[HN Gopher] Ask HN: I want to create IMDB for open source projects
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Ask HN: I want to create IMDB for open source projects
I am interested in developing a web application that bears
resemblance to IMDb but for open-source projects. The primary goal
of this application will be to serve as a directory for discovering
open-source projects. While GitHub is an exceptional platform, it
does not provide all the functionality I need. Therefore, I plan to
add a search function that enables users to filter projects. 1.
What do you think about this idea? 2. However, I am uncertain about
how to plan the product. Can you assist me with this?
Author : ganeshdole
Score : 176 points
Date : 2024-04-15 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
| mattl wrote:
| You might want to see if you can improve this?
| https://directory.fsf.org/
| ganeshdole wrote:
| Definitely! I can improve the UI and add more filtering
| options.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Doesn't accept MIT nor Apache-2.0 projects among many other
| licenses that are "less free".
| mattl wrote:
| Absolutely does.
|
| https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category:License
|
| List of projects under MIT/Expat license: https://directory
| .fsf.org/wiki?title=Special:Ask&limit=500&o...
|
| I suspect it has less articles than you'd hope for because
| the UI is _so_ bad.
| epistasis wrote:
| More than two decades ago, before git existed, there was
| something called Freshmeat (I think?) that published about new
| open source releases. Whatever happened to that... the closest
| thing I can find now is:
|
| https://www.freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Fresh...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking of, too. It was freshmeat.net[0],
| got sold, renamed (to "Freecode"), then died.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode
| Diederich wrote:
| Here's an example of what it looked like 21 years ago:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030204090614/http://freshmeat....
|
| Back then, for years before and after, I looked at it almost
| every day. It was my go-to 'take a quick break from work while
| at work' site.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Hah I _just_ concurrently posted basically the same thing.
|
| Thanks for the nostalgia-link. Man I miss those years.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Freshmeat was a daily (or multiple times a day) visit for me.
| Or sub to the RSS feed.
|
| Back then it was Lambda the Ultimate and Freshmeat on daily
| rotation.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Freshmeat was exceptionally good, with a much better UI than
| Sourceforge which was also strong back in the day. It was
| however closed source, so as soon as the assets were purchased
| by entities not interested in keeping it operational, it died
| as it happens with closed source products. The current owner is
| the same that owns SourceForge, which presumably don't want to
| compete with themselves by reviving it. http://freshcode.club/
| is considered its successor.
| jjirsa wrote:
| Remarkable to me that ctrl-f, "Sourceforge" had 3 hits on
| this page. Would have expected a dozen.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Assuming success / adoption, I would be careful with how you
| approach this.
|
| IMDB is centered on reviews and ratings of a static media asset.
|
| Open source projects are often growing/changing. They might have
| a really intriguing seed of an idea with an interesting roadmap,
| but the prototype is poorly executed / buggy. Does that deserve a
| low ranking / poor review?
| lowercased wrote:
| Ideally, the rankings should be associated with a time period.
| Something ranked high... but all those high rankings are from 2
| years ago, and there's been none since... that's a different
| signal that current high rankings and current code changes.
| Moogs wrote:
| I think how Steam handles game rankings is a good example of
| this. They separate out "All Reviews" from "Recent Reviews".
| Helps identify current reception of a game which may have had
| a buggy release.
| warbled_tongue wrote:
| There's a case to be made for done-but-not-dead projects that
| are feature complete and still the go to solution.
| pjerem wrote:
| Ideally those projects would still get reviews so
| timeframed reviews still makes sense.
| perlgeek wrote:
| You probably need to adjust the time scale of what
| "recent" means based on the number of reviews.
|
| If a project has a total of 10 reviews, it's probably
| best to not just take the average of the 2 newest
| reviews. On the other hand, if a project gets dozens of
| reviews a month, taking of the last two months or so
| would totally make sense.
| TZubiri wrote:
| U mean github?
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| I think you misspelled "google"
| Brainspackle wrote:
| This was my first thought. With projects like the "awesome
| lists of..." stuff too, I feel those do a pretty good job of
| distilling the more popular or in demand projects to browse
| through. Then you've got places popping up around those, like
| https://selfh.st/apps/ (which I just discovered via HN a week
| or two ago)
| neilk wrote:
| OpenHub (formerly Ohloh) tries, or tried, to do this. Seems like
| it's not getting a lot of love lately but perhaps you can learn
| from it.
|
| https://openhub.net/
|
| One useful feature is the ability to coalesce different
| identities. For example, I've released libraries on my personal
| accounts as well as through work. For a while I used to link
| there from my personal site since it nearly summarized that I'd
| made N thousand commits to OSS. But I stopped. I'm not really
| sure what the point is for me.
|
| https://openhub.net/accounts/neilk
|
| If it's bragging rights, we have Github stars. Effectively (and
| sadly) open source is a resume building tool nowadays, so maybe
| that?
|
| What use cases do you see?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > What use cases do you see?
|
| _" People who liked this also liked ..."_
|
| _" Most active developers on this also developed ..."_
|
| _" More projects using similar tech stack are ..."_
|
| The value of IMDB is _not_ getting a score on a movie, or a
| synopsis, it 's in discovering other movies[1] that you might
| like.
|
| [1] The easiest way to discover is to ask for a list of
| Christopher Nolan movies :-)
| stanislavb wrote:
| Yup. OpenHub is nice. I love the simplicity of its design. What
| do you think about LibHunt https://www.libhunt.com? It's
| similar to OpenHub to some extent; however, it is more focussed
| on alternatives and comparisons of libraries. For example, a
| nice trick is to open any github repo and replace "github" with
| "libhunt" to find alternatives of that project. E.g.
| https://www.libhunt.com/site/find_alternatives
| asciimov wrote:
| This is an app store, not IMDB.
|
| I don't like the idea of some "authority" picking the winners and
| losers in the open-source space.
|
| What makes IMDB work and this not, is that Movies are static
| things. You aren't going to one day find the 1957 romantic comedy
| Desk Set[1], suddenly turn into a slasher film. Where as open
| source software changes, sometimes drastically.
|
| [1]- You should watch Desk Set, it has Katharine Hepburn and
| Spencer Tracy. The main plot is about a computer taking over the
| job of information workers.
| simonw wrote:
| How certain are you that projects are actively seeking to attract
| potential contributors?
|
| Managing open source contributors is non-trivial work. It's
| actually one of the harder forms of engineering management,
| because you're dealing with volunteers - you can't even really
| directly tell contributors what to do, you have to deploy a whole
| bunch of (difficult) soft skills and influence and leadership to
| point people in the right direction.
|
| How confident are you that there's sufficient demand from
| projects to attract more contributors in this way?
| aendruk wrote:
| Yeah I have zero interest in actively soliciting attention to
| my projects. I shared them in case that helps anyone. We have
| web search.
| joewadcan wrote:
| This.
|
| Just because something _should_ exist, doesn 't mean it can be
| created today. The effort to build and attract open source
| projects is a monumental task. Unless you're offering something
| BIG - there's alot of inertia to overcome.
|
| I'd focus on building on top of the GitHub API to create those
| features you want. Not only will you focus your time on the
| unique stuff, GitHub can help with distribution and discovery.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'd imagine there's almost always a door open for talented and
| competent people looking to make meaningful contributions and
| have substantive impact.
| simonw wrote:
| I love it when people contribute to my projects by opening an
| issue, discussing their idea, then contributing a clean PR
| with bundled documentation and tests.
|
| Actively soliciting contributions isn't necessarily the way
| to get that.
|
| Look at what happens with Hacktoberfest: there are hundreds
| of thousands of newer developers out there who want to earn
| their stripes by contributing to an open source project. The
| amount of work this creates for the projects themselves is
| enormous.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Sure but the pipeline of increasing responsibility needs to
| be open to new recruits for the long-term viability of a
| project.
|
| We all used to be dumb teenagers as well.
| nox101 wrote:
| > then contributing a clean PR with bundled documentation
| and tests.
|
| I've never seen this. No tests, un-clean PR. Describing
| them how to fix it would take more time than re-doing the
| PR myself. Of course maybe if I thought they were going to
| contribute a bunch more PRs it would be worth spending time
| training them but I've never had that kind of contributor.
| dolmen wrote:
| This is a wrong assumption.
|
| Opening the code doesn't necessarily mean that external
| contributions are expected.
|
| Reports of issues might be welcome, code contributions less.
|
| I've seen too many popular projects polluted by low quality
| contributions. When they get merged without care, the
| project's quality degrades. When they accumulate, the load on
| the maintainers shoulders becomes heavy.
| haswell wrote:
| > _The primary goal of this application will be to serve as a
| directory for discovering open-source projects_
|
| _Maybe_ an increase in potential contributors is a natural
| outcome of increased discoverability, but I'm not convinced
| that a new site that is primarily facilitating project
| discovery will drastically change contributions.
|
| If you're the type of person to submit code to a project,
| you're probably already scouring the web to find the projects
| that are most relevant to you, and a site like this just makes
| that process more efficient.
|
| Most users of OSS are not contributors, and this project seems
| to be aimed at one of the barriers to adopting OSS: knowing
| where to look for options when you realize you need Tool X for
| Project Y.
| simonw wrote:
| That makes sense. As an open source maintainer a directory
| that helps people discover my projects in order to use them
| is a whole lot more interesting than one that helps me find
| contributors.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| There's a lot of "Awesome" that various individuals have made to
| curate vertical interests. Example:
| https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-ios
| thebeardisred wrote:
| If it's that you like the spirit of open source I would take a
| project in this list and contribute back to that project?
|
| There is potentially a lot of blind spots you have (e.g. What
| types of mechanisms are you going to have for license
| filtering?). Your questions along with request for assistance
| read much more as a request for mentorship as opposed to
| introducing more code into the world that people aren't reading.
| roshanj wrote:
| This sounds very similar to Ovio, which matches open-source
| projects with contributors that have relevant skills. There isn't
| a rating system but there are tools to browse and find good
| projects & issues to contribute to for aspiring OSS devs
|
| https://ovio.org/
| brianllamar wrote:
| What happened to Ovio. I haven't heard from them in years. Is
| it still active?
| kubatyszko wrote:
| Like SourceForge.net ?
| cowsup wrote:
| The main question you should ask yourself: Will this attract the
| right kind of contributions?
|
| Whenever I contribute to open-source, it's typically because I
| found the project on my own, and, by extension, I already have an
| idea of how it should operate, and so I'm able to recognize
| issues or missing features. If an open-source project I'm using
| already works great, I make no changes. This is how people's
| mindset should operate.
|
| Instead, a project like this seems ripe for people to come in and
| make _any_ sort of change. OSS maintainers already deal with
| garbage PRs because of self-taught developers hearing that they
| should "contribute to open source to learn," and then it's just a
| README change or other unnecessary tweaks from absolute
| beginners. If an OOS maintainer put their repo on your platform,
| I feel like they would deal with a _lot_ more of that.
|
| It also seems ripe for abuse from nefarious OSS maintainers, who
| will use that to just promote their own projects, rather than
| actively seeking contributions. If they have a limited scope as
| to the changes they'll accept, and are using your platform just
| as a means to get more eyeballs on their Donation link, that's
| bad for everyone.
|
| Just some things to keep in mind before you proceed.
| kijin wrote:
| How would you measure complexity and level of saturation? If you
| take a git repo and spit out a meaningful number for those, that
| could be a pretty useful technology in its own right, regardless
| of its integration into a standalone platform.
|
| Who are the target users? Newbies looking for open source
| projects with low-hanging fruit that they can pad their resumes
| with? Projects that need better documentation than what GPT can
| write for them? Or the Lasse Collins of the world who are
| desperately looking for a Jia Tan to help them? There are
| different kinds of open source projects, each with very different
| attitudes toward casual contributors. Which kinds do you want to
| focus on, at least in the beginning? Answering this question will
| help you plan what kinds of interactions you want to enable on
| your platform.
| alberth wrote:
| Feature (not a Product)
|
| This seems more suitable as a feature of GitHub, not a standalone
| product.
|
| (Interesting idea nonetheless, please don't take my comments as
| being negative)
| paxys wrote:
| Why do you need approval or product planning (whatever that is)?
| It seems like a solid idea. Go build it and see how it turns out.
| That's the only way to know whether people will find it useful or
| not.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Given recent supply chain attacks I think this can be a good
| idea. But it seems like a lot of work to centralize information
| in one place. A lot of unpaid work. Because no one is going to
| pay you for this information.
|
| I predict it would soon use three major APIs and leave everyone's
| private gitea or gitweb install in obscurity.
| dolmen wrote:
| https://openhub.net/ already exists (but it looks quite dead).
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Make a good website; try to get graphic and Ux designers on board
| so it won't be fugly; then contact people, one at a time, using
| personalized emails. They'll agree to be on there. Eventually
| you'll hit enough of a critical mass that people will start
| signing themselves up somehow, or asking to be on there. How do
| you verify? How do you keep spam out? You can figure that out
| next year or the year after.
|
| Then figure out why a person might want to visit your site.
| Curiosity? Interest in a person? To learn if a foss project is
| any good? To see who has traction to decide what to contribute
| to? Something else?
|
| Bonus points: a podcast with interviews with various community
| leaders; or try to encourage a volunteer to do such a thing. And
| try to get on other pro open source podcasts. I bet companies
| like purism would love any free publicity they can get
|
| Then, I'd you catch on, years from now, look out for Microsoft
| trying to crush you via some competing index tied to GitHub. Try
| to avoid the temptation to be acquired by Microsoft. Try to set
| up your company in a way that convinces foss people that this can
| never happen, Eg, put some fsf people on the board or something?
|
| Lastly, to make the gnu people happy, make your website usable
| without proprietary JavaScript and consider open sourcing your
| client and server code. After all, the valuable thing you hold
| isn't the site or tech: it's the network and traction you build
| boplicity wrote:
| I'm not sure how much value making something "not fugly" really
| matters. Design should be based on functionality, not anti-
| fugliness. In my experience, design considerations should come
| _after_ building a successful growth "feedback loop." (Or
| whatever you want to call it.) At that point, you may decide
| making your website look "polished" isn't even necessary.
|
| IMDB was certainly quite ugly for a long time. See:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20100712165326/http://www.imdb.c...
|
| Other examples of extremely successful, low design sites:
|
| https://archiveofourown.org/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/
| xianm wrote:
| > How do you verify? How do you keep spam out?
|
| An idea for this: you could require them to commit a file to
| their repo with a specific name and the content would contain a
| one time use token to add that repo to a users profile.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Make a good website; try to get graphic and Ux designers on
| board so it won't be fugly;
|
| Get the designers on board, by all means, but not to make it
| pretty: make it easy to use, understand, navigate.
|
| If something needs to be pretty before the target audience uses
| it, it's almost always a vitamin, not a painkiller.
| Nux wrote:
| Freshmeat v2? :-)
| vdfs wrote:
| There is something similar to your idea: https://www.libhunt.com/
| Iguess majority had this idea at certain point
| passion__desire wrote:
| this could be a feature? suggest alternatives
|
| https://alternativeto.net/software/matplotlib/
| remram wrote:
| https://alternativeto.net/ fills that role for me, it has crowd-
| sourced reviews, searchable facets, and of course
| recommendations.
|
| Not limited to open source products, but maybe that's a good
| thing so you can find alternatives.
| brimstedt wrote:
| I think it's a great idea if it's done right. I miss
| freshmeat.net :-)
|
| A database of open source software would help when looking for
| suitable products, personally I tend to scout for open source
| options before looking into closed options.
|
| If it contained easily searchable/filterable information on
| license, "activity" (i.e how alive the project is),
| hosting/deployment options, development language, operating
| system, it would be great.
|
| Also if it has info on how it accepts contributions, it'd be
| nice.
|
| Probably you could scrape I formation from GitHub, gitlab and
| similar sites and you could also let projects supply information
| for you in a "oss-info.yaml/json" in the root dir of the project.
| bakoo wrote:
| Freshcode.club isn't as vast as freshmeat felt, but at least it
| looks the same =]
| kpandit wrote:
| I can only give you a datapoint but unfortunately no advice
|
| 1. I never discovered any movie on IMDB. I go to IMDB to find
| trivia, cast or some other fact about a movie that I somehow
| already knew of.
|
| 2. My interest in an open source project will not be influenced
| by its popularity or any other metrics but purely by what it
| means to me. I submitted my first PR to an open source project
| not because it is popular but because it lacked something I
| needed.
|
| P.S. Thanks to all the nice people who generously contribute to
| OSS and offer their work for free. Hats off and respect.
| poisonborz wrote:
| I discovered gazillions of movies on Imdb, actually it's my
| primary resource. Through either the "more like this" carousel
| on a movie, or by filtered search (eg. best rated 50s comedy
| with at least 15k reviews).
| SCUSKU wrote:
| The best resource for me on IMDb is definitely just the lists
| of "Top 250 Movies of all Time"[1] or the "Top 50 $GENRE
| Movies of All Time" [2].
|
| @OP: Maybe just finding a way to curate the most popular open
| source libraries into lists per language, framework, etc
| would be helpful? For example, for me I'm not particularly
| interested in all open source projects, but I'm really
| interested in Django stuff. Hence why I love looking at the
| awesome-django curated list [3]. Maybe an application to just
| rank all packages for a given ecosystem? Just spitballing.
|
| [1]: https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/ [2]: https://www.imdb.co
| m/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres... [3]:
| https://github.com/wsvincent/awesome-django
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I use it to discover new movies, though mostly by drilling
| down into cast and crew, see what other projects they've
| worked on.
|
| Was thinking this "ossdb" could work similarly.
| saurik wrote:
| Like the other reply, I also find movies in IMDB and it is also
| my "primary" source, though I use it differently: I generally
| want to watch movies in clusters of who's involved, so I will
| watch a movie I ended up thinking was amazing and then want to
| see more movies by the same director or starring the same
| actors, etc.
| nine_k wrote:
| To counter your points (all valid):
|
| - I did discover interesting movies on IMDB. It was more by
| chance though, while looking up info on known movies.
|
| - Popularity of a piece of OSS may be important when choosing
| to use it for an org. Something alive and widely used has
| better chances of survival in the future, and/or speed of
| reaction to security incidents.
|
| That said, I agree that IMDB is not what I'd like the directory
| of OSS to resemble. I'd rather go after imitating tvtropes.
| haunter wrote:
| Not on IMDB but discovered a lot on Letterboxd, it's my primary
| source for new films
| InexSquirrel wrote:
| Interesting. I use IMDB as a filter, for score and synopsis. I
| rarely find new movies there (find recommendations elsewhere),
| but I basically filter anything out that sits below a 7, or
| include anything 6+ if it's in a genre I happen to like. I
| suppose I could use rotten tomatoes for that too.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| My behaviour is similar.
|
| But that doesn't mean it couldn't change if something different
| were available that gave some (unspecified) advantage.
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| I discovery movies only on torrent sites.
|
| Imdb is quite good if you're just looking for the best 100
| movies ever made.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| I still mourn Freshmeat.net
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| So like freshmeat.net back in the day?
| shallow-mind wrote:
| Anyone remembers freshmeat.net?
| gbolcer wrote:
| Just curious how you would populate the data?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| By what process will the projects be added to the db? I would
| argue for having some sort of automation process for this. If
| it's curated by a human, they will eventually bore of it and
| abandon this.
| dolmen wrote:
| Automating also requires resources to keep the DB up to date.
|
| Just look at the state of https://openhub.net/ .
| brudgers wrote:
| 1. How will it be better than Github stars? Open source
| developers use Github already. Closed source developers use it
| too and Github is big enough to moderate the rating system (at
| least somewhat).
|
| How will your search function be better than Google? (and how and
| who will classify projects?)
|
| 2. If it is important to you, build a ShowHN. Don't plan, just
| build and be ready to pivot. Don't expect people to help you.
|
| What most people want is not a list of tools. They want an expert
| opinion.
|
| IMDb works because movies are passively consumed; have a short
| period of engagement and there aren't many of them....a few
| hundred theatrical releases a year in the US.
|
| Good luck.
| zettabomb wrote:
| I actually really like this if you're the kind of person like
| myself who prefers to be able to self-host service and work off
| cloud. The "awesome-" Github repos might be a good place to start
| sourcing information. A few things I think would be nice:
|
| * You should be able to easily tell how the project is hosted. I
| prefer containerized applications, but there's people who don't.
| Sometimes they make you install their own hosting platform -
| yuck.
|
| * If a paid version is available, how much is it? Are the
| features provided by that paid version big important ones or it
| is mostly just for support?
|
| * If there are screenshots, an easy screenshot browser would be
| nice. Many projects either do not provide them, or they're in the
| Github repo which doesn't have an easy left/right browse
| functionality. I want to know if the UI sucks before spending the
| time to deploy.
|
| * What's the most comparable commercial project? How does it
| excel and how does it fall short? Perhaps a (moderated) comments
| or reviews section would be worth it here.
|
| * What about interoperability with other popular tools? It's
| difficult tell sometimes if a project supports something as
| simple as LDAP. This would depend somewhat on the product which
| features are shown.
|
| * Ffs please provide a semi meaningful graph of forks. The way
| Github does it with Insights is nearly useless.
|
| I suppose it would benefit to ask people with a reasonable amount
| of experience for a given field what they want/need too. That's
| not necessarily something you'd see on the site, but it'd be done
| in the background. For instance, I want 3MF support for 3D
| printer slicers, but that's not relevant for a kanban board.
|
| As far as interfaces, I enjoy the filtering provided by sites
| like Texas Instruments or Analog Devices for electronic
| components. They really managed to figure that out.
|
| Good luck with your project! I hope it succeeds, I would very
| much enjoy such a tool.
| aristofun wrote:
| 1. amazing, go for it!
|
| 2. i don't know, but don't plan, just cobble up something first,
| some barely working POC. Then you'll have a solid ground for
| fruitful discussions and feedback.
| tomashertus wrote:
| I use Github's Trends (https://github.com/trending) for
| discovery, and for all other searches, I use their search and
| tags. It never failed me to find what I was looking for. The star
| system already provides you with ratings for open-source
| projects, and Github's search has powerful filtering. I don't
| anticipate a general need for such a project.
|
| If you are junior developer interested in learning development or
| a specific technology, it would be great project to build and
| open source though.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Start with a user diagram. What user is suppose to have in mind?
| I feel like "I want to discover OSS projects" is too general and
| niche at the same time.
|
| For example, "Free Photoshop alternative" is a lot more likely
| scenario where such service might help. Btw I think
| https://alternativeto.net is pretty good for that.
| jolj wrote:
| it's not that rating is what's missing, github stars are kind of
| a proxy for that
|
| what's missing are curated lists of projects you need to use for
| a specific reason: you want to setup a web site? which framework
| do you use, db, api style, formatter, linter, etc what about SIMD
| libraries? Java unit testing?
| firtoz wrote:
| 1: yes 2: build for yourself first. Make it feel great for
| yourself, and then your friends, or anyone you can keep bothering
| without worrying whether you are bothering them. These could be
| passionate users, or friends and family.
|
| What kind of planning do you need though, like, "how to build
| it", or "what would users want"?
|
| I as a potential user would want to see:
|
| Is it actively maintained?
|
| License
|
| Category/compatibility (like want to search for things compatible
| with remix or react three fiber but not the latest version)
|
| Amazon style product reviews, split between ease of use, bugs
|
| Community quality and links
| muratsu wrote:
| Since it's not a paid product the best way to test your
| hypothesis is to ship an MVP and track usage :)
|
| You can chat with GPT to help you plan things. It's really good
| for this type of stuff.
| rurban wrote:
| Easy. You just need the scrape the various hubs, like gh, gitlab,
| sf.net, bitbucket, savannah, codeberg, sourcehut, ...
| devd00d wrote:
| Two sites are alreading doing this really well:
|
| https://osssoftware.org/ https://selfh.st/
| nox101 wrote:
| Interestingly I just went to osssoftware.org, clicked "design"
| and it showed photopea which AFAIK is not open source
|
| https://osssoftware.org/tools/photopea/
| stainlu wrote:
| This idea is interesting. But I think you are on the wrong
| mindset: literally merging product and features together won't
| get the work done. Instead, think about customers.Think about how
| current use case. - Why are they using open-source projects? -
| How are they using them? - Why don't they use other products? The
| core here is that we use open-source projects NOT because they
| are open-source, but they are available and cater to my need. So
| this is actually IMDb for all softwares.
|
| The second question is, you are making something real big if you
| want to build another website. Will a browser plugin for github
| work? If yes, go for it.
|
| That's my suggestion
| franky47 wrote:
| IMHO, the value of IMDb is in its network graph. I spent
| countless hours navigating films, directors, actors and the like
| to discover hidden gems.
|
| Open-source may have a similar graph (projects, contributors,
| sponsors), and could make for a fantastic content/talent
| discovery mechanism.
|
| However, a lot of IMDb's content is user-curated. What is your
| content acquisition strategy?
| specproc wrote:
| I put this on another comment, but I like it so much I'll do it
| again here.
|
| This is fabulous, and pretty much the graph you're looking for:
| https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/
| politelemon wrote:
| If you're planning it to have ratings and reviews, a la IMDb,
| remember that the key difference is there are people at the other
| end of the ratings. With media productions, the ratings are up
| against a company wall. With open source projects it's against
| people volunteering their time.
|
| Seeing how people behave on ratings sites, it's pretty obvious
| that this can open up developers to abuse and harassment, if it
| gains popularity and traction.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Interesting idea. I want this to exist. It's needed now that many
| projects have left github. The closest thing I can think of to
| what you want to make are those "awesome x" repos on github which
| list projects related to x (e.g.:
| https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm)
|
| It needs a memorable name like wesource or youcode.
|
| You'll probably want a way for maintainers to claim a project
| (like google allows businesses to do on maps). Community
| management in general seems hard.
|
| The other hard part will determining relevancy. What do you show
| on the homepage?
|
| Ad-supported or donation-based?
|
| Look to large wikis and public resources like everymac.com for
| inspiration maybe.
| instagraham wrote:
| I think semantic search will be important, open source project
| documentation can be a bit obscure so it can be hard to find what
| you're looking for with a cursory Google search.
|
| I want to build x that does y using z, where you your database
| has x y and z - but maybe x y and z's own github pages don't
| explain what their code is capable off as well as you do. I think
| that would add value to what already exists.
| karaterobot wrote:
| When I think of IMDB, I think about using it to get granular
| information about a movie, not to discover new movies. I use it
| for finding out who were the cast and crew (and what else did
| they work on), how much was the box office, when was it released.
|
| I assume that's not what you mean though. You wouldn't, for
| example, list the credits for each open source project, i.e. who
| were the engineers, who were the QA testers? Or maybe you would!
| But that seems like it'd be a ton of work, and supporting the
| changing roster over different versions seems like it'd be a
| scope nightmare.
|
| (I have always wanted this website to exist, though. I just think
| it's impossible without a software industry equivalent of the
| screen actors guild, or MPAA, or whichever entity it is that
| mandates rules about who gets credit for a film)
|
| Instead, do you mean more like a big searchable list of open
| source projects? If so, I'd still want to know what kind of
| information you plan on collecting about each project, to know
| whether I would use it or not.
| jmbwell wrote:
| I like the idea of looking up a given project and seeing a list
| of other projects by the same contributors across all the various
| hubs. That's a big use case for IMDB for me... _"wow, what an
| actor/director/writer; I wonder what else they've done I should
| see"_
|
| I also like the idea of consolidating all the "awesome*" lists,
| which have been very useful for me for discovering software.
|
| But I also like the idea of automated rankings, especially if it
| can avoid being clogged with clickbait, astroturf, and SEO like
| some popular software comparison type sites I can think of.
|
| So I guess what you're considering might be kind of a list
| engine. Build a big meta-database, then provide both curated
| lists (top rankings, contributor lists, etc.), and user-generated
| lists.
|
| I think I'd check out such a site
| vinay_ys wrote:
| > However, I am uncertain about how to plan the product. Can you
| assist me with this?
|
| List your fav features of IMDB that you want to emulate in your
| project. Then, scope your project to something you can do in 3
| months and do it and show off to users and get feedback. Then,
| after that figure out what to do next.
|
| > What do you think about this idea?
|
| There are common fallacies and pitfalls when someone says they
| want to do "like X for Y". (Like Uber for shopping etc). Learn
| about them and make sure your idea isn't suffering from those
| same issues.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The main feature that's on my wishlist for open-source
| directories (including package repositories etc) are better
| features for surfacing related projects. "people who use this
| also use that", "people who looked at this project but aren't
| using it are instead using that", etc.
| specproc wrote:
| You may appreciate the map of github [0] it's a fantastic piece
| of work that trended here a while back.
|
| [0]: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/
| DowagerDave wrote:
| funny enough this was the killer feature of CDNow: human
| curation before Amazon bought them and destroyed the product.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I mean, there are dozens of low effort websites already that
| scrape from Github for this. They are generally worthless. I
| think you need to think carefully so you don't just make another
| one of those.
|
| Reviews might be a good differentiator, but obviously that's hard
| to get content for.
| brianllamar wrote:
| openbase did reviews and got up to 400k users. They couldn't
| figure how monetize and shut down I think their blog post on it
| is still available somewhere.
| rhardih wrote:
| If you want inspiration on how to do this in a good way, I've
| always been a big fan of how https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/
| surfaces just the right information and lets you compare projects
| to others in the same category.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| It's not immediately clear why or how one would search open
| source projects.
|
| Is it to discover tools that solve a specific problem?
|
| Is it just for entertainment purposes?
|
| I am not a heavy IMDB user but I just go there to get actor names
| by movie title or lookup rating by movie title.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Let me make a semi-cynical reply, and at the same time challenge
| you to prove me wrong.
|
| Let me also say that you learn more from failure than success, so
| even if this goes as I predict, you'll learn a lot about this
| kind of idea, and that alone may be worth it.
|
| I predict the project will fail. Here's my thinking;
|
| Firstly, projects should always start with a revenue model. You
| didn't mention one so either you chose not to mention it, or you
| don't have one. This project will cost money every month, in
| hosting fees if nothing else. If it becomes popular it'll fail
| because you can't afford it.
|
| Secondly it'll fail because the data needs to be curated. If it
| isn't, and it becomes popular it'll be buried in low-quality
| submissions. There are thousands and thousands of everything
| released as open source. 99% of it is rubbish (just like
| commercial stuff.)
|
| Curating costs time or money. Once you get a day job, or another
| OSS idea, this one will lose your attention, and with it any
| sense of quality.
|
| Lastly there's a network effect problem. To be valuable you need
| the directory to be populated. To get populated it needs to be
| valuable.
|
| As a bonus, someone else proposes such a directory every other
| week. Some have been successful for a while. But they don't stick
| around. Why do you suppose that is? Why doesn't a quality
| directory already exist? The idea is not novel, sooo ..... ?
|
| Good luck!
| interactivecode wrote:
| I like the idea, but I think looking at imdb from a movie viewer
| perspective is not really doing it justice. imdb is first and
| foremost an industry directory. This creates the value for
| everyone to fill their profiles and use it as the source of
| truth. "Finding cool movies to watch" in that sense is secondary.
|
| The idea of a imdb for open source is really cool, cracking the
| code to get industry buy in will in my opinion be the way to
| ensure a long tail of value for anyone using it.
| itronitron wrote:
| >> it does not provide all the functionality I need
|
| So, do something that provides the functionality you need. It
| might be useful to others but probably not.
|
| I think that a search function that also enables filtering on
| attributes would be useful, but an 'IMDB' for open source
| projects sounds like a terrible idea.
| chha wrote:
| One of the first things you need to think about is the inclusion
| criteria.
|
| Wikipedia bases all its content on the following: "A topic is
| presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it
| has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are
| independent of the subject."
|
| This is flexible enough to allow a lot of stuff, but also causes
| endless debates, discussions and complaints when content is
| removed. This is (in my opinion) one of the things that actually
| give Wikipedia value. If everything is permitted, separating spam
| from actual content is hopeless.
|
| Defining a scope for your application is a must; if you gain even
| the slightest popularity, every self-serving developer is going
| to try to piggyback on you. "See, my project is listed on xyz,
| therefore it's famous and hence I'm a rockstar."
|
| -Do you want to include any project hosted anywhere?
| -Incomplete/unfinished projects? -Forks? -Do you want to limit
| yourself to particular licenses? -What about ecosystems such as
| PyPi, Nuget, npm and all the rest? Code is mainly hosted on
| github, but do you want to maintain any kind of relation between
| source and package?
|
| I think this could be handy, both for finding alternatives if you
| have an issue with a library or if you're looking for "something"
| that does <abc>.
| paradite wrote:
| I made an encyclopedia for frontend with json and markdown:
|
| https://github.com/paradite/frontend-encyclopedia
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Tall order. Github stars are maybe closest these days?
|
| - Maybe should be an aggregator-aggregator, using github stars
| and all the various metrics/lists you can find, making formal
| affiliations with those sites so there's no ill-will?
|
| - Maybe a decentralized governance (or clear neutrality in
| listing mechanism) to encourage people to participate knowing
| you're not gonna turn bad?
|
| - Maybe section off a bit more wishlisting projects people WANT
| to exist (and subscribe to updates on as others fulfill)?
|
| - Maybe a place to complain and critique existing software
| (closed or open source) and dream up alternatives (like a reverse
| engineering or UX critique forum?)
|
| - Maybe some affiliates program to get projects to backlink,
| and/or incentives program to manage a donation pool across
| projects to pay for advertising and bring more people into the
| space?
|
| - Maybe plan around inter-project architecture (common libraries
| in demand) and have people be able to push for the most needed
| ones?
|
| - Maybe plan around AIs becoming an increasingly large segment of
| contributors, certainly on more junior/intermediate things, and
| make workflows to direct their efforts in a simple-to-contribute
| way (e.g. hook up your compute to an open-source AI coder hosted
| in the cloud with a TODO list to churn on already vetted by other
| people/AIs)
|
| All ideas. Good luck! Would love this to exist at popular scales.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Love this idea.
| dolmen wrote:
| The only feature of IMDB I use is cast info: explore movies where
| an actor played, then from a movie jump to another actor.
|
| Is it something you are building to track contributors across
| projects?
|
| I already see how I would be even more solicited on LinkedIn...
| sdesol wrote:
| This is shameless plug, but I have an analytics tool for GitHub
| orgs and repos and my goal is to make the data freely available.
| Here are some examples as to how analytics can be used to help
| users decide if they should use and/or adopt open source
| projects.
|
| https://devboard.gitsense.com/zed-industries
|
| https://devboard.gitsense.com/supabase
|
| https://devboard.gitsense.com/ollama
|
| My value proposition isn't the data, but the ability to gather,
| organize and update data at scale, so giving it (data) away free
| is not an issue for me.
| seanvelasco wrote:
| i find github.com/explore great at discovery - what specific
| functionality are you looking for? outside github, i found that
| oss projects generally get announced at twitter. most oss are
| full-blown products, so producthunt.
| scoofy wrote:
| I am the developer of https://golfcourse.wiki which I see as very
| _conceptually_ similar to what you 're trying to build. It's on
| App Engine, the front end is HTMX, my backend is Flask, and my DB
| is mongo. If you're in the SF area, I'd be happy to discuss the
| project with you, costs involved (pretty low), etc.
|
| I honestly had no idea what I was doing when I started it during
| the pandemic, but I now have about 2k unique users per month, and
| it seems to be holding itself together pretty well. My best
| metrics are the google search results which are going in a very
| positive direction.
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| This is the best that I've ever used to search for similar
| software:
|
| https://alternativeto.net/
|
| No alternative to it that I'm aware of.
| heyts wrote:
| I had an adjacent idea a few weeks ago, but centered more around
| the idea that it may be difficult for new open-source
| contributors to find appropriate issues to work on. Suggesting
| and allowing to discover interesting issues across multiple
| repositories would allow the prospective user to get a nice view
| of what interesting issues are available to make a first / second
| / third contribution to a project, and possibly to also track
| contributions / pull requests etc.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > While GitHub is an exceptional platform, it does not provide
| all the functionality I need
|
| It also doesn't contain all open source software. I'd be
| surprised if it even has most of it, but I don't know.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| There are so many sites like this already though, what is the
| point of yet another one?
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