Open Source Development Metrics

I find statistics and charts on the development of open source quite fascinating. In the past I've used tools such as CIA, which tracks commits to project like KDE. It is then possible to track all manner of details.

Today I came across Ohloh. It describes itself as, "Mapping the open source world by collecting objective information on open source projects." Check out my statistics. Ohloh also tracks statistics for KDE overall.


This data is collected solely from kdelibs and kdebase in trunk. It makes an assumption of the number of "person years" it would take to write the the lines of code we have, and then multiplies that by an estimated $55,000 (USD) per year, per developer to produce some rough estimate what it would cost to develop KDE in the absence of volunteer work. Of course this neglects all the other non-programming work, as well as the work on KDE 1, 2 & 3.

Naturally the English Breakfast Network (EBN) provides our own statistics on both project activity and potential errors in code or documentation.

Danny Allen's Commit Digest has been getting better as well. Each week we are treated to some beautiful charts dissecting all the (programming) work that has gone into KDE.