The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source The world of open source metadata (Interview)
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Nov 5, 2025 In this engaging discussion, Andrew Nesbitt explores the vast landscape of open source metadata, having built impactful tools like Libraries.io and ecosyste.ms. He dives into the importance of dependency data over download counts, sharing insights on the funding of critical maintainers and how concentrated package usage can be. Andrew elaborates on the challenges of indexing various ecosystems and the potential for automated analyses. He emphasizes the project's collaborative future, inviting contributions from the community to enhance its impact.
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How 24PullRequests Sparked A Data Mission
- Andrew started with 24pullrequests to get people contributing to open source and found many projects were abandoned or hard to contribute to.
- That experience pushed him to build metrics and tooling to surface healthy, active projects at scale.
Dependencies Reveal Real Usage
- Mining dependency graphs gives a far stronger signal of real usage than stars or raw downloads.
- Removing a dependency reduces counts, revealing breakage or abandonment more reliably than stars or downloads.
Libraries.io: Growth, Sale, And A Do-Over
- Libraries.io grew big, expensive, and hard to sustain; GitHub's dependency graph and Dependabot shifted the landscape.
- Andrew sold to Tidelift, open-sourced the code and data, then later rebuilt the project as ecosystems for research infrastructure.