
The Fastest Growing Open Source Project? - maximesalomon
http://blog.codecombat.com/uid/137237
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mkal_tsr
How can they say they're the fastest growing when Popcorn Time nearly doubled
the unique contributors (95-ish to 40ish) in nearly the same time? Seems
rather disingenuous to include PopcornTime clearly showing it's much younger
than CodeCombat, showing at the same age of being open-source it has nearly
double the unique contributors, then claiming it's growing slower than
CodeCombat. Don't get me wrong, what CodeCombat is doing is great and all the
well wishes to them, but I don't think they're interpreting the data very
fairly.

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stonogo
The Fastest-Growing Open Source Project As Determined By Our Incredibly
Specific and Sometimes Downright Strange Metrics

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nwinter
Unique contributors since open source launch is strange?

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stonogo
"Unique contributors within inital 86-day window of project upload to Github"
is not equivalent to "unique contributors since open-source launch."

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schmatz
You're right, that's true.

It's not the ideal metric, but it's one that is realistic to compute with
limited time and resources. To analyze that statistic using a growth metric
like "largest 30 day average contributor gain" across such a gigantic dataset,
consisting of hundreds of millions of rows and tens of millions of unique
repositories, requires resources and engineer time which few people possess.
We certainly don't want to divert too much of either of those things away from
development of CodeCombat just for a fun data science experiment!

~~~
stonogo
So you narrowed the problem set down to one that was sufficiently effortless,
then uploaded a blog post declaring yourself world champions. I'm not sure
that makes anything better. "Fastest-growing open-source project, as far as we
care" is a perfectly fine headline. What you've got now is disingenuous and
baselessly self-congratulatory.

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chriseppstein
Navel gazing is the best way to convince yourself that things are going great
and to give you that boost to keep working on the project. At some point you
will probably look back at this and think it was nothing to brag about, but it
doesn't matter because you're having fun and enjoying the feedback loop
between you and your users -- this is a good sign.

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dalek2point3
Also see: [http://xkcd.com/1102/](http://xkcd.com/1102/)

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AndyNemmity
I was pretty confident I knew that openstack was the fastest growing open
source project. They didn't show up in the answers, so maybe the criteria was
such that it was cut out?

~~~
schmatz
Looking at OpenStack, it does look like an aggregate of all of the
organization's repositories would be definitely the fastest growing. However,
we looked at individual repositories, so that's why it's not on the graph. It
would be interesting see the growth of the big open source organizations (GNU
vs Apache vs OpenStack etc.)

~~~
kiallmacinnes
OpenStack kinda has a single repo - every commit to the core projects triggers
a submodule update in
[https://github.com/openstack/openstack](https://github.com/openstack/openstack)
\- and there are LOTS of projects which aren't included in this. For example
CI and Developer tooling etc.

> openstack$ git count -pm -n3

> 2014-03-01 2608

> 2014-02-01 2545

> 2014-01-01 2173

That looks OpenStack has 7326 commits in the previous 3 months.

> codecombat$ git count -pm -n3

> 2014-03-01 642

> 2014-02-01 426

> 2014-01-01 427

The same tool gives me 1495 commits in the previous 3 months for CodeCombat.

(The tool I used is [https://github.com/moskytw/git-
count](https://github.com/moskytw/git-count) )

~~~
kiallmacinnes
Replying to my own comment feels odd.. whatever ;)

If you're interested in numbers[1] shows the commits currently running through
the OpenStack CI system at this very moment in time.. I'm counting 125 when I
look at the page.

In the last 24 hours, OpenStack's CI system has peaked at just under 1000 jobs
ran in an hour, an eyeballed average looks like to be 450 jobs every hour for
the last 24 hours.

For build slaves over the same period, It looks like about 750 Jenkins slaves.

Oh and - OpenStack has a strict 1 change == 1 commit policy. So "Fix typo in
previous commit" never happens .. The actually reduces the overall number of
commits ;)

[1]: [http://status.openstack.org/zuul/](http://status.openstack.org/zuul/)

~~~
schmatz
This is so cool :)

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dalek2point3
erm, and also the fact that MANY MANY open source projects are not on github?
Linux, apache, android, some of the most influential projects are missing.
This should be titled, "the fastest growing open source project by people who
are not too important to be hosting on Github".

~~~
schmatz
Actually, the Linux kernel, Android, and Apache are all on GitHub, and were
analyzed (though the latter two are mirrors, so I guess not purely on GitHub.)

For projects like Linux, while it may have 3500+ contributors, it got that way
over 23 years.

We also made the assumption that due to the social nature of GitHub, its
meteoric growth, and the visibility that it brings open source projects, the
fastest growing open source projects are on GitHub. We presume this assumption
is correct, but don't have the data (or even know where we could get the data)
to verify it.

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KevinBongart
Worth noting: there's a Code Combat challenge on ChallengePost:
[http://codecombat.challengepost.com](http://codecombat.challengepost.com)

You have 50 more days to build a working parser and help others learn to code
in new languages playing CodeCombat

