In a bumper announcement, Black Duck Software have embraced the FOSS mantra by revealing their equivalent of a repository Yellow Pages, through the Ohloh Open Data Initiative.

The website tracks 488,823 projects, allowing users to compare data from a vast amount of repositories and forges. But now, Ohloh’s huge dataset has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, encouraging further transparency across the companies who have already bought into Ohloh’s aggregation mission directive.

"Licensing Ohloh data under Creative Commons offers both enterprises and the open source community a new level of access to FOSS data, allowing trending, tracking, and insight for the open source community," said Tim Yeaton, President and CEO of Black Duck Software.

He added: "We are constantly looking for ways to help the open source developer community and enterprise consumers of open source. We're proud to freely license Ohloh data under this respected license, and believe that making this resource more accessible will allow contributors and consumers of open source gain unique insight, leading to more rapid development and adoption."

Juggernauts of the open source world have backed the resource collector's announcement. Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, Mike Milinkovich said that "visible metrics help open source project teams better manage the operations of their projects” whilst RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady offered similar sentiments saying “the more, better data that is available on the thousands of open source projects today, the easier it is to identify new patterns, trends and insights on the evolution of open source itself.” Unsurprisingly, Eclipse share their data on Ohloh, whilst Red Monk mine alongside Black Duck.

Continuing to preach the benefits of free and open source software (FOSS), Black Duck have also announced the new public beta of Ohloh Code, a search engine that provides access to 10 billion lines of code. Ohloh Code is essentially an integrated analysis tool that wants to bolster the link between project code and metadata, and having some of the greatest open source project tools investing their code is not a bad way to go about it. These include the likes of GitHub, SourceForge, Eclipse, Mozilla and Apache.

Ohloh's RESTful API requires you to register for a key before you can query metrics from the vast number of projects such as the number of active contributors, commits, lines of code and the main programming language used.

Why not check it out?