SourceForge, a renowned software directory and source code repository system, along with Slashdot, a tech news aggregation system are being put up for sale by their parent company DHI Group, Inc., as Ars Technica reports.

In a lengthy press release that details their 2015 second quarter results, the DHI Group announced it "plans to sell the Slashdot and SourceForge businesses (together referred to as "Slashdot Media") and has engaged KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. to act as exclusive financial advisor to the Company [DHI Group] in connection with such a transaction."

Both sites were acquired in 2012 from Geeknet for $20 million / €18.1 million, alongside Freecode, formerly known as Freshmeat, which eventually was shut down.

According to DHI, the sites were meant "to provide the Dice business with broader reach into Slashdot's user community base and to extend the Dice business outside North America by engaging with SourceForge's significant international technology user community."

Plans did not go as smooth as the DHI Group hoped to, and there are a series of events that lead to this outcome.

Slashdot lost ground to newer tech news aggregation services

While Geeknet was well embedded in the open source world and had the pulse of the community, creating, running, and offering a series of beloved services (at that point in time), the same cannot be said for DHI, a classic NASDAQ traded company, which made its claim to fame via the Dice.com website, a job portal for techies.

Soon after DHI bought the three sites, "someone" had the bright idea of giving Slashdot a "redesign." As current Hacker News users can tell you, most geeks and nerds like their interfaces clean and minimal, and Slashdot, being the Hacker News of its days, founded back in 1997, had a similar userbase, which heavily and relentlessly criticized the new UI until DHI was forced to go back to the original green-white style we're all familiar with.

Unfortunately, the damage was already done, and as time went by, traffic dwindled, the userbase and the general open source community labeled Slashdot as a "boardroom-run" site, and moved on to other services like Hacker News, Reddit or Techmeme.

The site's infamous "Slashdot effect" was replaced by the Hacker News or Reddit's "hug of death," and very few people these days know what "slashdotting" is without consulting Wikipedia first.

The SourceForge adware-injecting debacle was the straw that broke the camel's back

On the other side, SourceForge hanged on pretty good for a couple of years, but with GitHub's rise in the open source community, traffic plummeted, developers stopped coming to the site, and DHI made the humongous strategic error of injecting adware into some popular open source projects like GIMP, and PyDAW.

Soon after other projects started leaving the site, moving their code to GitHub or other similar source code hosting systems, projects like phpMyAdmin, Wine, and elementary OS.

As InfoWorld put it, SourceForge practically committed "reputational suicide," and today's press release from DHI can serve as the site's official obituary because we find it hard to believe someone can ever raise SourceForge from the grave DHI laid it in.

There is no word if the two services are to be sold separately, or if they will be bundled together, but wording in the official press release makes it seem like the two will be sold as one entity: "Slashdot and SourceForge businesses (together referred to as "Slashdot Media")."