I ran a query against Dash to get some sense for project activity over the past couple of years. The graph below shows a comparison of how many active projects we have at Eclipse, compared against the total number of projects.
For the purposes of this graph, I have defined a project as active in any month if it had at least one commit in that month.
I’ve observed a couple of interesting things. First, total number of projects (top line) seems to increase at a pretty regular rate. There are two significant drops in the total number of projects that align with the retirement of projects in the DSDP Restructuring of 2010 and the great Technology Subproject Culls of 2010 and 2011.
The other thing that I’ve observed is that the number of active projects is relatively stable. I’m not sure exactly what to make of this information. It’s worth noting that the number of active committers (using the same definition of “active” is also stable through the same time period).
The coincidental drop offs in December 2011 are also interesting: one might conclude that we must have killed off some active projects. That’s not the case. None of the nine Technology subprojects that were terminated and archived in that period had a single commit in all of 2011. 186 Eclipse projects made at least one commit in 2011. Of the 186 Eclipse projects that made commits in 2011, 58 did not make commits in December. 20 Eclipse projects that made commits in November 2011 did not have any commits in December. There were 5,598 total commits in November, but only 4,691 in December. I have to conclude that it has something to do with Santa Claus. Or Pirates.
