Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Ohloh: Cool service for monitoring open source projects

August 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Ohloh: Cool service for monitoring open source projects

TAGS: Open Source

Leon Gommans (of the Holland Open Source Conference) sent me a link to a great site today: Ohloh. Ohloh estimates the value of open source software (measured in terms of lines of code and the cost it would take to pay someone to write that code - so, not the value one derives from it, but rather how much it would cost you to write it from scratch), highlights licenses used in a given project, and tracks developer and project activity over time.

It's not a perfect tool, but it's quite interesting. (I think Ohloh used a decent way to measure software value, but often it can be more expensive to pare down your code base than it is to "ramble" in your code. But I don't have a better suggestion of how to do it.)

Here are a few sample projects I pulled:

• Mambo
  
• JBoss Portal
  
• SugarCRM
  
• Alfresco
  
• Liferay Portal
  
• Struts (The factoids on this one are interesting)

This is a great service and, as Leon noted to me, reiterates the fact that open source projects can't lie. An open source project can claim something (the language it's written in, the strength of its community, the number of outside developers, or whatever), but the code doesn't lie. It's all there, and Ohloh captures much of it.

Thanks for sharing, Leon!

Posted by Matt Asay on August 21, 2006 06:39 AM

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