Lambda the Ultimate

I was wondering if there is any interest in a ranking of open source developers.

Such a ranking might be automatically determined by seeing how successful their applications have been (e.g., # downloads). We could also take into account other factors such as the size and complexity of the application.

Of course, if an application is built by many developers, we have to address the credit assignment problem. Namely, who is primarily responsible for the success of the application? We might examine the CVS repository to see who wrote what.

In any case, once we have this ranking of open source developers, we could then consider various applications:

* code search that returns code fragments written by particularly good developers (e.g., I might search for "drag and drop" across KDE apps and the most highly ranked drag & drop code fragments returned by the search would come from expert developers)

* mailing list search that takes into account how good of a developer the poster is (e.g., I might search for a problem related to drag and drop and the most highly ranked drag & drop messages returned by the search would come from expert developers)

Do you think building a ranking of open source developers would be worthwhile?

Do you think the applications mentioned would be compelling?