Forums : Ohloh General Discussion
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Recession effecting free software? Evidence in Ohloh charts?
Ohloh’s chart of lines of code contributed to free software projects (split by programming language) mirrors the charts for the economy these days:
Why is this?
Did Ohloh lose a data source, meaning did Ohloh stop counting a large code repository?
Or has the recession also hit free software?
I was hoping it just meant that some repositories hadn't been updated for the last month or so but your explanation makes much more sense. Unfortunately.
This is an interesting plot. That peak and sharp drop in mid/late 2008 is pretty dramatic.
Great observation. We're just as stumped here at Ohloh. We're not currently aware of any change in our crawling/analytics that would cause this. The economic impact theory seems plausible - however we should investigate our data deeper to make sure it's not a problem our end.
We'll try to get to the bottom of it this week.
Great! :-)
I guess it depends on your point of view, my open source output has increased drastically in the last 6 weeks since I got laid off, now that my commercial output has dropped to practically nothing. :)
What happened to C/C++?
https://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?l0=cncpp&measure=projects
Hi Gaz,
When Ohloh started, we grouped C and C++ into a single language category. Now, however, we correctly count C and C++ as two separate languages.
We've recounted the vast majority of the old C/C++ code to break it out into the separate languages, but there are still a few projects left to recount.
Eventually all of the C/C++ will disappear from Ohloh.
@gaz: I think they are being steadily replaced by scripting
languages which are more expressive (better language design, bigger libraries) and run just as fast.
Had a debate about this topic with my friend and blogged a bit about some of the possible explanations at:
http://agileconsulting.blogspot.com/2009/03/recession-reduces-open-source.html
Also, while going through some of the projects to look at their number of contributions, I saw several big projects (Eclipse Platform, Mozilla Firefox, MySQL, etc.) where their codebase went down to 0 around that time.
Is this just a case of the projects changing the location of their repository and Ohloh not updating?
We've been doing some digging through this over the last week or two, and I think that the explanation is not so dramatic.
I believe that the simple time delay between real world events and Ohloh updates can explain almost all of this apparent decline.
When a project moves from one source control system to another, it often takes a few weeks before Ohloh is updated to the new location. This is a common event, so there is always some fraction of projects for which Ohloh's recent statistics are missing. With the rising popularity of Git and other distributed SCMs, this is especially pronounced lately.
Also, Ohloh sometimes simply has technical problems that prevent us from analyzing some repositories. It can take a few weeks to fix these problems. So again, there is always some fraction of projects for which Ohloh has no data over the last few weeks. Recently, a few large and prolific projects have been in this category.
These two facts alone can account for anything from a 10 to 20 percent drop in the apparent activity over the last two months. I would always take the most recent data from Ohloh with a grain of salt. Ohloh is eventually correct, but our global open source snapshot usually lags reality by several weeks.
All that said, I have a suspicion that the Ruby decline might be real. Time will tell.
@robin: Thanks for taking the time to examine these data closely. It seems you've identified a systematic effect (i.e. large-scale migration from SCM x
to git, etc.).
Lesson learned: jumping to conclusions without careful examination of data is dangerous!
Indeed the recession hit everyone hard, even the places you would think to be recession proof, like Amish communities. Amish communities interact with the outside world out of necessity, and a lot of Amish fathers look for work in cities to make ends meet. Elkhart Goshen, Indiana, is one such place, and a lot of Amish workers were laid off when RV plants laid off workers or closed. Short term loans aren't exactly going to be what they look to, although some have filed for unemployment benefits, which goes against the grain of not accepting aid. The unemployment rate hits anywhere and everywhere, as there is a need for debt relief even in the Amish communities.
I'm not so sure the repositories->ohloh lag still holds, there is still a significant drop since the beginning of 2009
Hi Gilles,
Where specifically do you see the drop? Q1 2009 was a record quarter for Ohloh in terms of the number of open source commits we tracked, and I expect that the total number of commits this year will match last year.
I think there is still a lag between the real world and Ohloh. A lot of projects have been moving to Github this year, and it's taking us a while to make that same switch. Also, we have been a bit pokey about absorbing all of the new Mercurial and Bazaar activity.