Google Comes Up With A Metric For Gauging Critical Open-Source Projects

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Comes Up With A Metric For Gauging Critical Open-Source Projects

Google as part of their involvement in the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has devised the "Criticality Score" as a means of judging crucial open-source projects...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenSSF-Criticality-Score

[elatllat]

That seems like a dev popularity score.

A score based on usage, network exposure, and language saifty would indicate what projects should get more attention.

[uid313]

Well there are some very important projects that are maintained by just one guy or so, I think it was some NTP date software that was widely used by pretty much all Linux distributions and servers world wide.

Also software written in Python or JavaScript are likely going to have more contributors because of lower bar to entry and since many are taught those languages in school. While projects coded in lower level system languages like C, C++, Rust, Ada, etc is going to have fewer.

I can imagine TeX being pretty important, but I can also imagine it having almost no commits, and only one inactive contributor.

[gQuigs]

They use the obligatory xkcd in their announcement. Awesome.

[ix900]

Slap a number on everything according to a mathematician. Importance isn't always just a number.

[You-]

Any score is useless if it does not also take the bus factor into account.

"How many people have to be hit by a bus for this project to fail"

If it is a critical piece of equipment and the bus factor is 1 or close to it, there are real concerns.

[zerothruster]

Apart from what people have already said, I'm amazed that BitCoin can be regarded as an important project - I thought it was primarily for fraudsters.

[Calinou]

Their ten most critical C++ projects include Tensorflow, Ceph, PyTorch, Bitcoin, Electron, Marlin, Cataclysm-DDA, LLVM, RocksDB, and QGIS.

I didn't know roguelikes were critical. :P

[andyprough]

Making lists and then manipulating and monetizing them - it's what google does. I wonder how they intend to embed their global ad slinging and private data harvesting into these projects.

[piorunz]

Bitcoin fifth most critical C++ project on the planet according to Google. Just in time when Human Rights Foundation started sponsorship for Bitcoin Core development. Not bad prospects