Ohloh has begun a public beta of its hosted service that helps customers evaluate which open source software to use.
Looking to remove the veil over the development process, Ohloh collects project information from source code and the source control system. The company looks at software to find sound engineering practices and potential licensing conflicts. Users can compare product metrics including languages, code base size, the size of development teams involved in a project and project activity.
Ohloh's service differs from offerings from companies such as SpikeSource and SourceLabs, which maintain an open source stack, said Scott Collison, Ohloh CEO.
"What we do is provide transparency into how the open source software was made," Collison said.
Additionally, the company helps customers make build-or-buy decisions by providing cost estimates for development of projects.
Ohloh crawls the Internet in search of open source projects to examine. The company plans to expand its services to include proprietary software as well.
Posted by Paul Krill on July 13, 2006 03:16 PM
