Open Sourcing Libscore, the JavaScript Tracker

A little over a year ago, Libscore was released as part of Stripe’s Open Source retreat. Co-sponsored by DigitalOcean, Libscore has become the authoritative source of JavaScript library usage in the year since it’s launched.

Today, we are publicly releasing the Libscore source code. There are some really cool internals at work. We believe transparency in our methods is important to being an authoritative and unbiased metric. Also, being borne out of an open source program, it only makes sense to be open source ourselves.

Being authors of open source projects ourselves ($.Velocity, Quill), we know firsthand that there is a strong distinction between open source software and open source projects. The latter involves documentation, support channels, customizations, and everything else that makes open source more than just lines of code. Libscore.com itself will remain up and running for the foreseeable future, with its data being updated monthly, but at the moment Libscore lacks the means to be a full fledged open source project.

Much of Libscore’s potential remains untapped, with many directions it can be taken in. The Libscore team can only take Libscore.com in one of those directions, which prioritizes breadth and front end open source libraries, but availability of the source code now means anyone to take it in others.

Happy forking!