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Comment by the__alchemist

2 months ago

> It checks contributor patterns too. If 90% of commits come from one person who hasn’t pushed in months, that’s flagged.

IMO this is a slight green flag; not red.

17 comments

the__alchemist

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sethops1  2 months ago

I have to agree - the highest quality libraries in my experience are the ones maintained that one dedicated person as their pet project. There's no glory, no money, no large community, no Twitter followers - just a person with a problem to solve and making the solution open source for the benefit of others.

artski  2 months ago

Fair take—it's definitely context-dependent. In some cases, solo-maintainer projects can be great, especially if they’re stable or purpose-built. But from a trust and maintenance standpoint, it’s worth flagging as a signal: if 90% of commits are from one person who’s now inactive, it could mean slow responses to bugs or no updates for security issues. Doesn’t mean the project is bad—just something to consider alongside other factors.

Heuristics are never perfect and it's all iterative but it's all about understanding the underlying assumptions and taking the knowledge you get out of it with your own context. Probably could enhance it slightly by a run through an LLM with a prompt but I prefer to keep things purely statistical for now.

  • 85392_school  2 months ago

    It could also mean that the project is stable. Since you only look at the one repository's commit activity, a stable project with a maintainer who's still active on GitHub in other places would be "less trustworthy" than a project that's a work in progress.

    • kstrauser  2 months ago

      I agree. I have a popular-ish project on GitHub that I haven't touched in like a decade. I would if needed, but it's basically "done". It works. It does everything it needs to, and no one's reported a bug in many, many years.

      You could etch that thing into granite as far as I can tell. The only thing left to do is rewrite it in Rust.

    • artski  2 months ago

      Not a bad idea tbh, maybe an additional how long issues are left open, would be a good idea. Though yeh thats why I was contemplating of not necessarily highlighting the actual number and more have a range e.g. 80-100 is good, 50-70 Moderate and so on.

      2 replies →

  • delfinom  2 months ago

    The problem is your audience is:

    > CTOs, security teams, and VCs automate open-source due diligence in seconds.

    The people that probably have less brain cells than the average programmer to understand the nuance in the flagging.

    • artski  2 months ago

      Lol yeah tbh - I just made it without really thinking of an audience, just was looking for a project to work on till I saw the paper and figured it would be cool to check it out on some repositories out there. That part is just me asking gpt to make the read me better.

  • mlhpdx  2 months ago

    The signal here is how many unpatched vulnerabilities there are maybe multiplied by how long they’ve been out there. Purely statistical. And an actual signal.

255kb  2 months ago

Also, isn't that just 99% of OSS projects out there? I maintained a project for the past 7+ years, and despite 1 million downloads, tens of thousands of monthly active users, it's still mostly me, maintaining and committing. Yes, there is a bus factor, but it's a common and known problem in open-source. It would be better to try to improve the situation instead of just flagging all the projects. It's hard enough to find people ready to help and work on something outside their working hours on a regular basis...

lispisok  2 months ago

It's gonna flag most of the clojure ecosystem

  • throwaway150  2 months ago

    Yep, and it's not just Clojure. This will end up flagging projects across all non-mainstream ecosystems. Whether it's Vim plugins, niche command-line tools, academic research code, or hobbyist libraries for things like game development or creative coding, they'll likely get flagged simply because they're often maintained by individual developers. These devs build the projects, iterate quickly in the early stages, and eventually reach a point where the code is stable and no longer needs frequent updates.

    It's a shame that this tool penalizes such projects, which I think are vital to a healthy open source ecosystem.

    It's a nice project otherwise. But flagging stable projects from solo developers really sticks out like a sore thumb. :(