Statistics On Free Software projects 93
GenericBoy writes: "The first edition of The Orbiten Free Software Survey is out online. Some of the stats are number of authors and projects, the top 10 contributing authors, how many MB are in all of the free software projects put together (!) and a bunch more. " Now, as they themselves point out in the their Scope and Method, the methodology is crude, and I don't think Orbiten could quite submit it to Nature yet or anything, but it's an interesting bunch of stats.
Re:Well... kinda... (Score:1)
Re:Gordon Matzigkeit contributed to 267 projects?! (Score:1)
Well, if you recognize Gordon's name, you'll remember what project he is perhaps best known for: libtool. Now, packages that use libtool happen to include some rather long (autogenerated) files in them that have Gordon's name attached. So for every package that uses libtool, Gordon gets credited with about 8 thousand lines of code. What a sweet deal!
Troll Dictionary (Score:1)
Troller Derby: a skating game in which everyone skates around screaming, "First Score" even if they are the 10th.
Cinnamon Trolls: tasty flavored grits poured down one's pants.
Troll Call: all participants stand in a line and appeal for Natalie Portman's nubile body.
On a Troll: when some loudmouth who cannot read an actual article does nothing but disparage slashdot submissions incessantly.
Con-Troll: a miscreant poster who just escaped prison.
Dave Troll: leader of the band called the Foobar Fighters.
Bridge Troll: offtopic poster interested in card games.
Pet-Troll: (1) impudent poster used as fuel in the UK; (2) a troll belonging to another, as a pet.
Trolley: conveyance used to transport numerous trolls in San Francisco.
Trollkin: the family of a troll.
Trollop: a female poster of ill repute.
Trollanthropy: the rare act of a wiseass poster giving someone or something its due.
Statistics Missing Large Projects (Score:1)
Admittedly I didn't look through everything, but I don't see Jakarta mentioned under the apache author page, nor do I see mozilla under jwz or Netscape's author pages. Am I blind, or are they?
And if they did miss these two, (Mozilla alone is a somewhat massive sum of source code) what else are they leaving out?
Everybody say it with me... (Score:1)
Or, if you don't believe me, just remember that
"united states government as represented by the" is responsible for 305,338 lines of code, 200k in the Linux Kernel, 100k in OSKit, and 10% of the Linux Surfboard Driver. Go, US!
...and bow down and worship Gordon Matzigkeit. One day, every child in America will be able to spell his last name, and recognize him as the unsung hero of the free software revolution...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Top 10 authors ranked by contribution of code (Score:1)
if, say, the site was
Wooohoo! My server survived its first slashdotting. Without any particular preparation either (I didn't notice it had made slashdot till a friend told me), and while running all my nice eye-candy too. Kudos to apache...
Adrian.
Re:Well... kinda... (Score:1)
Re:Pretty Bogus (Score:2)
Yep. I came to the same conclusion. The authors of the survey do a brute force analysis and count whatever name shows up.
So if you manage to show up on some file that gets included in a lot of projects, like the C/C++ libraries, you will score very high. That is what put Ulrich Drepper on number 8.
On the contrary I was not able to spot a lot of hard working folks from the BSD crowd. So the authors of the survey did not scan through a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD tree. Even giants, like Donald E. Knuth (DEK) did not show up. So TeX was not included either.
What to think of it?
The basic idea is nice, the equivalent of a Open Source top ten. It could appeal to the same people who try to score high on distributed.net or Seti. (But especially these projects had people show up who increased their scores bei illegal methods)
I however like the idea to, in a few years on from now, to be able to look up on what stuff I worked. But guess this will need a much improved system.
My conclusion is these guys had the right idea, that the existing body of free code screams to be analyzed. So let's forget that they did it poor, and let's try to improve things.
At first they should extend their input, an easy way is to scan the contents of the former Walnut Creek ftp server, as it cover a lot of free software. However one would need to add a lot of different servers too. Adding the major free systems, commercial stuff like mozilla, projects from science (there is a lot of free Fortran out too!
If anyone is interested in setting up a better attempt, please contact me.
Re:The figures need a lot of work (Score:2)
Yep. The author credited is usually the person who wrote the first version of a particular file. This neglects the maintainer and the many people who might advance the state with their patches. All of them, plus web masters, documenters, release and source code repository engineers (maybe I forget a couple of important folks too) deserve credit!
If done properly, patch submitters should be noted in the CVS logs. Some projects (like FreeBSD) route that comments in commit logs too.
Ergo: scan the cvs trees and not the release packages.
Here's how to establish credibility (Score:3)
- Oh, yeah? You have the source. Write it yourself, you moron!
- QT/GTK is for idiots.
- Apple is so stupid. If they open-sourced everything we'd fix it for them.
- M$ code is terrible.
- Why isn't Company X open-sourcing their product? Proprietary software is evil!
- Free software project X sucks.
or such things, be expected to link to this site showing exactly how much they've contributed.Although, given that the study has managed to overlook my insignificant but non-zero contributions, maybe I shouldn't propose that.
Hey! I'm on that list! :) (Score:2)
What!? They counted me TWICE? Once as tord.jansson@swipnet and then later as tord.jansson... hm... 248447 bytes for each of them... Hm, seems like they somehow counted me twice but with the SAME value or maybe they somehow split it in half.
Let's click on my name and see what projects they have mentioned me participating in, should be just BladeEnc... What!? makeMP3.codd!!! What the heck is THAT program!? Hm, I see... got to be some kind of frontend that has included the BladeEnc code...
Feels a bit odd getting credited for a program I don't know anything about, but still kind of okay...
On the other hand, I wonder how they came up with 248447 bytes, the BladeEnc code is about 1.5 meg
But then again, it wouldn't be fair to credit me for more anyway since BladeEnc is so heavily based on the original ISO code and the other BladeEnc contributors haven't gotten any credits since they're just mentioned on the homepage.
Guess this shows how far from precise this study is. A good attempt to measure something quite
imessurable though. Kudoz to all the people who must have put down an awfull lot of work on this and hope you could get some usefull out of the big picture although the small details are terribly wrong.
Tord Jansson
BladeEnc Creator
Re:Lines of code (Score:1)
Microsoft has hundreds of full-time programmers on Windows, more than enough to swamp the efforts of 13000 part-time hackers and students. IIRC, Windows, measured in man-hours, is the single greatest engineering project in the history of humanity.
Based on Redhat (Score:2)
--
It's all in the braces! (Score:1)
I know it is only one line, but a lot of unix code I've seen does "} else {". That's three lines of windows code. It adds up!
-- Thrakkerzog
Error rates (Score:2)
Secondly, most of this community, by its very nature, is distributed, decentralized, and hard to account for. That's not a coincidence - many of us like remaining anonymous.. the man behind the scenes. As anecotal(sp?) evidence look at the .sig blocks on slashdot - how many famous people note their OSS accomplishments in their sig? Very few. And as Linus himself said.. it's not like girls are throwing their underwear at him. Many people don't *want* to be counted.. an anonymous patch here and there is sufficient.. "I just want it to work".
So before people start using this report as a metric of people's contributions, remember two things: Even small contributions count, and this is an inclusive rather than exclusive community - you are welcome here whether you contribute source or not. People who write documentation, help the newbies, and convince management to put their company printers on linux (3Com anyone?) ought to be commended too. There's alot more here than code!
The figures need a lot of work (Score:4)
In general the handling of large packages such as KDE seem fairly poor. For example KDE apparantly has no authors according to the by-project listing. I think this is a great idea, but it needs a cleaner source of data, for example Coolo has been able to give some very interesting and detailed figures by running scripts on the KDE CVS repository. Perhaps this is the sort of thing they need to be using as the initial data set from which they make their analysis.
Rich.
What's wrong with this survey and why (Score:2)
on the other hand, the collection of the data -- if it can be arranged in some meaningful manner and then processed in a reasonable way that will yield thoughtful conclusions -- is no small task and rishab and his associates should be applauded for the hard work they did on that portion of the project. i, for one, would be glad to work with them to try to pull out some meaningful reports from their well-meaning but, i think, misfiring project.
Paul Jones [mailto]
Re:Not bad (Score:1)
Re:Lines of code (Score:1)
Actually, the Great Wall of China has more in common with Windows than you might think - it didn't work.
Re:Excel (Score:1)
Well, of the graphs they provided, the 3D piegraph was definitely superfluous, and everything except the last pie graph could have been done using free software (take a look at gnuplot; it may have been able to do the pie graph as well, I'm not sure), so yes, I'd say he has a point.
This has happened with Linux more than once (Score:2)
Absolutely! What is more, losing "key staff" in an open-source project is generally much less devistating than it is in a closed-source context, as open-source by its very nature tends to distribute expertise on a given project much more widely.
For example, early in the Linux Years (pre 1.0) the guy (I forget his name) who did allot of the early networking work abandoned Linux to its own devices, largely due to being flamed for not having written the perfect, most elegant implimentation in his first iteration. Another took over that aspect, the kernel lived on, development moved forward, and Linux is now a raging success. The loss of a very key developer caused hardly a hiccup in development (though an auful lot of discussion, flamage, and doomsday saying).
kNFS was abandoned for almost a year, which caused myself and others a number of headaches in dealing with Linux NFS (and is probably the reason why Linux NFS lags behind the BSDs and commercial UNIXen in performance). That having been said, it was picked up, is being actively developed, with NFS V 3 support in the 2.4-pre kernels. This is probably the best "worst case" or at least "very bad case" example of an open source project being abandoned one can find, at least in the Linux area of endeavor.
Abandonment of a project can lead to some delay (as with NFS), but as often as not the delay is minimal (gimp, Linux networking) as another active developer takes over. I would submit that delays in closed-source commercial applications are much more common and typically much more lengthy.
Finally, with open source the project will always be picked up and continued by someone, as long as there is any interest. Contrast this to many closed-source products which are orphaned, leaving developers and users in a serious bind which they can do nothing about, other than remapping their entire engineering or corporate strategy to a complety new, competing product, at great cost in time and money. In the worst case open-source scenerio, such a customer would have to finance and perform ongoing development and maintenance themselves, which would often be a less expensive solution than the alternatives. Having said that, I do not know of a single open-source project where anyone was compelled to do this. I do know of a number of orphaned, closed-source products which left consumers in a terrible bind, from bitter, personal experience.
Our solution, which has to date saved us tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of developer hours in cost, was to move to an open source platform (Linux and FreeBSD) and require open source libraries to be used wherever possible, limiting our exposure to orphanage of closed-source products.
a little messy, eh (Score:1)
granted, good ole raster is a huge part of the project, but i was surprised to see him mentioned at least three times ("the rasterman", "carsten haitzler", and "raster@zip.com") as was mandrake...duno if this should be attributed to their data collection methods or to messy credits files (understandable in the case of raster's typing
-dk
Re:Based on Redhat (Score:1)
Discussion on Advogato (Score:5)
The discussion points out some interesting facts about why some individuals are listed as big contributers (such as the author of libtool. Duh.) and why some aren't listed at all. They even have some comments from the developers of the survey.
And I just love the comment of Havoc Pennington:
Re:Lines of code (Score:1)
That or the Apollo space program ... or pick your favorite big project. Get a sense of proportion, please.
No comp.sources.unix? No UNC metalab? (Score:1)
Hate to say it, but they made their mistake in thinking freshmeat.net was comprehensive. freshmeat.net is a very small part of the open source out there.
RocketAware [rocketaware.com] already lists much more than freshmeat (and is way easier to use, if you are a programmer looking to reuse code, eh?)
Re:Finally, a good Slashdot article.. (Score:1)
Bowie J. Poag
Finally, a good Slashdot article.. (Score:2)
Bowie J. Poag
Re:Finally, a good Slashdot article.. (Score:2)
FYI, I wasn't whining, dippy. I just find it interesting that this study ignored non-code based contributions to Linux.
Go back to work, goon.
Bowie J. Poag
Not bad (Score:1)
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Sure is! (Score:1)
Let's say they looked at 10 million lines of code. Well, 0.139% is 13900 lines of code. Not insignificant.
Duh.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
the <1%'ers (Score:2)
Heck, as I sit here now I have found three lines of code I need to put in this program I am writing where I did not clean up my linked list. Argh! No wonder the original app has had a tendency to crash over the past 3 years.
The small stuff is as big as the big stuff.
Re:Gordon Matzigkeit contributed to 267 projects?! (Score:1)
If this ever gets as popular as karma whoring, OSS is in for some serious bloat! "Oh yea? Well my tool inserts eight million lines of code, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh!"
--
Ok kiddies, boost your ranking (Score:2)
Well, maybe not quite that much attention. We don't need kiddies who wouldn't know C++ from Excel macros checking in millions of lines of garbage into any open CVS.
Re:Lines of code (Score:2)
As for number of projects, potato has 4376 packages, not all of those are separate projects (some are from multi-binary source, some are task packages), but I'm rather sure more than 3149 of them are :)
Completely false statistics (Score:2)
He succeeded in writing the exact same size of code in numerous projects:
Stats would be interesting if they were true (Score:1)
Then I started to check into details. Being the author and participator of at least five projects listed on freshmeat (all of them included in this "report") I checked them up to see what they had to say about me and the projects I've contributed to.
They had no clue at all. Lots of people got a lot of code submissions they've for sure never made, while it was very obvious that some of the major authors did not get as large enough amount acredited as they have done to the projects. Many names were very confusing and mixed up.
Seeing how badly wrong they are on the few projects I have in-depth knowledge about, how can I trust any conclusions they make in general on the whole context?
I say scrap the whole thing, do it all from the start. This is not the truth.
How much of there data is way off? (Score:2)
However, glancing through a project that I'm the primary author on shows me as the 24th on the list of developers for it, having written 585 bytes. I suspect I've written a few more than that.
The top of the list was dominated by a mailing list address that isn't even correct. The second name on the list was the UCRegents, who owns the copyright (but certainly their lawers didn't write the code).
And judging by the other comments, I suspect that the majority of their data is similarily way off. I wonder if they even tested the tool they developed on a few randomly selected projects to see how accurate the results were. They didn't even perform the most obvious data collection method I can think of: "cvs annotate".
I like the study, but I'd sure like to see it done better.
Active vs. Passive OSS Participation (Score:3)
Similarly, if you wanted to determine who the most prolific scientific researcher is in a field, would you gather data by simply grepping for names in the texts of papers? No, you'll skew the data by counting the names who appear in the paper's "References" when you should just be counting the actual investigators who are listed as the authors of the paper!
I would like to see this study repeated but making the distinction between an active contributor to a project and someone whose code was simply included. Only then would a top-heavy distribution suggest anything meaningful in regards to OSS authorship.
If anyone has looked at the CODD algorithms/code and can show me if they used a more sophisicated method to filter out authors with no active involvement in a project, please post. It's a difficult problem to infer who actively and who passively contributed to a project with just a perl script.
Re:Pretty Bogus (Score:1)
Pretty Bogus (Score:2)
I noticed on the PostgreSQL Hackers list that Thomas Lane said this was very bogus because it appears to re-include his libjpeg as many times as it is used by something else.
Also, is FSF an Author? Is BSD an Author?
Re:Top 10 authors ranked by contribution of code (Score:1)
Re:Error rates (Score:2)
Dictionary.com doesn't even give [dictionary.com] it that much credit. It's an acronym.
Well... kinda... (Score:3)
OTOH, it's nice to see some sort of a start at studying the free software community...
Our greatest achievement: Win2000 or Great Wall? (Score:2)
hmmm... I wonder how many man-hours went into the pyramids and the great wall... Any of you engineers wanna venture an estimate on the G.W.? I think the ancient Chinese beat MS hands down.
Ten million? (Score:1)
Lets say this were Windows NT .. the person who wrote the 13900 lines of code would have written the code to blast you with "You must reboot for changes to take effect" dialog box that pops up whenever you dare move the mouse. A worthy contribution, indeed! :]
No BSD? (Score:1)
Re:Lines of code (Score:1)
It probably depends on your definition of "single". But I reckon the pyramids would beat windows, given that they were done by hand millenia ago.
Re:foo22, foo1 (Score:2)
Did the original poster even *mention* Linux? Linux is not the same thing as Open Source.
Free software was not a "rational choice" in 1984, if by rational you mean The Best Tool For The Job. If everyone only cared about using the best toolset, gcc would not have been written and none of this open-source explosion would have happened. Your use of the word "rational" suggests the original poster's view is crazy. Well, remember that this whole shebang has been made possible by a man who is "crazy", in the sense of not always wanting to use the short-term best tool for the job.
I agree with your point, that the use of Excel does not detract from this study at all. You're also right about misuse of the word "ironic". Please don't misuse the word "rational".
They didn't look in the best place (Score:4)
They list their sources as follows:
Debian would have been a more sensible distro to use, because it is overflowing with (packages|crap). Red Hat (presumably) just ship the ones which it makes commercial sense to ship, wheras Debian has everything that anyone's bothered to include whether it's useful or not. For example, Cooledit (my favourite text editor) is missing from the survey. The only problem with Debian would be stuff missing because it is not DFSG-free. Such stuff is available in the non-free/ directory but it's probably not as comprehensive as the main/ directory is.
Having said that, it's very interesting to see what they have got. I didn't know Andrew Tridgell did all that stuff, for example. This could be a good tool for the community to get to know people better.
ESR Fodder (Score:2)
"The top 1271 authors, 10% of the total, accounted for 72.3% of the total code base. The top 10 authors alone (0.08% of the total) are credited for 19.8% of the code base. Free software development may be distributed, but it is most certainly very top heavy."
"Our conclusion: Free software development is less a bazaar of several developers involved in several
projects, more a collation of projects developed single mindedly by a large number of authors."
The question from Bezroukov's paper I didn't bring up was that open source projects look much more cathedralesque and hierarchical as one moves up. E.g., not just anybody gets patches put right in to the Linux or *BSD kernel.
Key contributors (Score:5)
This relates an interesting story. It appears that, while the real strength of OSS is incremental improvement over time, few projects can exist without a guiding intellect or a handful of ambitious coders on the core team.
Presenting this data to employers who are concerned about losing control of their code may help assuage their fears of open source. Clearly projects that are "owned" by no one are rarities. A corporation *can* have its cake and eat it too.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
A simple proposal. (Score:1)
Come up with our own protocol.
I have had this Idea in my head for a while, but I am only a network support tech, not a programmer, so I couldn't do it myself. I have some great ideas, but no way of implementing them.
Re:A simple proposal. (Score:1)
Re:the <1%'ers (Score:2)
I fully agree. And there is an important point that shouldn't be missed. The top author, FSF, is not only not a single person, but because of copyright assignments, it isn't even really a single organization. The FSF has been a valuable member of the free software community for a long time. In fact, arguably, free software might not exist as a viable force today without it. But that doesn't make the FSF a single contributor.
I know that there are some files out there with an FSF copyright on them that I wrote. I don't begrudge them the copyright assignment. They have taken the stewardship of the projects that I contributed those files to. For the sub one percent group, of which I am one, don't ever forget that our strength lies in both numbers and diversity. Jon Bentley quoted someone in his Programming Pearls chapter entitled Bumper Sticker Computer Science:
It would be easy enough to expand that to cover all of the relevant things that a new set of eyes bring to a free software project: new hardware configurations, a new language, new data.... But the original quote stands alone quite well.
To each and every contributor of code, bug reports, feature requests, reviews, documentation, translations, or anything else, I offer my thanks. The most obvious evidence that you are needed is that you made a contribution. You did what no one else did.
Re:Well... kinda... (Score:2)
Perhaps we should help them with a more intelligent 'author filter', and a better FM source snagger. It's obvious that Mr. Matzigkeit didn't belong that high up on the list, and other entities like UCB are over represented as well. Most everything *BSD carries the Berkley name, regardless of author!!
Re:MS Exel (Score:1)
"When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."
Re:Here's how to establish credibility (Score:1)
Yeah, same here. Not like I do a whole lot, just the occasional patch or bug report. But the fact that I seem to have absolutely nothing implies either something is wrong with their methods or people haven't been crediting me in their changelogs.
Of course once I actually get around to releasing the projects I've been working on I'll have some stuff on there.
Re:Key contributors (Score:1)
However, this also shows a weakness of open-source projects - if the major person of the project abandons it for any reason, the project will be stalled at the very least.
How do you tell a company that the guy maintaining the program they're using just isn't interested in it any more? I guess the solution is more people who are paid and actually have responsibility for the projects (obviously projects under the FSF won't have this kind of problem).
Re:Excel (Score:1)
Re:Lines of code (Score:1)
Lines of code (Score:3)
This is a POTENTIALLY bad thing... (Score:1)
There is a good story about IBM in the late 70s about how they measured a researchs labs performance based on KLOCs (100s of lines of code). Suprisingly the lab at Boca was winning most of the time. Then someone figured out that they were unrolling all of their loops in order to increase the line count...
Proves is can/does happen...
Re:MS Exel (Score:1)
Code Re-use (Score:1)
Is there anybody doing studies on code-reuse on OS sw or closed source sw ?
McC
Re:How To Lie With Statistics (Score:2)
anyway, the point is that stats can be used to lie, but equally they can be used to extract the truth. For example much of modern materials science is based on statistics. Likewise economic forecasting techniques. Stats aren't always bad, it's just that they can be misused.
[OT] Agreed (Score:1)
Statistics are the tool of the devil.
Huh? (Score:1)
Other than that, they are sampling a very small (and non-representative, I would guess) number of projects. There are a hell of a lot more than 3000 projects listed on Freshmeat alone. And god knows how many developers are missed. It's a start, but no more than that.
Re:MS Exel (Score:1)
How To Lie With Statistics (Score:1)
And finally, a word from Harry Truman: "There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics!"
Re:Sure is! (Score:1)
However, those 11 lines may have been the most important 11 lines in the project!
Re:Sure is! (Score:1)
Re:Statistics is a lie that shackes society (Score:1)
Re:Key contributors (Score:1)
Losing key staff is no longer the exclusive realm of corporations. I sort of surprises me to see this argument brought up in the context of open software! :-)
Re:The figures need a lot of work (Score:1)
I pride myself in contributing lots of humble changes or fixes to lots of projects. Still, I'm not in the business of getting my name in the AUTHORS file of every project under the sun (even though it a nice side effect of a hobby that exploded :-) My motivation is to make my life easier and more fun, while contributing to the public good.
The most flattering thing that was ever said about my contributions was hidden in the URL of an interview by Feed Magazine [feedmag.com]. When I showed this URL to my family, the reaction was "wait a sec! Bottomfeeders? Isn't that a bit derogative?". It took quite some explaining to make it clear that it was the culmination of what I've done over the years: I've joined the hordes of folks who, by submitting small patches, fixes, bits of functionality, have made the difference between making Open Source a hobby of a select few, and making it a (possibly) useful tool.
Oh well. I hope the folks at Orbiten will improve the situation (I'm sure their mailboxes will suffer the slashdot effect), and make the relative merit of their measuring methodology more clear. It is gratifying to see that someone picked up the odious task of trying to quantify what Open Source has to offer.
As a side note, I lost my previous (very well written, thanks for noticing!) reply to this message because of accidentally clicking on a banner ad on slashdot. Oh, for the irony!
Re:Active vs. Passive OSS Participation (Score:2)
Hmmm, this reminds me of the infamous Quotation Index used in the scientific world. Back when I studied sociology, a professor of mine would spend five minutes each college blasting the practice. As it turned out, a number of his colleagues were quoting each other, thereby bumping each others ratings. "On the effects of offering free ballpoints to interviewees", being referenced by an article on "A critical review of free ballpoints", referenced by the rebuttal, ad nauseam.
Doesn't it strike a familiar note in a forum driven by mechanically established karma?
Dos 1.0 (Score:1)
Excel (Score:1)
Re:Excel (Score:1)
Re:MS Exel (Score:1)
--
Isn't one gig a little small? (Score:1)
THese projects would average about 300 K each...what are they? Drivers? Application programs? Pac-Man clones?
MS Exel (Score:1)
Devilish
--------Irc.destructor.net--------
--------The Geek Network--------
Re:Not bad (Score:1)
Interesting statistics, but... (Score:1)
I wish I had time to sit around and contribute to a ton of open source projects... alas, I have to make a living.
My question is, after viewing some of the profiles of the top contributors, is 0.139% really much of a contribution to a project?
Re:Lines of code (Score:2)
Hmm, this gives me an interesting idea... for another Slashdot poll suggestion, of course :-)
Why does Win2K have more lines of code than all the open source projects combined?
nowhere near close (Score:1)
Re:Based on Redhat (Score:1)
I'd like to see what they would get if they did it on LinuxOne
Re:Too bad they didn't list individual authors (Score:1)
There is no deleting of earlier posts (Score:1)
comment from survey author (Score:1)
the text clearly lists the limitations of the survey including the small code base used; the algorithm to identify and credit authors is clearly documented - and the source code is available on the site FWIW. of course, the survey is full of errors, some of which i've commented on here, on advogato [advogato.org] and elsewhere (e.g. gordon matzigkeit).
the main problem is naturally that this is impossible to do by hand and has to be automated; we did want to look at authorship at a file level (the lowest level of granularity available); and author credits are in no fixed format. they're not even there much of the time, which is why copyright holders such as the FSF get a lot of credit too. the only alternative to listing them as they are is to have a huge "uncredited" portion - at least until authors start consistently claiming credit, using the same name or e-mail address in each file they write.
incidentally it is not possible for us to guess which of many contributors to a single file are more important; as documented, the credit is currently split equally among them.
finally, this is just a start. while we intend to continue working on this, the algorithm source code is available as are all the code bases, so nothing stops you from doing it too.
M$'s innovation: "Fatware" (Score:1)
Of course for those enthusists out there willing to develop on four platforms (Win 9x, Win NT, Win 2000, and Win CE, where Win 9x keeps DoS 1.0 compatiblity), take it from the former richest man in the world -- code "Fatware" and aquire a mono^H^H^H^H er, sucessful company.
Win 2000 will work on any computer! Any computer that is fast as AMD's Athlon can be overclocked! That is the sucess of "Fatware" -- make deals with OEMs, and when the hardware companies get more revenue because of your "Fatware", you get a cut! How can you go wrong? Unless you have a DOJ lawsuit hanging over your head, you can't!
Of course coding excessive lines can be rather time-consuming. The fun part is having more backdoors in your software than the White House. After making a bunch of companies squirm over the backdoors, write a simple patch and charge a fortune. ;) But it's not a "bug fix" as those open-source people would say... nah, it's a "Service Pack".
Ah, maybe M$ should have compatibilty with DoS 1.0 -- the later versions didn't improve the OS much. :)
Re:Well... kinda... (Score:1)
Troll pie! (Score:1)
how those trollers used to make me smile
And I knew that if I had my chance
I could make Slashdot:ers dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while.
Did you write the stuff that matters /. tells you so
And do you have faith in CmdrTaco
If the
Now do you believe in rock 'n troll
And can moderation save their mortal soul
And can you teach me how to troll real low
Well I know that you're in love with her
'Cause I saw you posting in the forum
Pouring hot grits down her pants
Man, I dig those flamebait rants
I was a lonely teenage broncin' h4x3r
With a pink iMac and a beowulf cluster
But I knew that I was out of my mind
The day The Slashdot died
I started singin'
Bye-bye, Miss Petrified
Surfed my IE to the forum but the forum was dry.
And good old trollers (were) drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die
I met a geekgirl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some nerdy news
She stole my coke and turned away
Well I surfed down to the sacred forum
Where I'd saw the posts years before
But the 404 said the posts woudn't come
Well now on the street the trollers screamed
The l33t3rs cried, and the h4x0rs dreamed
But not a word was posted
The Taco Bells all were broken (OT?)
And the free man I admire the most
OOG with the Holy Post
He sent the last post to the host
The day The Slashdot died
We started singin'
||: Bye-bye, Miss Petrified :||
Surfed my browser to the forum but the forum was dry.
And good old trollers (were) drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die
(repeat plz)
(TTL 4) We started Pingin'
____________________________________________
By: TACO TROLL of the Troll Liberation Lobby