Open Source projects ranked by awesomeness | Hacker News Reader

Open Source projects ranked by awesomeness

blog.masterbranch.com

55 pointsplunchete34 comments

Ever wondered what projects are developed by the best kick ass hackers?

Reads more like a list of the most well-known brogrammers to me.

Seems like an algorithm designed to list cliques by popularity.

Yep, this is a pretty lame ranking system. Projects are given more points the more people are registered in them with accounts on the system.

Compare this with what Ohloh does, where someone can be ranked in the top #10 of contributors (or projects) without even signing up.

Ohloh doesn't offer very interesting stats, so I was expecting something more for stats junkies, but this is considerably worse in most all respects.

It will result in Flickr-like interestingness numbers, where people who play in the social network have more ratings, rather than a system that identifies the most important projects or the most widely active developers.

What kind of stats would you like to view?

We don't feel confortable ranking projects and people based on info from not registered people, just our choice.

One of the things that really differentiates our ranking from Ohloh's is the way we calculate the DevScore. The DevScore it's not a popularity rank and it's not based on the amount of lines. The DevScore tries to measure the impact of your contributions (measure the amount of code, the reputation of the project and the reputation of the people that you work with) and of course we are continuously improving it and open to heard feedback.

Fun fact: open source projects that host their own repos are categorically not awesome.

Fun fact #2:

In the top 9 most awesome Open Source projects in the world 6 out of 9 are ruby projects. Linux or Apache projects are not in the lists. Yep, seems about right... (I am sarcastic of course)

Plus, but it may only be me, rating open source projects by "awesomeness" is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of Open Source and the contribution that everybody can bring into this world.

> In the top 9 most awesome Open Source projects in the world 6 out of 9 are ruby projects

Why did you pick the top 9?

We didn't pick them, it's the result of the sum of its contributors' DevScore. And we calculate the DevScore taking into account your contributions, the reputation of your projects and the reputation of the people you work with.

I'm sorry, my question was ambiguous. I'm not asking how the list was generated. I'm asking how the person my comment was in reply to, who criticized it as being too ruby heavy, decided to base his criticism on the top 9 elements of the top 10 list instead of basing it on all 10.

The natural sample would have been all 10 items in the top 10. Cutting it off at the rather weird 9, especially considering that the 10th is not a ruby item, gives the appearance that he massaged the data to support his position.

The screen grab in the blog post only shows the top 9.

They are! The ones that are self hosted are in the leader board too. (And if there's not, you can suggest it and add it).

The idea that it's necessary for an open source project to fill out a form and register with the awesome authority is... weird.

I understand what you're trying to do, but I think this (and similar efforts) are a net negative. Sorry.

What's wrong with hosting your own repo?

The service only pulls info from hosting services like Github/Bitbucket. If you host your own, you can't show up on their "awesome" list.

Ah, gotcha :)

The service pulls info from self hosted repos as well as long as they use git, svn, cvs or hg.

In addition, we actively track projects from forges like Github, Bitbucket, Apache, Java.net, Google Code, etc.

Linux just barely squeaks by in the top 100 at 99.

Other well known open source projects and their ranks:

asterisk: 16286

nginx: 13540

emacs: 2447

vim: 2618

a github page with somebody's vim configuration: 2068

clang: 2315

busybox: 11186

gcc: Not listed except for some ps3 ports aroynd 12k

Well we now know that emacs is more awesome than vim, but vim's configuration format is more awesome than either.

ohloh.net has been at this for a number of years. I've found it a useful way to make sure an open source project has enough lasting momentum before I start to rely on it.

In order to be awesome you have to register, wtf? I think this is proof that RMS is the awesomest.

It's curious to see ruby on top of the leaderbord. I guess it's because your main source it's github, am I right? Anyway, It's a nice way to find newer projects.

I thought the same thing -- six of ten are ruby projects.

It's not because Github is our main source but because we have more people from Github registered (we have connectors to support git, svn, cvs and hg open source projects from any forge).

Would be great to see people from other communities and/or languages (i.e jquery ranks 13 but John Resig is not even registered)

This makes the data much less interesting to those who come from communities that are generally not signed up.

You can't rank people without having them register?

Yes, we could rank non registered members, but we prefere not to use data from people that don't participate on Masterbranch.

As far as jquery goes we have to sign up or take your word for it?

You can check here https://masterbranch.com/jquery-project/343862

A very nice list of projects to avoid. Well done.

the rails documentation branch at #1? apache maven? i think their algorithm needs a bit more tuning

It's a very interesting way to rank open source projects and see who are the contributors :)

Good way to find new projects to contribute too

Any list which doesn't have Linux, Apache, and Asterisk near the top = automatic fail.

Looks very cool - do you normalize based on the number of developers per project?

Not for now. Depends on the total registered developers and their personal score.

Great idea. I develop many projects that are non-public and this is a nice way to get publicly credit for them as well. I guess that there are many people out there who don't actively contribute to open-source, but are still great developers.

very cool!

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