Ohloh

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ohloh
Image:Ohloh logo.gif
URL http://ohloh.net/
Commercial? Yes
Type of site software metrics
Owner Ohloh.net Inc.
Created by Jason Allen and Scott Collison
Launched 2004
Current status Active

Ohloh is a website which provides a web services suite and online community platform that aims to map the landscape of open source software development. It was founded by former Microsoft managers Jason Allen and Scott Collison in 2004 and joined by the developer Robin Luckey.[1][2] As of June 2008 the site lists 13,500+ projects.

Contents

[edit] Design

By retrieving data from revision control repositories (such as CVS, SVN, or Git), Ohloh provides statistics about the longevity of projects, their licenses (including license conflict information) and software metrics such as source lines of code and commit statistics. The codebase history informs about the amount of activity for each project. Software stacks (list of software applications used by Ohloh's members) and tags are used to calculate the similarity between projects.

Global statistics per language measure the popularity of specific programming languages since the early 90s.[3] Those global statistics across all projects in Ohloh have also been used to identify those with the most extensive continuous revision control histories.[4]

Contributor statistics are also available, measuring open source developers' experience as observable in code committed to revision control repositories. Social network features (kudos) have been introduced to allow users to rank open source contributors. A KudoRank for each user and open source contributor on a scale of 1 to 10 is automatically extracted from all kudos in the system.[5]. The idea of measuring open source developers' skills and productivity on the basis of commit statistics or mutual rating has received mixed reactions in technology blogs.[6][7]

[edit] Development

On August 22, 2007 a public beta of a web-service API was announced, exposing Ohloh's data and reports to promote the development of third party applications.[8]

[edit] See Also

[edit] References

Free software Portal
  1. ^ Darryl K. Taft (13 July 2006). Startup Helps Assess Open-Source Projects. eWeek. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
  2. ^ Ehemalige Microsoft-Manager gründen Infoportal zu Open Source (German). Heise Online (19 July 2006). Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
  3. ^ Robin Luckey (8 October 2006). PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast. Ohloh. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
  4. ^ Robin Luckey (31 August 2007). The World's Oldest Source Code Repositories. Ohloh. Retrieved on 2008-01-03.
  5. ^ Robin Luckey (4 May 2007). Ohloh Kudos. Ohloh. Retrieved on 2008-02-29.
  6. ^ Bill Snyder (21 February 2008). Is counting open source code contributions really useful?. InfoWorld. Retrieved on 2008-02-29.
  7. ^ Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers. Slashdot (21 February 2008). Retrieved on 2008-02-29.
  8. ^ Robin Luckey (22 August 2007). Ohloh API Beta. Ohloh. Retrieved on 2007-12-23.

[edit] External links

  This Web software related article is a stub. You can help by expanding it.