SourceForge, the company behind the popular code hosting service, has announced plans to acquire Ohloh. The acquisition is part of a broader effort to renew the relevance of SourceForge and bring greater value to the website's users.

Ohloh is a social network for open source software communities. It analyzes the source code in remote version control systems in order to collect data about software and programmers. Users can set up profiles at the site which will aggregate all of the information collected by Ohloh about their participation in open source software projects. The site aims to provide useful metrics about a multitude of open source software projects and makes it easier for participants to find each other and interact.

SourceForge is one of the oldest and best-known code hosting services for open source software projects, but it has declined in relevance as more compelling alternatives—such as GitHub and Launchpad—have emerged with support for popular distributed version control systems. SourceForge is making a major comeback and recently launched a bunch of impressive new features, including support for distributed version control systems and hosted Web applications. A user interface overhaul has helped to improve its usability and make it a more competitive option.

In an announcement on Thursday, SourceForge revealed that it has signed an agreement to acquire Ohloh. The move will make it possible for SourceForge to leverage the rich code metrics and social connection data that Ohloh has accumulated. We discussed the implications of the acquisition with SourceForge media group president Jon Sobel, who shared some of his views about the benefits that the acquisition will bring to end users.

He says that the sites will continue to be maintained as separate entities for now, but there will be a lot of cross-linking and backend integration. Ohloh will be moved into SourceForge's data center so that it can leverage the company's network and hardware infrastructure. This will allow Ohloh to grow faster and do more than it can do today in its current environment.

Sobel says that SourceForge wants to serve as a universal source of information about open source software projects regardless of where those projects are hosted. Ohloh's code crawling and analysis features are highly conducive to achieving that goal. The data will also be used to make connections between projects and developers more visible to the SourceForge community. Another advantage for SourceForge, he explained, is that Ohloh's data will help the company deliver advertising that is more targeted and effective.

One of the key features of Ohloh is that it provides APIs to make its data accessible to third-party applications and Web mashups. I asked Sobel if SourceForge will be gaining similar capabilities. He said that SourceForge is aiming to be a platform for collaboration and open source metrics, which means that providing APIs is an important part of the overall strategy. He says that there are new experimental SourceForge APIs under development and that we could see a lot more functionality exposed in the future.

SourceForge's acquisition of Ohloh is the latest in a string of very smart moves that are rapidly turning SourceForge into the collaboration powerhouse that it originally aspired to become. The company has made an enormous turnaround after years of stagnation and is once again taking a strong position of leadership relative to its formidable new competitors.