Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers

Posted by kdawson on Thursday February 21, 2008 @06:06AM from the over-your-shoulder dept.

eldavojohn writes "The startup company Ohloh has a database listing 70,000 developers working on 11,000 open source projects. Their aim is to 'rank' open source developers, which raises some interesting questions about exactly how useful this tracking company is. Questions like, 'Is there an accurate way beyond word of mouth to measure the importance and skill of a developer?' I found it slightly alarming that, to this site, the number of commits (with input from the number of kudos) tells how good a developer you are."

1 of 115 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

sounds familiar by Anonymous Coward · 2008-02-21 06:24 · Score: 5, Informative

This reminds me of how academics are increasingly judged. It is more about how many papers and how many other people link to it rather than the quality of each paper's work or the note of the linking party. Accordingly, many authors inflate their 'impact' scores by splitting up papers and publishing nonadvancing science, no-one can blame them for this as many are trying to justify themselves to their departments or are still doing the postdoc merry-go-round looking for new jobs every 18months.