7 ms·

Slashdot and SourceForge sold to Dice Holdings

170 points by thenextcorner 14y ago

zheng 14y ago
I have very little perspective here, but this seems like a low price for /. and SourceForge ($20M). The article states that last year alone the two sites brought in that much revenue, but I'd assume they weren't bought if the purchaser didn't think there was growth potential.
- jnorthrop 14y ago
  And conversely, they wouldn't have been sold at 1x annual revenue if the seller didn't think that the future prospects were bleak.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    And/or if the parent wasn't desperate for cash and found few takers. That said, upside doesn't look all that great.
- debacle 14y ago
  $20M in revenue, but how much in profit? Slashdot and sourceforge can't be cheap to host.
  - viseztrance 14y ago
    Perhaps, but how much revenue did Instagram have?
    - rmc 14y ago
      The had millions of users using it for photos when Facebook, who had lots of money, was worried.
    - Codhisattva 14y ago
      Speculation drove up Instagram's "value". As did a likely bidding war with Google.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    And it's an established business. No zero-point extrapolation here.
  - masterponomo 14y ago
    You nailed it. GKNT shareholder here. They have struggled for years to monetize the media business, with little success (profit-wise). Cost of revenue is always very high. Add in a lot of turnover in editorial/content/business leadership (basically everything on the media side) and it has been a whole lot of operating losses. ThinkGeek, meanwhile, has had great year-over-year sales increases, and costs are being brought under control. With the sale of media business, 2012 could be GKNT's first profitable year in many a year (or ever--haven't checked back more than 5 years). Or it could be they finally unloaded the media business (they hired a company to shop it around, BTW) and will now try to sell the e-commerce side (say, to Amazon) and close the doors.
  - eli 14y ago
    I heard $5M.
- seiji 14y ago
  They are basically internet retirement communities. They have a stable population until the population starts to die off. Except with a normal retirement home, there are always new old people joining. No sane person under 45 really wants to be around the /. "we hate everything" crowd or whatevertheheck sf.net turned into.
  - nn2 14y ago
    Not sure about sourceforge. It lost its lustre to github, but there are still a lot of good project there. freshmeat/freecode is really great. Lots of great software there (I liked the old name better) Browsing the freecode frontpage is far more satisfying than the HN page because it's all about real code that does something and very little hype and BS.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      Reading Sourceforge is not unlike reading magazines at the dentist's office while awaiting a root canal. All the magazines are old, dog-eared, and full of things you don't care about and the environment is extremely disconcerting. This latest redesign takes Sourceforge from Slashdot-flavored ugly into domain-squatter horrendous.
      - nn2 14y ago
        True for the html layout, but not the content (the projects/code). For a code site layout in the end is very secondary. Besides github is doing its best to compete on the "largest number of useless buttons/toolbars on the webpage" front with sf. I also found that finding something based on keywords works better on sf than on guthub.
        astrodust 14y ago
        For code, layout is everything. Consider how excruciating it is to try and view source code on SourceForge compared with GitHub. On the latter you are literally shown a listing of files with the README already open for any given repository. Sourceforge has this absolutely useless "Download" link where you have to grab an archive, extract it, dump it into your text editor, and only then will you find out it's not what you want. It is not an understatement to suggest that Sourceforge is by people with no idea about open source.
- dmethvin 14y ago
  Many profitable businesses tail off very slowly over years, throwing off excellent revenue in the process. Last year, for example, AOL made $175 million off 3 million customers who still subscribe to its dial-up business.[1] Those businesses can become even more profitable in the near term if your strategy is to cut marketing/operating costs to the bone and "ride them down". It sounds very mercenary, but that can be the right approach when there is no growth potential. [1] http://www.splatf.com/2012/07/aol-3million-chart/ http://www.splatf.com/2012/07/aol-3million-chart/
  - cydonian_monk 14y ago
    My dad is one of those 3 million dial-up subscribers - but not by choice. He doesn't use dial-up, hasn't had a PC with a modem in it for several years, but every time he calls AOL to cancel they give him six months to a year of free service.
    - cstejerean 14y ago
      Without a modem, why even take AOL up on the free six months to a year of service? It just means you'll have to call again in 6 months, and so on.
      - cydonian_monk 14y ago
        Presumeably because calling every six months or so is easier than telling people your new email address.... I honestly don't understand it myself.
        maxerickson 14y ago
        The email service is free.
      - dredmorbius 14y ago
        Subscriber numbers themselves can be useful, even if only to count as possible future revenue or marketing.
- Codhisattva 14y ago
  Well it's different to sell a profitable company than a speculative company. Valuation of a start up is based on speculation while an operating and profitable company would go for around 110% of gross annual revenue in cash. Since it used old school valuation we can assume a few things: * GeekNet content traffic is growing very much * There was no other bidder and no 'bidding war' * GeekNet was highly motivated
Syssiphus 14y ago
Bye bye /. .. you will be missed.
- weego 14y ago
  It's been awful ever since the narrative on there was almost entirely changed to "freedom and rights from the point of view of socially awkward software engineers". You cannot curate a community based on negativity, bile and cynicism and expect it flourish.
  - ebiester 14y ago
    But enough about 1999. Honestly, wasn't that always what /. was about?
  - antidoh 14y ago
    "negativity, bile and cynicism" Sounds like a niche to me. Niches are good.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    It got a lot better since that crowd migrated over to Reddit.
  - crusso 14y ago
    Freedom and rights with absolutely no responsibilities.
  - romaniv 14y ago
    I can give you many counterexamples, at least in computer gaming circles. You need to have something in addition to cynicism, though.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Works for Fox.
RenierZA 14y ago
Unique monthly users: * Slashdot: 3.7 million * SourceForge: 40 million * Freecode: 0.5 million
- thenomad 14y ago
  Hmm. Let's assume 2 page views per visit for simplicity. 44.2M visitors /mo = 88.4M page views /mo If they're bringing in $20m revenue per year, that means $1.66m per month, or $19 CPM, more or less. Either they've got a lot of page views per user or they're monetising at pretty high rates. Do /. or Sourceforge have non-ad monetisation methods, or are they just getting very good ad deals?
  - TylerE 14y ago
    Or 2 pages per visit is an absurdly low number.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      Back when I used to visit Slashdot, it'd be more like a pageview every 5 minutes. The core audience used to be extremely dedicated. I wouldn't be surprised if their pages per visit number is still abnormally high.
      - gknoy 14y ago
        Yes, but I think we all use adblock, so I'm not really sure where their views and clicks would come from.
    - manys 14y ago
      Not since the grand redesign(s). It's been pretty much maddening to use for at least a few years, so my readership has gone down from 10+ PV/day to <1/wk. My uid is 115xxx. Couple this with their editorial mechanism posting the same 30 word blurb for the same news item everybody else is posting, only two days later after every body has said their piece, what's the upside? The commentary there is no better than other places.
ksherlock 14y ago
They must be trying to set a record for how many corporate overlords they can have. Andover.Net, VA Research, VA Linux, VA Software, SourceForge, Inc, Geek.Net, Dice, ...
- ben1040 14y ago
  To be fair those were a lot of names for what pretty much was the same company, as VA Research went on a decade-long journey from being a Wall Street IPO hit selling Linux workstations to selling T-shirts to people who use Linux workstations.
ed_blackburn 14y ago
Would have been interesting to see github acquire SorceForge, for nothing more than the projects. I guess a migration wouldn't be worth it, the projects with life and activity would have left SF sometime ago?
- coffeeaddicted 14y ago
  Not really. At least when it comes to desktop software a lot of free software projects I use regularly are hosted on sourceforge. Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity.
  - uxp 14y ago
    Conversely, a lot of free software I use on both the desktop and on servers is hosted on GitHub. (I'm not sure how this argument is a rebuttal against GitHub acquiring SourceForge) Though, GitHub is in the collaboration business. They take the standard git model and remove 99% of the complexity of me trying to share my repo with my co-workers while I'm at a coffee shop and can't passthrough a NAT router, for example. Hosting software is kind of a by-product. SourceForge has always been about software, not collaboration between people. Buying SourceForge wouldn't solve anything since dead software will still be dead software without someone to take the reigns and become a manager of incoming patches and contributing him or herself, which all can be done without spending 20 million.
    - coffeeaddicted 14y ago
      Wasn't a rebuttal against GitHub acquiring SourceForge but against "the projects with life and activity would have left SF sometime ago".
  - TillE 14y ago
    That's much more about momentum than someone starting from scratch, looking at SF and GitHub (and Bitbucket, etc) and choosing SourceForge. > Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity. GitHub is huge everywhere, especially with open source. It's absolutely not a HN thing.
Spoom 14y ago
I've been posting on Slashdot since the early 2000s and have stayed on the site primarily for its community; the higher-modded comments tend to come from some pretty intelligent people. Unfortunately it seems like the current staff don't really understand why the community that is there remains and have been trying out a shotgun blast of different strategies recently: Slashdot TV, SlashBI, SlashCloud, SlashDataCenter... I just want to discuss IT with intelligent people. If they only got that the community is their power, they might be able to make the site more relevant again. It seems like when Rob Malda knew something was going on behind the scenes when he quit last year. (For more, read his AMA: http://www.topiama.com/r/137/iam-rob-cmdrtaco-malda-founder-of-slashdot-ama http://www.topiama.com/r/137/iam-rob-cmdrtaco-malda-founder-... ) At least there's HN if this latest sale makes /. go south completely.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  With slashdot being sold for that little, I am still holding out hopes for Rob somehow getting his hands on the site again, gutting it, and bringing it back to its old (albeit not really profitable) glory.
  - TheCondor 14y ago
    Rob would have to start something new. Actually, I think some new young punks would need to build something up. Slashdot, SourceForge, the whole VALinux experience was a sort of magical time when it happened. Not sure it will again. Really it was all anchored around Linux and this idea that we as a community could do it all without MS or IBM or whoever. Hard to really explain it all, if you were around in the late 1980s, the industry was very much top down, MS or IBM handed users stuff to use and then there was some freeware. As GNU and Linux got larger and became real, there was a dramatic cultural shift and the world just isn't the same anymore. (Hell, compilers and dev tools use to cost thousands of dollars and that's just how it was, when I was a kid, I actually couldn't get a compiler unless I pirated it) What I'd like to see is a mix of slashdot, reddit and hn where you have to pay something, $5 a la metafilter just to weed out the bastards. Not saying it won't happen again but it'll be different next time, Google, Apple and company give the community enough that the completely free community isn't nearly as addictive as it was back then.
noonespecial 14y ago
I remember that wonderful day in 2007 when I noticed that there was a little news aggregator bodged onto the back end of Paul Graham's essay blog and I thought to myself "wow, this is like /. only it doesn't suck so much".
- sabat 14y ago
  LOL, I had roughly the same experience. I'd already moved onto Digg (before it was went downhill) and then to Reddit. But if I'm looking for more serious (if sometimes negative) technology conversation, this right here is the epicenter.
  - bduerst 14y ago
    I agree - Digg is a good example of how creators can kill a community, and Reddit is a good example of how overall community quality is inversely related to size.
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    This was exactly my experience. /. then Digg and then Reddit. I got tired of reddit being too political and too liberal (although I am a liberal myself) so I was hoping/looking for something else. Then in a StackOverflow podcast Jeff and Joe was talking about a new place where all the cool kids hung out. They didn't want to say the name in fear of it being overrun and ruined. With a little research I found HN and haven't left since.
    - frewsxcv 14y ago
      "I got tired of reddit being too political and too liberal (although I am a liberal myself) so I was hoping/looking for something else." Unsubscribe from /r/politics
      - ThomPete 14y ago
        Well back then I was just reading the main feed.
blerrrgh 14y ago
Oh man, look at the awful sites currently maintained by Dice Holdings... > http://www.dice.com/ http://www.dice.com/ (recruiting and career development) > http://www.efinancialcareers.com/ http://www.efinancialcareers.com/ (finance recruiting and career development, UK) > http://www.clearancejobs.com/ http://www.clearancejobs.com/ (U.S. government security clearance career development) > http://www.rigzone.com/ http://www.rigzone.com/ (oil and gas industry content/advertising) > http://www.allhealthcarejobs.com/ http://www.allhealthcarejobs.com/ (healthcare career development) > http://www.targetedjobfairs.com/ http://www.targetedjobfairs.com/ (IT and security related career fairs and open houses)
- drivingmenuts 14y ago
  I think it's fairly likely that their new acquisitions will be used to drive traffic to their job hunting sites. The more active members of SF and FC are pretty much ripe targets for recruiting messages driving them to job hunts. Given the sad state of the economy, the more active of them will make for a good pool of hiring candidates. *there was a complete thought in there, but it derailed on the word economy.
- blerrrgh 14y ago
  ...it gets worse: http://news.dice.com/ http://news.dice.com/
cicero19 14y ago
If they are generating $20m/yr in revenue doesn't a $20m purchase seem a bit low? How did they agree on $20m?
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  Presumably, that $20m/yr in revenue comes with a decent chunk of costs too.
- ebrescia 14y ago
  According to TechCrunch, they are on track to do $5 MM in EBITDA, so they have about $15 MM in annual operating costs (before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization). This means that Dice paid about 4x operating profits. Here's the link: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/dice-holdings-buys-slashdot-sourceforge-and-freecode-from-geeknet/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/dice-holdings-buys-slashdot...
  - bduerst 14y ago
    $20m is the price you would expect. Rule of thumb is 3 years earnings + a little extra for goodwill/brand name/human capital.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Well you can jump the shark and sometimes the shark eats you. Too bad.
bane 14y ago
So basically geeknet = thinkgeek. Is this some kind of really delayed stealth IPO?
- Codhisattva 14y ago
  No but it could be prime for an Amazon acquisition. GKNT is already public http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GKNT http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GKNT
  - bane 14y ago
    Sorry I should have been more clear. Yeah, geeknet is already publicly traded, but with these divestitures, their only remaining property is thinkgeek. I agree it looks like they're setting up for a sale of some sort, especially in light of some recentish departures from Thinkgeek management clearing the way for an acquisition. http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=701230 http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=701230 edit also this makes sense in light of their Q2 financials, with their media properties losing money (no wonder the acquisition by Dice was at 1x revenue) http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=697536 http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=697536 ThinkGeek e-commerce revenue increased 24 percent to $17.8 million for the second quarter of 2012, compared to $14.3 million for the second quarter of 2011. Orders received increased by 21 percent in the second quarter of 2012 as compared with the same period last year. Media revenue decreased 8 percent to $5.3 million for the second quarter of 2012, compared to $5.8 million for the second quarter of 2011. Total cash and investments at the end of second quarter 2012 was $34.6 million. TG has long been the revenue backbone for geeknet. Getting rid of the other properties effectively makes TG the same as geeknet meaning TG is now effectively a publicly traded company. edit 2 also it looks like they were grouping geeknet media into a bundle prepping for a possible sale for a while, that division even had it's own web site that doesn't seem to have much purpose beyond trying to promote the properties as sales targets http://geeknetmedia.com/ http://geeknetmedia.com/
vectorbunny 14y ago
Ouch. I'd venture this is a fair indication of the directionality of the value of these aging 'name brands'. It seems not unlike a former arena-filling headliner reduced to doing van tours of Holiday Inn lounges.
madrona 14y ago
This is surprising. I just spilled hot grits onto my lap. This (and Netcraft) confirms the rumors that Slashdot is dying.
xyzzyb 14y ago
Wow. I remember when my older brother introduced me to /. when I was a teenage nerd just starting to run Linux in 1998. There weren't even user accounts. Now I feel like reading a Jon Katz article for nostalgia.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  That would be an excellent way of curing yourself of the risk of ever feeling nostalgia again.
  - mongol 14y ago
    Ha ha... I found this (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/11/17/204207/message-from-kabul http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/11/17/204207/message-from-...): (About "Junis", a hacker from Kabul two months after 9/11) There are many computers in Afghanistan, Junis said, many in clusters in cities like Kabul and Kandahar (news reports have frequently mentioned that Bin-Laden's organization used both e-mail and encrypted files to communicate). Computer geeks are already hooking up with one another all over the country; Junis isn't the only Afghan e-mailing these days. He says other coders and gamers hid their PC's as well. Meanwhile, he's especially eager to get his hands on the Apple iPod, and has been drooling over the Apple website site since he got back online. And some things, of course, never change. "I thought they were going to get Microsoft," he wrote. "I guess not."
  - zem 14y ago
    i recently read katz's "geeks" [http://www.amazon.com/Geeks-Lost-Boys-Internet-Idaho/dp/037550298X http://www.amazon.com/Geeks-Lost-Boys-Internet-Idaho/dp/0375...], partly out of a sense of slashdot nostalgia, and found it surprisingly engaging.
rwmj 14y ago
Does this include Ohloh as well? That's a pretty nice code analysis site, which was acquired by SF back in 2009: http://meta.ohloh.net/2009/05/sourceforge_acquires_ohloh/ http://meta.ohloh.net/2009/05/sourceforge_acquires_ohloh/
- brondsem 14y ago
  Black Duck Software acquired Ohloh from Geeknet. http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2010-10-05 http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2010-10-05
- boyter 14y ago
  Interesting. Working on a competitor to code.ohloh I always wondered how they got such good hooks into sourceforge, but this explains it. With Black Duck owning them and Koders their strategy makes more sense now.
simias 14y ago
Does anybody here still use SourceForge to host their projects? Back in its days it was the place for open source software, but these days I shudder when software I want to use is hosted there. I think it failed to evolve and become what is now github. Or maybe they target an other market?
- marquis 14y ago
  There is still a lot of good legacy code hosted on SourceForge, I end up there all the time and figure that whoever the owner was never got around to moving it to github or google code.
- romaniv 14y ago
  SF is not "social", quite slow and is more difficult to use for developers. However, I feel that it is more end-user friendly. Maybe not inherently, but because of the differences in culture. There are tons of software there that I can just download and install without any tinkering. I don't recall a single application that I've ever installed from GitHub.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I think for most software on Github, the "end users" are themselves developers. Libraries, vimscripts, languages, programmer oriented utilities, etc. I almost never got that sort of software from SourceForge. Most things that I have gotten from SourceForge are more "user application"-y. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head since it's been so long.. maybe things like Wesnoth. Basically what I think I am saying is it depends on who the end user is.
- neilxdsouza 14y ago
  I host my survey and cross tab compilers on sourceforge. It's a nice place you can keep things in public, and no one will ever notice - hiding in plain sight. I didnt want to move to github because I felt loyalty to sourceforge.
willvarfar 14y ago
I was so pleased when I acquired the username `bogomips` on sf. Never did use it for much though. Sad how obvious it is how it slipped away long before github filled the vacuum.
dredmorbius 14y ago
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=slashdot,+digg,+reddit,+hacker+news&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=slashdot,+digg,+reddit,+hack...
- zerohm 14y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what Sub-Reddits have interesting tech discussion? I love reddit for interesting/ridiculous/obscure internet finds, but I don't see a lot of leading edge tech/business talk.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    I'm still exploring that myself. There's /r/linuxadmin, but traffic's fairly low. You can toss search terms at the front page (sitewide) or through Google/DDG and see where you end up. I'm having better luck at focused technical discussion on Stack Exchange rather than Reddit. I've found a few non-technical subreddits of interest though. For that, it's been a pretty phenomenal community builder. Better than any other forum I'm currently aware of, HN included (though HN's focus on tech and the startup world is pretty good). Farmsteading Reddit seems to work reasonably well, though it takes time to generate traction. Seed, fertilize, and weed.
languagehacker 14y ago
This would be like Monster.com purchasing Fark.com. Not really news because none of those things have mattered for years.
Codhisattva 14y ago
Seems like GeekNet is going to focus on ThinkGeek.com. Good move I'd say. Well unless their next step is to sell it to Amazon (a la woot.com).
rdzgtdsv 14y ago
Will it mean any changes for my project hosted on SourceForge?
- mariuz 14y ago
  maybe more dice ads
zeruch 14y ago
I was on the SF.net "Ignition" team (and am still close friends with 2 of the original 4 project team) and what Sourceforge aspired to be versus what inevitably was done to it...to what it has been sold to...God, what a depressing fin de sicle.
- joeyh 14y ago
  I still wear my "cold storage" T-shirt sometimes.
  - zeruch 14y ago
    As do I. I think there were only a few dozen made, so they are actually a "rare" item.
hnriot 14y ago
I, for one, welcome our new Dice Holdings overlords. I used to love slashdot, coffee and a discussion about boot loaders for breakfast. It all went to rat shit of course, but that's just the natural order of the universe.
mhartl 14y ago
In late 2008, I attended an "open-source CEO" dinner, at which I was coincidentally seated between the CEOs of SourceForge and CollabNet (principal developer and supporter of the Subversion VCS). I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git, and he was dismissive, indicating that Subversion had already won as the definitive open-source VCS. I then asked the SourceForge CEO if he knew about GitHub; he was vaguely familiar with them, but appeared utterly unconcerned that they might be a threat. I thought to myself, All the battles have been fought and lost, and these guys don't even know there's a war.
bgilroy26 14y ago
That's like, half of the internet!

170 points by thenextcorner 14y ago

zheng 14y ago

I have very little perspective here, but this seems like a low price for /. and SourceForge ($20M). The article states that last year alone the two sites brought in that much revenue, but I'd assume they weren't bought if the purchaser didn't think there was growth potential.

jnorthrop 14y ago
And conversely, they wouldn't have been sold at 1x annual revenue if the seller didn't think that the future prospects were bleak.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  And/or if the parent wasn't desperate for cash and found few takers. That said, upside doesn't look all that great.
debacle 14y ago
$20M in revenue, but how much in profit? Slashdot and sourceforge can't be cheap to host.
- viseztrance 14y ago
  Perhaps, but how much revenue did Instagram have?
  - rmc 14y ago
    The had millions of users using it for photos when Facebook, who had lots of money, was worried.
  - Codhisattva 14y ago
    Speculation drove up Instagram's "value". As did a likely bidding war with Google.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  And it's an established business. No zero-point extrapolation here.
- masterponomo 14y ago
  You nailed it. GKNT shareholder here. They have struggled for years to monetize the media business, with little success (profit-wise). Cost of revenue is always very high. Add in a lot of turnover in editorial/content/business leadership (basically everything on the media side) and it has been a whole lot of operating losses. ThinkGeek, meanwhile, has had great year-over-year sales increases, and costs are being brought under control. With the sale of media business, 2012 could be GKNT's first profitable year in many a year (or ever--haven't checked back more than 5 years). Or it could be they finally unloaded the media business (they hired a company to shop it around, BTW) and will now try to sell the e-commerce side (say, to Amazon) and close the doors.
- eli 14y ago
  I heard $5M.
seiji 14y ago
They are basically internet retirement communities. They have a stable population until the population starts to die off. Except with a normal retirement home, there are always new old people joining. No sane person under 45 really wants to be around the /. "we hate everything" crowd or whatevertheheck sf.net turned into.
- nn2 14y ago
  Not sure about sourceforge. It lost its lustre to github, but there are still a lot of good project there. freshmeat/freecode is really great. Lots of great software there (I liked the old name better) Browsing the freecode frontpage is far more satisfying than the HN page because it's all about real code that does something and very little hype and BS.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    Reading Sourceforge is not unlike reading magazines at the dentist's office while awaiting a root canal. All the magazines are old, dog-eared, and full of things you don't care about and the environment is extremely disconcerting. This latest redesign takes Sourceforge from Slashdot-flavored ugly into domain-squatter horrendous.
    - nn2 14y ago
      True for the html layout, but not the content (the projects/code). For a code site layout in the end is very secondary. Besides github is doing its best to compete on the "largest number of useless buttons/toolbars on the webpage" front with sf. I also found that finding something based on keywords works better on sf than on guthub.
      - astrodust 14y ago
        For code, layout is everything. Consider how excruciating it is to try and view source code on SourceForge compared with GitHub. On the latter you are literally shown a listing of files with the README already open for any given repository. Sourceforge has this absolutely useless "Download" link where you have to grab an archive, extract it, dump it into your text editor, and only then will you find out it's not what you want. It is not an understatement to suggest that Sourceforge is by people with no idea about open source.
dmethvin 14y ago
Many profitable businesses tail off very slowly over years, throwing off excellent revenue in the process. Last year, for example, AOL made $175 million off 3 million customers who still subscribe to its dial-up business.[1] Those businesses can become even more profitable in the near term if your strategy is to cut marketing/operating costs to the bone and "ride them down". It sounds very mercenary, but that can be the right approach when there is no growth potential. [1] http://www.splatf.com/2012/07/aol-3million-chart/ http://www.splatf.com/2012/07/aol-3million-chart/
- cydonian_monk 14y ago
  My dad is one of those 3 million dial-up subscribers - but not by choice. He doesn't use dial-up, hasn't had a PC with a modem in it for several years, but every time he calls AOL to cancel they give him six months to a year of free service.
  - cstejerean 14y ago
    Without a modem, why even take AOL up on the free six months to a year of service? It just means you'll have to call again in 6 months, and so on.
    - cydonian_monk 14y ago
      Presumeably because calling every six months or so is easier than telling people your new email address.... I honestly don't understand it myself.
      - maxerickson 14y ago
        The email service is free.
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      Subscriber numbers themselves can be useful, even if only to count as possible future revenue or marketing.
Codhisattva 14y ago
Well it's different to sell a profitable company than a speculative company. Valuation of a start up is based on speculation while an operating and profitable company would go for around 110% of gross annual revenue in cash. Since it used old school valuation we can assume a few things: * GeekNet content traffic is growing very much * There was no other bidder and no 'bidding war' * GeekNet was highly motivated

Syssiphus 14y ago

Bye bye /. .. you will be missed.

weego 14y ago
It's been awful ever since the narrative on there was almost entirely changed to "freedom and rights from the point of view of socially awkward software engineers". You cannot curate a community based on negativity, bile and cynicism and expect it flourish.
- ebiester 14y ago
  But enough about 1999. Honestly, wasn't that always what /. was about?
- antidoh 14y ago
  "negativity, bile and cynicism" Sounds like a niche to me. Niches are good.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  It got a lot better since that crowd migrated over to Reddit.
- crusso 14y ago
  Freedom and rights with absolutely no responsibilities.
- romaniv 14y ago
  I can give you many counterexamples, at least in computer gaming circles. You need to have something in addition to cynicism, though.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Works for Fox.

RenierZA 14y ago

Unique monthly users: * Slashdot: 3.7 million * SourceForge: 40 million * Freecode: 0.5 million

thenomad 14y ago
Hmm. Let's assume 2 page views per visit for simplicity. 44.2M visitors /mo = 88.4M page views /mo If they're bringing in $20m revenue per year, that means $1.66m per month, or $19 CPM, more or less. Either they've got a lot of page views per user or they're monetising at pretty high rates. Do /. or Sourceforge have non-ad monetisation methods, or are they just getting very good ad deals?
- TylerE 14y ago
  Or 2 pages per visit is an absurdly low number.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    Back when I used to visit Slashdot, it'd be more like a pageview every 5 minutes. The core audience used to be extremely dedicated. I wouldn't be surprised if their pages per visit number is still abnormally high.
    - gknoy 14y ago
      Yes, but I think we all use adblock, so I'm not really sure where their views and clicks would come from.
  - manys 14y ago
    Not since the grand redesign(s). It's been pretty much maddening to use for at least a few years, so my readership has gone down from 10+ PV/day to <1/wk. My uid is 115xxx. Couple this with their editorial mechanism posting the same 30 word blurb for the same news item everybody else is posting, only two days later after every body has said their piece, what's the upside? The commentary there is no better than other places.

ksherlock 14y ago

They must be trying to set a record for how many corporate overlords they can have. Andover.Net, VA Research, VA Linux, VA Software, SourceForge, Inc, Geek.Net, Dice, ...

ben1040 14y ago
To be fair those were a lot of names for what pretty much was the same company, as VA Research went on a decade-long journey from being a Wall Street IPO hit selling Linux workstations to selling T-shirts to people who use Linux workstations.

ed_blackburn 14y ago

Would have been interesting to see github acquire SorceForge, for nothing more than the projects. I guess a migration wouldn't be worth it, the projects with life and activity would have left SF sometime ago?

coffeeaddicted 14y ago
Not really. At least when it comes to desktop software a lot of free software projects I use regularly are hosted on sourceforge. Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity.
- uxp 14y ago
  Conversely, a lot of free software I use on both the desktop and on servers is hosted on GitHub. (I'm not sure how this argument is a rebuttal against GitHub acquiring SourceForge) Though, GitHub is in the collaboration business. They take the standard git model and remove 99% of the complexity of me trying to share my repo with my co-workers while I'm at a coffee shop and can't passthrough a NAT router, for example. Hosting software is kind of a by-product. SourceForge has always been about software, not collaboration between people. Buying SourceForge wouldn't solve anything since dead software will still be dead software without someone to take the reigns and become a manager of incoming patches and contributing him or herself, which all can be done without spending 20 million.
  - coffeeaddicted 14y ago
    Wasn't a rebuttal against GitHub acquiring SourceForge but against "the projects with life and activity would have left SF sometime ago".
- TillE 14y ago
  That's much more about momentum than someone starting from scratch, looking at SF and GitHub (and Bitbucket, etc) and choosing SourceForge. > Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity. GitHub is huge everywhere, especially with open source. It's absolutely not a HN thing.

Spoom 14y ago

I've been posting on Slashdot since the early 2000s and have stayed on the site primarily for its community; the higher-modded comments tend to come from some pretty intelligent people. Unfortunately it seems like the current staff don't really understand why the community that is there remains and have been trying out a shotgun blast of different strategies recently: Slashdot TV, SlashBI, SlashCloud, SlashDataCenter... I just want to discuss IT with intelligent people. If they only got that the community is their power, they might be able to make the site more relevant again. It seems like when Rob Malda knew something was going on behind the scenes when he quit last year. (For more, read his AMA: http://www.topiama.com/r/137/iam-rob-cmdrtaco-malda-founder-of-slashdot-ama http://www.topiama.com/r/137/iam-rob-cmdrtaco-malda-founder-... ) At least there's HN if this latest sale makes /. go south completely.

jlgreco 14y ago
With slashdot being sold for that little, I am still holding out hopes for Rob somehow getting his hands on the site again, gutting it, and bringing it back to its old (albeit not really profitable) glory.
- TheCondor 14y ago
  Rob would have to start something new. Actually, I think some new young punks would need to build something up. Slashdot, SourceForge, the whole VALinux experience was a sort of magical time when it happened. Not sure it will again. Really it was all anchored around Linux and this idea that we as a community could do it all without MS or IBM or whoever. Hard to really explain it all, if you were around in the late 1980s, the industry was very much top down, MS or IBM handed users stuff to use and then there was some freeware. As GNU and Linux got larger and became real, there was a dramatic cultural shift and the world just isn't the same anymore. (Hell, compilers and dev tools use to cost thousands of dollars and that's just how it was, when I was a kid, I actually couldn't get a compiler unless I pirated it) What I'd like to see is a mix of slashdot, reddit and hn where you have to pay something, $5 a la metafilter just to weed out the bastards. Not saying it won't happen again but it'll be different next time, Google, Apple and company give the community enough that the completely free community isn't nearly as addictive as it was back then.

noonespecial 14y ago

I remember that wonderful day in 2007 when I noticed that there was a little news aggregator bodged onto the back end of Paul Graham's essay blog and I thought to myself "wow, this is like /. only it doesn't suck so much".

sabat 14y ago
LOL, I had roughly the same experience. I'd already moved onto Digg (before it was went downhill) and then to Reddit. But if I'm looking for more serious (if sometimes negative) technology conversation, this right here is the epicenter.
- bduerst 14y ago
  I agree - Digg is a good example of how creators can kill a community, and Reddit is a good example of how overall community quality is inversely related to size.
- ThomPete 14y ago
  This was exactly my experience. /. then Digg and then Reddit. I got tired of reddit being too political and too liberal (although I am a liberal myself) so I was hoping/looking for something else. Then in a StackOverflow podcast Jeff and Joe was talking about a new place where all the cool kids hung out. They didn't want to say the name in fear of it being overrun and ruined. With a little research I found HN and haven't left since.
  - frewsxcv 14y ago
    "I got tired of reddit being too political and too liberal (although I am a liberal myself) so I was hoping/looking for something else." Unsubscribe from /r/politics
    - ThomPete 14y ago
      Well back then I was just reading the main feed.

blerrrgh 14y ago

Oh man, look at the awful sites currently maintained by Dice Holdings... > http://www.dice.com/ http://www.dice.com/ (recruiting and career development) > http://www.efinancialcareers.com/ http://www.efinancialcareers.com/ (finance recruiting and career development, UK) > http://www.clearancejobs.com/ http://www.clearancejobs.com/ (U.S. government security clearance career development) > http://www.rigzone.com/ http://www.rigzone.com/ (oil and gas industry content/advertising) > http://www.allhealthcarejobs.com/ http://www.allhealthcarejobs.com/ (healthcare career development) > http://www.targetedjobfairs.com/ http://www.targetedjobfairs.com/ (IT and security related career fairs and open houses)

drivingmenuts 14y ago
I think it's fairly likely that their new acquisitions will be used to drive traffic to their job hunting sites. The more active members of SF and FC are pretty much ripe targets for recruiting messages driving them to job hunts. Given the sad state of the economy, the more active of them will make for a good pool of hiring candidates. *there was a complete thought in there, but it derailed on the word economy.
blerrrgh 14y ago
...it gets worse: http://news.dice.com/ http://news.dice.com/

cicero19 14y ago

If they are generating $20m/yr in revenue doesn't a $20m purchase seem a bit low? How did they agree on $20m?

ceejayoz 14y ago
Presumably, that $20m/yr in revenue comes with a decent chunk of costs too.
ebrescia 14y ago
According to TechCrunch, they are on track to do $5 MM in EBITDA, so they have about $15 MM in annual operating costs (before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization). This means that Dice paid about 4x operating profits. Here's the link: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/dice-holdings-buys-slashdot-sourceforge-and-freecode-from-geeknet/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/dice-holdings-buys-slashdot...
- bduerst 14y ago
  $20m is the price you would expect. Rule of thumb is 3 years earnings + a little extra for goodwill/brand name/human capital.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Well you can jump the shark and sometimes the shark eats you. Too bad.

bane 14y ago

So basically geeknet = thinkgeek. Is this some kind of really delayed stealth IPO?

Codhisattva 14y ago
No but it could be prime for an Amazon acquisition. GKNT is already public http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GKNT http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GKNT
- bane 14y ago
  Sorry I should have been more clear. Yeah, geeknet is already publicly traded, but with these divestitures, their only remaining property is thinkgeek. I agree it looks like they're setting up for a sale of some sort, especially in light of some recentish departures from Thinkgeek management clearing the way for an acquisition. http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=701230 http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=701230 edit also this makes sense in light of their Q2 financials, with their media properties losing money (no wonder the acquisition by Dice was at 1x revenue) http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=697536 http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=697536 ThinkGeek e-commerce revenue increased 24 percent to $17.8 million for the second quarter of 2012, compared to $14.3 million for the second quarter of 2011. Orders received increased by 21 percent in the second quarter of 2012 as compared with the same period last year. Media revenue decreased 8 percent to $5.3 million for the second quarter of 2012, compared to $5.8 million for the second quarter of 2011. Total cash and investments at the end of second quarter 2012 was $34.6 million. TG has long been the revenue backbone for geeknet. Getting rid of the other properties effectively makes TG the same as geeknet meaning TG is now effectively a publicly traded company. edit 2 also it looks like they were grouping geeknet media into a bundle prepping for a possible sale for a while, that division even had it's own web site that doesn't seem to have much purpose beyond trying to promote the properties as sales targets http://geeknetmedia.com/ http://geeknetmedia.com/

vectorbunny 14y ago

Ouch. I'd venture this is a fair indication of the directionality of the value of these aging 'name brands'. It seems not unlike a former arena-filling headliner reduced to doing van tours of Holiday Inn lounges.

madrona 14y ago

This is surprising. I just spilled hot grits onto my lap. This (and Netcraft) confirms the rumors that Slashdot is dying.

xyzzyb 14y ago

Wow. I remember when my older brother introduced me to /. when I was a teenage nerd just starting to run Linux in 1998. There weren't even user accounts. Now I feel like reading a Jon Katz article for nostalgia.

smacktoward 14y ago
That would be an excellent way of curing yourself of the risk of ever feeling nostalgia again.
- mongol 14y ago
  Ha ha... I found this (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/11/17/204207/message-from-kabul http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/11/17/204207/message-from-...): (About "Junis", a hacker from Kabul two months after 9/11) There are many computers in Afghanistan, Junis said, many in clusters in cities like Kabul and Kandahar (news reports have frequently mentioned that Bin-Laden's organization used both e-mail and encrypted files to communicate). Computer geeks are already hooking up with one another all over the country; Junis isn't the only Afghan e-mailing these days. He says other coders and gamers hid their PC's as well. Meanwhile, he's especially eager to get his hands on the Apple iPod, and has been drooling over the Apple website site since he got back online. And some things, of course, never change. "I thought they were going to get Microsoft," he wrote. "I guess not."
- zem 14y ago
  i recently read katz's "geeks" [http://www.amazon.com/Geeks-Lost-Boys-Internet-Idaho/dp/037550298X http://www.amazon.com/Geeks-Lost-Boys-Internet-Idaho/dp/0375...], partly out of a sense of slashdot nostalgia, and found it surprisingly engaging.

rwmj 14y ago

Does this include Ohloh as well? That's a pretty nice code analysis site, which was acquired by SF back in 2009: http://meta.ohloh.net/2009/05/sourceforge_acquires_ohloh/ http://meta.ohloh.net/2009/05/sourceforge_acquires_ohloh/

brondsem 14y ago
Black Duck Software acquired Ohloh from Geeknet. http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2010-10-05 http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2010-10-05
boyter 14y ago
Interesting. Working on a competitor to code.ohloh I always wondered how they got such good hooks into sourceforge, but this explains it. With Black Duck owning them and Koders their strategy makes more sense now.

simias 14y ago

Does anybody here still use SourceForge to host their projects? Back in its days it was the place for open source software, but these days I shudder when software I want to use is hosted there. I think it failed to evolve and become what is now github. Or maybe they target an other market?

marquis 14y ago
There is still a lot of good legacy code hosted on SourceForge, I end up there all the time and figure that whoever the owner was never got around to moving it to github or google code.
romaniv 14y ago
SF is not "social", quite slow and is more difficult to use for developers. However, I feel that it is more end-user friendly. Maybe not inherently, but because of the differences in culture. There are tons of software there that I can just download and install without any tinkering. I don't recall a single application that I've ever installed from GitHub.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I think for most software on Github, the "end users" are themselves developers. Libraries, vimscripts, languages, programmer oriented utilities, etc. I almost never got that sort of software from SourceForge. Most things that I have gotten from SourceForge are more "user application"-y. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head since it's been so long.. maybe things like Wesnoth. Basically what I think I am saying is it depends on who the end user is.
neilxdsouza 14y ago
I host my survey and cross tab compilers on sourceforge. It's a nice place you can keep things in public, and no one will ever notice - hiding in plain sight. I didnt want to move to github because I felt loyalty to sourceforge.

willvarfar 14y ago

I was so pleased when I acquired the username `bogomips` on sf. Never did use it for much though. Sad how obvious it is how it slipped away long before github filled the vacuum.

dredmorbius 14y ago

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=slashdot,+digg,+reddit,+hacker+news&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=slashdot,+digg,+reddit,+hack...

zerohm 14y ago
Just out of curiosity, what Sub-Reddits have interesting tech discussion? I love reddit for interesting/ridiculous/obscure internet finds, but I don't see a lot of leading edge tech/business talk.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  I'm still exploring that myself. There's /r/linuxadmin, but traffic's fairly low. You can toss search terms at the front page (sitewide) or through Google/DDG and see where you end up. I'm having better luck at focused technical discussion on Stack Exchange rather than Reddit. I've found a few non-technical subreddits of interest though. For that, it's been a pretty phenomenal community builder. Better than any other forum I'm currently aware of, HN included (though HN's focus on tech and the startup world is pretty good). Farmsteading Reddit seems to work reasonably well, though it takes time to generate traction. Seed, fertilize, and weed.

languagehacker 14y ago

This would be like Monster.com purchasing Fark.com. Not really news because none of those things have mattered for years.

Codhisattva 14y ago

Seems like GeekNet is going to focus on ThinkGeek.com. Good move I'd say. Well unless their next step is to sell it to Amazon (a la woot.com).

rdzgtdsv 14y ago

Will it mean any changes for my project hosted on SourceForge?

mariuz 14y ago
maybe more dice ads

zeruch 14y ago

I was on the SF.net "Ignition" team (and am still close friends with 2 of the original 4 project team) and what Sourceforge aspired to be versus what inevitably was done to it...to what it has been sold to...God, what a depressing fin de sicle.

joeyh 14y ago
I still wear my "cold storage" T-shirt sometimes.
- zeruch 14y ago
  As do I. I think there were only a few dozen made, so they are actually a "rare" item.

hnriot 14y ago

I, for one, welcome our new Dice Holdings overlords. I used to love slashdot, coffee and a discussion about boot loaders for breakfast. It all went to rat shit of course, but that's just the natural order of the universe.

mhartl 14y ago

In late 2008, I attended an "open-source CEO" dinner, at which I was coincidentally seated between the CEOs of SourceForge and CollabNet (principal developer and supporter of the Subversion VCS). I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git, and he was dismissive, indicating that Subversion had already won as the definitive open-source VCS. I then asked the SourceForge CEO if he knew about GitHub; he was vaguely familiar with them, but appeared utterly unconcerned that they might be a threat. I thought to myself, All the battles have been fought and lost, and these guys don't even know there's a war.

bgilroy26 14y ago

That's like, half of the internet!