Open Stack

Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> On 07/23/2013 07:25 AM, Roman Prykhodchenko wrote:
>> I still think counting lines of code is evil because it might encourage
>> some developers to write longer code just for statistics.
> 
> Data becomes evil when you decide to use them for evil purposes :) I
> don't think that lines of code is a bad metric per se: like any other
> metric it becomes bad when used in an evile context. I'm getting more
> and more convinced that it's a mistake to show ranks and classifications
> in the dashboard and I'll be deleting all the ones that we may have on
> http://activity.openstack.org. (see
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-community/+bug/1205139)
> 
> Counting anything in OpenStack, from commits to number of reviews is not
> a race, we don't need to *rank* top contributors.

While I think those stats are useless to identify "top" contributors
(since the precise metric used will influence who ends up in the top
spots), I think they are useful to identify who does not contribute at
all. In that case 0 commits = 0 lines of code = 0 reviews and the metric
used does not matter that much.

You could say we should not be in the business of shaming people, but
remember that since we use a permissive license, societal pressures
(rather than institutional pressures like the license) are the only way
to force companies to contribute back. The Apache license lets you not
contribute back, but that doesn't mean companies who claim to be an
OpenStack open source team player can get away with not contributing
anything at all...

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)