Making Ohloh Open Source?

Hi Anant,

It's a fresh idea and really nifty.

Thanks for the kind words.

Adding better algorithms than just the LOC count to arrive at the popularity of a project is one such thing that could be done.

I agree with your general point. However, I wanted to make clear that our project popularity ranking is not derived from LOC. It's measured from a reverse link count using Yahoo's Search API (ie: how many websites point to the project's homepage). On the general point, however, we're in complete agreement. We plan on going broader and deeper: more data sources than source code repositories as well as deeper metrics on the source code repositories themselves .

Are there any plans to make Ohloh itself an open source project in the future?

Like many startups, we're struggling with this question. We'd love to engage everyone to help us make Ohloh better but we have to make sure we're profitable enough to stick around (ie: we've gotta eat!). We are supporting Open Source as much as we can already: we're built almost entirely on it, we engage the community at large wrt to our development and are providing a free service to help propel open source forward. We're currently evaluating ways to make money and the direction we take will impact what portions of Ohloh we'll open up.

Meanwhile the best way to contribute to Ohloh is to share ideas, suggestions and feedback with us (as you already are). Many thanks,