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Google Launches Google Code
ibjhb writes "Google is at it again and has launched Google Code. It appears to be "Google's place for Open Source software". " Can't say that I'm surprised that our old friend (and former Slashdot Author) Chris DiBona is working on this one. They have links to several open source projects, as well as to Google API information.
I got my hopes up. I saw Google Code and thought they were releasing thier code for goodle. After reading, I found out its another "service" thing. What ever its pro OSS
Well done, Chris! You know that I voted for you.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
not exactly freshmeat..
**What is code.google.com?
Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It's where we'll publish free source code and lists of our API services.**
besides than that.. *Why are you releasing code through Sourceforge?
Well, because they were nice enough to oblige, and because developers here like Sourceforge. Future homes for new projects might include Tigris.org or language specific sites like the Vaults of Parnassus and CPAN. *
yeah. ALL THE PROJECTS ARE ON SOURCEFORGE!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
From the FAQ:
People at Google keep saying that they get ~20% time to work on personal projects. I'm curious about a couple of things here.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
I'd like to see Google IM.
Good to see apple moving more towards open source software, but has anyone worked out what happened to GoogleX (http://labs.google.com/googlex/)
it now 404's, yet was working yesterday as a 'prototype' of what a google for mac and on other systems could look like. Obviously the labs are having a fun week.
Business Voyeur
But who will be the first to throw open the floodgates and actuallly provide unlimited API querying at a price? Businesses (such as (plagiarism detection), (rank tracking) and (advanced alerting) are starting to be built out of this stuff, so there's obviously a genuine economy out there for the taking.
What a coincidence!
Using the Google API is the best way to encourage its growth. The more apps that use it, the more those apps become "Google" - and the more Google will grow itself by growing its web services.
However, hosting all those Google API apps solely on Google is a bad move. Too many eggs in one basket. Better to host them on both Google AND Freshmeat/SourceForge. In fact, one great Google API app would be an automirror. Hosting at one is automirrored at the other. Which has immediate benefits in load balancing and uptime (no single point of failure). And longterm benefits of keeping the code free of capricious corporate decisions down the road
--
make install -not war
Given the article today about zombies http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/03/17/1551255.shtml?t id=172&tid=220 ..it would be interesting if an online zombie checker could be linked into google code. Create a passive system scan and you can bet alot of users would try it.
It is great that Google are visibly supporting the development of open source software - to whatever degree.
The ubiquity of google and the respect they have gained over the years make them somewhat of a model company. While im sure there may be a couple of people who might dispute their company motto to "not be evil" I think most people would agree that google seems to be doing things the right way.
Google is well thought of by anyone who uses the web, not just geeks, but the PHB's and Grandma's alike. This brings me to the next point...
Google have got Microsoft worried - frustrated that they couldnt "own" google they paid google the greatest compliment- they redesigned their search engine that is functionally more than just similar to google - and to a certain extent the low graphic - no-frills feel!
It is interesting to see Google innovating and re-thinking many of the ways we use the web. Now that google are being visibly more active in open source - It couldnt be better press for F/OSS at this time - and damn that's really going to p*ss Microsoft off - I'd like to see them match this idea. In addition to this its certainly going to help to legitimise F/OSS to those PHB's who have been toying with the idea but afraid to test the water.
Its going to be extremely interesting to see what google has deep in the bowels of its R&D department waiting to come into fruition. Lets hope that they can keep their face clean in the process!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
You can see code that Google is opening up here. My favorite is the perftools code because it helps with things like heap profiling. Very handy stuff, and it's hosted with Sourceforge. I'm pretty sure these four projects were just added in the last day or so.
The code.google.com update blog, and an easy way to subscribe to the RSS feed with Firefox
Several people have commented that it is nice to see Google using an existing code site (sf) rather than create their own.
I'm also glad to see that they are using an existing and respected license (BSD 2.0) rather than invent their own. The other big companies (eg. Sun, MS) always have to create their own pseudo-FLOSS licenses when they release code, with their own little catches and gotchas.
It's nice to see that they aren't suffering from "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
Indeed, to convert PDFs to html in google desktop they use a pdftohtml.exe which comes from http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/. Let me guess what other desktop search engines will do....reinvent the wheel?
Yes - at first I thought this was going to be a search engine for source code, grepping through tons of free software. That would be a rather useful thing to have (how do I use this library? I'll just grep for an example). There is koders.com but its search engine isn't that gret - when looking through source code you need to be able to include punctuation characters and search by them.
All you really need to do is spider freshmeat.net, download the tarball of the latest release of each app, and do a massive grep whenever anyone submits a query. OK, not quite that simple. But almost - the total source code size is tiny compared to, say, a Web search engine, so you don't have to be that clever with indexing. You could do a keyword search as the first stage and then grep.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I believe that it is/was 3 hours/week at 3M.
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An engineer wanted something to mark pages in choir books at church. He found an adhesive that they'd previously dismissed as too weak to be useful, diluted it further, and now we don't have to paint our monitors and walls . .
hawk
Maybe Google can buy out OSTG and we can have a slashdot.google.com or geeknews.google.com. :)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!