dowhatimean.net

Recently I came across ohloh.net, a Web 2.0-ish directory of open source projects. It seems to aggregate information from at least SourceForge, Freshmeat, user-provided RSS feeds, and possibly other sources.

The most interesting aspect: To gather information about a project, Ohloh also connects to its CVS repository and displays statistical and historical information about the project’s development, and even generates information on individual contributors. Thus, it’s a public website that provides a hosted service somewhat similar to tools like StatCVS.

A good example is the Ohloh page for StatCVS itself. Here’s the page about me as a contributor to StatCVS – Ohloh determines that I have 1.2 years of Java experience and four months of CSS experience. Neat, it uses SIMILE Timeline.

The developers also have a blog.

So, what can Ohloh do for people involved with open source? I think the clearest story is this: People who want to quickly evaluate a project can use Ohloh to get a one-stop overview. For example, we learn from the StatCVS page that the project has “5 active developers”, “increasing development activity”, an “established codebase”, and a project cost of $139K (huh?).

In the future Ohloh could add some more sources of data (project mailing lists, issue trackers), and could become a one-stop dashboard for people involved with the project, to stay on top of day-to-day developments. A bit like a hosted version of Trac.

I see this as one more unexpected advantage of the open source development process: Since the source code and other data is available on the Internet, third parties can built services that add value to the development process.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under General, StatCVS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.