Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers

eldavojohn writes "The startup company Ohloh has a database listing 70,000 developers working on 11,000 open source projects. Their aim is to 'rank' open source developers, which raises some interesting questions about exactly how useful this tracking company is. Questions like, 'Is there an accurate way beyond word of mouth to measure the importance and skill of a developer?' I found it slightly alarming that, to this site, the number of commits (with input from the number of kudos) tells how good a developer you are."

L337 development skills!

[hellfire]

So in other words, I could commit some of my own code to a CVS repository, find some errors that I missed, fix them, commit it again, decide to add more comments, commit it again, find one more thing I probably could have done differently and then rewrite it, commit it again...

Your willingness to fix errors, add comments, and do code rewrites puts you in the pantheon of programming gods! The next thing you are going to tell me you actually write your own legible "how to" user guides in PDF!

No, no no!

[morgan_greywolf]

of penguin stuffed animals in your possession.
# of kernel builds
# of ICQ shouting matches ending in "Nazi!!!"
# of cans of Jolt consumed
# of steps from mom's basement to side door.

No! You got it all wrong! Everybody knows that programmer productivity is inversely proportional to the number of Slashdot posts!