Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode have been acquired by Dice Holdings, a company that specializes in professional and career websites like the (tech-focused) Dice.com. The three websites were all owned by Geeknet, and they've been purchased by Dice for $20 million in cash today. It's not clear how Dice plans to integrate the decidedly geeky websites into its current staple of offerings — at first blush this doesn't seem like the most natural of pairings — though the CEO statement in today's press release claims it "fits squarely into our strategy of providing content and services that are important to tech professionals in their everyday work lives."

The most well-known of Geeknet's properties is undoubtedly Slashdot, a user-submitted science and technology news aggregator that surfaces the most popular content and features comment sections on the site for each story. SourceForge, meanwhile, is a repository for source code, and Freecode is a similar but Linux- and Unix-focused site. ThinkGeek — known for its wide array of nerdy gear like the iCade family and this drum machine T-shirt — was also part of Geeknet's collection of sites, but was not included in this purchase. Instead, Geeknet will focus squarely on that site now that it has stripped itself of Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode. The three media sites apparently earned $20 million in revenue last year — the same amount they were purchased for today — suggesting that they may have had other troubles.

Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that ThinkGeek was included in the acquisition.

Thanks, grublets!