Some time ago I read a story (really, more of an announcement) on slashdot about a new Web site/service that was attempting to evaluate open-source projects. When I noticed that site was founded by a couple of ex-Microsofties my interest was piqued!
Rather than blindly rely on the anti-MS propaganda that the slashdot readership tends to spew forth, I went ahead and checked out the site for myself. First question... exactly what does Ohloh intend to provide? Answer... directly from their about page:
Ohloh is a resource for open source intelligence on thousands of open source projects. Ohloh collects software metrics from a variety of sources including the project’s source code and the software development infrastructure used by the project’s development team.
They do what?
Ohloh is attempting to put a public (and intuitive) face on the historically shrouded process that is software development. The OSS movement has exposed some facets of the process - namely the source code is available for anyone to see - but much remains unseen. Or rather, under-utilized. For example:
- How many developers are contributing how much to the project?
- How much activity (check-ins, adds, deletes, etc...) occur in the codebase?
- What languages are utilized?
- What licenses are used by the project?
- And many, many more...
How to determine that?
That's where Metrics come into play. By analyzing the source code Ohloh is able to provide some quantitative numbers for each project. This in turn allows for comparisons to be drawn between any two (or more) projects.
To help illustrate this, I've added the Subtext project's SVN repository to Ohloh. Check out Subtext's Metrics here. As a note, I've only added the TRUNK of the SVN repository, so any work being done in other branches is not reflected.
A few examples.
Here are a few images of the metrics Ohloh provides for Subtext.
I actually had a lot of fun playing with the Project Cost metric... you can change the Avg. Salary of a developer to get all kinds of interesting numbers! You can also take a look at the recent commit activities by each developer (or the team as a whole) and see how much each developer/contributor is adding to the project - and what type of content they are checking in!
For instance, the Subtext Contributors metric shows that Phil has a Comment Ratio of just 0.6% over a total of 777,645 lines of code, whereas I have a 1.4% Ratio over my 3,045 lines.
An interesting corollary is Phil's primary language is XML whereas mine is C#... and that might explain why I have a higher Comment-to-Code ratio.
What a great factoid that would have otherwise gone unnoticed (and perhaps it should have). Way to go Ohloh!
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