Where's the Yelp For Open-source Tools?

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185), shares some thoughts from long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We'd like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That's another matter... Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project's popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites — and their methodologies — have flaws.
The article looks at a variety of attempts, including freshmeat.net; Eric Raymond's attempt to revive Freecode; GitHub's star (which Docker's co-founder calls a "bullshit metric"); Synopsys's Black Duck Open Hub (formerly Ohloh); and even Google Trends. But it wraps up by pointing out that Brian Profitt, Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager, is working with others on "Project CHAOSS," a new Linux Foundation project to make it easy to evaluate open-source projects.
This pulled together Grimoirelab and similar programs, such as Augur and Red Hat's own Prospector... Its metrics include what kinds of contributions are being made; when the contributions are made; and who's making the contributions. All of which are vital to understanding the overall health of a project.

CHAOSS is still a work in progress. Its official release is scheduled for February 2021... Ultimately, this data will be available to all, from end users to the project leads. "In fact, I hope this happens a lot, because we can refine our models more quickly," says Profitt.

Red Hat uber alles

[doom]

Brian Profitt, Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager, is working with others on "Project CHAOSS," a new Linux Foundation project to make it easy to evaluate open-source projects.

And strangely, it ranks systemd as the world's greatest software project.

Let the games begin

[cahuenga]

Who in the world would wish to copy a platform that has been so gamed, corrupted and worthless as Yelp?

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

AlternativeTo.net is much better. You know some app and want to see similar/related ones. Filter by OS and licence.

Red, Screaming Flags

[Kunedog]

CHAOSS is a Linux Foundation project focused on creating analytics and metrics to help define community health. . . . The working groups are: Common Metrics Diversity and Inclusion Evolution Risk Value

https://github.com/chaoss/wg-d... [github.com]

Problem Statement The tech industry has a well-documented representation gap, and this issue is even more prevalent in open source communities. While there has been a marked emphasis on increasing diversity in these communities in recent years, numbers lag and the ability to foster inclusive environments remains challenging. With no standards or best practices for measuring inclusion, contributors, users and project teams lack the opportunity to make ethical, data-driven decisions.

Your project will be smeared unless you implement a racist CoC, and refuse to hand control over to far-left activists when they demand it.

error

[Kunedog]

Your project will be smeared unless you implement a racist CoC, and hand control over to far-left activists when they demand it.

"refuse to" shouldn't be there. Do strikethrough tags not work on slashdot?

Re:

[thegreatbob]

No strikethrough here; as an alternative, I've seen a fair number of people use ^H to indicate character deletions.

We had one. Gone now... R.I.P. Freshmeat.net

[Narcocide]

(Sourceforge ruins everything it touches.)

Not everything needs to be an app store

[Generic User Account]

And since when is Yelp a good thing? Tons of third party directories of freely available software exist and they are all scummy, ad-laden and useless. Many eventually bundle the free software in "installers" with malware, excuse me, value added software. One more of those would not improve anything.

Copyleft attribution?

[groktrev]

It works for most licenses, but someone would need to organize the cites. After that, you'd know how frequently and by which downstream projects a parent project was cited. Reputable source repositories would start to gain impact factor scores similar journals based on the quality of projects.

What about freshcode?

[sombragris]

Freshcode.club [freshcode.club] is a good replacement for freshmeat. Now it just should get more entries, but it is quite good in terms of functionality.

Only 2 kinds of open source programs

[thegarbz]

You don't even need 5 stars to describe them, a simple toggle will do. Open source programs can generally be judged to be either :

1) Horrendous bug ridden garbage with Fisher Price UIs designed by some PhD UX genius who thinks the ideal app is one you start and just spits out a single answer which is what the user most likely wanted, and if not it's the user's fault for wrong expectations, and if it's not that then it likely crashed while opening.... or

2) Highly complex infinitely scalable and powerful tools designed by an an actual genius who as a role reversal requires the end user to have said PhD to figure out how to run the damn program in the first place, and if it doesn't work well that's because the user didn't edit one of the 30 config files and forgot how to regex the awk output after grepping the the daemon to life.

That's it. That's all of Open Source. And thank god it is, since the mobile world really only has apps that fall into number 1.

Using search metrics to infer popularity?

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA's author suggests that search metrics are usable to infer popularity (e.g.: LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice). I don't think that measures what TFA's author thinks it measures, I think it's more appropriate as a difficulty metric.

Why do I think this? How many times do you search for information about a product when you're trying to download it, versus how many times do you search for information about a product when you're having difficulties using it? e.g.: trying to figure out how to use a particular featur

Project CHAOSS?

[t4eXanadu]

Project CHAOSS? Really? That sounds like a bad Bond villain's plan for world domination.

Obligatory XKCD

[bart_smit]

https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]