A decade of forges

We here at FLOSSmole have been gathering data about how free, libre, and open source software is made for about 10 years now, actually a little more.

In that time, a lot has changed in the forge landscape, both with the players and with the tools.

Just for fun, I decided to run a few quick queries to show the ascendance of Github and the concurrent decline of some smaller forges. These two graphs show the rate of new project creation (called 'registration' on Rubyforge and 'creation' at Github - and yes, the Github numbers do include forks).

rubyforge
click for full size

github
click for full size

Data Sources:
For the Rubyforge data, I used FLOSSmole datasource_id=388 (Sept 2013), available on our public database. The query is:

SELECT year(date_registered), month(date_registered), count(*)
FROM rf_projects
WHERE datasource_id=388
GROUP BY 1,2
ORDER BY 1,2

Then I fed the data into Google Charts, saved as a png and annotated it in Preview to add the little circles and stuff.

For the Github data, I used the very excellent Ghtorrent tool. The query is:

SELECT year(created_at), month(created_at), count(*)
FROM projects
GROUP BY 1, 2
ORDER BY 1, 2;

Then I fed that data into a separate Google chart.

ENJOY!

AttachmentSize
Image icon GithubAscending.png46.54 KB
Image icon RubyforgeDeclining.png70.73 KB