.NET Open Source Community – CodePlex / GitHub Comparision

The .NET segment of the open source ecosystem has been one of the fastest growing over the last few years.  The vast majority of all projects on CodePlex are .NET related, and among .NET developers CodePlex is generally the most well-known open source project hosting site.  The number of new projects started on CodePlex has been ever accelerating as shown in the following chart:

CodePlex / GitHub Comparisons

GitHub is another open source project hosting site that has been rising in popularity.  Although GitHub is primarily used by developers preferring Mac or Linux, there are also many .NET developers that use it for their projects.  Sometimes we get questions about how the .NET open source developer community compares between CodePlex and GitHub, so below includes some information around that.

Project Counts

After CodePlex, GitHub probably has the largest number of .NET projects among the various open source project hosting sites.  The following table shows both the total counts and “Popular Project” counts (projects with at least 5 followers):

Popular Projects (5+ followers)

Between the two sites there are over thirty thousand projects, although CodePlex has approximately 2.5x as many .NET projects as GitHub.  For popular projects, CodePlex has approximately 4x as many.  We’re not sure whether this is because popular .NET projects are more likely to choose CodePlex, or the community on CodePlex is more likely to make a .NET project popular, but it is probably some combination of both.

* GitHub does not require developers to specify a license, and typically less than half of them do.  Without a license specified, a project is not considered true “Open Source” since without specifying a valid open source license, project users do not actually have the legal rights that an open source license provides.  The above table counts the total number, not just the number of C# projects with an open source license specified.

Popular Projects

I think another interesting statistic is the percentage of total projects that are “Popular” using the same metric of having 5 or more followers.  The following table shows the popular project percentage for CodePlex and GitHub, including for just the subset of GitHub projects that are C# and Objective-C:

The percentage of popular projects on CodePlex is higher than for C# projects on GitHub, but both are higher than the percentage of popular projects across all languages on GitHub. However for Objective-C projects on GitHub, a very high percentage of them are popular. GitHub is very popular among Mac developers, so is presumably the correlation there.

Overall Summary

I think it is great to see the growth in the .NET open source community, and all indications are it will only continue growing faster. I believe CodePlex has done a lot to help encourage and support .NET open source developers and look forward to helping many thousand more open source projects become popular and successful!

Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council

Oracle employees are purging the OpenOffice.org community council of people who support the competing LibreOffice and The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice is a fork of Oracle’s OpenOffice.org.

In the log of a community council meeting held last Thursday, linked to from member Cor Nouws at UberVu, Oracle community manager Louis Suarez-Potts put the question plainly, describing the problem as a conflict of interest.

“You now represent The Document Foundation (TDF) and LibreOffice,” he told TDF steering committee member Christoph Noack. “These are distinct from OpenOffice.org. For you to represent OpenOffice.org (OOo) in the Community Council (CC) is therefore quite confusing.”

Brazilian Olivier Hallot, another member of the TDF steering committee, tried to intervene. “Our presence in OpenOffice Community (OOC) is a good opportunity to keep door open to both projects,” he wrote.

Later in the transcript, he admitted “I only see Cor Nouws, Christoph Noack and Olivier Hallot as the community members and all other are now Oracle employees so I take it as Oracle wants us to get out.”

In the transcript Matthias Huetsch, a former Sun employee now with Oracle, backed up Suarez-Potts. “You have chosen to leave, so we wish you good luck, but please leave; and that has nothing to do with Oracle; that is my personal opinion.”

Suarez-Potts then set a deadline of today for an answer to the resignation demand, writing “We are giving the TDF members the time to understand the weight of their action and to act gracefully.”

Assuming the community council members comply, and the situation is as Hallot described it in the transcript, then as of today the OpenOffice.org community council is a collection of Oracle employees masquerading as a community.

And if that’s the case, then OpenOffice.org is no longer a community endeavor, but entirely a corporate project. Anyone thinking of contributing to the code base should probably keep that in mind.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.