Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CollabNet is a provider of open source collaborative software development platforms and services and the acquisition brings it employees that can build sophisticated Web sites to serve as communities for open source programmers. CollabNet already hosts open-source programming sites for customers like Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

Bill Portelli, president and chief executive officer of CollabNet, said the combined company would focus on creating the next generation of global, collaborative software development environments. He added that Alphanumerica's expertise in Web site and Web application development would allow for rapid deployment of the new development environments.

Alphanumerica has a history with CollabNet. The two companies were already working together on building collaborative software development environments for Sun's OpenOffice.org project and Oracle's OTN Xchange. Also it has built out several new online communities, including the recently re-launched CollabNet and SourceXchange sites.

"Our teams have been working together for several months and we look forward to continuing to complete projects for CollabNet customers, as well as taking on new challenges," said Kerry Fitzpatrick, co-founder and chief operating officer of Alphanumerica.

In the years since Alphanumerica's founding in 1997, the company has developed a name for itself in the open source community. It has been a significant contributor to the Mozilla Web browser project and sponsored the first two Mozilla Developer Meetings. Its customers include Netscape, The Alan Guttmacher Institute, The Brooklyn Public Library and Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group.