Show HN: Comparing Open Source Projects | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Comparing Open Source Projects

ossrank.com

37 pointsrywalker14 comments

We just pushed out http://ossrank.com/compare which allows you to compare commit and contributor velocity for a group of OSS projects.

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Isn’t number of commits a very weak measure of activity? All these metrics depend greatly on the size and maturity of a project, the base language the majority of code is written in, and the culture of the company or community behind the project. I would tend to use them to look at a single project over time rather than between projects.

I'd put Github stars in the very weak category :)

Combining commits + contributors is my favorite (obviously!), especially when considered over a long time range.

Yes, some (usually smaller) teams make small incremental commits, others have more ceremony and commits tend to be less frequent and bigger. And you could easily game the system theoretically, but not easily in a project of important and substance.

We've added a voting system, where we give every dev 20 votes, and we'd give more notable OSS contributors a higher weighting, but it's very early days for that — but we'd mix that data into the score if we had it.

How would you do it? We're open to suggestions :)

Nice project! Just one question, how do you find open-source projects?

I'm the core maintainer of an open-source smart home software (https://github.com/GladysAssistant/Gladys, 2.2k stars, has been existing since 2014), and is not listed, any reason why? :)

We add projects as they catch our eye, or upon request, because we manually categorize and try to clean up the contributor list, mark bot committer as bots (and exclude them), and identify a few of the top developers as we add them.

We've added Gladys Assistant @ https://ossrank.com/p/2035

OSS Insight is also great and shows relative growth: https://ossinsight.io/collections/monitoring-tool/

What insights should we expect to derive from this comparison? Just that a project has more commits? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Don't get me wrong, the site looks great and graphs are slick. But not particularly insightful.

https://ossrank.com/compare?project_id=1472&projects=1906%2C...

My interpretation of the charts is that they are in a good duel, but Phoenix seems to be pulling away lately as Actix activity is waning.

I've never used either framework; would you agree with that assessment from other signals you've seen?

Looks like Actix dropped off a lot since Nikolay Kim stepped away from the project (no commits for past year https://ossrank.com/p/1906-actix)

Since this is a Show HN it's best to refer to the project page rather than a blog post, so we changed the URL from https://rywalker.com/comparing-open-source-projects-3c45ce0c.... Readers should still read the blog post though!

ah sorry - thanks :)

This is a nice one! Thx for sharing. Looks similar to OSS insight! We found our project over there: https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder IMHO I don't want to register to compare projects tho.

Yeah, you can't even add projects when you sign in yet — super early!

I added it for you though @ https://ossrank.com/p/2037 (1000 isn't the real rank, will take a few hours to get ranked, we rescore projects every 3 hours)

#MVP

It looks cool.

Could you add our open source project: https://github.com/refinedev/refine

Why is my project not on the list?

We're happy to add it, email support@ossrank.com :)

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