Open Hub

Black Duck Open Hub
(formerly Ohloh)

Logo of Open Hub in 2012, while in its former name Ohloh.
Type of site	Public directory of free and open-source software (FOSS)
Owner	Black Duck Software
Created by	Jason Allen and Scott Collison
URL	www.openhub.net
Commercial	yes
Launched	1 January 2006; 18 years ago (2006-01-01)
Current status	Active
Content license	Proprietary; interface Apache License[1]

Black Duck Open Hub, formerly Ohloh,^[2] is a website which provides a web services suite and online community platform that aims to index the open-source software development community. It was founded by former Microsoft managers Jason Allen and Scott Collison in 2004 and joined by the developer Robin Luckey.^[3][4] As of 15 January 2016^[update], the site lists 669,601 open-source projects, 681,345 source control repositories, 3,848,524 contributors and 31,688,426,179 lines of code.^[5]

In 2017, Black Duck Software (the company running the site) was acquired by Synopsys for $565 million.^[6]

History

Ohloh is a website that provides a web services suite and online community platform that aims to index the open-source software development community. It was founded by former Microsoft managers Jason Allen and Scott Collison in 2004 and joined by the developer Robin Luckey.^[7][8] As of 15 January 2016^[update], the site lists 669,601 open-source projects, 681,345 source control repositories, 3,848,524 contributors and 31,688,426,179 lines of code.^[9] On 28 May 2009, Ohloh was acquired by Geeknet, owners of the popular open-source development platform SourceForge.^[10] However, Geeknet sold Ohloh to the open-source analysis company Black Duck Software on 5 October 2010. Black Duck integrated Ohloh's functionality with their existing products to advance the site into a major resource for FOSS development.^[11] On 18 July 2014, Ohloh became Black Duck Open Hub.^[12] In late August 2014, the Black Duck Open Hub's Organizations feature moved out of Beta and into Version 1.0.^[13]

Functionality and features

By retrieving data from revision control repositories (such as CVS, SVN, Git, Bazaar, and Mercurial), Black Duck Open Hub provides statistics about the longevity of projects, their licenses (including license conflict information) and software metrics such as source lines of code and commit statistics. The codebase history informs about the amount of activity for each project. Software stacks (list of software applications used by Black Duck Open Hub's members) and tags are used to calculate the similarity between projects.

Global statistics per language measure the popularity of specific programming languages since the early 1990s.^[14] Those global statistics across all projects in Black Duck Open Hub have also been used to identify those with the most extensive continuous revision control histories.^[15]

Contributor statistics are also available, measuring open-source developers' experience as observable in code committed to revision control repositories. Social network features (kudos) have been introduced to allow users to rank open-source contributors. A KudoRank for each user and open-source contributor on a scale of 1 to 10 is automatically extracted from all kudos in the system.^[16] The idea of measuring open-source developers' skills and productivity on the basis of commit statistics or mutual rating has received mixed reactions in technology blogs.^[17][18] Contributor profiles may also contain a contributor supplied email address, and avatars loaded from Gravatar using that email address.

On 22 August 2007, a public beta of a web-service API was announced, exposing Black Duck Open Hub's data and reports to promote the development of third-party applications.^[19]

On 18 January 2013, the team announced a new metric, the Project Activity Indicator (PAI). The PAI combines the number of contributors and the number of commits in an algorithm that weighs more recent activity more heavily than past activity. Activity is normalized so that all projects can be considered and weighed equally one against another; that activity assessment is scaled relatively to the number of project contributors and commits.^[20]

On 14 January 2014, the team announced a new score, the Project Hotness Score. The PAI shows long-term activity and growth on FOSS projects, but its requirement that there be at least a year of data means that new projects can't be ranked. The Project Hotness Score looks at activity over the past few weeks and evaluates daily activity to identify those projects. By design, the Project Hotness Score is highly volatile.^[21]

On 6 April 2016, the team announced Hub 3.0, which streamlined continuous integration and DevOps processes through policy management and rapid scanning capabilities.^[22]

Code search

In 2012, Black Duck Open Hub launched Open Hub Code Search, a free code search engine based on the predecessor Koders.^[23] It could search over 21 billion lines of open-source code and filter by language, project or syntax, but was discontinued in 2016.^[24]

See also

• Google Code Search
• Koders
• Krugle
• Protecode

References

1. blackducksoftware. "blackducksoftware/ohloh-ui: Web Application for the Ohloh Stack. Currently Rails 4.2.7 & Ruby 2.2.5". GitHub. Retrieved 3 December 2020.
2. "Black Duck Open Hub Blog | About the Black Duck Open Hub". Black Duck Software. Archived from the original on 20 November 2015. Retrieved 25 August 2014.
3. Darryl K. Taft (13 July 2006). "Startup Helps Assess Open-Source Projects". eWeek. Retrieved 29 August 2007.^{[permanent dead link]}
4. "Ehemalige Microsoft-Manager gründen Infoportal zu Open Source". Heise Online (in German). 19 July 2006. Retrieved 29 August 2007.
5. "Open Hub". Retrieved 15 January 2016.
6. Loizos, Connie. "Fifteen-year-old Black Duck Software gets its exit, selling to Synopsys for $565 million". TechCrunch. Retrieved 7 January 2018.
7. Darryl K. Taft (13 July 2006). "Startup Helps Assess Open-Source Projects". eWeek. Retrieved 29 August 2007.^{[permanent dead link]}
8. "Ehemalige Microsoft-Manager gründen Infoportal zu Open Source". Heise Online (in German). 19 July 2006. Retrieved 29 August 2007.
9. "Open Hub". Retrieved 15 January 2016.
10. "SourceForge Acquires Ohloh – Black Duck Open Hub Blog". Archived from the original on 20 December 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2009.
11. "Geeknet Sells Open Source Directory Ohloh To Black Duck Software". TechCrunch. Retrieved 5 October 2010.
12. "Black Duck Open Hub on Twitter".
13. "Unveiling the Retooled Organization".
14. Robin Luckey (8 October 2006). "PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast". Ohloh. Archived from the original on 12 September 2007. Retrieved 29 August 2007.
15. Robin Luckey (31 August 2007). "The World's Oldest Source Code Repositories". Ohloh. Archived from the original on 14 February 2012. Retrieved 3 January 2008.
16. Robin Luckey (4 May 2007). "Ohloh Kudos". Ohloh. Archived from the original on 17 April 2008. Retrieved 29 February 2008.
17. Bill Snyder (21 February 2008). "Is counting open-source code contributions really useful?". InfoWorld. Retrieved 29 February 2008.
18. "Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers". Slashdot. 21 February 2008. Retrieved 29 February 2008.
19. Robin Luckey (22 August 2007). "Ohloh API Beta". Ohloh. Retrieved 23 December 2007.
20. Sands, Rich (18 January 2013). ""About Project Activity Icons" Open Hub Blog". blog.openhub.net. Retrieved 15 January 2016.
21. Degen-Portnoy, Peter (14 January 2014). "About the Ohloh Hotness Score". blog.openhub.net. Retrieved 15 January 2016.
22. "Black Duck Releases Latest Version of Hub Open Source Security Solution". businesswire.com. 6 April 2016. Retrieved 3 February 2020.
23. Bily, Susie. "Ohloh + Code = Ohloh Code". Ohloh Blog. Archived from the original on 18 May 2014. Retrieved 7 June 2013.
24. "Open Hub in 2016". OpenHub Blog. Retrieved 15 April 2016.

External links

• Official website