Black Duck Software acquires Ohloh

blackducksoftware.com

36 points·gokhan··6 comments

Boo. I liked Ohloh. OK, it was a proprietary web service, but it had neat things for people who write code.

All the notes in the blackducksoftware.com/ohloh/ page talk about making it easier for corporate people to consume free software, not providing services for free software developers.

They open sourced some of their stuff though, e.g., the Ohcount project which uses Ragel FSM for counting LOC in a variety of languages (what generates most of statistics in Ohloh).

Speaking of counting LOC there is also sloccount[1].

[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount

Disclaimer: I work for Black Duck / Ohloh.

As far as I can tell, existing Ohloh features and community will stay as is and will remain free as we add more features and enhance the site. Feel free to email me <username> @ blackducksoftware.com if you'd like to ask any specific questions or have ideas/comments/suggestions.

FWIW - I think this FAQ covers a lot of questions - http://www.blackducksoftware.com/ohloh/faq.html

Per recent news items about large companies considering open source an issue :( ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735360 ) in the products/services they acquire, the Black Duck code label seems like it would be useful:

http://www.blackducksoftware.com/files/code-label1.jpg

For others though, I'm not sure what the use would be, as they'd probably try to hide it from companies that asked, even though that could kill a deal per: http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2010/09/27/27idg-how-to-...

After reading the article on typefaces, looking at this announcement makes my eyes bleed. >_<

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