisition will integrate Ohloh’s data on open source trends to further enrich SourceForge’s analysis of their community and provide new insights to improve targeted advertising. SourceForge is already offering an array new ad products that vastly outperform industry standards and can now be even more finely targeted and better integrated into the site.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in early June 2009.

“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.

Ohloh, founded in 2004, is the largest directory of open source projects and developers. The company’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. Ohloh also tracks open source activity through community-enabled services on its site and provides data to leading technology companies.

SourceForge’s network of web sites serves 34 million unique visitors each month* and includes: SourceForge.net, Slashdot, ThinkGeek and freshmeat.net. For more information www.sourceforge.com.