Last week I took part as master of ceremonies on an special event for FLOSS developers at .. Microsoft Spain offices! The idea for the meeting was to explore the different FLOSS technologies already supported by Microsoft Azure with speakers from different companies and communities like MongoDB, PhoneGap/Cordova, etc.
The event is part of the new openness strategy that is driving the company. But, I have thought about how open is really this movement? Of course, they are releasing a lot of code as Open Source, but is the company contributing to other FLOSS projects beyond their own ones? And by suprise, the answer has come from our own dashboards.
Many would consider OpenStack as an Azure competitor, and it is really surprising seeing that Microsoft is already fixing bugs or commiting code to it. Not too many, but they are doing something.
Even more interesting is to see that Microsoft is already doing commits to Red Hat products like RDO. Again, not that many, but we could conclude that something is changing inside.
On the other hand, these data reveal how important are these analytics on FLOSS projects not only for the obvious view of how is it going on but for other knowledge that could be extracted from the data:
- Key contributors, that could be hired by interested companies
- Companies contribution evolution, to analyze who is really driving the community or who is getting more interest in the project
- Code review timing, to see how fair is the process between competitors
- Community demography, to know how knowledge is retained or how is it dying
- … and many more
All of this is part of Bitergia services, so if you find them interesting, just ask!