DHI Group, Inc. announced as part of its quarterly earnings report Tuesday that it intends to sell off old-school tech forum Slashdot, and open source applications and software directory SourceForge.

The company acquired both properties from Geeknet, Inc. (the company previously known as both VALinux, Inc. and SourceForge, Inc.) for $20 million in 2012, in an effort by DHI (then known as Dice.com) to give their digital recruitment business a broader reach by tapping into Slashdot’s user community base and to extend the business outside North America “by engaging with SourceForge’s significant international technology user community.”

Given both are now on the market, it probably goes without saying that those plans didn’t work out so well, with DHI saying that they had not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base, and that the anticipated value to the Company of the SourceForge traffic outside North America had not materialized.

“While Slashdot Media has an established and solid position in the Open Source community with iconic brands and an incredibly loyal and passionate following of tech professionals, it is no longer a core strategic business for DHI,” President and Chief Executive Officer of DHI Michael Durney said in a statement.

“We believe Slashdot Media will have greater opportunity to capitalize on its brand equity and unique assets as part of a business that is focused primarily on media and software solutions and, at the same time, divestiture of the businesses will allow us to allocate resources to our core strategies.”

Shuffled around

It may be a slight exaggeration to say that Slashdot has had too many owners, but the site has changed hands, along with SourceForge a number of times over the years.

Although perhaps not as well known to younger techies, Slashdot, providing technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues, is one of the longest running tech forums and news sites on the web, having been founded back in the pre-first tech bubble days of 1997.

The site still remains influential today, but the glory days, which created the term “the Slashdot Effect” which could crash sites linked to by it due to the sheer volume of traffic, are long behind it, although it still plods along with both an active, and engaged userbase.

Like Slashdot, SourceForge has also seen better days, although the blame lies with DHI, who for all intents and purposes has driven the once hugely popular service into the ground through trying to monetize the business by forcibly bundling adware into open source packages; a new owner might be able to revive the business, but given its name is now mud in the open source community, it would be a huge ask of anyone.

KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc. has been hired to find a buyer, and both sites are officially on the market, although it’s not clear whether DHI is looking to sell them together, or would be happy to sell each property individually.

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