10 ms·

Couldn't the decline just be more or less the shredding of the economy in the past 2-3 years? Fewer companies with extra cash around to have people spend time c

by cpr 16y ago

Couldn't the decline just be more or less the shredding of the economy in the past 2-3 years? Fewer companies with extra cash around to have people spend time contributing back to OSS projects.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
btilly 16y ago
That is possible. It is also possible that Ohloh's tracking is not perfect. They can't track things that haven't been reported to them, and that process can take time. So I'd expect under reporting of recent changes. (Not necessarily as much as we see though.)
- zedshaw 16y ago
  Their tracking is probably imperfect, but it seems like a reasonable indicator. I'm still waiting to see if their data has some flaw, or maybe if github has more. However, that data wasn't the point, just an indicator.
  - chmod 16y ago
    http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy Numpy must be stealing from other projects, as they have -150KLOC
    - barrkel 16y ago
      To make that clear to others - like me - that didn't see it first time, that's negative 150K lines of code.
      - cdavid 16y ago
        This is weird :) We recently moved to github (where recent is a few days), so I wonder if that's linked Also, numpy is not mainly written in modula-2.
        dmm 16y ago
        Hmm I don't see a denial of the "Very few source code comments" analysis... ;)
        cdavid 16y ago
        Nope, nor does it need one. Source comments are weakly correlated with code quality :) Moreoever, you have to be careful about numbers of lines-based statistics for numpy and scipy, because a lot of code is generated or 3rd party libraries (that are integrated because no distribution has them packaged, not even debian). Also, cloc gives me vastly different numbers, with a lot of comments and all (but again, not very meaningful because of generated/integrated code). ohlo stats are not very reliable in my experience, at least for the packages I am involved with.
  - dfox 16y ago
    That decline looks too "perfect" to be believable. My theory: projects migrate away from sourceforge and don't bother to enlist new repositories in ohloh.
    - zedshaw 16y ago
      Sourceforge? Ohloh collects stats and information from all over, they even have a Mongrel2 project page and I've never set it up. I'm pretty sure you're mistaken about the kind and quality of data they collect, but who knows. Their blog seems to say they track git, cvs, svn, others? http://www.ohloh.net/blog/new_subversion_downloader http://www.ohloh.net/blog/new_subversion_downloader That's also why I mentioned github, they could provide other data (if they weren't too busy inflating their numbers by counting every commit, gists, forks, and duplicate projects as a "project").
      - dfox 16y ago
        They can track almost anything, but require somebody to manually create the project and "enlist" it's source repositories. And because often the person who created the Ohloh project has almost nothing to do with original project these data tend to get stale.
  - Encosia 16y ago
    They've got Firebug with 400k+ LoC, Firefox with ~60K LoC, and Chromium with almost 4 million LoC. That doesn't inspire much confidence.
  - weavejester 16y ago
    According to GitHub, the amount of commits its getting per day has increased considerably: http://github.com/blog/620-committing-like-crazy http://github.com/blog/620-committing-like-crazy Does anyone know how Oholoh gets its numbers? As far as I can tell, projects have to be manually added; it doesn't appear to scrape them from hosting sites.
- bergie 16y ago
  Actually, around the time of the 'decline' lots of projects started switching to DVCSs like git. So I guess many enlistments are still pointing to the old CVS or SVN repos where obviously nothing is happening.
zedshaw 16y ago
Actually I think most open source doesn't depend on companies paying someone to work on it. I also think that during an economic down turn you see more. But, that's just my experience and (like you) I have no data to back it.
- frossie 16y ago
  most open source doesn't depend on companies paying someone to work on it Not directly, but there is a correlation. For example the amount of open source that our shop puts out is definitely related to workload - as we have shed staff, the remaining people start to burn out and have less time for side projects, "personal development", as well as less energy for coding at home. Our enthusiasm has not waned, but our ability to tap into it has diminished. I don't recommend it, it's bad for morale. Good devs need room to grow, and open source is a great outlet for this.
  - zedshaw 16y ago
    If you read the article, I'm saying the rise of consumer internet companies who don't keep up the contract is one of the causes. Just because your company does maintain the contract doesn't mean there aren't 100s more who are doing the wrong thing. And yes "our" enthusiasm (since I'm one of you) has waned. We no longer have community like in the old days, we have a series of fad driven social ponzi schemes where 10% of the people hope to make money and the other 90% are dupes thinking they are.
    - cma 16y ago
      App-store get-rich hype probably did a lot of damage too.
      - wefqwef 16y ago
        Indeed, I have the feeling that Apple killed opensource will the appstore.
    - frossie 16y ago
roc 16y ago
I'm more predisposed to believe the economic factor too. Much of OSS contribution is fair-weather stuff. And the weather just ain't fair. Further, I have a pet theory that OSS is largely a cultural/generational thing. That is: OSS might have picked up steam simply as the only logical approach to creating software under the long shadow of Redmond. (If you kept the source and make a product, MS buys or buries you. So why not open it up?) For many OSS projects, their purpose was to compete with stagnant lackluster industry standards and force them to move ahead. But today's young geeks have no context for that. They haven't seen software monopoly stifle innovation. They take the current competitive atmosphere for granted.
- gaius 16y ago
  It's much deeper than that. Think AT&T and the Unix source. Remember for most of this time there was little overlap between the Unix and Windows worlds. A Unix user would no more care about Word and Excel than a Windows user would care about Emacs and FORTRAN. Back in those days Microsoft developed software on a VAX and cross-compiled it, and had their own Unix, Xenix.
pmjordan 16y ago
The Linux kernel has grown more during the last 2-3 years than ever before. Kernel level stuff is something you can't (yet?!?) host in the cloud, which lends credibility to the original argument.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  > Kernel level stuff is something you can't (yet?!?) host in the cloud Really? What do you think all the clouds run on? How about Amazon and other cloud hosting solutions? Isn't that linux (and its kernel) in the cloud?
  - barrkel 16y ago
    You don't rent your kernel in a SaaS sense, such that every kernel syscall involves a trans-cloud RPC.
    - zerohp 16y ago
      Thanks for the fantastic startup idea. Working on it now.
      - alanh 16y ago
        (Not to get all Reddit up in here, but) your username is fantastic in this context.
- robryan 16y ago
  Linux is also driving the increase in cloud computing though, those web services that are replacing OSS code are being ran on linux, meaning it's really a special case.
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    Apart from the virtualisation features, I don't see many additions to the kernel that are driven by the cloud computing industry though. Most of the changes are drivers and revamped subsystems.

by cpr 16y ago

Couldn't the decline just be more or less the shredding of the economy in the past 2-3 years? Fewer companies with extra cash around to have people spend time contributing back to OSS projects.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

btilly 16y ago

That is possible. It is also possible that Ohloh's tracking is not perfect. They can't track things that haven't been reported to them, and that process can take time. So I'd expect under reporting of recent changes. (Not necessarily as much as we see though.)

zedshaw 16y ago
Their tracking is probably imperfect, but it seems like a reasonable indicator. I'm still waiting to see if their data has some flaw, or maybe if github has more. However, that data wasn't the point, just an indicator.
- chmod 16y ago
  http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy Numpy must be stealing from other projects, as they have -150KLOC
  - barrkel 16y ago
    To make that clear to others - like me - that didn't see it first time, that's negative 150K lines of code.
    - cdavid 16y ago
      This is weird :) We recently moved to github (where recent is a few days), so I wonder if that's linked Also, numpy is not mainly written in modula-2.
      - dmm 16y ago
        Hmm I don't see a denial of the "Very few source code comments" analysis... ;)
        cdavid 16y ago
        Nope, nor does it need one. Source comments are weakly correlated with code quality :) Moreoever, you have to be careful about numbers of lines-based statistics for numpy and scipy, because a lot of code is generated or 3rd party libraries (that are integrated because no distribution has them packaged, not even debian). Also, cloc gives me vastly different numbers, with a lot of comments and all (but again, not very meaningful because of generated/integrated code). ohlo stats are not very reliable in my experience, at least for the packages I am involved with.
- dfox 16y ago
  That decline looks too "perfect" to be believable. My theory: projects migrate away from sourceforge and don't bother to enlist new repositories in ohloh.
  - zedshaw 16y ago
    Sourceforge? Ohloh collects stats and information from all over, they even have a Mongrel2 project page and I've never set it up. I'm pretty sure you're mistaken about the kind and quality of data they collect, but who knows. Their blog seems to say they track git, cvs, svn, others? http://www.ohloh.net/blog/new_subversion_downloader http://www.ohloh.net/blog/new_subversion_downloader That's also why I mentioned github, they could provide other data (if they weren't too busy inflating their numbers by counting every commit, gists, forks, and duplicate projects as a "project").
    - dfox 16y ago
      They can track almost anything, but require somebody to manually create the project and "enlist" it's source repositories. And because often the person who created the Ohloh project has almost nothing to do with original project these data tend to get stale.
- Encosia 16y ago
  They've got Firebug with 400k+ LoC, Firefox with ~60K LoC, and Chromium with almost 4 million LoC. That doesn't inspire much confidence.
- weavejester 16y ago
  According to GitHub, the amount of commits its getting per day has increased considerably: http://github.com/blog/620-committing-like-crazy http://github.com/blog/620-committing-like-crazy Does anyone know how Oholoh gets its numbers? As far as I can tell, projects have to be manually added; it doesn't appear to scrape them from hosting sites.
bergie 16y ago
Actually, around the time of the 'decline' lots of projects started switching to DVCSs like git. So I guess many enlistments are still pointing to the old CVS or SVN repos where obviously nothing is happening.

zedshaw 16y ago

Actually I think most open source doesn't depend on companies paying someone to work on it. I also think that during an economic down turn you see more. But, that's just my experience and (like you) I have no data to back it.

frossie 16y ago
most open source doesn't depend on companies paying someone to work on it Not directly, but there is a correlation. For example the amount of open source that our shop puts out is definitely related to workload - as we have shed staff, the remaining people start to burn out and have less time for side projects, "personal development", as well as less energy for coding at home. Our enthusiasm has not waned, but our ability to tap into it has diminished. I don't recommend it, it's bad for morale. Good devs need room to grow, and open source is a great outlet for this.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  If you read the article, I'm saying the rise of consumer internet companies who don't keep up the contract is one of the causes. Just because your company does maintain the contract doesn't mean there aren't 100s more who are doing the wrong thing. And yes "our" enthusiasm (since I'm one of you) has waned. We no longer have community like in the old days, we have a series of fad driven social ponzi schemes where 10% of the people hope to make money and the other 90% are dupes thinking they are.
  - cma 16y ago
    App-store get-rich hype probably did a lot of damage too.
    - wefqwef 16y ago
      Indeed, I have the feeling that Apple killed opensource will the appstore.
  - frossie 16y ago

roc 16y ago

I'm more predisposed to believe the economic factor too. Much of OSS contribution is fair-weather stuff. And the weather just ain't fair. Further, I have a pet theory that OSS is largely a cultural/generational thing. That is: OSS might have picked up steam simply as the only logical approach to creating software under the long shadow of Redmond. (If you kept the source and make a product, MS buys or buries you. So why not open it up?) For many OSS projects, their purpose was to compete with stagnant lackluster industry standards and force them to move ahead. But today's young geeks have no context for that. They haven't seen software monopoly stifle innovation. They take the current competitive atmosphere for granted.

gaius 16y ago
It's much deeper than that. Think AT&T and the Unix source. Remember for most of this time there was little overlap between the Unix and Windows worlds. A Unix user would no more care about Word and Excel than a Windows user would care about Emacs and FORTRAN. Back in those days Microsoft developed software on a VAX and cross-compiled it, and had their own Unix, Xenix.

pmjordan 16y ago

The Linux kernel has grown more during the last 2-3 years than ever before. Kernel level stuff is something you can't (yet?!?) host in the cloud, which lends credibility to the original argument.

patrickaljord 16y ago
> Kernel level stuff is something you can't (yet?!?) host in the cloud Really? What do you think all the clouds run on? How about Amazon and other cloud hosting solutions? Isn't that linux (and its kernel) in the cloud?
- barrkel 16y ago
  You don't rent your kernel in a SaaS sense, such that every kernel syscall involves a trans-cloud RPC.
  - zerohp 16y ago
    Thanks for the fantastic startup idea. Working on it now.
    - alanh 16y ago
      (Not to get all Reddit up in here, but) your username is fantastic in this context.
robryan 16y ago
Linux is also driving the increase in cloud computing though, those web services that are replacing OSS code are being ran on linux, meaning it's really a special case.
- pmjordan 16y ago
  Apart from the virtualisation features, I don't see many additions to the kernel that are driven by the cloud computing industry though. Most of the changes are drivers and revamped subsystems.