Downloader: Ohloh lets you stalk your favorite open-source software developers

Monday, June 21, 2010

Ohloh lets you stalk your favorite open-source software developers

Ohloh is not a project hosting website; instead, it is a "tracking" website for open source projects and developers.

It's easy to explain with an example: The screenshot above comes from Stefan Küng's profile page. Stefan is the lead developer for TortoiseSVN, and his profile page lets you zoom in and see exactly what code he personally committed to the project, and when.

That timeline you see is zoomable. When you click it, you're taken to a neat scrollable version that shows the last 300 days of commits. When you click on a particular day (May 2, for example) you get a pop-up showing you exactly what commits were made that day.

Each commit has a short description, such as "zlib 1.2.5 doesn't have the gvmat32.asm file anymore". When you click it you can see exactly what files were changed.

In other words, there's no limit to how deep you can drill down. You can get down to a single line of code. That is a lot of data about each particular developer -- and Stefan doesn't even maintain the Journal and News sections of his profile. All of the data seems to be automatically pulled from his code commits, so it doesn't take any work to maintain.

I like the site because it highlights the people behind open source projects; I think that's important, because when working on an open-source project you often get nothing in exchange for your time, except for recognition and respect. And I feel Ohloh promotes exactly this sort of recognition.