Blender Development Metrics
Ever wondered how the development of Blender is evolving? Who is the top developer? Who poured more code into our beloved application? Ohloh seems to be the answer to that.
It was quite a surprise for me to see that there were so many people involved in the development of Blender since it became Open Source. According to Ohloh, 56 developers had access to the cvs during the last 4 years and developed something in Blender. While 56 seems a big number, the estimate of current active developers is 30.
As would be expected, Ton shows up as the main contributer, with a constant contribution to the development of Blender since the early days. But, while being the most active developer, there is another one, “hans”, who seems to have the biggest code contribution, this according to the graph! Can this be true? Ohloh still has a Beta tag under the Logo so it might be a Bug, or not … I’ll wait for Hans to speak up, I sure want to thank this guy.
Still there is more, following the graph we can clearly see that 2006 is the year with the biggest development so far, mostly due to Orange, culminating with an estimated total effort spent on the project of 244 Man Years.
Now, for the Bad news, there is a worrying message in the page, which I quote:
Some source code may be covered by the Artistic license, which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).
This might be nothing, but sure is something to worry about, lets wait for the developers to read this and validate the issue.
I could keep drawing conclusions out of it, but I think it is best if everyone go check it out and post their own conclusions here. Overall I think it gives a very positive insight on Blender Development and how it is growing.
Hans was the one who committed the original sources to cvs. Similarly when someone commits an external library to cvs the lines of code contributed by that person can go up very fast.
Neat link! Maybe Hans is just the one who made the initial commit in the (current) cvs.
if only we could “borrow” the 120 developers from OpenOffice and the 42 developers from Firefox for 3 months, now that would be a boost! :-D
I really appreciate all the work done by developers on Blender! Big thanks to all Blender developers!
do i see right? – it had cost more than 13 mio $, if it were commercial? ((-:
@brecht && UncleZiev: That might be right, but it extends all the way to 2006, so it might be a problem with Ohloh crawler !?
@rcas: from the “activity” graph you can see that Hans only did something in 2002. Hans’s “code contribution” goes all the way to 2006, because that code he committed in 2002 is still part of the current version of Blender.
Wim,
the active developers stat is quite misleading. For Openoffice and Firefox most of the active developers contributions over the recent time period were quite minor. GCC has truely active ‘active developers’.
Also they seem to have done some errors, ie they show gimp as abandoned but it has had reasonable activity in recent months.
LetterRip
“Some source code may be covered by the Artistic license, which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).”
Doing a quick search – mt19937int.c – they isn’t actually used anymore was only used in the NaN days – it was for the keygen algorithm it is mentioned in key_internal.h also
should probably be removed but should not really be a problem
LetterRip
@laurens: It might be that, I considered that option, but I was hoping that someone who knew Hans could elucidate me, thanks. It does make sense in a way.
@LetterRip: That’s good to know.
rcas,
Hans (Hans Lambermont) is the original creator of Blenders makefiles I believe, as others note the big bump is from his initial commiting of everything to CVS. Asside from an occasional bug fixes i don’t believe he has committed much.
LetterRip
Hi there,
The last posting of LetterRip pretty much sums it all up.
When I started at NaN in 2000 I was surprised there was no source code repository at all. The sources were copied manually from a system to the next (tar ball, ftp, no shared NFS) and hacked upon until blender worked on that platform too, and so on to the next platform. So I set up a CVS repository, and convinced Ton to actually use it too ;-) Then I spent a lot of time into the build system, I rewrote the makefiles completely and set it up such that the source tree could be used via NFS on all (8 ? at the time) platforms while compiling simultaneously on all of them, and for each developer. Later I added a tinderbox system and added automated nightly release-ready packages. Then we went broke for the second time :( and I prepared the source tree to go open source (dual license), which had to be done in a new repository (politics).
I now do little more on Blender than maintaining the FreeBSD port.
H_xNaN (Hans)