User:Micklo75

The project reuse ranking is the reuse analysis algorithm^[1] created by the french start-up Antelink. The ranking is based on the number of open source projects reusing at least one of the artifacts of the project being ranked.

Based on a large database set of 162,008 open source projects,^[2] the project reuse ranking is available as a free service. It is based on the development of a product developed by Antelink that enables developers to upload any library to know how many times it is reused by other open source projects.^[3]

By definition, the project reuse ranking is based on a technology that provides how many times a library is reused and not used.^[4] The ranking considers the reusability of a libray if:

• the library is directly reused in the source code of the project involving the explicit integration of the artifact,
• the library is indirectly reused in the source code of the project via calls,
• the library is in a forked project.

The reuse of open source artifacts in proprietary software development is not taken into account. The project reuse ranking is based on 162,608 open source projects that are downloaded from the main forges GoogleCode, Sourceforge and other sources such as GNU Savannah, RubyForge and OW2. The release policy of open source projects doesn't affect the ranking because the Project Reuse Ranking takes into account all the releases of a project.

The ranking considers the libraries that other Project are reusing as well as libraries it used to reuse. The ranking of open source projects is constantly evolving as ever more projects are created and others are released. The project reuse ranking supports any open source programming languages:^[5]

• Java
• C
• C++
• Ruby
• Python
• Perl
• Haskell
• PHP

Projects are ranked on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10 in which 10 is the highest ranking. The project reuse ranking aims to ease comparison between projects to know how much reused are other projects offering the same kind of solutions. The result is much more robust than metrics based on each release since it will be independent of release policy. The results on open source end-users applications are not relevant.

For instance, the Apache Commons project is one of the most reused open source project. It ranks 8 on the Project Reused Ranking while the commons-logging library is one of the most reused libraries. Apache Commons is widely reused in open source projects. Almost 3% of open source projects ever created reuse one of the Apache Commons artifacts.^[6]