Ask HN: I want to create IMDB for open source projects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40041954

by _bggh • 2 years ago

241 142 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am interested in developing a web application that bears resemblance to IMDb but for open-source projects. The primary goal of this application will be to serve as a directory for discovering open-source projects.

While GitHub is an exceptional platform, it does not provide all the functionality I need. Therefore, I plan to add a search function that enables users to filter projects.

1. What do you think about this idea? 2. However, I am uncertain about how to plan the product. Can you assist me with this?

mattl2• 2 years ago

You might want to see if you can improve this? https://directory.fsf.org/

ganeshdole• 2 years ago

Definitely! I can improve the UI and add more filtering options.

nunobrito• 2 years ago

Doesn't accept MIT nor Apache-2.0 projects among many other licenses that are "less free".

epistasis• 2 years ago

More than two decades ago, before git existed, there was something called Freshmeat (I think?) that published about new open source releases. Whatever happened to that... the closest thing I can find now is:

https://www.freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Fresh...

EvanAnderson• 2 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking of, too. It was freshmeat.net[0], got sold, renamed (to "Freecode"), then died.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode

Diederich• 2 years ago

Here's an example of what it looked like 21 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20030204090614/http://freshmeat....

Back then, for years before and after, I looked at it almost every day. It was my go-to 'take a quick break from work while at work' site.

cmrdporcupine3• 2 years ago

Hah I just concurrently posted basically the same thing.

Thanks for the nostalgia-link. Man I miss those years.

cmrdporcupine3• 2 years ago

Freshmeat was a daily (or multiple times a day) visit for me. Or sub to the RSS feed.

Back then it was Lambda the Ultimate and Freshmeat on daily rotation.

squarefoot• 2 years ago

Freshmeat was exceptionally good, with a much better UI than Sourceforge which was also strong back in the day. It was however closed source, so as soon as the assets were purchased by entities not interested in keeping it operational, it died as it happens with closed source products. The current owner is the same that owns SourceForge, which presumably don't want to compete with themselves by reviving it. http://freshcode.club/ is considered its successor.

jjirsa• 2 years ago

Remarkable to me that ctrl-f, "Sourceforge" had 3 hits on this page. Would have expected a dozen.

jasonjmcghee• 2 years ago

Assuming success / adoption, I would be careful with how you approach this.

IMDB is centered on reviews and ratings of a static media asset.

Open source projects are often growing/changing. They might have a really intriguing seed of an idea with an interesting roadmap, but the prototype is poorly executed / buggy. Does that deserve a low ranking / poor review?

lowercased• 2 years ago

Ideally, the rankings should be associated with a time period. Something ranked high... but all those high rankings are from 2 years ago, and there's been none since... that's a different signal that current high rankings and current code changes.

Moogs• 2 years ago

I think how Steam handles game rankings is a good example of this. They separate out "All Reviews" from "Recent Reviews". Helps identify current reception of a game which may have had a buggy release.

warbled_tongue• 2 years ago

There's a case to be made for done-but-not-dead projects that are feature complete and still the go to solution.

TZubiri• 2 years ago

U mean github?

CodeWriter232• 2 years ago

I think you misspelled "google"

Brainspackle• 2 years ago

This was my first thought. With projects like the "awesome lists of..." stuff too, I feel those do a pretty good job of distilling the more popular or in demand projects to browse through. Then you've got places popping up around those, like https://selfh.st/apps/ (which I just discovered via HN a week or two ago)

neilk• 2 years ago

OpenHub (formerly Ohloh) tries, or tried, to do this. Seems like it’s not getting a lot of love lately but perhaps you can learn from it.

https://openhub.net/

One useful feature is the ability to coalesce different identities. For example, I've released libraries on my personal accounts as well as through work. For a while I used to link there from my personal site since it nearly summarized that I’d made N thousand commits to OSS. But I stopped. I’m not really sure what the point is for me.

https://openhub.net/accounts/neilk

If it’s bragging rights, we have Github stars. Effectively (and sadly) open source is a resume building tool nowadays, so maybe that?

What use cases do you see?

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

What use cases do you see?

"People who liked this also liked ..."

"Most active developers on this also developed ..."

"More projects using similar tech stack are ..."

The value of IMDB is not getting a score on a movie, or a synopsis, it's in discovering other movies[1] that you might like.

[1] The easiest way to discover is to ask for a list of Christopher Nolan movies :-)

stanislavb• 2 years ago

Yup. OpenHub is nice. I love the simplicity of its design. What do you think about LibHunt https://www.libhunt.com? It's similar to OpenHub to some extent; however, it is more focussed on alternatives and comparisons of libraries. For example, a nice trick is to open any github repo and replace "github" with "libhunt" to find alternatives of that project. E.g. https://www.libhunt.com/site/find_alternatives

Aeolun• 2 years ago

Effectively (and sadly) open source is a resume building tool nowadays

Is that sad? Isn’t that a purely positive signal?

asciimov• 2 years ago

This is an app store, not IMDB.

I don't like the idea of some "authority" picking the winners and losers in the open-source space.

What makes IMDB work and this not, is that Movies are static things. You aren't going to one day find the 1957 romantic comedy Desk Set[1], suddenly turn into a slasher film. Where as open source software changes, sometimes drastically.

[1]- You should watch Desk Set, it has Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The main plot is about a computer taking over the job of information workers.

simonw4• 2 years ago

How certain are you that projects are actively seeking to attract potential contributors?

Managing open source contributors is non-trivial work. It's actually one of the harder forms of engineering management, because you're dealing with volunteers - you can't even really directly tell contributors what to do, you have to deploy a whole bunch of (difficult) soft skills and influence and leadership to point people in the right direction.

How confident are you that there's sufficient demand from projects to attract more contributors in this way?

aendruk2• 2 years ago

Yeah I have zero interest in actively soliciting attention to my projects. I shared them in case that helps anyone. We have web search.

joewadcan• 2 years ago

This.

Just because something should exist, doesn't mean it can be created today. The effort to build and attract open source projects is a monumental task. Unless you're offering something BIG - there's alot of inertia to overcome.

I'd focus on building on top of the GitHub API to create those features you want. Not only will you focus your time on the unique stuff, GitHub can help with distribution and discovery.

kristopolous2• 2 years ago

I'd imagine there's almost always a door open for talented and competent people looking to make meaningful contributions and have substantive impact.

simonw4• 2 years ago

I love it when people contribute to my projects by opening an issue, discussing their idea, then contributing a clean PR with bundled documentation and tests.

Actively soliciting contributions isn't necessarily the way to get that.

Look at what happens with Hacktoberfest: there are hundreds of thousands of newer developers out there who want to earn their stripes by contributing to an open source project. The amount of work this creates for the projects themselves is enormous.

dolmen4• 2 years ago

This is a wrong assumption.

Opening the code doesn't necessarily mean that external contributions are expected.

Reports of issues might be welcome, code contributions less.

I've seen too many popular projects polluted by low quality contributions. When they get merged without care, the project's quality degrades. When they accumulate, the load on the maintainers shoulders becomes heavy.

haswell• 2 years ago

The primary goal of this application will be to serve as a directory for discovering open-source projects

Maybe an increase in potential contributors is a natural outcome of increased discoverability, but I’m not convinced that a new site that is primarily facilitating project discovery will drastically change contributions.

If you’re the type of person to submit code to a project, you’re probably already scouring the web to find the projects that are most relevant to you, and a site like this just makes that process more efficient.

Most users of OSS are not contributors, and this project seems to be aimed at one of the barriers to adopting OSS: knowing where to look for options when you realize you need Tool X for Project Y.

simonw4• 2 years ago

That makes sense. As an open source maintainer a directory that helps people discover my projects in order to use them is a whole lot more interesting than one that helps me find contributors.

CodeWriter232• 2 years ago

There's a lot of "Awesome" that various individuals have made to curate vertical interests. Example: https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-ios

thebeardisred• 2 years ago

If it's that you like the spirit of open source I would take a project in this list and contribute back to that project?

There is potentially a lot of blind spots you have (e.g. What types of mechanisms are you going to have for license filtering?). Your questions along with request for assistance read much more as a request for mentorship as opposed to introducing more code into the world that people aren't reading.

roshanj• 2 years ago

This sounds very similar to Ovio, which matches open-source projects with contributors that have relevant skills. There isn't a rating system but there are tools to browse and find good projects & issues to contribute to for aspiring OSS devs

https://ovio.org/

brianllamar2• 2 years ago

What happened to Ovio. I haven’t heard from them in years. Is it still active?

kubatyszko• 2 years ago

Like SourceForge.net ?

cowsup• 2 years ago

The main question you should ask yourself: Will this attract the right kind of contributions?

Whenever I contribute to open-source, it’s typically because I found the project on my own, and, by extension, I already have an idea of how it should operate, and so I’m able to recognize issues or missing features. If an open-source project I’m using already works great, I make no changes. This is how people’s mindset should operate.

Instead, a project like this seems ripe for people to come in and make any sort of change. OSS maintainers already deal with garbage PRs because of self-taught developers hearing that they should “contribute to open source to learn,” and then it’s just a README change or other unnecessary tweaks from absolute beginners. If an OOS maintainer put their repo on your platform, I feel like they would deal with a lot more of that.

It also seems ripe for abuse from nefarious OSS maintainers, who will use that to just promote their own projects, rather than actively seeking contributions. If they have a limited scope as to the changes they’ll accept, and are using your platform just as a means to get more eyeballs on their Donation link, that’s bad for everyone.

Just some things to keep in mind before you proceed.

kijin• 2 years ago

How would you measure complexity and level of saturation? If you take a git repo and spit out a meaningful number for those, that could be a pretty useful technology in its own right, regardless of its integration into a standalone platform.

Who are the target users? Newbies looking for open source projects with low-hanging fruit that they can pad their resumes with? Projects that need better documentation than what GPT can write for them? Or the Lasse Collins of the world who are desperately looking for a Jia Tan to help them? There are different kinds of open source projects, each with very different attitudes toward casual contributors. Which kinds do you want to focus on, at least in the beginning? Answering this question will help you plan what kinds of interactions you want to enable on your platform.

alberth• 2 years ago

Feature (not a Product)

This seems more suitable as a feature of GitHub, not a standalone product.

(Interesting idea nonetheless, please don’t take my comments as being negative)

paxys• 2 years ago

Why do you need approval or product planning (whatever that is)? It seems like a solid idea. Go build it and see how it turns out. That's the only way to know whether people will find it useful or not.

INTPenis• 2 years ago

Given recent supply chain attacks I think this can be a good idea. But it seems like a lot of work to centralize information in one place. A lot of unpaid work. Because no one is going to pay you for this information.

I predict it would soon use three major APIs and leave everyone's private gitea or gitweb install in obscurity.

dolmen4• 2 years ago

https://openhub.net/ already exists (but it looks quite dead).

gentleman11• 2 years ago

Make a good website; try to get graphic and Ux designers on board so it won’t be fugly; then contact people, one at a time, using personalized emails. They’ll agree to be on there. Eventually you’ll hit enough of a critical mass that people will start signing themselves up somehow, or asking to be on there. How do you verify? How do you keep spam out? You can figure that out next year or the year after.

Then figure out why a person might want to visit your site. Curiosity? Interest in a person? To learn if a foss project is any good? To see who has traction to decide what to contribute to? Something else?

Bonus points: a podcast with interviews with various community leaders; or try to encourage a volunteer to do such a thing. And try to get on other pro open source podcasts. I bet companies like purism would love any free publicity they can get

Then, I’d you catch on, years from now, look out for Microsoft trying to crush you via some competing index tied to GitHub. Try to avoid the temptation to be acquired by Microsoft. Try to set up your company in a way that convinces foss people that this can never happen, Eg, put some fsf people on the board or something?

Lastly, to make the gnu people happy, make your website usable without proprietary JavaScript and consider open sourcing your client and server code. After all, the valuable thing you hold isn’t the site or tech: it’s the network and traction you build

boplicity• 2 years ago

I'm not sure how much value making something "not fugly" really matters. Design should be based on functionality, not anti-fugliness. In my experience, design considerations should come after building a successful growth "feedback loop." (Or whatever you want to call it.) At that point, you may decide making your website look "polished" isn't even necessary.

IMDB was certainly quite ugly for a long time. See:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100712165326/http://www.imdb.c...

Other examples of extremely successful, low design sites:

https://archiveofourown.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/

gremlinunderway• 2 years ago

I'm not sure how much value making something "not fugly" really matters.

Eh its still good advice. Far too often decent UX/UI criticism is waved aside as "who cares about making it pretty" and aesthetics and useability very often go hand-in-hand.

xianm• 2 years ago

How do you verify? How do you keep spam out?

An idea for this: you could require them to commit a file to their repo with a specific name and the content would contain a one time use token to add that repo to a users profile.

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

Make a good website; try to get graphic and Ux designers on board so it won’t be fugly;

Get the designers on board, by all means, but not to make it pretty: make it easy to use, understand, navigate.

If something needs to be pretty before the target audience uses it, it's almost always a vitamin, not a painkiller.

Nux• 2 years ago

Freshmeat v2? :-)

vdfs• 2 years ago

There is something similar to your idea: https://www.libhunt.com/ Iguess majority had this idea at certain point

passion__desire• 2 years ago

this could be a feature? suggest alternatives

https://alternativeto.net/software/matplotlib/

remram• 2 years ago

https://alternativeto.net/ fills that role for me, it has crowd-sourced reviews, searchable facets, and of course recommendations.

Not limited to open source products, but maybe that's a good thing so you can find alternatives.

brimstedt• 2 years ago

I think it's a great idea if it's done right. I miss freshmeat.net :-)

A database of open source software would help when looking for suitable products, personally I tend to scout for open source options before looking into closed options.

If it contained easily searchable/filterable information on license, "activity" (i.e how alive the project is), hosting/deployment options, development language, operating system, it would be great.

Also if it has info on how it accepts contributions, it'd be nice.

Probably you could scrape I formation from GitHub, gitlab and similar sites and you could also let projects supply information for you in a "oss-info.yaml/json" in the root dir of the project.

bakoo• 2 years ago

Freshcode.club isn't as vast as freshmeat felt, but at least it looks the same =]

kpandit• 2 years ago

I can only give you a datapoint but unfortunately no advice

1. I never discovered any movie on IMDB. I go to IMDB to find trivia, cast or some other fact about a movie that I somehow already knew of.

2. My interest in an open source project will not be influenced by its popularity or any other metrics but purely by what it means to me. I submitted my first PR to an open source project not because it is popular but because it lacked something I needed.

P.S. Thanks to all the nice people who generously contribute to OSS and offer their work for free. Hats off and respect.

poisonborz• 2 years ago

I discovered gazillions of movies on Imdb, actually it's my primary resource. Through either the "more like this" carousel on a movie, or by filtered search (eg. best rated 50s comedy with at least 15k reviews).

SCUSKU• 2 years ago

The best resource for me on IMDb is definitely just the lists of "Top 250 Movies of all Time"[1] or the "Top 50 $GENRE Movies of All Time" [2].

@OP: Maybe just finding a way to curate the most popular open source libraries into lists per language, framework, etc would be helpful? For example, for me I'm not particularly interested in all open source projects, but I'm really interested in Django stuff. Hence why I love looking at the awesome-django curated list [3]. Maybe an application to just rank all packages for a given ecosystem? Just spitballing.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/ [2]: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres... [3]: https://github.com/wsvincent/awesome-django

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

I use it to discover new movies, though mostly by drilling down into cast and crew, see what other projects they've worked on.

Was thinking this "ossdb" could work similarly.

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

I have to read the reviews; I do that for restaurants as well; the ratings don’t mean so much to me personally; people often up and down vote on a whim and emotion (just in a bad mood) so reading why they (particularly) didn’t like something tells me if I would like it.

saurik• 2 years ago

Like the other reply, I also find movies in IMDB and it is also my "primary" source, though I use it differently: I generally want to watch movies in clusters of who's involved, so I will watch a movie I ended up thinking was amazing and then want to see more movies by the same director or starring the same actors, etc.

nine_k• 2 years ago

To counter your points (all valid):

- I did discover interesting movies on IMDB. It was more by chance though, while looking up info on known movies.

- Popularity of a piece of OSS may be important when choosing to use it for an org. Something alive and widely used has better chances of survival in the future, and/or speed of reaction to security incidents.

That said, I agree that IMDB is not what I'd like the directory of OSS to resemble. I'd rather go after imitating tvtropes.

mcmoor• 2 years ago

Hmm, what would tv tropes for OSS projects looks like?

haunter• 2 years ago

Not on IMDB but discovered a lot on Letterboxd, it's my primary source for new films

InexSquirrel• 2 years ago

Interesting. I use IMDB as a filter, for score and synopsis. I rarely find new movies there (find recommendations elsewhere), but I basically filter anything out that sits below a 7, or include anything 6+ if it's in a genre I happen to like. I suppose I could use rotten tomatoes for that too.

cs02rm0• 2 years ago

My behaviour is similar.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't change if something different were available that gave some (unspecified) advantage.

_giorgio_2• 2 years ago

I discovery movies only on torrent sites.

Imdb is quite good if you're just looking for the best 100 movies ever made.

antifa2• 2 years ago

What torrent sites are best for discovery?

Scrounger• 2 years ago

I never discovered any movie on IMDB. I go to IMDB to find trivia, cast or some other fact about a movie that I somehow already knew of.

Then you're clearly using IMDB wrong.

IMDB is owned by Amazon, therefore, their recommendation algorithms are quite good.

And like Amazon, if you create an account and feed it data about your preferences and wishlists, these recommendations get better over time.

I've discovered countless new movies and TV shows I wouldn't have discovered otherwise thanks to IMDB.

tomcam• 2 years ago

IMDB is owned by Amazon, therefore, their recommendation algorithms are quite good.

Amazon user since day 1 or thereabouts. Their recommendation algorithm has never ever been useful to me. Anecdata, I know.

28304283409234• 2 years ago

I still mourn Freshmeat.net

cmrdporcupine3• 2 years ago

So like freshmeat.net back in the day?

shallow-mind• 2 years ago

Anyone remembers freshmeat.net?

gbolcer• 2 years ago

Just curious how you would populate the data?

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

By what process will the projects be added to the db? I would argue for having some sort of automation process for this. If it's curated by a human, they will eventually bore of it and abandon this.

dolmen4• 2 years ago

Automating also requires resources to keep the DB up to date.

Just look at the state of https://openhub.net/ .

brudgers• 2 years ago

1. How will it be better than Github stars? Open source developers use Github already. Closed source developers use it too and Github is big enough to moderate the rating system (at least somewhat).

How will your search function be better than Google? (and how and who will classify projects?)

2. If it is important to you, build a ShowHN. Don't plan, just build and be ready to pivot. Don't expect people to help you.

What most people want is not a list of tools. They want an expert opinion.

IMDb works because movies are passively consumed; have a short period of engagement and there aren't many of them....a few hundred theatrical releases a year in the US.

Good luck.

zettabomb• 2 years ago

I actually really like this if you're the kind of person like myself who prefers to be able to self-host service and work off cloud. The "awesome-" Github repos might be a good place to start sourcing information. A few things I think would be nice:

* You should be able to easily tell how the project is hosted. I prefer containerized applications, but there's people who don't. Sometimes they make you install their own hosting platform - yuck.

* If a paid version is available, how much is it? Are the features provided by that paid version big important ones or it is mostly just for support?

* If there are screenshots, an easy screenshot browser would be nice. Many projects either do not provide them, or they're in the Github repo which doesn't have an easy left/right browse functionality. I want to know if the UI sucks before spending the time to deploy.

* What's the most comparable commercial project? How does it excel and how does it fall short? Perhaps a (moderated) comments or reviews section would be worth it here.

* What about interoperability with other popular tools? It's difficult tell sometimes if a project supports something as simple as LDAP. This would depend somewhat on the product which features are shown.

* Ffs please provide a semi meaningful graph of forks. The way Github does it with Insights is nearly useless.

I suppose it would benefit to ask people with a reasonable amount of experience for a given field what they want/need too. That's not necessarily something you'd see on the site, but it'd be done in the background. For instance, I want 3MF support for 3D printer slicers, but that's not relevant for a kanban board.

As far as interfaces, I enjoy the filtering provided by sites like Texas Instruments or Analog Devices for electronic components. They really managed to figure that out.

Good luck with your project! I hope it succeeds, I would very much enjoy such a tool.

aristofun• 2 years ago

1. amazing, go for it!

2. i don't know, but don't plan, just cobble up something first, some barely working POC. Then you'll have a solid ground for fruitful discussions and feedback.

tomashertus• 2 years ago

I use Github's Trends (https://github.com/trending) for discovery, and for all other searches, I use their search and tags. It never failed me to find what I was looking for. The star system already provides you with ratings for open-source projects, and Github's search has powerful filtering. I don't anticipate a general need for such a project.

If you are junior developer interested in learning development or a specific technology, it would be great project to build and open source though.

ivanjermakov• 2 years ago

Start with a user diagram. What user is suppose to have in mind? I feel like "I want to discover OSS projects" is too general and niche at the same time.

For example, "Free Photoshop alternative" is a lot more likely scenario where such service might help. Btw I think https://alternativeto.net is pretty good for that.

jolj• 2 years ago

it's not that rating is what's missing, github stars are kind of a proxy for that

what's missing are curated lists of projects you need to use for a specific reason: you want to setup a web site? which framework do you use, db, api style, formatter, linter, etc what about SIMD libraries? Java unit testing?

firtoz• 2 years ago

1: yes 2: build for yourself first. Make it feel great for yourself, and then your friends, or anyone you can keep bothering without worrying whether you are bothering them. These could be passionate users, or friends and family.

What kind of planning do you need though, like, "how to build it", or "what would users want"?

I as a potential user would want to see:

Is it actively maintained?

License

Category/compatibility (like want to search for things compatible with remix or react three fiber but not the latest version)

Amazon style product reviews, split between ease of use, bugs

Community quality and links

muratsu• 2 years ago

Since it’s not a paid product the best way to test your hypothesis is to ship an MVP and track usage :)

You can chat with GPT to help you plan things. It’s really good for this type of stuff.

rurban• 2 years ago

Easy. You just need the scrape the various hubs, like gh, gitlab, sf.net, bitbucket, savannah, codeberg, sourcehut, ...

devd00d• 2 years ago

Two sites are alreading doing this really well:

https://osssoftware.org/ https://selfh.st/

nox1012• 2 years ago

Interestingly I just went to osssoftware.org, clicked "design" and it showed photopea which AFAIK is not open source

https://osssoftware.org/tools/photopea/

stainlu• 2 years ago

This idea is interesting. But I think you are on the wrong mindset: literally merging product and features together won't get the work done. Instead, think about customers.Think about how current use case. - Why are they using open-source projects? - How are they using them? - Why don't they use other products? The core here is that we use open-source projects NOT because they are open-source, but they are available and cater to my need. So this is actually IMDb for all softwares.

The second question is, you are making something real big if you want to build another website. Will a browser plugin for github work? If yes, go for it.

That's my suggestion

franky47• 2 years ago

IMHO, the value of IMDb is in its network graph. I spent countless hours navigating films, directors, actors and the like to discover hidden gems.

Open-source may have a similar graph (projects, contributors, sponsors), and could make for a fantastic content/talent discovery mechanism.

However, a lot of IMDb's content is user-curated. What is your content acquisition strategy?

specproc2• 2 years ago

I put this on another comment, but I like it so much I'll do it again here.

This is fabulous, and pretty much the graph you're looking for: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/

politelemon• 2 years ago

If you're planning it to have ratings and reviews, a la IMDb, remember that the key difference is there are people at the other end of the ratings. With media productions, the ratings are up against a company wall. With open source projects it's against people volunteering their time.

Seeing how people behave on ratings sites, it's pretty obvious that this can open up developers to abuse and harassment, if it gains popularity and traction.

phendrenad2• 2 years ago

Interesting idea. I want this to exist. It's needed now that many projects have left github. The closest thing I can think of to what you want to make are those "awesome x" repos on github which list projects related to x (e.g.: https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm)

It needs a memorable name like wesource or youcode.

You'll probably want a way for maintainers to claim a project (like google allows businesses to do on maps). Community management in general seems hard.

The other hard part will determining relevancy. What do you show on the homepage?

Ad-supported or donation-based?

Look to large wikis and public resources like everymac.com for inspiration maybe.

instagraham• 2 years ago

I think semantic search will be important, open source project documentation can be a bit obscure so it can be hard to find what you're looking for with a cursory Google search.

I want to build x that does y using z, where you your database has x y and z - but maybe x y and z's own github pages don't explain what their code is capable off as well as you do. I think that would add value to what already exists.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

When I think of IMDB, I think about using it to get granular information about a movie, not to discover new movies. I use it for finding out who were the cast and crew (and what else did they work on), how much was the box office, when was it released.

I assume that's not what you mean though. You wouldn't, for example, list the credits for each open source project, i.e. who were the engineers, who were the QA testers? Or maybe you would! But that seems like it'd be a ton of work, and supporting the changing roster over different versions seems like it'd be a scope nightmare.

(I have always wanted this website to exist, though. I just think it's impossible without a software industry equivalent of the screen actors guild, or MPAA, or whichever entity it is that mandates rules about who gets credit for a film)

Instead, do you mean more like a big searchable list of open source projects? If so, I'd still want to know what kind of information you plan on collecting about each project, to know whether I would use it or not.

jmbwell• 2 years ago

I like the idea of looking up a given project and seeing a list of other projects by the same contributors across all the various hubs. That's a big use case for IMDB for me... _"wow, what an actor/director/writer; I wonder what else they've done I should see"_

I also like the idea of consolidating all the "awesome*" lists, which have been very useful for me for discovering software.

But I also like the idea of automated rankings, especially if it can avoid being clogged with clickbait, astroturf, and SEO like some popular software comparison type sites I can think of.

So I guess what you're considering might be kind of a list engine. Build a big meta-database, then provide both curated lists (top rankings, contributor lists, etc.), and user-generated lists.

I think I'd check out such a site

vinay_ys• 2 years ago

However, I am uncertain about how to plan the product. Can you assist me with this?

List your fav features of IMDB that you want to emulate in your project. Then, scope your project to something you can do in 3 months and do it and show off to users and get feedback. Then, after that figure out what to do next.

What do you think about this idea?

There are common fallacies and pitfalls when someone says they want to do "like X for Y". (Like Uber for shopping etc). Learn about them and make sure your idea isn't suffering from those same issues.

wongarsu• 2 years ago

The main feature that's on my wishlist for open-source directories (including package repositories etc) are better features for surfacing related projects. "people who use this also use that", "people who looked at this project but aren't using it are instead using that", etc.

specproc2• 2 years ago

You may appreciate the map of github [0] it's a fantastic piece of work that trended here a while back.

[0] https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/

DowagerDave• 2 years ago

funny enough this was the killer feature of CDNow: human curation before Amazon bought them and destroyed the product.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

Yeah I mean, there are dozens of low effort websites already that scrape from Github for this. They are generally worthless. I think you need to think carefully so you don't just make another one of those.

Reviews might be a good differentiator, but obviously that's hard to get content for.

brianllamar2• 2 years ago

openbase did reviews and got up to 400k users. They couldn’t figure how monetize and shut down I think their blog post on it is still available somewhere.

rhardih• 2 years ago

If you want inspiration on how to do this in a good way, I've always been a big fan of how https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ surfaces just the right information and lets you compare projects to others in the same category.

nonethewiser• 2 years ago

It's not immediately clear why or how one would search open source projects.

Is it to discover tools that solve a specific problem?

Is it just for entertainment purposes?

I am not a heavy IMDB user but I just go there to get actor names by movie title or lookup rating by movie title.

bruce511• 2 years ago

Let me make a semi-cynical reply, and at the same time challenge you to prove me wrong.

Let me also say that you learn more from failure than success, so even if this goes as I predict, you'll learn a lot about this kind of idea, and that alone may be worth it.

I predict the project will fail. Here's my thinking;

Firstly, projects should always start with a revenue model. You didn't mention one so either you chose not to mention it, or you don't have one. This project will cost money every month, in hosting fees if nothing else. If it becomes popular it'll fail because you can't afford it.

Secondly it'll fail because the data needs to be curated. If it isn't, and it becomes popular it'll be buried in low-quality submissions. There are thousands and thousands of everything released as open source. 99% of it is rubbish (just like commercial stuff.)

Curating costs time or money. Once you get a day job, or another OSS idea, this one will lose your attention, and with it any sense of quality.

Lastly there's a network effect problem. To be valuable you need the directory to be populated. To get populated it needs to be valuable.

As a bonus, someone else proposes such a directory every other week. Some have been successful for a while. But they don't stick around. Why do you suppose that is? Why doesn't a quality directory already exist? The idea is not novel, sooo ..... ?

Good luck!

interactivecode• 2 years ago

I like the idea, but I think looking at imdb from a movie viewer perspective is not really doing it justice. imdb is first and foremost an industry directory. This creates the value for everyone to fill their profiles and use it as the source of truth. “Finding cool movies to watch” in that sense is secondary.

The idea of a imdb for open source is really cool, cracking the code to get industry buy in will in my opinion be the way to ensure a long tail of value for anyone using it.

itronitron• 2 years ago

> it does not provide all the functionality I need

So, do something that provides the functionality you need. It might be useful to others but probably not.

I think that a search function that also enables filtering on attributes would be useful, but an 'IMDB' for open source projects sounds like a terrible idea.

chha• 2 years ago

One of the first things you need to think about is the inclusion criteria.

Wikipedia bases all its content on the following: "A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject."

This is flexible enough to allow a lot of stuff, but also causes endless debates, discussions and complaints when content is removed. This is (in my opinion) one of the things that actually give Wikipedia value. If everything is permitted, separating spam from actual content is hopeless.

Defining a scope for your application is a must; if you gain even the slightest popularity, every self-serving developer is going to try to piggyback on you. "See, my project is listed on xyz, therefore it's famous and hence I'm a rockstar."

-Do you want to include any project hosted anywhere? -Incomplete/unfinished projects? -Forks? -Do you want to limit yourself to particular licenses? -What about ecosystems such as PyPi, Nuget, npm and all the rest? Code is mainly hosted on github, but do you want to maintain any kind of relation between source and package?

I think this could be handy, both for finding alternatives if you have an issue with a library or if you're looking for "something" that does <abc>.

paradite• 2 years ago

I made an encyclopedia for frontend with json and markdown:

https://github.com/paradite/frontend-encyclopedia

dogcomplex• 2 years ago

Tall order. Github stars are maybe closest these days?

- Maybe should be an aggregator-aggregator, using github stars and all the various metrics/lists you can find, making formal affiliations with those sites so there's no ill-will?

- Maybe a decentralized governance (or clear neutrality in listing mechanism) to encourage people to participate knowing you're not gonna turn bad?

- Maybe section off a bit more wishlisting projects people WANT to exist (and subscribe to updates on as others fulfill)?

- Maybe a place to complain and critique existing software (closed or open source) and dream up alternatives (like a reverse engineering or UX critique forum?)

- Maybe some affiliates program to get projects to backlink, and/or incentives program to manage a donation pool across projects to pay for advertising and bring more people into the space?

- Maybe plan around inter-project architecture (common libraries in demand) and have people be able to push for the most needed ones?

- Maybe plan around AIs becoming an increasingly large segment of contributors, certainly on more junior/intermediate things, and make workflows to direct their efforts in a simple-to-contribute way (e.g. hook up your compute to an open-source AI coder hosted in the cloud with a TODO list to churn on already vetted by other people/AIs)

All ideas. Good luck! Would love this to exist at popular scales.

ajkjk• 2 years ago

Love this idea.

dolmen4• 2 years ago

The only feature of IMDB I use is cast info: explore movies where an actor played, then from a movie jump to another actor.

Is it something you are building to track contributors across projects?

I already see how I would be even more solicited on LinkedIn...

sdesol• 2 years ago

This is shameless plug, but I have an analytics tool for GitHub orgs and repos and my goal is to make the data freely available. Here are some examples as to how analytics can be used to help users decide if they should use and/or adopt open source projects.

https://devboard.gitsense.com/zed-industries

https://devboard.gitsense.com/supabase

https://devboard.gitsense.com/ollama

My value proposition isn't the data, but the ability to gather, organize and update data at scale, so giving it (data) away free is not an issue for me.

seanvelasco• 2 years ago

i find github.com/explore great at discovery - what specific functionality are you looking for? outside github, i found that oss projects generally get announced at twitter. most oss are full-blown products, so producthunt.

scoofy• 2 years ago

I am the developer of https://golfcourse.wiki which I see as very conceptually similar to what you're trying to build. It's on App Engine, the front end is HTMX, my backend is Flask, and my DB is mongo. If you're in the SF area, I'd be happy to discuss the project with you, costs involved (pretty low), etc.

I honestly had no idea what I was doing when I started it during the pandemic, but I now have about 2k unique users per month, and it seems to be holding itself together pretty well. My best metrics are the google search results which are going in a very positive direction.

_giorgio_2• 2 years ago

This is the best that I've ever used to search for similar software:

https://alternativeto.net/

No alternative to it that I'm aware of.

heyts• 2 years ago

I had an adjacent idea a few weeks ago, but centered more around the idea that it may be difficult for new open-source contributors to find appropriate issues to work on. Suggesting and allowing to discover interesting issues across multiple repositories would allow the prospective user to get a nice view of what interesting issues are available to make a first / second / third contribution to a project, and possibly to also track contributions / pull requests etc.

JohnFen• 2 years ago

While GitHub is an exceptional platform, it does not provide all the functionality I need

It also doesn't contain all open source software. I'd be surprised if it even has most of it, but I don't know.

ranger_danger• 2 years ago

There are so many sites like this already though, what is the point of yet another one?

dv35z• 2 years ago

(1) I love the idea. (2) I would love to assist (including development & planning) - what do you need to succeed? Full-stack web app developer & agile product manager/team coach. I'm digging into React / Python / Django / Postgres & SQLite / Docker / Fly.io / CRUD web stack lately, in case those tools overlap with your tech vision.

swozey• 2 years ago

This used to be Twitter :( I had so many peers I worked with on different projects over more than a decade. Entire community just destroyed by musks takeover.

JonChesterfield• 2 years ago

I think there's something here. Discoverability of open source projects is not great, at least in the domains I spend time in. Github does a moderate job of telling me which projects have a lot of attention which sort of correlates with things of interest, but loads of people/projects use name-elided (and it has ~6.4k stars), and that's awful software I wouldn't wish on anyone.

It's not particularly search that I'm interested in, more some semi-objective indication of whether a given project is competently put together or not. Broadly, would adding it as a dependency be a good idea. Does it work for other people, do developers already using it like it, do said developers vaguely correlate with things I care about.

E.g. adding sqlite to a project is likely to make it better. C libraries are not all like that.

jayFellows• 2 years ago

There's a good read on a similar project called https://openalternative.co here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-side-project-...

The HN post for it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39639386.

sen_armstrong• 2 years ago

The only internet database I know of with a search interface that satisfyingly queries its structured data is vndb [1]. You might laugh, but I think it's a good example of an open-source project where an opinionated maintainer rejects lowest-common-denominator design. For once I don't feel like I'd rather use bare SQL (looking at you, every web storefront ever), but vndb even supports that! I do wish were more sites like it.

IMO almost no directory projects get both the wiki and database parts right like wikidata and vndb do (at two very different scales). Those two have in common: (come to think of it, so does OpenStreetMap mostly):

- query builder in addition to the search form [1][2]

- web query runner (SQL, SPARQL) [3], both with a custom backend [4]

- open data license (ODbl, CC0) [5]

- db dumps as files over http [5]

- (A)GPL source. Both also self-host their git web ui [6]

- no login-walls, and no ads

[1] with relational subqueries https://vndb.org/v?f=["and",["olang","!=","en"],["staff","!=...

[2] wikidata's is experimental and incomplete https://query.wikidata.org/querybuilder/?query={"conditions"...}

[3] https://query.vndb.org/?sql=SELECT+'https://www.wikidata.org...

[3] https://query.wikidata.org/##defaultView:ImageGrid%0ASELECT%...

[4] https://dev.yorhel.nl/sqlbin [4] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_Query_Service

[5] https://vndb.org/d14 [5] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access

[6] https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/vndb [6] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase

antifa2• 2 years ago

I'm usually looking for $X but (one or more or all of): open source, has dark mode, not electron, uses rust, is markdown first, git friendly for my data.

I could be specifically looking for, or flexible on details like: desktop GUI app (native? not electron? tauri ok?), a webserver with web UI (I might be picky about database, docker, backend language, front-end language), or CLI tool.

mikrotikker• 2 years ago

There used to be a cool website called http://libs.garden but it disappeared. You can see it and other sites at archive.org.

I see someone has recently tried to redo it under the name libs.field on GitHub.

piotrkulpinski• 2 years ago

I've built https://openalternative.co a month ago, but it's pretty niched down to software/saas applications. I think a more general one for broader selection of open source software would also be nice to have.

The code for OpenAlternative is on GitHub if you want to use some or take inspiration.

tutfbhuf• 2 years ago

I think you can pull much of the data you need for such a project from the GH Archive https://www.gharchive.org/ They basically have captured every event that happened on the platform starting from 2011.

IMDb works mainly by user reviews who rate videos from 1 to 10. But personally, I think any system can be gamed, just like GitHub Stars. When I'm interested in the GitHub Top 250 (as equivalent to IMDb Top 250), I just do a GitHub search with a filter for the language I'm interested in, e.g., Python, and then sort by stars. This works good enough for me.

yosef123• 2 years ago

Something like https://www.opensourcealternative.to/ ?

kirso• 2 years ago

There are a few:

- https://openalternative.co/

- https://www.opensourcealternative.to/

- https://opensourcealternatives.org/

- https://www.btw.so/open-source-alternatives

By just aggregating everything FOSS, doesn't mean its useful. Its useful in a certain context - such as searching for alternatives.

If you are uncertain how to "plan the product", don't plan -> just start.

dylanzhangdev2• 2 years ago

I am interested in many fields and have done several side projects, but my programming level is only elementary. This means that when I enter a new field, I need a lot of searching and making choices. I feel like what I want more is best practices. Based on the latest trends, what are the best practices for doing xx things. There are many small lists underneath a big topic. If someone could maintain such a list on a regular basis, I would be willing to pay, because searching and making decisions takes a lot of time, and time is money.

dylanzhangdev2• 2 years ago

It’s not that we don’t have anything, it’s that we have too much.

VirusNewbie• 2 years ago

Cool idea!

I think it might be interesting to have some comparisons between similar projects.

How does CockroachDB compare to Cassandra? Should I pick Spark or Apache Beam?

It also might be interesting to see timeline of major contributors to various projects as well ( Did the founder of CouchDB leave and go start working on PostGres at one point).

However, because Open Source is often tied to large corporations or startups, I'm sure the system could be gamed, and I'm not sure how you don't get in the situation amazon is in, where some small startup pays to get review bombed so their database is ranked higher than everything else.

What about when someone angry at having their gmail broken decides to go rant about how terrible all the google open source projects are? That seems like a pain in the ass.

So I think overall I'd ask what you want to get out of it personally. If you're looking for a business idea, I would be worried that if it makes a lot of money, github would just clone the best ideas and integrate it into their site. If you just want it to be a small money making side project, then that's probably fine.

If you're looking to do this as a personal project, I would focus on the most technically challenging and interesting parts. If you're looking to make some side money, do what is most popular. If you're trying to start a full time business...probably not enough $$$ and too easy to be copied by github.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 2 years ago

What use is a database of who worked on what software? I don't follow developers and I don't much care what else they might have contributed to because I am unlike to use it. I'm not even sure I watch movies that way. I don't see someone great on screen and think "I need to see everything else he's done". To the best of my recollection I have once watched something because of the music composer.

moi2388• 2 years ago

First create a site with just a search field, let us type the field we’re interested in (ie Mail clients) and then it fonds opensource projects that are Mail clients on GitHub, order them by language and stars and the basics are there, no?

sujayk_33• 2 years ago

In implementing this, the metric should reflect the frequency of the changes in that repo, coz trending repos are sometimes already dead but are still there because of recent stars they got.

greyzor7• 2 years ago

Something somehow similar to openalternative? Have a look at their product, maybe it already fits what you need: https://microlaunch.net/p/openalternative

Ask HN: I want to create IMDB for open source projects

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