According to ohloh, I made my 500th commit to GNOME today (although it hasn’t quite caught up with today yet, and CIA says it was my 662nd). After a brief period of inactivity I’m finally getting round to doing some things for GNOME again – and most importantly I’m doing it for fun. I think it’s probably fair to say I was pretty burnt out after helping organise GUADEC, but it’s also good to take a little break every now and again. Remember folks, you should only keep volunteering while you still find it enjoyable.
It’s probably slightly ironic that I was introduced to ohloh through Matthias’ blog post on the possible privacy implications. Although I’m relatively happy with the information shared about my contributions to Free and Open Source software, I remember it took me quite some time to come to terms with the fact that everything I did was so visible and easily accessibly to anyone and everyone. Has the Internet bred a community that is complacent to privacy, or do we just accept there are no guarantees for any data we place on-line?
You’re not the only one that discovered Ohloh via this post.
In fact, perhaps I saw a simple post in a website RSS feed I’m subscribed to but I didn’t take a look at it before I saw Matthias’ blog post.
The truth is I like the tool. If I wanted privacy, I wouldn’t have set up a domain name (full true whois info as mandated by law), I would never have done any OSS work at all. After all, all is done in the open, that’s the way OSS works.
Yes, Ohloh is really painting a partial profile (as only some projects are recorded, only some VCS are supported, no bugzilla activity or translations or documentation is taken into account.
Perhaps an opt out system would please people that are mad at this site. Anyway, Google Code Search would do the same. It only makes it easier.