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[17] Map/Reduce—A visual explanation: https://ayende.com/

blog/4435/map-reduce-a-visual-explanation

[18] MapReduce: Simpliﬁed Data Processing on Large Clusters:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.

com/en//archive/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf

[19] What is Apache Hadoop?: https://hadoop.apache.org/

[20] HDFS users guide: https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/stable/

hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-hdfs/HdfsUserGuide.html

[21] 100 open source Big Data architecture papers for data

professionals: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/100-open-

source-big-data-architecture-papers-anil-madan

[22] Choosing the right NoSQL database for the job: a quality

attribute evaluation: http://www.journalofbigdata.com/con-

tent/2/1/18

[23] Apache Hadoop NextGen MapReduce (YARN):

https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-yarn/ha-

doop-yarn-site/YARN.html

[24] Apache Spark: http://spark.apache.org/

[25] Big Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics, 2015

Edition: https://dzone.com/guides/big-data-business-intelli-

gence-and-analytics-2015

[26] Spark Survey Results 2015:

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/438089/DataBricks_Sur-

veys_-_Content/Spark-Survey-2015-Infographic.pdf

[27] Apache Spark—Preparing for the Next Wave of Re-

active Big Data: https://info.typesafe.com/COLL-

20XX-Spark-Survey-Report_LP.html?lst=PR&ls-

d=COLL-20XX-Spark-Survey-Trends-Adoption-Report

[28] Apache Spark Google Trends: https://www.google.com/

trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0ndhxqz

[29] CQRS: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CQRS.html

[30] Pragmatism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/

[31] Kolmogorov Complexity: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~-

fortnow/papers/kaikoura.pdf

[32] Lambda Architecture: http://lambda-architecture.net/

[33] Docker: https://www.docker.com/

[34] The 3 reasons why Docker got it right:

http://techapostle.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-3-reasons-

why-docker-got-it-right.html

[35] Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/

Author

John Esposito is Editor-in-Chief at DZone (dzone.com ), hav-

ing recently ﬁnished a doctoral program in Classics while

raising two cats. In a previous life, he was a VBA and Force.

com developer, DBA, and network administrator.

takes many forms (chroot comes to mind, or really any virtu-

al memory system), and it’s pretty easy to systemd-nspawn

without Docker. Only being able to isolate processes isn’t

enough. Why is Docker especially great [34]?

Two reasons: Dockerﬁles (“the new tarballs”) add porta-

bility; and the Dockerﬁle format is now a de-facto standard.

The ﬁrst takes the pain out of application delivery (while

earlier containers just created lighter VMs). The second

makes container-sharing social (and not just on DockerHub

[35]). I can try your application without mucking around for

hours not trying your application. (Remember how freeing

apt-get felt?)

Links

[1] Why Software Is Eating The World: http://www.wsj.com/arti-

cles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460

[2] Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework:

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

[3] Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineer-

ing: http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

[4] Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/

[5] Google trends—Bootstrap: https://www.google.com/

trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0j671ln

[6] Material Design Lite: http://www.getmdl.io/

[7] Bootstrap vs. Material Design Lite Google Trends:

https://www.google.com/trends/ex-

plore#q=%2Fm%2F0j671ln%2C%20%2Fm%-

2F0ll4n18%2C%20Material%20Design%20Lite&c-

mpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5

[8] Twitter Bootstrap Usage Statistics:

http://trends.builtwith.com/docinfo/Twitter-Bootstrap

[9] Bootstrap version 4 alpha release:

http://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/

[10] Bootstrap themes: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/

[11] AngularJS: https://angularjs.org/

[12] AngularJS directives:

https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive

[13] Why is the two-way data binding being dropped in Angular

2? https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-two-way-data-bind-

ing-being-dropped-in-Angular-2

[14] Highlights from AngularConnect 2015:

http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2015/11/highlights-from-an-

gularconnect-2015.html

[15] Spring: https://github.com/spring-projects

[16] Spring Boot vs. Spring Framework Google Trends: https://

www.google.com/trends/explore#q=spring%20boot%2C%20

spring%20framework&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5

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W O R K I N G

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Sys admins,

no matter what platforms they

work on, are awash in great

open source software tools. In this article, we highlight well-

known—and not-so-well-known—tools that have released

new versions in 2015.

BlackBox

Managing secrets is tough, especially when the secrets need

to end up on a server. That’s why Stack Exchange [1] devel-

oped the BlackBox [2] utility. BlackBox uses GNU Privacy

Guard [3] (GPG) to securely encrypt secrets, such as pass-

words and private keys, and store them in a version control

system. BlackBox also provides a mechanism for conﬁgura-

tion management tools (speciﬁcally Puppet [4]) to extract the

secrets when needed.

The plugin architecture of BlackBox makes it easy to ex-

tend. Although BlackBox was originally designed to work

with git [5] repos, support for Mercurial [6], Subversion [7],

and Perforce [8] has been added. BlackBox supports Linux,

OS X, and Windows (via Cygwin [9]), so it can be used in

mixed environments.

KeePass

Managing secrets gets a little easier when they don’t have

to go anywhere. Years ago, I started using KeePass [10] be-

cause it had been ported to the Maemo [11] platform. If aban-

doned mobile operating systems aren’t your thing, KeePass

is available for Linux, OS X, Windows, Android, and iOS.

When I was a newly minted sys admin, I had a notebook

of rarely used passwords that

I kept in a locked safe. KeeP-

ass is like that, except easier

to back up and sync across

locations. KeePass entries

store URLs, user names,

passwords, and free text. En-

tries can be sorted into groups

and given custom icons for

ease of use. Recent releases

have focused on improving

performance and UX.

ownCloud

Need a way to synchronize your KeePass database? own-

Cloud’s recent 8.2 release brings improved design and

ease of administration. For those who can’t or won’t use

third-party services, ownCloud [12] provides a great way

to share documents, photos, calendars, and other data

securely. A community-developed application repository

allows admins to extend the capabilities in a wide variety

of ways, including receiving SMS messages from Android

phones. If you need to give your users (or yourself) the

ability to collaborate while keeping control over your data,

this is a can’t-miss package.

Wireshark

Any day that I have to resort to analyzing packet captures

is a bad day, but the venerable Wireshark [13] always helps

make it a little easier. Although the project is almost old

enough to vote in the US, Wireshark 2.0 [14] was released in

November 2015. To say 2.0 is a major change is an under-

statement: The UI was rewritten in Qt [15], and many of the

interactions have been simpliﬁed. This new release brings a

lot of improvements, but it’s still the same Wireshark you’ve

known for years.

VirtualBox

Desktop virtualization comes in many ﬂavors these days, but

I ﬁnd that I always come back to Oracle’s VirtualBox [16].

At work, having the same operating system and version of

our software as a customer runs is valuable to me, so quick-

and-easy virtual machines

save me a lot of time. Virtu-

alBox 5.0, released in July,

added the ability to start VMs

in “headless” mode, which

works for me because I gen-

erally SSH into my virtual

machines for interactions. 5.0

also brings paravirtualization

support for better guest per-

formance, disk encryption,

and USB 3 support.

10 helpful tools for a

sys admin’s toolbox

BEN COTTON

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Docker

Certainly you’ve heard all about Docker [23] by now. Contain-

ers are the next big thing in the devops world, and Docker is

the container platform. The 1.9 release, which shipped at the

beginning of November, adds several new features. Multi-

host networking allows virtual networks to span hosts, giving

admins more ﬂexibility in their network topology. Persistent

storage support is improved, as well. Docker brings a level

of ﬂexibility and scalability to infrastructure that will have big

impacts on sys admins and users in the coming year.

Did we leave your favorite open source tool for sys admins

off the list? We’d love to hear about it: open@opensource.com .

Links

[1] Stack Exchange: http://stackexchange.com/

[2] Blackbox: https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox

[3] GNU Privacy Guard: https://www.gnupg.org/

[4] Puppet: https://puppetlabs.com/

[5] Git: https://git-scm.com/

[6] Mercurial: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/

[7] Subversion: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

[8] Perforce: https://www.perforce.com/

[9] Cygwin: https://www.cygwin.com/

[10] KeePass: http://keepass.info/

[11] Maemo: http://maemo.org/

[12] ownCloud: https://owncloud.org/

[13] Wireshark: https://www.wireshark.org/

[14] Wireshark 2.0 announced:

https://www.wireshark.org/news/20151118.html

[15] Qt: http://www.qt.io/

[16] VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/

[17] Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/

[18] RRDtool: http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

[19] Cacti: http://www.cacti.net/

[20] Xymon: http://xymon.sourceforge.net/

[21] RrdGraphJS: https://github.com/oetiker/RrdGraphJS

[22] RackTables: http://racktables.org/

[23] What is Docker:

https://opensource.com/resources/what-docker

Author

Ben Cotton is a meteorologist by training and a high-per-

formance computing engineer by trade. Ben works at Cycle

Computing, leading the support engineering group. Ben is

a community moderator for Opensource.com. Find him on

Twitter @FunnelFiasco.

Visual Studio Code

The editor wars had reached a somewhat

uneasy truce, but then a new kid appeared

on the block. Microsoft released Visual

Studio Code [17] for Windows, Linux, and

OS X under the MIT license, which was big

news for a company typically seen as hostile to

open source software. Although Visual Studio Code

is designed as a code editor, don’t take that to mean

it’s not useful for sys admins (after all, every sys ad-

min must do some coding). Visual Studio Code offers

built-in git interactions and Docker language support.

RRDtool

Even if you’ve never interacted directly with RRDtool

[18], chances are good you’ve used a project that incorpo-

rates it. RRDtool is a great package for storing and graphing

time series data, which is why it’s commonly used in perfor-

mance monitoring systems, such as Cacti [19] and Xymon

[20]. If static PNGs aren’t your thing, Tobi Oetiker has also de-

veloped a JavaScript library [21] for generating RRD graphs.

Mosh

Being away from the desk can’t stop the modern sys admin

from keeping the bits ﬂowing. Unfortunately, not all networks

are created equal. If you’ve ever tried to do an SSH session

over a mobile phone tether or an overburdened conference

WiFi network, you know how painful it can be. Mosh eases

that pain. Mosh allows for roaming network connections, and

makes slow connections more tolerable by locally echoing

as you type and allowing the connection to catch up. After

almost two years of silence, Mosh 1.2.5 was released in July.

Along with the usual bug ﬁxes and improvements in platform

support, the latest release adds IPv6 support.

RackTables

In a small environment, the sys admin may know exactly

where every server is without having to think about it. In

my ﬁrst job, the department had about half a rack of gear.

Easy peasy. When I moved to a larger group, suddenly

there were 4,000 machines to know about. At that sort

of scale, a tool like RackTables [22] becomes invaluable.

RackTables is a tool for documenting hardware informa-

tion, rack space, network conﬁguration, and more. Think

of RackTables as that terrible spreadsheet you’re keep-

ing, except not terrible.

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The best

couples

comple-

ment each other, and each

member of the couple con-

tributes unique and irreplace-

able parts to the whole. But

some couples are very odd.

Such is the case with our

best couple this year: the tar

and ssh commands.

Wait—what?!

Yup, that’s right, the tar and ssh commands work to-

gether in interesting ways, especially when used with full

consideration of the capabilities of Standard I/O (STDIO),

which is also known as standard streams.

ssh

The ssh command is a secure and sophisticated form of ter-

minal emulator that allows one to log in to a remote computer

to access a shell session and run commands. So I could

remote computer. The results are displayed in the ssh termi-

nal emulator window on my local host. The Standard Output

(STDOUT) of the command is displayed on my terminal win-

dow, but it remains on the remote host and cannot be used

by the local host.

That is trivial and everyone does that. But the next step

is a bit more interesting. Rather than maintain a terminal

session on the remote computer and issuing multiple com-

mands, I can simply use a command like the following to

run a single command on the remote computer with the

results being displayed on the local host. This assumes that

SSH public/private keypairs (PPKP) are in use and I do not

have to enter a password each time I issue a command to

the remote host:

ssh remotehost ls

So now I can use the results

of that command on my local

host because the standard

output data stream is sent

through the SSH tunnel to the

local host. OK, that is good,

but what does it mean?

Let’s look at the tar com-

mand before answering that

question.

tar

The tar command is used to make backups. The name

tar stands for Tape ARchive, but the command can be

used with any type of recording media such as tape, hard

drives, thumb drives and more. A command like the follow-

ing can be used to create a backup of a home directory on

the local host:

tar -cvf /tmp/home.tar /home

This command created a tar ﬁle—also called a tarball—

named home.tar in the /tmp directory. That ﬁle is a backup of

everything in the home directory. Well, that’s nice, but also

not very interesting because it is very common.

But what can be interesting is, although many people do

not realize it, if the target output ﬁle is not speciﬁed using

the -f option, the output of the tar command is sent directly

to STDOUT:

tar -cv /home

That means that the complete output of the tar command—

the ﬁles being backed up —is sent to the terminal, which

opens up some interesting possibilities, such as redirecting

the STDOUT data stream to a backup ﬁle. That looks like the

following command:

Best Couple of 2015:

tar and ssh

Best Couple

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tar -cv /home > /tmp/home.tar

This command performs the same function as the ﬁrst tar

command in this section, but in a somewhat different and

more interesting manner.

The Odd Couple

We can use a command similar to the following to back up

the home directory of the remote host to the /tmp directory

of that remote host:

ssh remotehost “tar -cvf /tmp/home.tar /home”

Note that the command to be executed on the remote

host is enclosed in quotes to ensure that the correct com-

mand is executed remotely; this is a bit of clarification for

both the shell and for us humans. A slight change to this

command gives us one in which we simply redirect the

output of the tar command to the /tmp directory on the

remote host:

ssh remotehost “tar -cv /home > /tmp/home.tar”

This command produces exactly the same result as the pre-

vious one. In this case, the STDOUT data stream of the tar

command is maintained entirely on the remote host and is

redirected to the backup ﬁle. The next command, however,

is the one that opens up many new possibilities. Can you see

what it does?

ssh remotehost “tar -cv /home” > /tmp/home.tar

In this case, the STDOUT data stream from the tar com-

mand is sent through the SSH connection to the local

host. This stream of data is then redirected to the backup

ﬁle /tmp/home.tar on the local host. By simply moving the

trailing quote to the left, the command is changed so that

we now have a command that can do backups of remote

hosts to a local host.

I use our couple of the year every day to perform backups.

I have a script that uses ssh and tar, along with SSH public

key encryption, to perform backups of several remote hosts

to an external USB hard drive on a local host. These two

commands simplify a necessary task, and the best part is

that they are free and open source software—free as in beer,

as well as free as in speech.

So let’s hear it for this year’s Opensource.com Best Cou-

ple: tar and ssh.

Links

[1] Standard streams:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_streams

Author

David Both is a Linux and open source advocate who re-

sides in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has been in the IT in-

dustry for more than forty years, and taught OS/2 for IBM

(where he worked for more than 20 years). While at IBM,

he wrote the ﬁrst training course for the original IBM PC in

1981. David has written articles for OS/2 Magazine, Linux

Magazine, Linux Journal, and Opensource.com.

BEST

COUPLE

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We round up

10 editor’s picks from the most

popular projects in 2015.

Apache Spark

When it comes to open source big data processing, Hadoop

is no longer the only name in the game. Apache Spark [1] is

a general purpose distributed data processing tool that al-

lows users to process gigantic datasets across many nodes,

coordinating the processing so that users can concentrate

on writing their queries in their language of choice. At the be-

ginning of this year, we announced a new world record [2] in

data processing set by Apache Spark, 100 TB of data in just

23 minutes. In the months that followed, interest in Apache

Spark has not slowed, and the project has gained many new

contributors and adopters.

Blender

The Blender Foundation is on a mission “to build a free and

open source complete 3D creation pipeline for artists and

small teams.” This year we’ve seen the power of Blender [3]

in the mix of Blender-related articles [4] we’ve run on Open-

source.com. Writer and Blender aﬁcionado Jason van Gum-

ster (author of Blender for Dummies [5]) shared the majority

of those stories, including reports from the October 2015

Blender Conference in Amsterdam.

When you are working with large amounts of raw data, some-

times a visualization is the best way to interpret what you’re

looking at. When you make that visualization available on

the web, you can add new levels of interactivity to display

information for an audience in an easy-to-understand format.

One tool for making this easy is D3 [6], a JavaScript-based

data visualization framework that provides options for show-

ing data in charts, graphs, plots, maps, and more. We pro-

ﬁled D3 earlier this year as a part of our roundup of 8 excel-

lent data visualization tools [7].

Dolphin

If you spend a lot of time managing ﬁles on your computer,

you’re going to want a ﬁle manager that suit your needs and

gives you features that let you quickly and easily take control of

your ﬁle system. Dolphin [8], the default ﬁle manager in many

KDE-based distributions, is a powerful tool to help you orga-

nize ﬁles. For more on Dolphin, take a look at Opensource.com

community moderator David Both’s comprehensive review and

guide to the Dolphin ﬁle manager [9] from earlier this year.

Git

The world of version control sure has changed since git en-

tered the scene 10 years ago as an open source alternative

to BitKeeper for managing the Linux kernel’s source code.

Since then, git [10] has rapidly become the most popular tool

for tracking changes to ﬁles, and not just for code. Git helps

track changes to ﬁles where revisioning, branching, and col-

laborative development can help improve the workﬂow of a

project. Are you still working with an older source code man-

ager, but thinking of moving to git? Here are some great tips

and resources for making the move.

Mattermost

To borrow from our review [12] of this open source team chat

alternative:

“Mattermost is [a] very modern approach to team chat.

Currently in its beta release, Mattermost is written in Gol-

ang with a good chunk of JavaScript under the React

framework. It features private and public chats, including

one on one communication, good archival support, and

a very similar interface to Slack, including most of the

features you’ve come to expect there. In fact, if you’re al-

ready using Slack, there’s an easy import function which

lets you move over your current channels and archives.

Mattermost also integrates into your organization’s ex-

isting LDAP or Active Directory authentication systems.”

Piwik

Piwik [13] is an open source alternative to Google Analytics,

and according to writer Scott Nesbitt, chances are it packs

the features you need.

Nesbitt writes [14]: “Those features include metrics on the

number of visitors hitting your site, data on where they come

from (both on the web and geographically), from what pages

they leave your site, and the ability to track search engine

referrals. Piwik also has a number of reports and you can

Top 10 open source projects

of 2015

JEN WIKE HUGER

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customize the dashboard to view the metrics that you want

to see. To make your life easier, Piwik integrates with over

65 content management, ecommerce, and online forum sys-

tems like WordPress, Magneto, Joomla!, and vBulletin using

plugins. With anything else, you just need to add a tracking

code to a page on your site. A number of web hosting ﬁrms

offer Piwik as part of their one-click install packages. You can

test drive [15] Piwik or use a hosted version [16].”

Fun fact: Maker of the LulzBot 3D printer, Aleph Objects,

uses Piwik to run their analytics [17].

In the era of big data, now may be the time to learn R [18],

which has become the programming language of choice for

data scientists and others interested in statistical computing

and graphics, and is touted by inﬂuencers in big data [19] like

Revolution Analytics. In 2015, the R Consortium [20] became

a Linux Foundation Collaborative project, created to provide

support for the development of R-Hub, a new code-hosting

platform for developing and distributing packages for R.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM [21] is the 800-pound gorilla in the open source

customer relationship management space, and has previ-

ously been featured as one of our top 5 CRM tools [22]. The

community edition of SugarCRM can be used out of the box

as a complete solution for organizations hoping to do a bet-

ter job of keeping their contacts manageable, or who want

to turn a list of names into something actionable. Complete

with huge list of features and a pluggable infrastructure that

allows for even more customization, SugarCRM is a great

solution for organizations that want to get a handle on their

contacts. (Editor’s note: SugarCRM 6.5 Community Edition

is the most recent open source version of SugarCRM and is

still widely used. Open source alternatives built on Sugar-

CRM CE are growing in popularity.)

Vagrant

In a nutshell, Vagrant [23] is a command-line tool for launch-

ing and conﬁguring virtual machines. With Vagrant, environ-

ments are reproducible and portable, and the data that de-

ﬁnes the environment is stored in text ﬁles, making it easy to

version control your environments and manage your virtual

machines just as you would code. Vagrant allows you to set

up development environments on your local machine that

are nearly identical to your production environment, regard-

less of what your host operating system is. Plus, learning

how to get started with Vagrant is easy.

Thanks to Jason Baker for his help on this article.

Links

[1] Apache Spark: http://spark.apache.org/

[2] World record set for 100 TB sort by open source and

public cloud team: https://opensource.com/business/15/1/

apache-spark-new-world-record

[3] Blender: https://www.blender.org/

[4] Opensource.com Blender articles:

https://opensource.com/tags/blender

[5] Blender for Dummies: http://blenderbasics.com/

[6] D3: http://d3js.org/

[7] 8 excellent open source data visualization tools:

https://opensource.com/life/15/6/eight-open-source-da-

ta-visualization-tools

[8] Dolphin: https://userbase.kde.org/Dolphin

[9] A comprehensive guide to Dolphin, a KDE ﬁle manager:

https://opensource.com/life/15/8/comprehensive-guide-dol-

phin-ﬁle-manager

[10] Git: https://git-scm.com/

[11] What to know before transitioning your team to Git:

https://opensource.com/business/15/7/interview-em-

ma-jane-hogbin-westby-git

[12] 4 open source alternatives to Slack for team chat:

https://opensource.com/business/15/9/alterna-

tives-slack-team-chat

[13] Piwik: http://piwik.org/

[14] Top 3 open source alternatives to Google Analytics:

https://opensource.com/business/14/10/

top-3-open-source-alternatives-google-analytics

[15] Piwik demo: http://demo.piwik.org/index.

php?module=CoreHome&action=index-

&idSite=7&period=day&date=yesterday#/module=-

Dashboard&action=embeddedIndex&idSite=7&period=-

day&date=yesterday&idDashboard=1

[16] Piwik Cloud: http://piwik.org/hosting/

[17] Open ethos powers Aleph Objects’ success:

https://opensource.com/business/15/11/open-ethos-pow-

ers-lulzbots-success

[18] What is R?: https://www.r-project.org/about.html

[19] Why now is the time to learn R: https://opensource.com/

business/14/12/r-open-source-language-data-science

[20] R Consortium: https://www.r-consortium.org/

[21] SugarCRM: https://www.sugarcrm.com/

[22] Top 5 open source customer relationship management

tools: https://opensource.com/business/14/7/top-5-open-

source-crm-tools

[23] Vagrant: A powerful tool for conﬁguring development envi-

ronments: https://opensource.com/business/15/9/ato-inter-

view-seth-vargo

Authors

Jen Wike Huger is Content Manager at Opensource.com, where

she manages the site’s publication calendar, its editing team,

and its community of writers. Follow her on Twitter @jenwike.

Jason Baker is passionate about using technology to make

the world more open. His interests range from software de-

velopment to bringing sunlight to local governments. Jason

is particularly interested in data visualization and analysis,

DIY/maker culture, simulations/modeling, geospatial tech-

nologies, and cloud computing (especially OpenStack).

Follow him on Twitter @jehb.

CO L L A B O R A T I N G

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So you decided

to use metrics to

track your free, open

source software (FOSS) community. Now comes the big

question: Which metrics should I be tracking?

To answer this question, you must have an idea of what

information you need. For example, you may want to know

about the sustainability of the project community. How quick-

ly does the community react to problems? How is the com-

munity attracting, retaining, or losing contributors? Once

you decide which information you need, you can ﬁgure out

which traces of community activity are available to provide it.

Fortunately, FOSS projects following an open development

model tend to leave loads of public data in their software

development repositories, which can be analyzed to gather

useful data.

In this article, I’ll introduce metrics that help provide a

multi-faceted view of your project community.

1. Activity

The overall activity of the community and how it evolves

over time is a useful metric for all open source communities.

Activity provides a ﬁrst view of how much the community is

doing, and can be used to track different kinds of activity.

For example, the number of commits gives a ﬁrst idea about

the volume of the development effort. The number of tickets

opened provides insight into how many bugs are reported

or new features are proposed. The number of messages in

mailing lists or posts in forums gives an idea of how much

discussion is being held in public.

2. Size

The size of the community is the number of people par-

ticipating in it, but, depending on the kind of participation,

size numbers may vary. Usually you’re interested in active

contributors, which is good news. Active people may leave

traces in the repositories of the project, which means you

Top 5 open source

community metrics to track

JESUS M. GONZALEZ-BARAHONA

Number of commits and number of merged changes after code

review in the OpenStack project, as found in the OpenStack

Activity Dashboard [1]. Evolution over time (weekly data).

Number of authors and number of posters in mailing lists in

the Xen project, as found in the Xen Project Development

Dashboard [2]. Evolution over time (monthly data).

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can count contributors who are active in producing code by

looking at the Author ﬁeld in git repositories, or count people

participating in the resolution of tickets by looking at who is

contributing to them.

This basic idea of activity (somebody did something) can

be extended in many ways. One common way to track activ-

ity is to look at how many people did a sizable chunk of the

activity. Generally most of a project’s code contributions, for

example, are from a small fraction of the people in the proj-

ect’s community. Knowing about that fraction helps provide

an idea of the core group (i.e., the people who help lead the

community).

3. Performance

So far, I have focused on measuring quantities of activities

and contributors. You also can analyze how processes and

people are performing. For example, you can measure how

long processes take to ﬁnish. Time to resolve or close tickets

shows how the project is reacting to new information that

requires action, such as ﬁxing a reported bug or implement-

ing a requested new feature. Time spent in code review—

from the moment when a change to the code is proposed

to the moment it is accepted—shows how long upgrading a

proposed change to the quality standards expected by the

community takes.

Other metrics deal with how well the project is coping with

pending work, such as the ratio of new to closed tickets, or

the backlog of still non-completed code reviews. Those pa-

rameters tell us, for example, whether or not the resources

put into solving issues is enough.

4. Demographics

Communities change as contributors move in and out. De-

pending on how people enter and leave a community over

time, the age (time since members joined the community)

of the community varies. The community aging chart [4]

nicely illustrates these exchanges over time. The chart is

structured as a set of horizontal bars, two per “generation”

of people joining the community. For each generation,

the attracted bar shows how many new people joined the

community during the corresponding period of time. The

retained bar shows how many people are still active in the

community.

The relationship between the two bars for each generation

is the retention rate: the fraction of people of that genera-

tion who are still in the project. The complete set of attracted

bars show how attractive the project was in the past. And

the complete set of the retention bars shows the current age

structure of the community.

5. Diversity

Diversity is an important factor in the resiliency of communi-

ties. In general, the more diverse communities are—in terms

of people or organizations participating—the more resilient

they are. For example, when a company decides to leave a

FOSS community, the potential problems the departure may

cause are much smaller if its employees were contributing

5% of the work rather than 85%.

Ratio of tickets closed by tickets opened, and ratio of change

proposals accepted or abandoned by new change proposals

per quarter. OpenStack project, as shown in the OpenStack

Development Report, 2015-Q3 [3].

Community aging chart for the Eclipse community, as shown

in the Eclipse Development Dashboard [4]. Generations are

deﬁned every six months.

Pony and Elephant Factor for several FOSS projects in the

area of cloud computing, as presented in The quantitative

state of the open cloud 2015 (slides) [8].

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[5] Eclipse Development Dashboard:

http://dashboard.eclipse.org/demographics.html

[6] Pony Factor Math:

https://ke4qqq.wordpress.com/2015/02/08/pony-fac-

tor-math/

[7] Daniel Gruno: https://twitter.com/humbedooh

[8] The quantitative state of the open cloud 2015 (slides):

https://speakerdeck.com/jgbarah/the-quantitative-state-of-

the-open-cloud-2015-edition

Author

Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona is co-founder of Bitergia

(bitergia.com ), the software development analytics com-

pany specializing in the analysis of free and open source

software projects. He also teaches and researches in Uni-

versidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain as part of the GSyC/

LibreSoft research group. His interests include the study

of software development communities, and he focuses on

quantitative and empirical studies of these groups. Find him

on Twitter @jgbarah.

The Pony Factor [6], a term deﬁned by Daniel Gruno [7] for

the minimum number of developers performing 50% of the

commits. Based on the Pony Factor, the Elephant Factor is

the minimum number of companies whose employees perform

50% of the commits. Both numbers provide an indication of

how many people or companies the community depends on.

There are many other metrics to help measure a commu-

nity. When determining which metrics to collect, think about

the goals of your community, and which metrics will help you

reach them.

Links

[1] OpenStack Activity Dashboard: http://activity.openstack.org/

[2] Zen Project Development Dashboard:

http://projects.bitergia.com/xen-project-dashboard/browser/

[3] OpenStack Development Report, 2015-Q3:

http://activity.openstack.org/dash/reports/2015-q3/pd-

f/2015-q3_OpenStack_report.pdf

[4] Measure your open source community’s age to keep it

healthy: http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/10/measure-your-

open-source-communitys-age-to-keep-it-healthy.html

WR I T E F O R U S

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