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http://www.ohloh.net/wiki/project_codebase_cost

Right, I had forgotten about that.

http://www.ohloh.net/wiki/project_codebase_cost

There are 70 committers, but Bruce, Tom, and Peter contribute the lion's share of code, by far.

Truth is, PostgreSQL could be bought rather easily, unless the primary contributers stood on principle and said "no way".

The best way for anyone developing a free software project to demonstrate that they could never be bought would be to assign copyright to the FSF. It's a sure bet the FSF could not be bought - they are very clear about their primary objective: promoting free software. Have you seen a signed written document from any PostgreSQL developer that says "I will never contribute code to PostgreSQL unless such code is released under a free software license."? I think not.

I'm not questioning the integrity or motivations of the PostgreSQL developers at all. I use PostgreSQL heavily. The community support for PostgreSQL is the best I've seen for any project anywhere. These guys are not only amazing coders, they are also great people - I know this from personal experience. But a billion dollars, to an individual, is a lot of money. You'd have to be Mother Theresa to turn down that kind of payday. Just sayin'.

Intel pay for a lot of X devs at the moment who do upstream development as well as Intel driver development: Eric Anholt, Jesse Barnes, Keith Packard (of at least Xrandr and COMPOSITE fame), Ian Romanick, Carl Worth...
Red Hat employ some upstream X devs too: Dave Airlie, Peter Hutterer, Adam Jackson, Kristian Høgsberg (who made Wayland) spring to immediate mind (I think they also used to emply Jesse and Carl)
Novell employ Matthias Hopf.
Nokia employ Daniel Stone.

There's an (incomplete?) list of xorg devs on ohloh. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they aren't out there hacking away...

you could probably use the c++ port of weka
http://www.ohloh.net/p/wekacpp

The numbers referred to for the other projects are 'unique' trunk/mainline commits only. Per that same measure, KDE sits at a little over 125,000 commits. Raw commits to all branches is vastly different for everyone.

BRL-CAD is about to cross 35,000 commits. Emacs has more than 85,000. GCC has about 12,000 unique over 150,000 commits.

That rounds out the three oldest continuously developed repositories with preserved revision history.

BRL-CAD is about to cross 35,000 commits. Emacs has more than 85,000. GCC has about 12,000 unique over 150,000 commits.

That rounds out the three oldest continuously developed repositories with preserved revision history.

BRL-CAD is about to cross 35,000 commits. Emacs has more than 85,000. GCC has about 12,000 unique over 150,000 commits.

That rounds out the three oldest continuously developed repositories with preserved revision history.

BRL-CAD is about to cross 35,000 commits. Emacs has more than 85,000. GCC has about 12,000 unique over 150,000 commits.

That rounds out the three oldest continuously developed repositories with preserved revision history.

Depending on what you mean by Mozilla, a quarter of the XULRunner codebase is written in Javascript and more than half of the Firefox codebase is written in Javascript.

Depending on what you mean by Mozilla, a quarter of the XULRunner codebase is written in Javascript and more than half of the Firefox codebase is written in Javascript.

...it shows a breakdown of commits by language; interesting stuff. Of course, the sample is limited to the projects they're tracking, and the metric - number of commits - is affected by the source code mgmt tool's idioms. Still, nice AJAXy-ness.

Don't forget:

• Qt has Jambi (Java version)
• Qt has the bindings generator (ECMAScript (JavaScript))
• Qt has various bindings to other languages like Qyoto(C#) and Python

And stayed hidden for some years before getting public... http://www.ohloh.net/projects/ffmpeg/contributors/19252190931444 http://xine.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xine/xine-ui/doc/README_uk?revision=1.3&view=markup to avoid being bothered by software patents (despite them still being illegal in France and EU in general)

I am implying that MS Access "is a piece of shit, and so is your face!"(TM). :D Same thing for SQLite, because it is no real database.

And he said "editor", not "developer". That description fits someone who inputs data to Access tables / form fields.

Ok there buddy. A few counter points for you. First of all if you read the home page for PlaneDisaster.NET, or though about the name, you would realize I have no grat love for JetSQL (the database engine MS access uses). However, it comes preinstalled on all windows machines. Its also good enough for a small dataset edited by a local workstation. That and syncing wors well with PocketPCs via Pocket access.

Finally, the program is an editor developed by a developer (myself) and used by at least one developer (myself again).

Now in the one instance I developed an application that stored its data in an mdb file, it made complete sense to do it that way considering all constraints present. When I wrote a website from the ground up that was more "traditional" in its requirements I used php for the application code and stored the data in a postgres database with lots of foreign keys and triggers. Different tools for different tasks.

Now if you really wish to check my credentials as a programmer, you will find my other open source contributions on my ohloh profile. I don't believe any of them are data related. However, if you want an example MS-SQL database from a talk I gave demonstrating advanced RDBMS features I can provide that as well.

Ohloh has a COCOMO calculator, which spits out ~$181M if you pay coders $55,000 a year.

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO

A surprisingly large fraction of applicants, even those with masters' degrees and PhDs in computer science, fail during interviews when asked to carry out basic programming tasks. For example, I've personally interviewed graduates who can't answer "Write a loop that counts from 1 to 10" or "What's the number after F in hexadecimal?" Less trivially, I've interviewed many candidates who can't use recursion to solve a real problem. These are basic skills; anyone who lacks them probably hasn't done much programming. Speaking on behalf of software engineers who have to interview prospective new hires, I can safely say that we're tired of talking to candidates who can't program their way out of a paper bag.

My pet peeve these days is diploma mills. A certain big, well-regarded university I know of seems to churn out unqualified masters students. I talked with the dean of CS there once about it, and he just said "We're already requiring so many courses, we can't require any more". Perhaps they need to be pickier about who they admit, but I've heard it speculated that the CS masters program is a profit center; and being pickier would hurt their bottom line.

Another useful data point is whether the person in question successfully gets lots of code into well-run open source projects like Wine or the Linux kernel. Handy tools to search for commits include http://ohloh.net/ http://marc.info/ and http://cia.vc/ . (And yes, despite being a wine advocate for years, I have fewer than 100 patches in. Lame! :-)

Most GNU projects are hosted on Savannah, many are hosted on GNA!, and many are self-hosted. It would be more accurate to use a service such as Ohloh to track license adoption.

I believe you'd find, when these other data sources are included, the numbers are very different.

The source code isn't difficult to find... Ohloh has a list of repositories you can play with. I imagine it's just another way of ensuring they don't get too many users.

There is quite a lot of code in git, including a substantial base system tree and an xorg-x11 tree. And at least one person claims to be running it on a live system.

Well here's some data on Debian. And here's some data on Postgres.

More importantly, Ohloh suggests two people perform the bulk of the commits. I don't know much about postgres development, but it appears that there isn't much democratization in development. Which is fine. You want gate keepers to be able to ward off performance harming patches, and to guide those who are only peripherally interested in the project.

Well here's some data on Debian. And here's some data on Postgres.

More importantly, Ohloh suggests two people perform the bulk of the commits. I don't know much about postgres development, but it appears that there isn't much democratization in development. Which is fine. You want gate keepers to be able to ward off performance harming patches, and to guide those who are only peripherally interested in the project.

I know I posted roughly this comment in the last GSoC Slashdot announcement but I've been told the information is really useful and some people might have missed it.

On the note about how GSoC effects our project you should take a look at our web stats since we where announced as a GSoC mentor organisation. The increase has been massive!

Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool tu rn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (ideas), the cla ssic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (ideas), an engine whic h lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework fo r building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of mul ti-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (ideas), one of the ori ginal open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.

This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).

Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.

One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.

The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a

Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool turn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (ideas), the classic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (ideas), an engine which lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework for building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of multi-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (ideas), one of the original open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.

This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).

Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.

One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.

The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a ruleset editor which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the future.

As well, the Open Source Office funded one student in a Summer of Code style outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope the code will soon be rolled out.

Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage with educational instit

You mean like this one? http://www.ohloh.net/projects/4929/contributors

Funny, I don't see David Diesel there (unless it's under an alias) nor even Bruce Perens.

You mean like this one?

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/4929/contributors

oholoh.net estimates the cost of developing the software at $2,446,697.

Hehe, $50k eh. That's about 2000 man hours. Ohloh estimates the cost of the Linux project at $172,788,619.

Thousand Parsec (a game framework for turn based strategy games) was one of the mentor organisations last year.

The effect on our project was really huge, not only did the students do some very cool work. We now have the creditability to approach Universities and help get their students involved with our project.

We already have one student working on Thousand Parsec as part of a high school internship and two students from the University of South Australia working on a Java MIDP client.

Thanks a huge amount to Google and the Summer of Code team, hopefully we can get in again this year and have even more fun!

My biggest active FOSS project has gone through two forks in it's lifetime. This was not because of me, but because of problems when the companies I worked for tried to appropriate my (after hours) hobby work. The final fork happened when I started my own company.

Ohloh has it listed., as well as the second of the two prior forks (both have since died as the companies couldn't maintain them without me). The newer project is however a niche-market project. It allows me to earn a living but it's hardly the kind of app that your typical computer user will ever want - it's there to do a specific job for a specific market section. It is very successful in that section however, and also fathered a number of large 'custom-version' projects which are my livelihood. Ohloh however only counts the roughly 8 months since it was forked - not the history of nearly 7 years prior to that.

A while ago, due to having a low comment-to-code ratio, I went out of my way to add more comments to the code- most of it was completely unneeded - my code made sense to me and others - but it was giving a false, bad reflection on me as a programmer.

Now where it stands, it has a fairly good rating and value on there - but if you consider the true history it's 'value' should be much higher. And since my program is so niche-market, I don't get much kudos from it, after all there are very few other FOSS people who know anything about the field.

This is a complex and powerful application with many levels to it, but it is targeted at a small userbase and consequently has a small contributing developer base, only one person other than me has commit access - I commit other patches myself, how else would I manage it in my spare time ? I feel ohloh greatly underestimates the worth of the project and it's developers simply because it has no way of distinguishing projects everybody needs a variation off and those that are for niche-uses.

Either way, not so much a complaint (my customers recognize the worth with or without ohloh) as an attempt at constructive criticism. On the upside, it has had 33 downloads from their sites and us small projects need all the free publicity we can get (it's a small percentage of the total downloads, but every user counts).

If you look around, eg javawoman not happy thread it is a bit worrying that an ex cat herder from M$ is not only behind the wheel, but clearly has the same marketing speak to shut up unhappy fodder for the soon to be commercialised service: ohloh_goes_open_source

If you look around, eg javawoman not happy thread it is a bit worrying that an ex cat herder from M$ is not only behind the wheel, but clearly has the same marketing speak to shut up unhappy fodder for the soon to be commercialised service: ohloh_goes_open_source

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3547/contributors/1354

Isn't this what http://www.ohloh.net/ does (and much more)?

you seem to be looking for commandline tools, but their never really going to offer a great way to visualize a new complex program, although they can be quite useful in development.

ide's with class browsers, like eclipse (w/ cdt for non java) or openkomodo are pretty good aids.

for source search, cross linking, and highlighting, the best tool i've come across is opengrok - http://opensolaris.org/os/project/opengrok/

if your more apt to build your own tool, there are a couple of nice libraries out there, scintilla has cross platform language parsers. silvercity builds a python api for looking examing language constructs. for ruby the recently released ohloh contains parsing capabilities, http://labs.ohloh.net/ohcount

also the venerable exuberant tags, is a must for non ide development environments. its a great tool in conjuction with flexible environments like emacs, or textmate.

of course, nothing beats a good debugger, and stepping through the runtime execution of the code paths.

Apologies for a slight confusion I may have caused. I meant to type "not what the project site claims".

But yes, the LICENSE file may be incorrect. I've seen it happen. Someone decides to include code, leaves the copyright and license on the file alone, but clearly contradicting the LICENSE file. In fact, the LICENSE file should be treated as a legal include file. If the code says "See LICENSING" then see licensing, other wise, whats the file itself says is all you get. Mostly, copyright should be placed at the top of a source file.

Ohloh already automates the process of examining licenses somewhat. Lawyers aren't that much of the equation. If you're seriously worried about law, write the open source software library guy and request a written offer to the code under the terms of the GPL, or whatever you want. Maybe offer a couple hundred dollars for the time he takes to do so.

The question was not how to make the code available, any idiot can put the code on SF or Google's code hosting. It was about making it OSS appealing. Dead upstreams aren't appealing, with good cause. Nobody knows the code better than the author, and for something user centric and internet enabled like a phpBB replacement (itself already a security nightmare), you want someone to be watching over the code and accepting security patches at the least.

And SF.net provides little means to determine whether code is worthwhile or not -- it mostly just tells you whether something exists or not. Ohloh at least tells you things like how many comments there are, how many contributers there are and how significant their contributions have been, how long it's been under development, etc. Releasing the code's the first step, but not the only step to making code appealing.

Actually, I'd say the technology is being tried by nearly every desktop user. And subsequently disabled. My roommate turned it off because it was too distracting. I keep it off because it tends to freeze X on me on feisty.

It's neat, but I suspect that it's not very well engineered.

I work at Ohloh.net, where we track thousands of OSS projects through their SCMs. After working with CVS, SVN and Git for 'a while', I've found Git's design to be both brilliant AND infuriating. Most infuriating is the command line interface, which is a result a of 'bottom-up' design. It's very functional but offers very little abstractions - one must understand how it works 'underneath'.

The underlying architecture, however, is fantastic. Firstly, you can easily clone a remote repository - anonymously (huge help for Ohloh - but also useful for more mainstream cases). I also like how it treats patches: a 'non-committer's patch carries his/her credentials into the repository. Example:

• Kernel 2.6: 3002 'developers' [GIT]
• GCC: 322 'developers' [SVN].

I quote 'developers' because we all know that a lot more than 322 people have contributed patches to GCC. However Git enables kernel patch submitters' names to go into the tree - thereby having clearer attribution. There are more goodies lurking in the Git plumbings - but i'd have to refer to my crib sheet...

I work at Ohloh.net, where we track thousands of OSS projects through their SCMs. After working with CVS, SVN and Git for 'a while', I've found Git's design to be both brilliant AND infuriating. Most infuriating is the command line interface, which is a result a of 'bottom-up' design. It's very functional but offers very little abstractions - one must understand how it works 'underneath'.

The underlying architecture, however, is fantastic. Firstly, you can easily clone a remote repository - anonymously (huge help for Ohloh - but also useful for more mainstream cases). I also like how it treats patches: a 'non-committer's patch carries his/her credentials into the repository. Example:

• Kernel 2.6: 3002 'developers' [GIT]
• GCC: 322 'developers' [SVN].

I quote 'developers' because we all know that a lot more than 322 people have contributed patches to GCC. However Git enables kernel patch submitters' names to go into the tree - thereby having clearer attribution. There are more goodies lurking in the Git plumbings - but i'd have to refer to my crib sheet...

...for me at least.

That's how I started building OSS projects.

No I don't mean man pages!

Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice project.

Quote: and became an even worse idea when Apple deprecated the Java-Cocoa bridge

We never used the CocoaJava bridge at all. I guess you never bothered to read the source code. In fact, we use very little Java at all as is pointed out by the ohloh source code analysis of our open CVS. There's little Objective-C as we do most of the logic in C++ and call out to ObjC when required. There are some other stats there you may find intriguing as well like the estimated man-years and cost it will take to approximate our code.

Trust me, once any OS X port of OOo starts getting font handling and input methods correct, it'll slow down as well. This is true especially for Asian and other foreign languages. The bottleneck is in Apple's ATSUI and how it mismatches to the underlying OOo code. Has nothing to do with Java at all. Speed in a vaporware demo is one thing; carrying speed into a functional product is something different completely.

ed

Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice project.

Quote: and became an even worse idea when Apple deprecated the Java-Cocoa bridge

We never used the CocoaJava bridge at all. I guess you never bothered to read the source code. In fact, we use very little Java at all as is pointed out by the ohloh source code analysis of our open CVS. There's little Objective-C as we do most of the logic in C++ and call out to ObjC when required. There are some other stats there you may find intriguing as well like the estimated man-years and cost it will take to approximate our code.

Trust me, once any OS X port of OOo starts getting font handling and input methods correct, it'll slow down as well. This is true especially for Asian and other foreign languages. The bottleneck is in Apple's ATSUI and how it mismatches to the underlying OOo code. Has nothing to do with Java at all. Speed in a vaporware demo is one thing; carrying speed into a functional product is something different completely.

ed

Why bother with all this categorization of what people said they did when ohlo goes straight to the point of open source software: the source code.

Ohh that post made my day :-)

At first I need to say that I'm the current project manager of FIFE so I thought it would be worth replying to this message eventhough it seems that the original writer hides behind his anonymity.

1. "It's ran by people who can't code"
So I guess you actually didn't take a look at our code, did you? It's pretty strange that we get quite positive feedback about our code, engine design, project organization and progress from rather professional developers (check e.g. http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp? topic_id=430811) while you are able to draw a conclusion without actually looking at the code. If you took a look at the code your statement seems even more strange to me.

How about raising some valid points = constructive critizism? E.g. "You guys got way too many singletons in the code, how about refactoring them to ..." or "Your engine doesn't look bad but the lack of an editor after such a rather long development time is a definite drawback from using your framework for my planned game project."

2. "they only know Lua"
So maybe you can answer where the 25000 LOC C++ come from? (check: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3313) Maybe a wizard and an elf wrote them? Following your logic the developers of Monkey Island 3, FarCry and Stalker can't code either, they're using Lua for scripting purposes ... A well, I hope you see where that leads to.

3. "This project has been stale for years"
I'm curious how a project can be stale for years, when it has been just founded 19 months ago. Our SVN changelog also says something different:
Engine SVN: https://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/engine/timel ine
Content SVN: https://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/content/time line

4. "And the project leader needs to move on"
Didn't get that one :-/ Maybe it's because I'm no native speaker.

So drawing my final conclusion: I know that it's hard to use arguments in discussions if your mother dropped you on your head by accident a few too many times. I know that it hards to understand the spirit of such a project if you think that HALOO IST HE MOST AWSOMEEE RpG MADE EVARRRRRR!!!!! (and according your post you clearly belong to this target audience).

But how about actually trying to activate your brain before writing these kind of posts. All your raised points (you can't call that arguments, can you?) could have been disproved with 5 minutes of google search. Maybe they didn't told you how to properly use a search engine in your 3rd class PC school course?

Moodle is a large GPL PHP project that has benefited from Microsoft funding. Last year Microsoft paid Moodle core developers to add MS SQL Server support in Moodle to let it work better in institutions used to Microsoft platforms.

      http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=57989

The developers actually used the chance to revamp their whole database abstraction layer, effectively adding support for a number of other commercial databases as well (Oracle, Interbase etc). ;-)

Microsoft also developed Sharepoint web parts for Moodle, and an extension for Word that allows teachers to publish straight into Moodle.

      http://www.codeplex.com/Moodle2003WP

Yes, it's true there was a business case for Microsoft, because some very high profile institutions can now switch to using MS SQL, but I think overall it was a win-win for all concerned.

Right, and the Linux kernel project started one year ago.