Open Source Economics and why visibility is good for you

posted 12:12PM Jul 03, 2007 with tags economics ohloh opensource sourcekibitzer by Lars Trieloff

Jitendra Gupta wrote an interesting article at Read/Write Web: Open Source Economics Driving Web 2.0 Innovation which explains some Open Source Business models and how they play nicely with Web 2.0. Much of this article is based on the research of Dirk Riehle, a scientist at SAP Labs whom I met some time ago. Jitendra sums up the reasons why contributing to open source makes sense to developers as follows:
It used to be the case that contributors did not get paid for their contributions and had to work on their own time, but things are changing. With the popularity of open source projects, more companies are paying contributors to support the community, or are even contributing proprietary modules to the community. This provides direct incentives to contributors to work with the community.
Open source participation is a great way to establish credibility if you are a programmer…Have you seen ads like these: "With your resume, please include some php and javascript code snippets or refer us to an open source project you've worked on."
Most good open source developers have an opportunity to become a public voice for the project. This extended role for engineers not only means an ego boost, but also translates to higher salaries etc.
As a developer of proprietary software, most of your know how is bound to this proprietary product and when you leave the company, this know how is in most cases of no use to your new employer. With every piece of knowledge you gather in proprietary development, you become more valuable to your current employer. As a developer that contributes to an open source project, e.g. because your employer uses this open source software you become an expert in this particular open source software and gather knowledge that is valuable to your current employer, and to potential future employers. This allows you to bargain stronger for your next raise.

You can increase your visibility to even further by using services like SourceKibitzer: This service donwloads source code from public open source subversion repositories, analyzes it for various metrics that are all related to your actual contribution and allows you to host a developer biography to tell even more about your skills. A similar service is ohloh.net, which in contrast to Java-centric Sourcekibitzer covers all programming languages popular in OSS development, but offers less visibility to developer profiles and has no Java-specific metrics.

new features at ohloh

posted 12:24AM May 08, 2007 with tags metrics ohloh opensource by Lars Trieloff

Having heard Ugo Cei's presentation on Web 2.0 open source project directories just some days ago, I had another look at Ohloh, the open source project directory that offers some interesting metrics on listed open source projects - and to my surprise, Ohloh was improved with many new features:
  • adding a project to your stack has become much easier
  • you get suggestions for software based on similar stacks
  • you can find out what other projects people are using that have stacked a project
  • there is a user and contributor map of users who have entered their location to their profile
  • you get an experience report based on the commits you have done on open source projects, so you can prove you have 25 years of HTML experience
  • you can give kudos to other developers and there is a ranking of contributors to open source projects based on activity and kudos' count
It is an interesting set of new features, even if Ohloh does not yet provide DOAP exports or activity feeds, which would help creating mashups based on this data, and even if the metrics can be inaccurate and popularity can be faked, I like the concept and the way Ohloh presents the gathered data.

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