

Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits - devmonk
http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=c&l1=html&l2=java&l3=php&l4=ruby&l5=shell&l6=xml&l7=python&l8=-1&measure=commits

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

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

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amujumdar
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!

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amujumdar
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).

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technomancy
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.

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Corrado
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.

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

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stcredzero
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.

~~~
sprout
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.)

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davidu
Are they tracking commits made to github?

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ciupicri
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).

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

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

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nakkiel
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.

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twymer
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.

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CedriK
You did the graph for C. Common!

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

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

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Corrado
For the lazy:
[http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=...](http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=-1&l1=html&l2=-1&l3=php&l4=python&l5=ruby&l6=shell&l7=xml&l8=-1&measure=commits&percent=true)

~~~
nakkiel
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=...](http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=-1&l1=html&l2=-1&l3=php&l4=python&l5=ruby&l6=shell&l7=xml&l8=-1&measure=commits)

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shurik
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?

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stcredzero
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.

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

~~~
nakkiel
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

