Immediately went looking for how to be a reviewer or who reviewers currently are (vetted), but didn't find anything? Clicking into a package I'm invited to leave a review where I see it's tied solely to my GitHub login. Not bad, but hard to see how the reviews are approved or curated. The centralization could be nicer than having to read a bunch of blog posts to get the gist but I'd rather defer to a proven community (like Debian's package maintainers) for guidance on JS packages. That's not a thing today, so maybe this project is a good first step.
Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
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Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#12Immediately went looking for how to be a reviewer or who reviewers currently are (vetted), but didn't find anything? Clicking into a package I'm invited to leave a review where I see it's tied solely to my GitHub login. Not bad, but hard to see how the reviews are approved or curated. The centralization could be nicer than having to read a bunch of blog posts to get the gist but I'd rather defer to a proven community…
You got it right!
Currently the only way to create an account is through GitHub login (we're going to add more options in the future). That means in order to write a review you have to log in with GitHub.
Behind the scenes, text reviews do not show immediately, we go over them and approve them manually, to verify there's not bad behavior, spam, offensive content, etc.
We plan on approving each text review ourselves manually until we're stretched too thin and this plan doesn't scale anymore.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#13Another interesting metric to try to capture would be issue resolution. A lot of time you might have a very decisive issue in Github where the developers basically piss off a lot of their users. I don't think that's generally a good metric to promote as a top level metric obviously, but it would be interesting way to slice and dice projects.
But that analysis could look for thumbs up or fireworks or other Happy reaction emoji vs negative feedback emoji tied to the replies of people on the team.
Yes, this goes back to criticizing open source maintainers for not doing what everyone wants - so perhaps that kind of metric would only be enabled on sponsor backed repos.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#14Do you have a plan to expand to other projects, not related to JS?
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#15Do you have a plan to expand to other projects, not related to JS?
Yep.
We're considering Python, Go, Java and few others.
We have a waiting list here! (also there's link in the homapge) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScexiehdwDWJwxZJym8...
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#16What’s the business model to get paid for something like this? Alternatively phrased, how is this a sustainable business?
And how do you beat Microsoft from melding in this functionality into GitHub / NPM? The friction would so much lower (existing GitHub account) and they can place the information directly on the project pages.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#17This looks like a lot of work. How will Openbase make money?
It is a lot of work. In terms of making money - we're thinking about paid promotion of packages: allowing maintainers (companies and individuals) to promote their packages, we found there's a big need for that. We want to limit it to a single (clearly marked) promoted package for each category. Obviously, we would just surface the promoted package, but the package reviews, insights, and metrics are obviously untouche…
That seems like an interesting choice.
As an individual, I don't think I'd ever pay for promotion of a package unless I had moved my career to providing support for open source packages.
I can imagine companies using it as a marketing exercise for their open source efforts. That might not be a bad thing as packages backed by companies tend to be better, more mature, have better support.
However I can see this then being abused by SaaS companies using this as a way to advertise their service. i.e. they provide a package that integrates with their service, so while the package is open source they are making money on the use. I can imagine this significantly degrading the quality of packages.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#18This is cool and I appreciate software development insights is getting some love. Full disclosure, I wouldn't say I'm working on the same thing, but we definitely have some overlap, when it comes to software development insights, which is gaining steam.
Your dashboard gave me some interesting food for thought, so I'll do the same and share with you, some of the things that I'm working on, that you are free to incorporate into openbase.
My focus is not on the discovery part, which you guys are working on, but rather, I'm more focused on providing "business intelligence" for the software development lifecycle.
I do agree with you that code metrics can only tell you so much, as it's not really meant for discovery. Code insights might provide things like stability, investment, complexity, etc., but like you said, you can't tell from code insights, if the code is easy to use or not. Discovery is a serious problem and GitHub has certainty not solved this problem yet, so what you guys are working on, is a problem worth solving in my opinion.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#19awesome
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#20On one hand, this is fantastic and desperately needed. I've wanted something similar for years.
On the other hand, I've been an open-source developer (one of my projects has 7.5k stars on GitHub) and the constant stream of negativity towards that the work I put hundreds of hours into for free was pretty psychologically draining, to say the least. And it's actually a pretty well-liked project! By making such a service you take on a lot of responsibility here.