Category Archives: Curriculum

FOSS Projects

I’ve been researching a few FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects on SourceForge.net and Ohloh. I decided to focus my efforts on project management software.

On Source Forge, projects are categorized based on a variety of criteria, including programming language, operating system, area of usage, status, etc. The search returned 31 pages of results (not all were directly “project management”). The number of projects at different status levels is given below:

  1. Inactive – 3
  2. Mature – 39
  3. Production/Stable – 263
  4. Beta – 126
  5. Alpha – 83
  6. Pre-Alpha – 55
  7. Planning – 59

A broad spectrum of languages have been used with the most popular being Java (223), PHP (165) and Javascript (114).

ProjectLibre is one of the top most popular projects and is listed as the open source alternative to Microsoft Project. It’s available on Linux, Mac OS or Windows platforms and is written in Java. It is licensed under the OSI license and is a ‘Stable’ project.

Sahana Disaster Management System is a humanitarian FOSS project. They have moved from SourceForge to Github which is really so much easier to navigate. I like the idea of contributing somehow to a humanitarian project, but a lot depends on the types of contribution they’re looking for, the time commitment, languages used, etc. Too many of these projects are written in Java, which is not my first (or second) choice for a programming language.

Ohloh does not host projects and code. Rather it provides directory and analytics services.

Here I looked at Epiphany, a web browser for the GNOME desktop, that is written mostly in C/C++ (~58K LOC) and some in XML (~3K LOC) and . It has 99 contributors, primarily in Europe with a few in the Americas.

In contrast, Firefox is a web browser for a variety of platforms with >9M LOC. It’s primarily written in C/C++ (~5.5M LOC) and Javascript (~1.2M LOC). Firefox has 2261 contributors, primarily in Europe with a few in the US.

Comparing Epiphany, Firefox and K-Meleon: Firefox has the most developers (2261) and lines of code although K-Meleon is a little older (12 years). The first two have high activity but the last one is “dying”.