Google Announces Open Source Repository

NewsForge (also owned by OSTG) has word of Google's newest product: an open-source project repository. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier sat down for a talk with Greg Stein and Chris DiBona, who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them. From the article: "Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects. DiBona says that it's a 'direct result of Greg concentrating on what open source projects need. Most bugtrackers are informed by what corporations' and large projects need, whereas Google's offering is just about what open source developers need. Stein says that Google's hosting has a 'brand new look' at issue tracking that may be of interest to open source projects, and says 'nobody else out there is doing anything close to it.'"

Comments

SourceForge is easy to beat

[telbij]

Whether or not they claim to be competing with SourceForge is really beside the point. SourceForge puts all its effort into providing service for its Enterprise customers. Or at least that's my interpretation of why their free services have been plagued with extensive downtime and poor administration. When I did the first release of a personal project last year I didn't even bother to put it on SourceForge. If they can't provide reasonable uptime and notification of changes (such as the infamous CVS root change) then it's worse than nothing.

If Google provides decent uptime--which seems likely given their infrastructure--then they'll already have SourceForge beat on the most important metric. If the service actually innovates and provides some unique value, well that's just a bonus.

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

[larry bagina]

would you rather of [sic] seen Google contribute to hotmail or yahoo mail rather than creating gmail? Or maybe they should have contributed to yahoo, msn, or altavista instead of creating their own search engine?

I investigated using the enterprise version of sourceforge about a year ago. We looked at the source code (from before they closed it) and decided it was a horrible mess and poorly designed. They may have cleaned it up after they closed it, but I wasn't impressed.

If google can do something better, they should.

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

[cheater512]

But we do contribute back to Sourceforge. Thats what all the ads are for.

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

[Excelsior]

As a non-project-admin user of SF, my biggest problem with SF was the period of time when their search failed to work 95% of the time due to overload. I'm willing to bet Google Code never has that problem. I could be wrong.

On a different topic, for all the times that people complain that Slashdot is posting topics that are in their best interest, topics like this show me this isn't the case. Since OSTG owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot, this posting goes against their financial best interest. They have exposed their huge audience to a competitor.

What a pity

[Rorian]

I was really hoping for something more exciting from google, when they announced that they'd be producing something for the open source community. Sourceforge has the occasional problem (CVS stats has been broken for how long now?), but basically it a fantastic site for open source, and easily provides all the services that any OSS project of any size needs in order to function and flourish.

I know google has done amazing things with stuff like webmail (gmail DESTROYS any previous webmail I have used in terms of features/functionality/speed/storage space, so much so that I haven't tried another since and doubt I ever will - if google decided to charge $10 a month for the gmail service I'd pay it in a heartbeat - it's that good :)). However, I just cannot see that they can bring any miraculous innovation to the table as far as hosting/supporting OSS projects goes - between forums, IRC and email, collaboration over OSS projects is already working perfectly and as I see it, that is all that google could help with - they can't really step in and do the actual development work required to create every Open source project out there.

Still, I'm sure it will be all AJAXy and perdy, maybe faster than sf.net and maybe I'll even choose them over sf.net the next time I can be bothered starting an OSS project.

Brand new look?

[dedazo]

C'mon now. How is this better than SourceForge? I mean SF.net has its problems (CVS servers in the gunk babeeee!) but they've been honing this thing for years. How long is it going to take Google to get to the level of domain knowledge SF.net has? The folks at Google are smart, but they're not experts at everything.

Call me a cynic but I think this is just a way to get more ad revenue. Kudos for them and all, but their offering better be *far* better than Berlios, GNU Savannah and SF.net for people to sign up.

Re:Brand new look?

[Wonko42]

By "honing this thing for years", do you mean "ignoring this thing for years"? I began using SourceForge the day it was announced, and I stopped using SourceForge about two years later when it became clear that they had no plans to fix many of the ridiculous bugs and annoying usability problems that have been there from day one.

* checks SourceForge again

Yep, same issues still there. SourceForge might get the job done, but it's not exactly getting the job done well, and they don't appear to have any interest in improving things.

By the way, Google isn't running ads on the Google Code pages. This isn't about ad revenue.

Whining

[PGC]

People complain that this Google project does not offer the same amount of features/sections as Sourceforge and thus must be worse. How often is it not that half of the sections on Sourceforge are empty (Documents is a nice example)? Resulting in completely confused visitors... Then are those that say it doesn't offer a project page, while most people using sourceforge do not keep their project pages on sourceforge either. As I see it, this Google service offers exactly what I've been looking for recently: a quick and simple method to maintain my small projects online without any application/approval periods.

Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing

[rucs_hack]

I've used sourcrforge for my project for the last four years. I have a small but constant stream of people downloading my project.

I have had numerous problems with services going offline, each time it's been annoying. recently I couldn't access the web page admin, so I haven't been able to update the site to reflect a new version of my software. As I've been working on the new release for a couple of months, this is a major issue for me.

Plus you now have to pay to get the very best service. I can't afford this, so I'm stuck with the less able service. They claim the normal free service is unnaffected, but I have my doubts. Even when everythings working it's not especially easy to use, and I don't much like some of the changes to the site they've added of late.

Their intentions may be good, and I do understand the need for funding, but non paying users are being effected, regardless of their intent. Paying users get better project admin options/tools too, and I'd rather like that. I'm a poor student though, such things are outside of my budget. I must say sourceforge has lost its appeal for me of late because of these things.

I think I may give google a try, and tramline the two for a while.

That's the open source way, the superior product survives based on how good it is.

Re:Let's see what they do

[linvir]

People would need project page hosting

http://pages.google.com/

They have the majority of the code and infrastructure in place in Google Pages. From there, it's a matter of integration.