Github Has Surpassed, in Popularity? Comparison of open source software hosting facilities and web-based source code repository; comparaison des forges logicielles

It is evident that  it's not easy to compare the facilities that host open-source development services.
Il n'est pas si évident de comparer les forges logicielles (une forge logicielle est un site web hébergeant la gestion du développement de logiciels (souvent  libres)).

1/ This problem of popularity is an ill-posed problem, although the Redmonk analysis is quite interesting (an evaluation of the metrics from commits at four mainstream forges – CodePlex, GitHub, Google Code, and Sourceforge):
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/06/02/blackduck-webinar/
voir la traduction en français:
http://www.blog-nouvelles-technologies.fr/archives/4294/github-a-depasse-sourceforge-et-google-code-en-terme-de-popularite/

Number of commits is the selected quantity. I think it is not a good measure. If a developer commits 100 changes/day, is he a better developer than somebody who commits every changes only once a day before he goes home?


2/ See the following article on RWW (published @ June 2, 2011):   http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/06/github-has-passed-sourceforge.php
"Github Has Surpassed Sourceforge(SF.net),  Google Code  and Microsoft's CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. " 

3/ See  the following article on sourceforge.net (published @ June 3, 2011):  
 http://sourceforge.net/blog/github-collaboration-and-haters/
"Many people use us together; GitHub for collaboration, and SF.net for distribution, since our end-user interface is a little more friendly to the non-techies."
  
Here's how the langages broke down on a forge by forge basis:

Source: Black Duck Software

4/ A "classic" analysis of popularity with 10 quantities:


Website ranks:

• Alexa rank
• Compete rank
• Quantcast rank

Pages indexed

• google
• Yahoo
• bing

Website Backlinks

• google
• bing
• yahoo
• alexa

With my "ex-ample" philosophy and dimentional analysis, we need  "ample quantities" to compare. See below 16 snapshots showing the 10 ranks obtained by http://www.webrankstats.com/
(data @ June, 5, 2011).

GitHub. The following result is impressive because SF has been online since 1999, and Github, only since 2008. 

Google Code is a google.com sub-domain and needs a more precise analysis. 

             Where visitors go on Google. com sub-domain:
             The % of site traffic code.google.com = 0.43%

then: 0.43%*150M=0.35M of unique visitors

CodePlex (Microsoft)

Assembla

Launchpad

tigris.org

Bitbucket (It is similar to GitHub, which uses Git. )

BerliOS (German; BerliOS  for "Berlin Open Source" is a project founded by FOKUS, a Fraunhofer Society Institute located in Berlin, to coordinate the different interest groups in the field of open source software. BerliOS is funded by the German government.)

Gitorious (Gitorious uses the Git distributed revision control system)

TuxFamily (French; TuxFamily.org est une association loi de 1901.)

Savannah's website is split into two domain names: savannah.gnu.org for software that is officially part of the GNU Project, and savannah.nongnu.org for all other software.

Another point of view: SF.net and GitHub.com have many subdomains.

GitHub = 82% of the traffic

SF.net   = 66% of the traffic

gist.github=2.5%

      Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others.

      All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned,

      forkable and usable as a git repository.

audacity.SF=2%

     Audacity is a free software, cross-platform digital audio editor

     and recording application.

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GitHub, Bitbucket and Gitorious are web-based hosting services for software development projects that use the Git revision control system.
Git, initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development, is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed.
The success of GitHub is linked to the power of Git.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities