April 25th, 2007
CollabNet buys Sourceforge (not exactly)
A lot of folks woke up this morning thinking that CollabNet has bought Sourceforge.
But as CollabNet vp-operations Nick Bonfiglio explained to me on the phone just now, this is not exactly the case.
What CollabNet has bought is SourceForge Enterprise Edition, a version of the site's services that was being sold to enterprises. Over the next year that will be integrated with CollabNet's own offerings.
CollabNet already runs "private forges" for things like OpenOffice and Java, so the stock deal also solves a problem for Sourceforge, which was losing large projects to in-house solutions.
Bonfiglio said the Sourceforge Enterprise Edition is a nice fit for his company. "CUBiT adds the build and test portions of the product lifecycle." CollabNet also runs Subversion, the version control project, and that too will be integrated.
As to VA Software, the sellers in this case, they get to concentrate on the editorial side of the house, which in addition to Sourceforge includes community and news sites Slashdot.org, ITManagersJournal.com, NewsForge.com, Linux.com and freshmeat.net.
They also get some stock in CollabNet, which will feel good against the headache they fornerly got trying to compete with it.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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