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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.'"
...who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them.
I guess they mean that in the sense that the Pittsburgh Steelers aren't intended to compete with an intramural squad playing in a park. Shall we start the SourceForge countdown clock?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
A quick look through the licenses mentioned in the TFA shows that public domain is missing.
Although its not a license per se, it might be nice to add that option for those projects that choose to go that route.
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.
:)). 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.
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
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.
And that, kids, is why we use the 'Preview' button. Durr.
...before I noticed what bullshit they slipped in.
I was looking around http://code.google.com/ when I took a look at the "Featured Projects". Pirate Island is a blatent advertisement for Dead Man's Chest, though it looks like a legit project until you go to the site. Google also did some bullshit like that with the Davinci Code too. I don't care if they want to advertise it. I have a big problem when they try to trick their users into thinking it's useful content.
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
Speaking of beating things, they must be marketing to the teenage/early 20's male programmer.
Have you seen their slogan?
Release early, release often
Whats next? An extension to Google News, where nobody reads the articles, but everybody stays for the discussion? I smell a pattern here ;-)
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.
But we do contribute back to Sourceforge. Thats what all the ads are for.
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.
We've been gathering input on the download system, well, pretty much since it was created. Personally, I find it painful, but there are a lot of reasons why it is the way it is today. That said, a replacement for the download system is currently in planning, and our primary aim is to allow consumers to get what they're looking for with fewer clicks. Our current phases tend to be about 90 days, and we plan to enter implementation in August.
-- May cause nausea, headaches, and interference with electronic devices.
We just finished listening to Greg's presentation at OSCON, and so far we're feeling pretty good about what this means for the Open Source community, and, by extension, SourceForge.net. Because, after all, what's good for the community is good for us. Greg talked a bit about how he expects that users will want to "mix and match" tools that are offered at Google Code, SourceForge.net, and other repositories. This resonates very well with us, and is consistent with our longer-term goals - flexibility is one of the cornerstones of our larger strategic direction. Developers should work using the tools they want to use. We've got a pretty good relationship with the folks over at Google, and I really believe they're launching this because they, like us, care about Open Source and want to see it continue to thrive. We've begun disucssions about integration between SF.net and Google Code - you'll notice that you can't register projects on Google Code with SF.net project names. I expect there will be a much more substantial integration as the community makes its needs known. Thanks, Ross Turk (joined by Jay Seirmarco) SourceForge.net Engineering Manager
-- May cause nausea, headaches, and interference with electronic devices.
Google is encouraging piracy!!! :-)
Of course, I happen to think that's a good thing, ye scurvey dogs, ye.
Hello,
/. username, feel free to email me there.
I'm an architect at SourceForge.net and I designed and implemented the search functionality that is currently running on the site. I take any complaints about the quality of the search results quite seriously. From I've seen, most of our users are quite happy with the latest revision of the search engine (launched in April of this year). However, if you could give me specific search terms that are returning poor results and some examples of what you think it should be returning I'd be happy to look into it to see if there is a bug in the search or statistics engines producing the poor results. My SF.net username is the same as my
Thanks,
--Chris