If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It: CHAOSS Project Creates Tools to Analyze Software Development and Measure Open Source Community Health

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Today over 80 percent of the software in any technology product or service is open source. And this trend is growing. According to a recent study by Sonatype, every day the supply of open source across all ecosystems increases by about 1,100 new projects and 10,000 new versions.

This raises important questions about which open source projects matter. What code should I bet my product, my company, or career on? Will those projects grow or shrink? Is the code base stable or changing? Does the project depend on one organization or many? Is the community healthy or hopelessly ill?

At The Linux Foundation, we want to grow and sustain the most important software in the world. One of the ways we can do this is by measuring the general health of an open source community and developing methodologies and tools for analyzing modern software development. With this in place, we can improve the health of projects and make it easier to answer the questions above.

We need software that will help benchmark and analyze project health along several dimensions as well as robust guidelines for what makes an open source community healthy. We need the means to apply analytics to the big data produced by all the systems supporting software development.

Welcome CHAOSS Project

It’s with this that I’m excited to announce the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software project (CHAOSS). CHAOSS is a new Linux Foundation project focused on creating the analytics and metrics to help define community health.

Read more at The Linux Foundation