Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits | Hacker News Reader

Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

ohloh.net

28 pointsdevmonk25 comments

NumPy: -157,525 lines of code, mostly written in Modula-2.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy

That's an embarrassing error in our processing. We just acquired Ohloh and are working hard to identify all such issues and fix them. Stay tuned!

We at Black Duck noticed it too. So far, looks like the decline is largely because, lately Ohloh - a) hasn't kept up with discovering new projects. b) hasn't paid needed attention to keeping existing projects up to date.

We'll provide more details once transition is over (we just acquired Ohloh from Geeknet).

I suspect it has more to do with the mechanism by which commit volume is measured than the actual commits themselves.

It's possible people are just moving away from verbose languages like C and Java and thus just needing to write less code, but I'm not sure I have enough faith in the human race to believe it.

Another possible reason is that as systems become more mature they require less maintenance. I know the 2 or 3 projects that I am involved with are pretty mature right now and we are mostly just fixing bugs.

Seems to shadow the recession. I wonder how this compares to closed-source commits.

One theory: programmer utilization at companies has increased with the recession, so there is less time for open-source commits.

Another theory: a huge fraction of open-source in recent years is written by programmers paid by companies to work on it. The recession has caused these programmers to be pulled off and put on projects where their time can be billed directly.

Third theory, there is more use of distributed version control "offline", which would not be detected by Ohloh.

Well, in contrast to the second theory, there's the possibility that open source commits and closed source commits look pretty much the same. They're mostly done by people looking to get a paycheck, and without a paycheck the quantity drops. People aren't necessarily being pulled off open source to work on closed source, they're just being laid off (which seems supported by the unemployment stats.)

Are they tracking commits made to github?

They're tracking any open source project that's registered on their website. If you have or know about an open source project that's not on Ohloh, you'll have to register it and specify its repositories (and branches).

Well, then a possible explanation is that people don't submit much projects to their website anymore and thus there are only "old" projects that are getting more and more mature and thus needing less commits.

I couldn't find any figure to back this though.

But I do remember that Ohloh used to be quite popular and I'm sure as hell that it's not anymore.

Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project additions to Ohloh

That the most probable explanation, I believe. But did you find a real figure somewhere? I couldn't.

I wondered what exactly was being measured here too. I checked around the site quickly but found no answers. Bah. Might as well be made up numbers as far as I'm concerned.

Hum. The App Store opened in mid 2008 and the Android Market in late 2008. There might be a link.

Also, there is a growing quantity of proprietary Web Apps which might have helped shift interest of many users and programmers along.

I'm not all that surprised as it has been one of my concern lately. The Open Dream might come to an end with the make-it-all-online meme.

What about the possibility of the emergence of distributed version control? Perhaps this is causing less actual commits to the actual project, but not necessarily less code being written.

You did the graph for C. Common!

Should add C++ and C#...ain't much of a decline.

You'll get totally different picture if you remove C (even if you just replace it with C++) and Java. So, hm?

For the lazy: http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=...

No. And no. The initial link was in Values, not in Percentage. When you click Update, the graph shown is switched to Percentage. Here is your link in Value:

http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=...

This is because it switches to percentages by default. See http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=...

Everything is going down.

The decline is in C, dynamic languages are on the rise. May be everything that had to be written in C has already been written?

It looks like the dynamic languages have been declining as well, though C's drop is much larger both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers.

HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, and Python all have steady increases, and ruby is mostly stable. It could just be that focus is more on the web (HTML in particular seems to have taken a biggish jump mid-2009 - related to HTML5?)

http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?measure=commits&p...

Same link but in Values, not Percentage:

  http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=html&l1=javascript&l2=php&l3=python&l4=ruby&l5=xml&l6=css&l7=-1&measure=commits

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