Open Sourced Connector: A $5 million gift?
Linda D. recently pointed out to me that the connector is currently in Ohloh as a project.
There’s some stats that are interesting:
- 7 contributors,
- 214,377 LOC (with a significant portion in the “view logic”),
- 55 man years
- An estimate to write this project from scratch of $5,545,809
What it doesn’t show is that the project went through over 10,000 commits over the last three years.
Of course, I’ve also warned against such measures.
16 Responses
By paying your developers $500k/year, I was able to make the project worth almost $28 million!
I was thinking the same – did the developers really average 100K?
Also, what license is it? MIT? In that case it really is a helluva contribution to open source. I still haven’t got around to studying its code. Good project for down time at ruby hoedown tomorrow.
I thought the point of developing in Ruby on Rails is that people experience a 10-fold increase in productivity.
So in a sense, instead of $5 million for Connector … it’s actually worth $50 million to develop.
@capitalist, yes. The code is GPLv2’ed.
@Ted, I think the ohloh already overestimates and in regards to this one, probably by ~2x (realize that there is iterations, refactoring et cetera that occurs on the same LOCs).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t RoR generate many of those LOCs?
@ jared, yes rails is about 80K LOCs
I have not seen a good explanation of why you chose the GPL for connector, rather than the MIT license that rails uses. Is it because you were scared that someone would bundle the connector with something like Adobe’s AIR and turn it into a desktop app? Because using the GPL causes other problems, since you are now deploying client code in javascript to the browser, raising issues of whether that means anyone who deploys the Connector has to reveal all source from the server because they’re deploying client-side javascript. I’m not sure the GPL answers this question, it may just be another grey area in that badly written license. What is Joyent’s official position on this?
As has already been said, your average salary for developers seems a little low. Am I right in suggesting that this may be due to the fact that much of connector was developed during the startup era of Joyent?
Of course you could also be obfuscating your salaries, imo a clever move.
While LOC isn’t a great metric of project cost, I do find benefit in running Sloccount over my projects once in a while when I lose touch of how much work I have done.
Not to be too far off topic, but does it seem like things have been quite lately in the Joyent camp.
Are any new developments going on?
@Ajay: we choose the GPL v2 because we believe in free software.
@Travis: not much. Today I came into the office. Vacuumed the red couch near my desk. Picked the lint out of my belly button. Ate an apple. Then I fell asleep. Jason was already asleep. Peter was talking to a customer, but decided to go for a walk around town and never came back. The developers were in town, but they were mostly drunk the whole week. They did fix a problem with the Calendar but lost the code. I woke up around 4pm pacific time, walked to my car, and drove home. Now I’m answering your comment. I think this weekend I’m going to learn more Spanish and talk to Jason about porting ObjectPascal to Solaris.
Haha, I wonder if Kristie would approve of your response to Travis. David, my question wasn’t about open vs closed software but why you chose a more restrictive license in the GPL, as opposed to the less restrictive MIT license? It doesn’t appear that much thought has been put into whether the GPL compels any deployment of connector to reveal all source, including that running on the server, because you’re deploying client-side javascript with the connector. Certainly this is not an issue that is properly addressed by the GPL, partly because it’s a somewhat old license, partly because it’s more ideologically driven than meant to be of practical use. I think you should consider this issue since otherwise anybody can run connector code on the server and not be compelled to reveal any modifications. If you want to properly deal with these situations, you can’t just depend on an inadequate license like the GPL to resolve them for you.
I believe, though could be wrong, what Travis is referring to is the abnormal frequency in blog posts.
I’m been an avid reader of this blog for sometime and have noticed the following:
* People seem to enjoy the post that talk about Joyent internals more than other posts.
* When posts occur on a regular schedule (daily, every other day etc), comments tend to be higher since it builds a habit of people visiting this site.
So, since he said it’s been quiet lately … I think he is referring to the infrequency of blog posts.
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Out of curiosity, how is the Accelerator business going? It seems like posts to the Accelerator forum lately has drastically slowed down. Are people less interested in it now since so many other alternatives exists? (Just speculating)
@Phil, the Accelerator business is doing very well and can barely keep up with 18 hour days. There has always been other alternatives and our main “competition” is whether someone wants to own their own stuff or not.
@Ajay – David’s response to Travis was actually a bit of a stretch. Pete eventually came back from his walk.
@Phil – The blog frequency needs to step up, absolutely. David used to post quite a bit, but since he took up vacuuming regularly, I can’t seem to get him to podcast or blog as much.
No worries though, I think all the boys are still in the “let’s do what we need to do to keep Kristie happy” phase, so I’ll tell them blog posts make me happy. That should do it.
You should expect about 20 posts by Wednesday.
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