BYBLACK DUCK

Journals, Closed-Source Positions Going Away

By on February 9, 2012 in blog

With any evolving site like Ohloh, there will be features that the team thought were a good idea at the time, but that in practice don’t get used much. Two such features: journals, and non-FOSS contributor positions, are being removed from Ohloh in the next few weeks.

Journals – An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone

Back when Ohloh was first brought online, there were no micro-blogging services like Twitter or Tumblr. Developers who wanted to assemble a stream of entries describing their cross-project contributions were limited to their own blogs, which were a heavy-weight tool for a problem needing a light-weight solution. The feature never really caught on however, and now, much of the journal traffic is spam. The amount of real journal entries has steadily declined, to where now there are only a small number of users who regularly post journal entries. With simple and effective alternatives in wide use across the net, we’re going to eliminate the journal feature with the current sprint.

Journals will go away when this sprint is put into production in about two weeks. Reducing the code base for Ohloh lets our developers focus on the features that will make the site even more valuable for FOSS decision support and developer reputation.

Closed Source Positions Going Away Too

Another feature from when Ohloh was young lets you add closed source, non-FOSS positions to your profile. The thinking was that Ohloh could aggregate both your FOSS contributions and non-FOSS efforts into one code-based CV. But as Ohloh has evolved into more of an analytics engine driven off of data drawn from public SCMs of FOSS projects, and as new tools such as LinkedIn let people easily assemble and present their work experience, this feature has also become less valuable. There are only a small percentage of profiles on Ohloh that include closed source positions. Ohloh can’t do anything with those positions other than report that a developer has claimed them, since the code itself is not in a public SCM.

It is time for this feature to go as well. It will be removed in the next sprint – not the current one – which will be put into production in about 4 weeks.

Once this feature is gone, when you claim a position in your profile, it will have to be a position in an open source project. Note – a previous version of this blog post implied that you wouldn’t be able to claim a position without a committerID – this is not the case, so if you’re using that capability to show contributions to projects where your authorship doesn’t come through, you’ll still be able to do so.

We’re always loathe to delete features from Ohloh, but by cleaning out the stuff that is rarely used, or used mostly by spammers, we can focus our resources on the good stuff.

Comments welcome!

About Rich Sands

I'm the Director of Developer Communities at Black Duck Software, and the product manager for Ohloh.
View all posts by Rich Sands →
  • http://www.unwesen.de/ unwesen (Jens Finkhaeuser)

    I liked both features.

    The thing I particularly like about non-FOSS positions is that it, as you say, gives a code-based CV. That’s easier to keep up-to-date than any other tool offers, and therefore makes for a pretty good tool for any freelance developer. I, for one, made good use of it.

    Now that I’m no longer freelance, I don’t care quite as much – but I can’t say I find it a great idea to remove the feature.

  • http://erlendsh.wordpress.com erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)

    I’ve never used the ‘non-FOSS positions’ feature myself, but I can definitely stand behind the decision to remove journals. You’re right on the money about services like Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress filling this spot and more. As long as you let me set up an RSS feed to aggregate content from my own blog, I’m super happy.

    I feel very strongly about sites’ identities. Ohloh is an aggregation site. I just want to go through the set up and that’s it . The last thing I want from a service like this is yet another thing to maintain or even worse, moderate.

    Good call!

  • http://joshtriplett.org josh (Josh Triplett)

    The mechanism you describe as “non-FOSS positions” also addresses a second important case: contributions that don’t show up under your own name. Back before Git and other distributed version control systems, SVN and CVS had no way to track authors independently from committers. Thus, a change always got attributed to the committer, even when they just committed a patch written by someone else.

    I currently use this feature to list some of my contributions to OpenOffice.org (namely, making it possible to build OpenOffice.org without the then-proprietary Java SDK, so that you could build OO.o on an entirely FOSS system). https://www.ohloh.net/p/openoffice/contributors/124554058572 (Which doesn’t seem to show the description anymore, either.) I need to do the same thing for LibreOffice.

    If you plan to remove this feature, please consider providing some replacement for the case of old mis-attributed commits.

  • robin (Robin Luckey)

    Hi Josh,

    After we remove non-FOSS projects from Ohloh, you will still be able to list your participation in FOSS projects that don’t show up under your own name, as you do today.

    In your current profile, you haven’t listed any contributions to, say, Microsoft Excel or Adobe Photoshop. It’s that category of commercial/proprietary software that will be removed from Ohloh.

    So I think your use case will be unaffected, unless I’ve misunderstood.

    Robin

  • http://rich-sands.com rsands (rsands)

    Josh – sorry for the misunderstanding. As the blog was originally written I can see how you would think we’re taking that capability away. You will still be able to claim positions without a committerID as you have been doing!

  • http://mcory.wordpress.com mcory (Matthew Cory)

    I just joined today, and I’m a little disappointed to see the removal of non-FOSS projects. I mean, I understand completely why you’d ditch it based on your explanation, but it’s still nice to show that I do have experience other than any of the open source stuff I’m claiming. Are there any plans to integrate info from LinkedIn or other networks to replace that? I mean, sure I can add a link to my LinkedIn profile, but maybe pulling that information in my profile here might be worth looking into.

    Also, I’m a little disappointed in the journal being ditched too — I was just trying to figure out how to use it, and looking at it as a possible replacement for Twitter to keep things focused on development stuff. Haven’t gotten too tied to it though, so I won’t lose any sleep over it :)

    (And just for the record, I really like this site so far; still playing with it and it’s pretty neat! I know I’m apparently a little late to this ball, but still…)

  • http://rich-sands.com rsands (rsands)

    Matthew – Thanks for joining! We’re looking into possible ways to connect Ohloh to LinkedIn, etc. Currently we’re thinking of something like having an explicit pointer to a developer’s LinkedIn profile in their Ohloh profile, as well as other social media pointers such as Twitter ID, IRC nicknames/networks, and so on. We also think that developers may want to add links on their LinkedIn pages back to their Ohloh profile to provide an in-depth independent accounting of their contributions to the FOSS world for people to see who are viewing their LinkedIn profile. This might be valuable for prospective employers, as well as others wanting to get a sense of a developer’s experience level.

    Would you (or others – chime in!) be interested in a LinkedIn application that puts Ohloh data right into your LinkedIn profile? We’ve thought of that as well – not on the front burner but it is an interesting idea.

    You might want to look at the widgets feature of Ohloh as well – you can embed bits of Ohloh goodness in any site that can embed JavaScript. We have widgets for both project information and contributor information. You get to the widgets from a link in the left-side navigation on these pages – check it out!

  • http://mcory.wordpress.com mcory (Matthew Cory)

    Personally, I wouldn’t see a heck of a lot of use from a LinkedIn app, but mainly because I’m only using Github right now and I’ve already got that attached to my LinkedIn profile. That said, I believe that only displays projects and commits, so if your app would show some of the other information you track, it’d probably be more informative.

    Since I haven’t used the journal, I don’t know what it is/was capable of or how the posts are shared through the site. As I said, I’d planned on using it as a kind of focused twitter replacement, in the hopes that I’d be more apt to get feedback from other developers on my projects (i.e. journal post might get their attention, they look in further, find a project of mine that looks interesting, then bash the heck out of my code).

    Thinking about it further, I’m guessing the journal would likely have been more of a subscriber-based model, so it probably wouldn’t have worked as well as I would’ve hoped for that. Do you happen to know of anything similar to what I’d (mistakenly) expected it to be — either here already, in the plans, or elsewhere on the net? I’m fairly new to the open source world (as a contributor at least), and I have no clue how to really get involved in the community. (And I apologize if that’s a little off topic — just seemed mildly relevant.)

  • http://rich-sands.com rsands (rsands)

    Matthew – AFAIK, different FOSS projects seem to have different “norms” for communication. Some have a very active IRC channel. Others use forums or mailing lists. Some developers have a big twitter following. Some projects do it in their issue tracker. I think that when journals were first created on Ohloh a long time ago, the thought was that contributors could consolidate their efforts across multiple projects and have one place where they could create a timeline-style of posts. It did not catch on however: if the other developers you need to see your work are all sitting in a forum in your project, that is the natural place to communicate. What if some of them aren’t on Ohloh or haven’t chosen to follow your journal posts? Anyway – I hope this helps! Your best bet is likely to ask others on the projects you’re interested in contributing to, how they like to engage. It will vary with the project!

  • Fabian Knittel

    I just noticed that my carefully gathered non-FOSS contributions have vanished.

    As I don’t closely follow Ohloh’s blog, I found out about the reason just now and am a bit disappointed that Ohloh kind of lost my data on purpose without sending a short note or something.

    Now I’ll have to go through the old projects and find out what languages and libs I used. Again.

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