13 posts tagged with "Blog"

On June 3, 2025, the OSS-Compass Product Innovation Conference was successfully held at the Zhongguan New Garden, Peking University. Industry experts from top domestic and international institutions gathered to share insights on open source ecosystem development, including Peking University, Nanjing University, Institute of Software (CAS), National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, OpenAtom Open Source Foundation, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Linux Foundation CHAOSS community, OSCHINA, Baidu, ByteDance, Huawei, Honor, Beihang University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Tianjin University of Technology, Shanghai Open Source Information Technology Association, and CAS Institute of Science and Development.

Hosted by Wang Yehui, Co-Chair of the OSS-Compass Technical Committee, the conference kicked off with the theme "Breaking Traditional Evaluation Models: Let Real-World Scenarios Speak", featuring three core agendas: new service launches, the initiation of an ISO standard working group, and business planning for the AI working group. Real-world cases demonstrated the core value of four new services. Let's revisit the highlights of this open source feast!

In the afternoon of April 25, 2025, the 2025 Board Meeting of the OSS-Compass (hereinafter referred to as "Compass") Community was successfully held at the Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A total of 11 Board members attended this meeting. Among them, Zhou Junsong from the Software Institute of the National Center for Industrial Information Security Development Research, Ma Hongwei from Baidu, Liang Guanyu from the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qiu Ruiqiao from Peking University, Ma Quanyi and Wang Yehui from Huawei, and Long Wenxuan from ChicoHoude attended the meeting on-site. In addition, Tao Xianping and Wang Liang from Nanjing University, and Hongshu and Zhang Shengxiang from OSCHINA participated in the meeting online, jointly embarking on this in-depth exploration journey of the development of the open-source community.

In the wave of the vigorous development of the open-source community, OSS-Compass has established an open-source project evaluation system based on an indicator model. After two years of polishing and precipitation, its functions have been continuously improved, and the community has become increasingly mature. For open-source developers who want to make a difference in the OSS-Compass community, a deep understanding of the project's front-end technical architecture is the key to opening the door to contribution. In this article, we will delve into the front-end main repository project architecture and development environment of the OSS-Compass platform, covering key aspects such as its technology stack, file structure, routing system, API interaction, and development environment setup, helping everyone understand the design ideas and implementation details behind it. In the follow-up, we will further explore the management techniques of the project classification repository, the construction and optimization methods of the document repository, and study the details of API interaction to improve data interaction efficiency.

Hello, all open-source friends! Long time no see! In the new year, the OSS-Compass community will also bring you new surprises! Today, we will share with you the efficient development guide compiled by the OSS-Compass community. Let's take a look together!

Nowadays, with the vigorous development of open source communities, how to efficiently evaluate the health of projects, track the activities of contributors, and quantify the influence of the community has become the focus of attention for developers and enterprises. As an open source ecosystem analysis platform, OSS-Compass provides powerful technical support for community governance by integrating data collection, storage, calculation, and visualization capabilities. Based on the recently compiled OSS-Compass development guide, this article will analyze how to quickly deploy the OSS-Compass platform and develop customized indicators, enabling developers to make a leap from open source consumers to ecosystem builders.

On February 21, 2024, the CNCF open source project Linkerd announced that it would no longer provide stable builds. The source code will continue to be under the OSI-approved Apache v2 open source license. Non-stable builds will also still be provided through the open source project. This change is about the release artifacts of stable builds only, not about code, governance, community, or anything else.

So why is there a push back and why was this so unexpected by the CNCF community at large?

Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, quite accurately describes itself as “a small but mighty team of software engineers, network programmers, and distributed systems experts.” That small but mighty team has been the sole force behind the open source project for quite some time, and as their CEO writes, “to do that work and maintain that quality, there’s only one sustainable path: we need the many, many companies around the world that are building their businesses on top of Linkerd to do their part to fund the project,” and he bluntly lays it all out (and on the line) in his expanded blog post here.

In a month where another CNCF project, Flux, backed by Weaveworks called it quits and folded up its tent (see Alex Richardson’s post), one has to wonder what is going on under the big tent of the CNCF and if there’s any way to stop a more seismic shift in the stability of CNCF projects.

Let’s take a step back and look at open source project health metrics for the Linkerd project.

In the previous two articles, "Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (1) - Evolution and Trends" and "Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (2) - The Multidimensional Space of Evaluation Systems", I summarized three main directions of open source community evaluation and measurement: open source softwares, open source projects, and open source ecosystems. I also introduced a three-dimensional space of evaluation systems (Figure 1) and discussed four evaluation models in the intertwined space of "open source ecosystem" and "collaboration": Collaboration Development Index Model, Community Service and Support Model, Organizational Activity Model, and Community Activity Model (deployed in OSS-Compass). I used the example of PyTorch vs. TensorFlow to demonstrate the logical relationships between these models.

In this article, we will primarily focus on the intertwining between "open source ecosystem" and "people" that gave rise to two important evaluation models: Contributor Persona Model and Contributor Milestone Model. These two models are the results of collaborative research with Professor Liang Wang and his team of Nanjing University, and I sincerely appreciate the efforts they have put into this.

In my previous article, "Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (1) - Evolution and Trends", I summarized three main directions for evaluating and measuring open source communities: open source software, open source projects, and open source ecosystems. However, for the purpose of technical insight work, this is just the first step in a long journey.

As an engineer, I hope to see the emergence of a practical and feasible evaluation system with the following characteristics: the ability to help open source communities identify specific problems, assist people in discovering valuable open source communities, and predict industry trends.

In summary, this evaluation system should be practical, providing tangible value rather than being just an elusive idea.

In recent years, I have been engaged in work related to the evaluation of open source ecosystems. This series of articles aims to summarize my work experience, and organize the thoughts for upcoming work. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to exchanging ideas with everyone.

Through the observation of the academic and open source industry development in the past thirty years, we can find that the evaluation and measurement of the open source community mainly focus on three mainstream directions: open source software, open source projects, and open source ecosystems. The emergence of these directions is closely related to the era, and with the development of open source, their boundaries gradually blur, showing a trend of mutual inclusion. Due to the different focuses of various markets and user concerns, they develop somewhat independently.

Jierui Zhang，Ying Li，Liang Wang，Xianping Tao

Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology OSS Compass

Abstract​

In this study, we study the community evolution behavior in developer social networks around open source software projects, in response to the limitation of traditional community evolution analysis techniques being biased towards qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. We propose a set of community split, shrink, merge, and expand indices based on information entropy to measure the evolutionary behavior of open source developer social networks. Empirical studies demonstrate that these indices effectively characterize the evolution of open source communities, by achieving a 94.1% accuracy in drawing conclusions consistent with existing qualitative work through simple rules. Furthermore, additional research indicates a significant correlation between the proposed community evolution indices and the productivity of open source projects, represented by the number of commits. The information entropy-based measurement indices presented in this study provide quantitative support for understanding and analyzing the evolutionary behavior of open source communities.