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Google Announces Open Source Repository

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the competing dept.

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.'"

6 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. What a pity by Rorian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Will program for karma.
  2. Brand new look? by dedazo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
    1. Re:Brand new look? by Wonko42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Re:SourceForge is easy to beat by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  4. Re:SourceForge is easy to beat by cheater512 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  5. Re:SourceForge is easy to beat by Excelsior · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.