Andrew Caudwell for Gource: Software Version Control Visualization

Your Nomination

Title for nomination:

Nominee's name or organisation:

Andrew Caudwell / Catalyst IT

Overview of your nomination:

In September 2009, following on from his previous work visualizing website access logs with Logstalgia, Andrew released Gource: a new tool for visualizing the history and development of software projects. Typically as software is developed, incremental changes to files are grouped together as ’commits’ and stored in a Version Control System, maintaining a history of the files changed, by who, and when. Gource takes this history and plays it back as an interactive animation. Software development is displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project. While Gource itself is an interactive tool, it includes the ability to capture video to create movies, which has proved very popular, with hundreds of videos of projects being and uploaded to Youtube, Vimeo and other video sites since it's release. Some highlights of projects visualized with Gource (video links below): Flickr (captured by Daniel Bogan, developer at Flickr): http://vimeo.com/11876335 YTMD 2.0 (by Max Goldberg, creator of YTMND) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf4LVe-bkrE 7 Years of Wordpress (video by Michel Valdrighi, author of Word Press): http://vimeo.com/8933205 Xero's Gource Kaleidoscope: http://blog.xero.com/2010/08/xero-kaleidoscope/ 25 year history of AmigaOS (by Hyperion Entertainment maintainers of AmigaOS): http://hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=arti... Gource of Git (created by Git contributor Sam Vilain) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTMC3g2Xy8c … and many more: http://www.google.co.nz/#q=gource&prmd=vfdl&source=lnms&tbs=vid:1

Reasons for winning this award:

The award would acknowledge the value of Andrew's contribution to the software development community and motivate future work on both Gource and other visualization tools.

Supporting Information

Use and benefits of open source:

Being Open Source has allowed users to contribute back new features, extended Gource to support more Version Control Systems and run on more platforms. Some important community contributions: ImageJ developer Johannes Schindelin added PPM video output support to Gource, removing the need for additional software to capture Gource videos. Gentoo packager Diego Elio Petten re-wrote the Gource build system to use Automake. Gource's support for the Bazaar version control system was written and contributed by Bazaar developer John Arbash Meinel. In total, over 20 developers have made contributions back to the project.

Recent achievements:

Daniel Bogan's Gource of Flickr was published on Gizmodo.com, a popular technology news site, and received more than 38,000 views: http://gizmodo.com/5542882/what-seven-years-of-source-code-for-flickrcom...

Plans for future work:

Andrew continues to work on visualization software and is currently developing an animated GIS visualization tool, applying techniques from Gource to GIS data visualization. Andrew continues to work on Gource, currently focused on improving performance by removing bottlenecks.

Websites and other information:

Project site: http://code.google.com/p/gource/ Gource main repository on Github: http://github.com/acaudwell/Gource Original videos collage of Gource: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5xPMW5fg48 Andrew's blog: http://www.thealphablenders.com/