Ohloh

Ohloh

URL	www.ohloh.net
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Public directory of free and open source software (FOSS)
Owner	Black Duck Software
Created by	Jason Allen and Scott Collison
Launched	2006
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 March 2011 the site lists 441,250+ projects.^[3]

On May 28, 2009, Ohloh was acquired by Geeknet, owners of the popular open source development platform SourceForge.^[4] However, Geeknet later sold Ohloh to the open source analysis company Black Duck Software on October 5, 2010. Black Duck plans on integrating Ohloh's functionality with their existing products to advance the site into a major resource for FOSS development.^[5]

Design

By retrieving data from revision control repositories (such as CVS, SVN, Git, Bazaar and Mercurial), 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. Ohloh also offers a download service.^[6]

Global statistics per language measure the popularity of specific programming languages since the early 90s.^[7] Those global statistics across all projects in Ohloh have also been used to identify those with the most extensive continuous revision control histories.^[8]

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.^[9] 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.^[10][11]

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.^[12]

See also

Free software portal

• Koders
• Krugle

References

1. ^ Darryl K. Taft (13 July 2006). "Startup Helps Assess Open-Source Projects". eWeek. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1988547,00.asp. Retrieved 2007-08-29. 
2. ^ "Ehemalige Microsoft-Manager gründen Infoportal zu Open Source" (in German). Heise Online. 19 July 2006. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/75652. Retrieved 2007-08-29. 
3. ^ Ohloh Search
4. ^ SourceForge Acquires Ohloh
5. ^ "Geeknet Sells Open Source Directory Ohloh To Black Duck Software". TechCrunch. http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/05/geeknet-sells-open-source-directory-ohloh-to-black-duck-software/. Retrieved 5 October 2010. 
6. ^ [1]
7. ^ Robin Luckey (8 October 2006). "PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast". Ohloh. http://www.ohloh.net/articles/php_eats_rails. Retrieved 2007-08-29. 
8. ^ Robin Luckey (31 August 2007). "The World's Oldest Source Code Repositories". Ohloh. http://www.ohloh.net/blog/worlds_oldest_source_code_repositories. Retrieved 2008-01-03. 
9. ^ Robin Luckey (4 May 2007). "Ohloh Kudos". Ohloh. http://www.ohloh.net/about/kudos. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 
10. ^ Bill Snyder (21 February 2008). "Is counting open source code contributions really useful?". InfoWorld. http://www.infoworld.com/t/tech-industry-analysis/counting-open-source-code-contributions-really-useful-208. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 
11. ^ "Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers". Slashdot. 21 February 2008. http://yro.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?id=534130&op=view. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 
12. ^ Robin Luckey (22 August 2007). "Ohloh API Beta". Ohloh. http://www.ohloh.net/announcements/api_beta. Retrieved 2007-12-23. 

External links

• Ohloh homepage