SourceForge, the popular open source code hosting service, has seen better days. Once the biggest of its kind, SourceForge has seen increasing competition from the likes of GitHub or Launchpad, which offered better products. But now it wants to turn the tides and has announced plans to acquire Ohloh, a social networking site for open source developers.

Ohloh was founded in 2004 and currently has over 300,000 open source developers using it. Users have profiles on the site that automatically lists their involvement in various projects. It gathers statistics and data on more than 300,000 open source projects from more than 3,500 open source forges.

“We have long held SourceForge in high regard. We are eager to combine our skills and insights with SourceForge’s credibility and reach in the open source ecosystem and look forward to joining the SourceForge team,” declared Ohloh CEO Scott Collinson.

SourceForge is a well-known name in the open source world and its service is used by hundreds of thousands of projects. However, it has seen a decline in popularity as other services offered more attractive products while SourceForge stagnated. Recently, they have been trying to make a comeback with a host of new features. The site now supports popular distributed version control systems Git, Mercurial and Bazzar.

DVCS is the next step in source code management and other services offering support for it have gained great popularity at the expense of SourceForge, which only supported the older CVS and Subversion. It has also launched a web app hosting system that allows SourForce users to run popular open source applications like MediaWiki, phpBB, Laconica, Mantis and Trac.

Ohloh and SourceForge.net will remain separate for now but there will be a lot of integration behind the scene. Ohloh will also be hosted by SourceForge's data center. SourceForge plans to make use of the data Ohloh collected, as well as the APIs that will allow third parties to access to the data. There is also speculation that SourceForge plans to make revenue targeting ads for their services at the open source developers on the social network.