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this 40% metric could only be true of they are counting the third-party (with ffmpeg, webkit, etc) but then we cannot say this is chrome..

also there are a lot of tools written in python(gyp, grit, ninja etc).. but this dont get into the executable or libraries.. so i would not count (at least in the perspective of this thread) as the chrome itself. since those tools are used in other projects as well and come only with the source code to build things (it would be like to count the gcc compiler as part of the source)



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I was measuring by number of projects. Consider that most web browsers also depend on a dozen or more C libraries.

I guess you could quantify it with % of code. I've never actually snooped around inside of there, and I'm basing what I was saying off of things I've read here on HN. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've gotten the impression that a larger percentage of the Safari code base is not open source than Chrome.

Saying that any percent >0 causes the software to not be considered open source is also drawing a line. Either way in my opinion it's subjective where you choose to draw it.

I agree that Safari should be included. I was simply disagreeing with the parent, because I got the impression that he or she was saying they are equal. Also, if someone decided they wanted to draw the line somewhere where it would exclude Safari, I would understand where they're coming from, and agree, as Chrome is more open sourcy.

Edit:

> "If you want to draw lines and make it sound scientific then you better show us some numbers. "

I'm not sure where you're getting this. I wasn't trying to draw lines or making anything sound scientific. All I said was that more of Chrome is open source, that's it. Like I said, I feel it's subjective as to where you draw the line, which is why I was disagreeing with parent. I felt that he or she was making an objective claim with how it should be. In my opinion if you insisted on being objective about it, you would probably have to measure the % code or whatever. I don't believe that the objective view on it is treating any software with greater than 0% proprietary software the same.


Nahh, only because it's counting on google hits, it doesn't mean it's worthless

If that were true then you would see quite different results!

Look at sourceforge.net and compare perl and pythons numbers (2700 vs 4200)

Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap) shows Perl & Python with 8905 and 12,149 respectively. Certainly interesting to see that C# has even more opensource projects on there than both Perl & Python with 12,192 :)

Still no good looking at one repo site without comparing with some of the others for a fuller picture. Here are some other figures I just browsed for:

Freshmeat:

  * Perl   3898 - http://freshmeat.net/tags/perl
  * Python 3526 - http://freshmeat.net/tags/python
Github: (http://github.com/languages)

  * Perl  13%
  * Python 9%
When it comes to site statistics, always take them with a pinch of salt when you try to imply meaning outside of their context!

Good point.

Also, I wonder how those would be weighted if you counted projects that consist of >90% identical code as the same project (for example, how many of those Ruby projects are thinly veiled forks of Rails?), filtered out projects that are less than (say) 10k of source, etc. Maybe more Python projects are on bitbucket because of Merucial.

The 90% and 10k there are pretty arbitrary; just, those language stats need a lot more clarification before their meaning is clear.


I can think of a number (Linux, Eclipse, vim, mysql, etc), but as a percentage of total software produced, it's very small.

I agree that it's interesting to see these numbers.

But, take into account that Chrome sees much more intensive development than all these projects. Progress is a more fitting measure than time.


Yeah, it's not easy to measure, since there is so much use of third party libraries.

as it goes for 99.99999999999% people who release under MIT.

And linux (GPL) does have paid developers, and so does webkit (LGPL).

Your data is rather meaningless… but I'm happy your statistic that excludes all the data points you dislike proves your theory :)


You might be right. According to openhub Firefox had 1121 contributors last year. Compared to that Chromium had 1919 contributors. Not all of them work for Mozilla and Google respectively and not all employees commit to the code base...

Real, normal people? I wish it were true but in my experience github is just another source code repository.

As for BSD a search of my (partial) ports tree finds 19326 Makefiles of which 102 contain the string github. Thats 0.5 percent, which tends to argue against your claim.

That's just the easiest measure I have at hand. Would be interested in others and their findings.


Most of those authors are drive-by fixers. Go scroll through the commits list and look at the affiliations of those who are doing the regular work. But watch out, a few of them list OpenJS Foundation but actually work for Microsoft.

The Chromium stats are misleading for the same reason. Almost all commits are made by Googlers. There is a long tail of contributors over the years outside of Google but that doesn't mean their contributions are equally sized.


I'd love to see stats on how many libraries are really shared, I'd imagine it might be less than you hope (other than the big graphical ones)

It needs to become commonplace to include your OS, external dependencies, and any language runtime code in this count. Otherwise it's just not going to evolve into a proper demoscene.

would be cool to know the percentage of different codebase nowadays.

Compilation, screen brightness, docker, and slack are another significant chunk.

That's an incorrect number. If you look at the open source code on the internet, it hovers around 47% to 48% (with a greater than 2b unique project lines sample.

About 22% are lgpl, though, so maybe that's what you meant.


And how much of their codebase is this? 0.5%, if that?

I like the idea of making a trace through a complex app (such as a browser) and the kernel and listing off all the open source developers whose code it passes through. Just how many people contributed to my 1s of Youtube cat video watching pleasure?

All the ones I listed are the ones where they are significant contributors.

The much larger set of where they are mostly users, like the BSD userland tools, curl, Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and so forth, I omitted. There are just too many.

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