Dice Holdings acquires Slashdot and SourceForge

The well-known news web site Slashdot, along with open source project hosting provider SourceForge and software index Freecode, has been bought by Dice Holdings for $20 million in cash. Dice Holdings, which provides career and job listing web sites, plans to integrate the acquired sites into its own online presence.

The takeover increases the reach of Dice Holdings' web properties significantly. Slashdot, which provides user-curated news and commentary, reportedly has close to 4 million unique monthly visitors who generate more than 5,300 comments per day. Geeknet's former main property, SourceForge, is one of the biggest repositories of open source code with 40 million unique visitors every month. Freecode in turn is one of the largest listings of software for Linux, Unix and cross-platform applications, and is visited by 500,000 visitors a month. Geeknet, which sold the web sites and was formerly known as SourceForge Inc., has confirmed the deal. The company has stated that it now wants to concentrate on running the specialist online retailer ThinkGeek which has become an increasingly significant part of its income.

Dice currently does not plan to change the web sites drastically. Speaking to The Verge, Dice Holdings' Chief Financial Officer Michael Durney said, "we expect to keep them pretty much the same as they are now", adding that in time the company would probably increase the number of job advertisements. Slashdot and SourceForge already have a joint job board and while the company does not want to disrupt the experience of the current users, it is likely that this will receive some attention fairly soon.

(fab)