How Ohloh increases competition of OpenSource projects

Ohloh LogoAs I wrote in one of my former postings lately I discovered the platform Ohloh. This platform provides a pretty nice functionality to combine the codebase of various software projects with others listed in this directory.
The platform directly accesses the cvs, subversion or git of the projects and analyzes it regarding …

  • Codebase – Total lines of project source code, excluding comments and blank lines
  • Activity – Number of commits made to the project source code each month
  • Contributors – Number of contributors who made changes to the project source code each month

OTRS as the world leading ticket solution amongst service management tools does not really know any competitive solutions but never the less I compared OTRS with the Request Tracker (RT) which is pretty widely used in the US.

If you take a look at the feature lists of both solutions it looks like RT would not provide you with that huge amount of functionalities like OTRS which offers +1,100 functions additional to those features you might expect from almost any professional trouble ticket system.

Codebase
As all of us have learned from the books as well as from our daily experience software development is all about the genius of solving as many tasks and calculations with only as many lines of code as necessary.
A relation of 6,000,000 (RT) vs. 175,000 (OTRS) lines of code where OTRS provides you with a much completer feature set, I really wonder what Best Practical needs all those lines of code for?
All graphs below show OTRS values in red and RT related values in green.
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Activity
Is there a value that defines how often a developer needs to check in his source code? Within OTRS common sense regulates how often a commit into our cvs needs to be made.
Obviously this differs to Best Practical…
[singlepic=19,320,240,,]

Contributors
Too many cooks spoil the broth…
The growth of OTRS Inc & OTRS AG went slow but constantly over the years since its foundation back in 2003.
The reason is simple: there is no venture capital within the company and every engagement of a new employee needs to be thought carefully. Latest graph shows that OTRS and RT are head-to-head with each other.
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