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Saturday, November 22, 2008
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Open source software: The Movie!



code_swarm - Apache from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Reading the history of open source software projects like Apache (seen above), Python and Eclipse can be pretty dull. A UC Davis graduate student has tried to liven things up by producing short movies that visually represent the always unique development histories of such software into an animated mix of light and sound.

Code_swarm tries to take some of the complexity out of documenting the history of open source contributions, according to the student, Michael Ogawa. His movies highlight the names of developers, connecting those who worked together and making them fade away to represent when the devlopers stopped contributing.

"The viewer gets an impression of the dynamics of the project: Who the big players are, whether they work on the same or separate files and the scale of the project in time and space," Ogawa said in a statement.

He also said he went with a music video model to contrast with the typical snoozer videos produced by academia.

The open source code is available here.

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