Ohloh: an open source directory

Recently I came across ohloh.net, a Web 2.0-ish directory of open source projects. It seems to aggregate information from at least SourceForge, Freshmeat, user-provided RSS feeds, and possibly other sources.

The most interesting aspect: To gather information about a project, Ohloh also connects to its CVS repository and displays statistical and historical information about the project’s development, and even generates information on individual contributors. Thus, it’s a public website that provides a hosted service somewhat similar to tools like StatCVS.

A good example is the Ohloh page for StatCVS itself. Here’s the page about me as a contributor to StatCVS – Ohloh determines that I have 1.2 years of Java experience and four months of CSS experience. Neat, it uses SIMILE Timeline.

The developers also have a blog.

So, what can Ohloh do for people involved with open source? I think the clearest story is this: People who want to quickly evaluate a project can use Ohloh to get a one-stop overview. For example, we learn from the StatCVS page that the project has “5 active developers”, “increasing development activity”, an “established codebase”, and a project cost of $139K (huh?).

In the future Ohloh could add some more sources of data (project mailing lists, issue trackers), and could become a one-stop dashboard for people involved with the project, to stay on top of day-to-day developments. A bit like a hosted version of Trac.

I see this as one more unexpected advantage of the open source development process: Since the source code and other data is available on the Internet, third parties can built services that add value to the development process.