2011 was a banner year for the open source community, especially for the Eclipse Foundation, which celebrated its 10th anniversary. In that vein, I decided to look at 2011 open source project trends and compare them to popular Eclipse projects. Using Ohloh.net, the free social directory of open source projects and developer resources (N.B.: Black Duck acquired Ohloh last year), I did a deep dive on a few key attributes of popular Eclipse projects in the context of the typical “flow” of an open source project.
My team and I compared the top 20 Eclipse projects to the top 100 Java projects. What stood out right away was the number and diversity of committers to both Eclipse and Java projects. The top projects in both categories have committers from a broad number of organizations – they’re not dominated by one vendor.
We also looked at how active Eclipse projects are compared to Java projects, measured by number of commits. Even though the top 20 Eclipse projects have fewer committers than the top 100 Java projects, Eclipse committers were more active with the average number of commits 15,355 compared to 9,550, to be precise.
Lines of code (LOC) per commit are lower, reflecting the more frequent commits, although Eclipse projects show fewer comment lines as a percent of total LOC (29 percent vs. 33 percent) than Java. The average number of committers to an Eclipse project is 48.
Not surprisingly, as an Eclipse project becomes a “mature, well-established codebase,” the number of committers on the project declines. Everything has a lifecycle; what the Ohloh data shows is that, as adoption increases, community activity changes. While the number of committers may go down, the frequency of commits (albeit smaller in size) may rise, reflecting more bug fixing activity.
The obvious challenge for OSS projects: keeping committers engaged in the project as it matures. The key to this is managing and supporting the project community – a subject my colleagues and I will continue exploring in 2012. We would love your insight.
P.S. You can easily do a similar analysis using tools on Ohloh.net. Take a look, pull some charts and compare activity on your favorite projects – it’s easy, readily available and free of charge.
