Ohloh's growth

hi Dartar,

Fun idea - and curious timing. I just noticed that we're within striking distance of having 10k projects on Ohloh.

One thing we get asked here pretty often is "how many open source projects are there?" It's impossible to respond accurately, because the question is too vague. In most cases, however, people generally mean is "how many projects where":

• Is still active (a commit in the last 12 months, perhaps?)
• Consists of more than just a few script files
• Is not a trivial fork or port of another project

Now this request is more actionable, although still very difficult to estimate accurately. I've given up on simple forge-scrape-estimates (100k? 500k? 1M?) - they simply contain too much noise. Our approach has been to favor data quality of quantity. I'm obviously very curious to know this too - since I'd like to know how much further we need to go ;-).

As for users, we surpassed 10k a while ago. I'm afraid we can't provide graphs just yet. We've been busy building a new service we're getting close to launch, so we're pretty tied up at the moment. You could perhaps create some reports yourself using our Ohloh API?

Actually, using the created_at timestamps on projects and accounts you could build the graphs of when they were added to Ohloh... that's how we'd do it.