A new site www.ohloh.net popped up on people’s radars today and was promptly Slashdotted to death, although it is now recovering.

It’s avowed intent is to act as a single point of intelligence on open source projects, enabling developers and users find the projects that meet their criteria. That may sound rather like Freshmeat, or Sourceforge. However Ohloh offers some novel aspects.

For a start, it attempts to be friendly in terms of design and text for open source neophytes. While that may sound trivial, it stands out simply because the home pages of good proportion of open source projects are fairly opaque, with a tendency to concentrate on the status of the latest patch, rather than the big ‘what this project is about’ picture.

More meaty is the analysis which the site attempts to attach to each project, generating nice graphs of developer activity and code changes over time, giving details of the license used and a small capsule note on any interesting aspects of the projects development.

It even - shock horror - attempts to estimate the “value” of the project based on a simple number-of-lines-of-code and guessed salary model.

The site is still in beta, and many of the functions are still basic. But it shows substantial promise in my opinion. The basic information is going to be ad-supported, but the intention appears to be to sell more detailed project analysis in the future.

If the company does it right, it should provide developers with a decent tool set for comparing the stability, development status and functionality of competing products. And I suspect that it could well become a hangout for VCs on the look out for innovation, as well as analysts like us.

All-in-all, this kind of development is overdue - open source development and deployment thrives where stakeholders have the ability to make informed choices. I’m also hopeful that a little competition could induce the existing open source portals out there to gussy-up their own analytical tools somewhat.