The last time I saw Richard Stallman was when he got into a bus that I was on in Cambridge, MA about 6 or so years back. His name comes up often whenever the Free Software Foundation, GNU, or open source software in general is discussed. It should have been no surprise for me to see his name show up in Ohloh, a “free public directory of open source projects and people”. What surprised me was where I found it:
There we go. Five slots above mine.
My Kudo Position recently received a fairly large boost (as evidenced by the +2339 above) due to Secure-Endpoints pushing Network Identity Manager and the KCA Provider for Network Identity Manager into GitHub. Once this got me excited about my Kudo Rank, I discovered that much like democracy, the rank isn’t based upon my opinion of my work or the quantity thereof, but on what others think about it.
So how exactly is the Kudo Rank and Kudo Position calcuated? Ohloh’s About Kudos page describes the process. The Kudo Rank is based on Kudos that are received by a contributor, either as a result of someone giving them Kudos directly or by giving Kudos to a project that he has contributed to. Think of a Kudo as a compliment and the Kudo Rank as the reputation, which increases with each compliment you receive personally or for your work. Registered Ohloh users can give Kudos while any individual recognized by Ohloh as a contributor to one of their tracked projects and registered users with or without any recognized commits can receive them.
The system is not perfect. Notably, it favors developers who contribute to open source projects whose user-base has a large number of open source developers who are Ohloh users. As such, contributors to projects that target primarily non-technical users can run into difficulty establishing a good ranking. Also absent from the list of factors is a measure of the actual contribution to open source projects; Kudos received by a project are distributed to its contributors in proportion to the number of commits, but commits by themselves do not increase the contributors’ Kudo rank. However, given the constraints and the limited dataset, Kudos work reasonably well. It will be interesting to see whether these kinds of rankings will become a currency, like Google’s PageRank.
One side-effect of open source is that in addition to making the source code available for the whole world to see, in many cases, the code repositories themselves are made public. Consequently, every mistake, misspelled identifier, grammatically incorrect comment, every oops, and every aha is out there in all its glory. This practice is helped by the plethora of public open source hosting services which make it almost trivial to have a public repository. Ohloh aggregates this information to analyze individual projects. For example, the code analysis of OpenAFS shows a breakdown of the programming languages used, licenses, and the quantitative evolution of the codebase. It also shows that the code represents about 274 person years of work or about $ 15,043,108 at the time of this writing.
This is a great use of the wealth of information that is available. These statistics provide a valuable insight into the maturity and evolution of the developer community.
But what about Mr. Stallman? Let’s take a closer look at his entry:
You will notice the notable absence of pretty much his entire open source legacy with the exception of a single project. In reality, Stallman’s name appears 12 times in the rankings. The top entry has a Kudo Rank of 10 and a Kudo position of 30. Alas, it would be patently false to say I should be ranked anywhere near some of these people around me. The ranking, while fun, can be a tad misleading at times.
(This post was written in the summer of 2010, and hasn't been updated since.)
There we go. Five slots above mine.
My Kudo Position recently received a fairly large boost (as evidenced by the +2339 above) due to Secure-Endpoints pushing Network Identity Manager and the KCA Provider for Network Identity Manager into GitHub. Once this got me excited about my Kudo Rank, I discovered that much like democracy, the rank isn’t based upon my opinion of my work or the quantity thereof, but on what others think about it.
So how exactly is the Kudo Rank and Kudo Position calcuated? Ohloh’s About Kudos page describes the process. The Kudo Rank is based on Kudos that are received by a contributor, either as a result of someone giving them Kudos directly or by giving Kudos to a project that he has contributed to. Think of a Kudo as a compliment and the Kudo Rank as the reputation, which increases with each compliment you receive personally or for your work. Registered Ohloh users can give Kudos while any individual recognized by Ohloh as a contributor to one of their tracked projects and registered users with or without any recognized commits can receive them.
The system is not perfect. Notably, it favors developers who contribute to open source projects whose user-base has a large number of open source developers who are Ohloh users. As such, contributors to projects that target primarily non-technical users can run into difficulty establishing a good ranking. Also absent from the list of factors is a measure of the actual contribution to open source projects; Kudos received by a project are distributed to its contributors in proportion to the number of commits, but commits by themselves do not increase the contributors’ Kudo rank. However, given the constraints and the limited dataset, Kudos work reasonably well. It will be interesting to see whether these kinds of rankings will become a currency, like Google’s PageRank.
One side-effect of open source is that in addition to making the source code available for the whole world to see, in many cases, the code repositories themselves are made public. Consequently, every mistake, misspelled identifier, grammatically incorrect comment, every oops, and every aha is out there in all its glory. This practice is helped by the plethora of public open source hosting services which make it almost trivial to have a public repository. Ohloh aggregates this information to analyze individual projects. For example, the code analysis of OpenAFS shows a breakdown of the programming languages used, licenses, and the quantitative evolution of the codebase. It also shows that the code represents about 274 person years of work or about $ 15,043,108 at the time of this writing.
This is a great use of the wealth of information that is available. These statistics provide a valuable insight into the maturity and evolution of the developer community.
But what about Mr. Stallman? Let’s take a closer look at his entry:
You will notice the notable absence of pretty much his entire open source legacy with the exception of a single project. In reality, Stallman’s name appears 12 times in the rankings. The top entry has a Kudo Rank of 10 and a Kudo position of 30. Alas, it would be patently false to say I should be ranked anywhere near some of these people around me. The ranking, while fun, can be a tad misleading at times.
(This post was written in the summer of 2010, and hasn't been updated since.)
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