Did you know that the Hudson project has grown from 200,000 to 500,000 lines of code since January of 2007?

Did you know there's a guy in France (Jim Meyering) who has contributed to the GCC, CVS, Emacs, and Perl projects?

The website ohloh.com has this and lots of other interesting information about open source projects.

Ohloh.com is the frontend to a "source code crawler", which analyzes thousands of open source projects. And what an analysis! It actually goes to the source code repository and checks out the code and looks at the changes, recording who and when the change was made, how many lines of code were modified, the language used, and even the licensing.

Once analyzed, there's lots of interesting views you can see:

On the project view you can see a Google Map showing where users or developers are located. There's also a graph showing the growth of the codebase and a list of all the contributers to the project.

On the people view information on the individuals who create open source software can be seen. You can see what projects they have contributed to, how active they have been, and what languages they have been using.
There's even a timeline for their projects, showing when the commits were made, and what the changes were.

Finally, on the language view you can see aggregate information on the languages used in open source -- what's commonly used, what's popular.

Turns out that 34.6% of Java code is comments... who knew?

Other interesting things you can do:

• Track growth of a project (is it active, is it abandoned?)
• See what languages are popular or growing in the open source world (C/C++ still leads)
• Get a sense of the popularity of an open source project
• See an rough estimate of the "cost" of the project (in time and price)

An additional feature on ohloh is that it is also a community. Users are encouraged to list the software projects they use, with the idea that people can see what projects are used together (e.g. Linux + Apache
+ MySQL + Php).

How much of this information is truly useful? I don't know. But I did see that Rod Johnson of SpringSource uses Ohloh as a demonstration of how his company is committed to open source. His quote:

Ohloh is a tool for ranking activity on open source projects that's a handy resource when choosing the provider of your open source support.
You can see whether any of your support dollars are going into developing open source software (and thus helping to ensure that the projects you depend on will be dependable tomorrow), and you can judge whether or not the staff who are paid to solve your problems have the expertise and intimate knowledge of the code to ensure that they can do so quickly, and in the best possible way.