What a stunningly fabulous idea so elegantly executed. Ohloh (blog) (Phil turned me on to it) analyzes open source software. Not deep source analysis like Fisheye, but broad analysis that answers so many of the questions being asked like: Is it actively developed? Is it just one guy or a bunch? Is it well commented?
It says that DasBlog is about 13 Man Years of effort and would cost about $726k to write from scratch. It's about 54k lines of code.
Subtext, a Fork of .Text managed by my other arch-nemesis Phil (I have a baker's dozens arch-nemisi (nemisissies?) Just kidding.) has 81k lines of code and would cost $1.1M over 15 Man Years.
What's really interesting is looking at more important projects like FireFox. Looks like only 50k lines of code? I wonder if that counts the rendering engine or if it's really that tight?
One odd problem/artifact, there's two DasBlog's listed. I'm not sure if this is because we had a CVS repository then moved to SVN, or what. We'll get the older one deleted.
As an aside, the flash-based charts they are from Maani.us and they are slick slick slick. A very inexpensive and permissive license and they consume a fairly intuitive XML format as their datasource. Hook those babies up to an HttpHandler and you've got great looking charts for your ASP.NET (or whatever) page.
Additional aside: There is a small transparency problem with the charts showing up with a gray background under Firefox 2 RC3, but I'm not sure if that's Flash's problem, Firefox's problem, or Ohloh's.
The real question that Ohloh may be able to shed some light on over the coming months is "Is Open Source a Crap Idea?" Seriously, though, it's interesting to see the levels of involvement, although there's no way to show the dozens of patches that were submitted to the DasBlog project by the community that were committed to the repository by me "glucopilot."
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