“Selling its SourceForge Enterprise business to CollabNet makes sense, and this move further strengthens CollabNet’s position in the collaborative software development space.”
Enterprise software development collaboration vendor Collabnet is acquiring
all the assets and intellectual property surrounding VA Software’s SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE) software. The deal does
not include the popular SourceForge.net open source code repository, which is
not powered by SFEE.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed though Collabnet will be
bringing in VA Software’s entire SFEE development team. The company expects
that the deal will significantly enhance Collabnet’s market presence and
make it more competitive.
“We go from 100 to 300 users overnight; the combined entity has 1.1 million
users; we have broader geographic coverage; and their sales and marketing
channel don’t overlap with ours,” Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet, told
internetnews.com. “Now also we have VA Software’s 30 million eyeballs
that we are now partners with, so this represents a lot of channel
expansion.”
In addition to the SFEE assets, Collabnet will be entering into a 30-month
media relationship for online advertising services with VA Software, which owns a number of popular open source-oriented Web sites, including
Sourceforge.net, Slashdot.org and NewsForge.com, plus the ThinkGeek.com
retail site.
Portelli explained that he expects Collabnet will ultimately merge the
SFEE product line and brand with Collabnet. In the short term, Collabnet has the right to use the SourceForge Enterprise trademark and brand for a multi-year period. “I believe that all of this gives us the opportunity to push our combined products faster into the market.”
SFEE is a
proprietary closed source product that is a complete and total rewrite
of the open source code that powers the open source SourceForge.net code
repository. SourceForge.net remains powered by an infrastructure that is
different than SFEE. SFEE is based on J2EE architecture and includes a
service oriented architecture with an open API (define) and SDK.
The original SF.net open source code still lives as open source in a number
of projects, perhaps most notably in the Gforge effort, which was started by a former VA Software member.
Portelli noted that he has no plans to make SFEE an open source project,
either. He argued that Gforge and other SF.net variants like it, though
competitive in some ways to SFEE, actually help to grow the market.
“Gforge at a technical level does not have the same capabilities that
Collabnet enterprise has or SFEE,” Portelli said. “That said there is a
space for it.”
“They’re very much making people aware of online distributed development and
frankly we seen a number of clients coming to us saying they’ve outgrown
their Gforge environment and now want enterprise class tools and support.”
Raven Zachary, an analyst with 451 Group, told internetnews.com that VA Software is repositioning itself as a media company, focused on advertising revenue from its online properties, including SourceForge, Freshmeat, Slashdot. Linux.com, and Newsforge.
Collabnet Welcomes ‘The Forge’
