Google Code Disables New Project Creation, Will Shut Down On January 25, 2016

An anonymous reader writes GitHub has officially won. Google has announced that Google Code project creation has been disabled today, with the ultimate plan to kill off the service next year. On August 24, 2015, the project hosting service will be set to read-only. This means you will still be able to checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis, but nobody will be able to make changes or new commits. On January 25, 2016, Google Code will be shut down. Google says you will be able to download tarballs of project source, issues, and wikis "throughout the rest of 2016." After that, Google Code will be gone for good.

Comments

SourceForge should be next.

[itomato]

Taken a look at the top projects lately?

Re:SourceForge should be next.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the same 5 top projects have been on the side bar of this site for what 10 years now?

Re:SourceForge should be next.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's source forge?

Re:SourceForge should be next.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the buggy whip manufacturer equivalent for source-hosting sites.

Re: SourceForge should be next.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I'm busy, want to try my nodejs-controlled vibrator?

- Posted from my iPad Mini 2 Retina Late 2014

Re:SourceForge should be next.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only flamebait because of the corporate umbrella.

Go polish the clearcoat on the PT Cruiser, whydontcha..

Re: SourceForge should be next.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem plaguing SourceForge are idiots putting up binaries for non-open source software. I've reported a few of them, but the admins don't seem to give a shit.

Re:SourceForge should be next.

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't taken a look at any Sourceforge project since I learned that they allow drive-by malware installers.

Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Who didn't see this coming?

Google, where good ideas go to die.

Re:Google Product

[JourneymanMereel]

This was my thought exactly. Sadly, Google has proven themselves to be very unreliable.

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Unreliable at what? There are better alternatives than Google Code and there is no reason for it to exist. Teh Googles can recognize this.

Re:Google Product

[cheesybagel]

So much for it being a reliable store of data. That's the unreliable bit.

They want you to put all your data in the cloud but then don't guarantee it will be stored properly.

Re:Google Product

[ralphsiegler]

Wrong, the data will still be there and accessible. People can migrate to another store and take over a year to do so and be fine. I love people that whine about something a business provides for free, like a business is somehow obligated to give away freebies indefinitely. No one is going to lose any data. Reliable and responsible handling, in this case.

Re:Google Product

[snowgirl]

It's not unreliability...

If it's not worth spending money to keep developers on the project, then better to shutter it, and have people move off than just let it sit abandoned indefinitely... right?

I mean, that's what makes sense in the real world...

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

We implemented Wave 100% at our company! We are cutting edge and will rule the future in our industry! GOOGLE FAH EVAH!

Re:Google Product

[Richard_at_work]

So what happens when you have uploaded 100TB to Google NearLine and in a year they discontinue it?

Re:Google Product

[ralphsiegler]

NearLine is product that people pay money to use, and has so has service level agreements and etc; not relevant.

You know, I have a lot of complaints about Google, but this article's issue is not one of them.

Discontinuing free offerings in a responsible way, so people don't lose their data and can migrate, is fine.

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

people that whine about something a business provides for free

Yet it's not free: Google mines your data every time you interact with them.

Google Code? They mine your IP address (do they user supercookies?) and record that along with the million other things one does on the web.

Re:Google Product

[ralphsiegler]

slashdot does that too, you know.

Re:Google Product

[N1AK]

It's not unreliability...

I think it is. When I am choosing a service one important consideration is how much effort getting onto that solution is, and how likely it is it will last. Even if Google provides a better service, I reconsider using it over a slightly inferior alternative because they're track record is terrible on this front.

I understand completely why they want to kill of unpopular projects, but from a user perspective it sucks that they launch a service, try and persuade people to put the non-negligible effort in to learn it, then kill it because they screwed up and couldn't make it worthwhile maintaining.

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

NearLine is product that people pay money to use, and has so has service level agreements and etc; not relevant.

Apple's POP email service used to be a product that people paid money to use ... until it wasn't when they decided to force users to IMAP-only so that the cloud must have a copy of any email you wanted to retain.

The question about what happens if Google decides next year that they don't want to continue selling you the service of hosting your very-large quantity of data is directly relevant to this article.

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, that's what makes sense in the real world...

I don't mean to alarm you - but you posted that on slashdot.

Re:Google Product

[hairyfeet]

Which is why I advise my customers against using a Google service until it has become huge, with Google there is huge and there is gone, and nothing in between. We've seen time and time again since the IPO that anything that isn't generating major buzz? Is as good as dead.

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know you're saying that to an AC, not a logged in user, right?

Re:Google Product

[HiThere]

Sorry, but to me that seems a quite responsible way to shut down a project that they've decided not to continue. There have been many times in the past when they deserved criticism for how they handled shutting down a project, but this doesn't appear to be one of them.

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Google's money has "worth", and their users/contributors time does not.

I'd love to see someone bring a lawsuit for their lost hours based on the principle of Promissory Estoppel. It'd probably never fly legally, but it might at least make Google review its EULA for any accidental language benefitting their users, rather than exclusively themselves.

Re:Google Product

[xonen]

A year is not long. Only young people think a year is long. It might as well have been a week.

Some people just want to put their code in 'the public domain'. It may be code they are not maintaining, not commercial, or targets a very small niche.

Sometimes you want your code just published - shared with the world - forever, for the next one to find it useful.

Google promises such service. One would think 'google, they know how to store data'. Even google engineers use the service themselves. And then, one day, they announce the service will cease in 2 years.

Google should NOT HAVE STARTED SUCH SERVICE. They mislead developers, and now put them up with the extra hassle of moving stuff. If they wanted to kill it, they should have said 'testing' 'alpha' 'beta' 'do not use for your project' etc.

I'm totally with the some of the other people here, Google has proven to be unreliable. Any service they not like could be gone at ant time they choose, no matter how well it works or how succesful it is. Your gmail account may well be next.

I don't mind google cleaning up beta projects. But Google Code was anything but a beta project. Ok, they were not the largest player in the market, how bad is that? I do like choice, and multiple players can learn from eachother.

So.. My personal conclusion: a very very bad move of Google which will steer many people away from their current and future projects.

Re:Google Product

[silentcoder]

Google should partner with github to let them replicate the projects including giving htem the public keys so that if any devs want access after the fact it can be already-working.

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sig makes me want to punch you. Do you also have a spork you'd like to hold up for us?

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Apple seems slow to release. They use Google for R&D and only release what sticks around for more than a few years.

Re:Google Product

[frank_adrian314159]

Christ Almighty, Richard Stallman, who the hell shit in your Wheaties this morning?

You shills better get better at writing your articles - the odd shrillness of the message coupled with the vagueness about how somehow losing their project hosting injures them to this great of an extent gives you away - you've already taken the time to write the code. A bit more coding/work to migrate the projects? Dude, it's not that much work. Inconvenienced by only a year's migration time? Yes - that I could believe. Reduced to almost incoherent rage, as you seem to be? Hardly.

Well, unless you're the kind of person who thinks that depending on a cloud provider doesn't mean you still need catastrophic backup and/or migration plans for important data. Either that or you value your code far too highly. Frankly, there are often days I'd like to throw away all the code and existing machines in the world and start over, let alone my own programs. I'm almost always sure I can rewrite them with about twice the functionality in half the number of lines, given technology upgrade opportunity.

Re:Google Product

[ralphsiegler]

An AC who had an IP address at the time of the post, yes. Maybe he even takes cookies and loads pixel beacons or link beacons. Maybe he was logged in but clicked the Anonymous box before posting. And maybe he visited another site in the Dice partner morass with the same IP. Uh oh, getting scary eh?

Re:Google Product

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the original AC poster:

Slashdot records my IP address along with the million other things I do on the web?

Now, that's impressive, and false.

Google is the only Leviathan whose tentacles pervade virtually every major website. That is why I don't like them. If they only spied on me 5% of the time, I wouldn't have that much of an issue. But it's closer to 95%.

Re: Google Product

[lems1]

Time to move off gmail. Good write up.

Re:Google Product

[ralphsiegler]

Essentially yes. Many "leviathons" things are being loaded by Slashdot's pages, including even Google's. Slashdot's tentacles are thus even more numerous than Google's.

"Tum tum tum

[Anonymous Coward]

Another one bites the dust!"

More seriously though, I'll never understand people who rely on Google's applications.

Re:"Tum tum tum

[Anonymous Coward]

they were good when gmail came out. shits gone mad downhill.

Re:"Tum tum tum

[MightyYar]

More seriously though, I'll never understand people who rely on Google's applications.

1. Good enough.
2. Free.
3. Familiar.
4. When they shut down, they usually give you a way to get your data.

Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Google services actually stick around?
More importantly, when will they do this to Google+?

Re: Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you compared the functionality to bitbucket or github... It's extremely lame and it was obvious that they weren't investing anything in it for years. Gplus on the other hand is in it for the long haul.

Re:Par for the course

[HairTriggerPoint]

It has gotten to the point that I shudder at the thought of relying on Google for anything beyond search and email. I fear that I will use something of theirs only to have it shut down out of nowhere. I would never use them for anything mission critical.

Re:Par for the course

[Grishnakh]

Google is weird in that they'll quickly abandon anything that they aren't #1 or #2 in, or that they don't think they're going to achieve that (rationally or not). So you have to consider that when you look at their offerings. Gmail isn't going anywhere, because it's #1. Same with search, same with Youtube, same with Google Maps. Anything else is more iffy. Google Fiber is probably pretty safe, since there isn't any good competition for it in its local markets. G+ seems to be safe for now because they refuse to give it up, but I wouldn't rely on it. Google Docs seems fairly safe, since its main competition is Office365 but again you never know. But anything smaller, I wouldn't rely on it because it's just too likely they'll pull the carpet out from under your feet.

It's really odd, and honestly a shame. A healthy market requires more than 2 strong competitors, and lots of other companies are perfectly happy to be #3, #4, or #5, or even farther back. Just because you're a big company doesn't mean you need to be #1 in everything you do. Just look at a lot of the Japanese conglomerates: they hang in there for ages, as long as they're profitable. At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit? If so, you're succeeding. It's when you're in the red and it doesn't look like you're going to pull out that you need to throw in the towel and try something else.

Re:Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

yes. you should write google a letter about this in case they do not read /. They have probably not thought about any of these ideas.

Re:Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit? If so, you're succeeding. It's when you're in the red and it doesn't look like you're going to pull out that you need to throw in the towel and try something else.

Do you imagine that Google Code brings profit to Google?

Re:Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

They've already started the Google+ end of life cycle. They've stopped integrating it into every fucking service (effectively by stopping payment of bonuses to teams for doing it) and started walking some of the worst examples back.

Re:Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

Android — and projects integrated with it (Calendar, Wallet, Chrome, &c.) —should be safe.

Re:Par for the course

[Paradise Pete]

you should write google a letter about this

I'm pretty sure the only emails Google doesn't read are the ones addressed to it.

Re:Par for the course

[ShaunC]

At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit?

Maybe that applies to the Japanese conglomerates you speak of. For publicly traded American companies, what really matters in business is: are you extracting every last possible penny of revenue, actively slashing your salaries and expenses each successive quarter, and maximizing profit as much as possible?

Re:Par for the course

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately, that's quite accurate.

Re:Par for the course

[Grishnakh]

It brings (well, brought) mindshare, and that's pretty important. When someone likes one thing your company provides, they'll want to use other things from your company too.

And now, by sacrificing mindshare by axing every product that isn't generating a lot of profit, they're making it so they can't enter any new markets: every time they try to try something new with their "let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" approach to business, people are going to say to themselves "well this isn't a well-established business for them like search, Maps, Gmail, or Youtube, and they're always killing off all their smaller products, so I better not bother even looking at this thing because it'll probably be on the chopping block soon. Last time I heard about some cool little thing from Google, it was already being canceled!" Who's going to want to make themselves dependent on any new Google product when they have such a track record of killing of popular but not-popular-enough products? It's a total crapshoot whether a new product will be long-lasting or just something else to get the ax. So why bother?

Re:Par for the course

[Grishnakh]

I'm sure they have, their business methods are different. Instead of being like Japanese or Korean conglomerates, they have an American business philosophy, which is basically to concentrate on fewer things and then maximize profit from them, except they're taking it to an extreme even for American companies.

The problem with this philosophy is that it isn't very successful in the long term. Those Asian conglomerates have very long lifetimes and employ lots of people in their societies. If you care about a corporation's duty to society, as Asian corporations do, instead of merely profitability, this is important. American companies don't generally have the great longevity or the immense overall revenues that Asian companies do. Also, having your hand in lots of things generates mindshare: people like one thing from your company, they're more likely to buy other things from it.

Re:Par for the course

[dgatwood]

So what you're saying is that the GGP should himself or herself a letter about it. Sounds like a solid plan to me.

Re:Par for the course

[dgatwood]

I came to that conclusion about Google several years ago. There's a reason that I never bother to look at my Google+ account even though I created one. I didn't trust it to not go away, so why bother. And that was almost four years ago.

We're well past the point where new Google services should be presumed DOA. My general assumption at this point is that unless it is a major source of ad revenue or they spent at least triple-digit millions to acquire it, they don't care about it.

Re:Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like how Sony is making oodles of moneys from its assortment of businesses, right? Oh wait, they shut most of them down even though they are #3/4/5 in their respective businesses because they're losing money.

Re:Par for the course

[LordWabbit2]

Please, I am relying on other search engines more and more.
I go looking for a review of a movie and half of the google results are
In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s)
The automated DMCA removal requests are turning google search into a joke.

Re:Par for the course

[AmiMoJo]

Google does stuff either because it hopes it can find a way to make money out of it, or because it needs something and it doesn't exist.

Services like Reader were attempts to make money that didn't work out. Like many start-ups they never figured out how to monetize it, despite getting millions of users.

Projects like Chrome are there to push web technology forward, because Google needs it to move faster than it was previously. Google Code was the same, when it started back in 2006 there wasn't much except for SourceForge. Now there is in the form of GitHub and the like there is no need for Google Code, and it doesn't make money so... It's going.

Re:Par for the course

[master_kaos]

And that is probably exactly what google is doing with google code -- in the red. So they chucking in the towel.
Services/Product that I IMO I believe are safe to use, and not going anywhere -
Search
Chrome
Gmail
Drive
Docs (sheets, docs, etc)
Calendar
Youtube
Maps (+google earth)
Apps (or at least apps for business)
Android

Was going to add sketchup -- didn't realize it was sold though.

Maybe a couple products/services I am missing. I would be comfortable using all of these services and not worrying about it shutting down. All the other services (including google plus) I would only use if I was prepared for if it got shut down.

It has been obvious for years that google code was fading. Tons of projects have been migrating away from it to github or another service for the past couple years. I dont know of a single project that migrated to google code from github,

Re:Par for the course

[ShaunC]

I think it's worth mentioning that Google didn't necessarily want to go public, they were forced to do so in 2004 because they had a certain valuation and a certain number of shareholders. 10 or 11 years ago, I really believe that "don't be evil" was part of Google's culture. Once they were wedged into becoming a publicly traded company, all bets were off. Shareholder profits uber alles.

Sourceforge should be blocked by browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

It is nothing but an adware site if you try to download on windows now. Completely irresponsible management of what is little more than a husk.

DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, GitHub. You won. The entire software world is now dependent upon a single point of failure. Explain to me exactly what the advantage of DVCS was supposed to be again?

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, GitHub. You won. The entire software world is now dependent upon a single point of failure.

... because GitHub and Google Code were the only two choices available?

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Grishnakh]

The "D" is for Distributed. Git doesn't require you to use a single server; it's pretty much trivial to move your project history from Github to a competing service, since you're copying the entire project history every time you clone your repo anyway. So even if Github instantly vanished tomorrow, all the project authors would easily be able to re-clone their repos on a different service. That's the advantage of DVCS.

Re: DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Realistically, for any open source project with no budget that doesn't want to host its own infrastructure, yes, they are the only options.

There are others, but they're typically inferior in some major way. Like being based off of old versions of SourceForge, or affiliated with the FSF, or only supporting CVS.

Re: DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are others, but they're typically inferior in some major way.

Bitbucket is free for small private projects, free for public projects, and handles both Git and Mercurial. And has a nicer looking website in my opinion. What is inferior about it in a major way, please?

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Single point of failure? Git is distributed, my friend. GitHub could burn to the ground tomorrow and the worst that would happen is developers push to a different origin.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nearly as easy to copy an SVN repo, too. Hell, even a CVS repo can be moved easily enough.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Just Some Guy]

No, really, it's not. A Git clone has 100% of the information required to serve as the master for any number of other repos. Every copy is as good as "the original". In fact, Git doesn't even have a concept of "the original", just repos that you fetch commits from.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that most people don't even know how to do pull requests via email any more. And Git isn't even that old.

A lot of people don't even know the difference between Git and GitHub.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

"all the project authors"
Yes, if they were not using github as the main repo and not updating every freaking minute. For big projects, github doesn't gurarantee any more than a normal VCS, or even advanced DVCS like clearcase/perforce. You put yoru src code in the cloud and the cloud either rains on you or dries up.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, really, it is. You've been able to do a full client-side clone of a Subversion repository for a couple of years now.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[jrumney]

He did say nearly. With SVN or CVS, you have to copy the files from the server. With a DVCS you can copy files from any client that has cloned the repository. The process is not much different, a single directory copy will suffice for all cases.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

The "D" is for Distributed. Git doesn't require you to use a single server; it's pretty much trivial to move your project history from Github to a competing service, since you're copying the entire project history every time you clone your repo anyway. So even if Github instantly vanished tomorrow, all the project authors would easily be able to re-clone their repos on a different service. That's the advantage of DVCS.

Really? So if GitHub went down, every developer would have a complete and up-to-date list of all open issues, their priorities, the forum where the issues were discussed, etc. etc. etc?

A DVCS greatly increases the chance that someone on the planet, somewhere, has a copy of the files and their histories, but the code is not the entirety of a project.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Grishnakh]

You can, but who does?

Most SVN users just check out what they need, and that's it. They don't do full client-side clones if they don't have a good reason for it.

With Git, every user has a full client-side clone.

So, when the central server you're using suddenly disappears, with SVN you're hosed if you didn't specifically prepare for this, but with Git it's no big deal at all.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Grishnakh]

No, you're right, but that's not the aim of a FOSS DVCS like Git. Unlike some proprietary software solutions, it does not aim to include every conceivable thing you need for any task, it just focuses on one task and does it well. If you want bug-tracking, you use something like Bugzilla, if you want a forum, you use something else, etc.

Yes, if Github vanishes suddenly, the bug tracker and forum etc. will be gone if someone didn't back them up somehow. But the code, and its history, is easily the most important part of any software project. You can recover pretty easily from the loss of your bug tracker and your discussion forum. Recovering from a loss of your source code (and all the development branches) is not so easy. Git makes this easy because with it, everyone who checked out a copy has the entire repository and history (up to the point at which they checked it out). And whoever checked in the newest change will have a repository that mirrors that on Github, so as long as that person is around, no data is lost.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[X0563511]

That also means a git repo can get a bit bloaty, should a repository be very old and/or active.

There's pros and cons to each approach.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

The linux repository, probably one of the most active and oldest git repositories, requires just about 900 MB for storing all of the project's history. That doesn't sound too bad to me.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty bad when someone accidentally checked in a 10GB blob 2 years ago then deleted it, but everyone still has to download >10GB every time they clone.

Re: DVCS is now CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you use some other DVCS like fossil (http://fossil-scm.org/). There's chiselapp.com for fossil reporitories. I have not actually used chiselapp, since i don't do coding for PCs, so i don't know how/if it is inferior, but it's an option too.

Re:DVCS is now CVS.

[Per Wigren]

It IS possible to delete from the Git history, though. Instructions here.

Read the comments

[SuperKendall]

If you have code in Google Code, read through the comments in the first link - there is some important Q&A going on there, including a flag you can set in advanced project settings when you've migrated off Google Code, that will forward on links looking at Google Code to the new home...

I didn't see it stated explicitly but I'm thinking they are only supporting migration to GitHub for forwarding compatibility? I don't have a Google Code account so I can't check what the setting says it does.

Seconded

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has proved quite Evil as in they are not immune to the al mighty dollar..

Re:Seconded

[Anonymous Coward]

Google do some Evil shit these days but I don't think closing down struggling or unpopular free-as-in-cost projects is one of them. Quite the opposite... Google exiting a market has been often been Good for that market as we see free-as-in-libre projects take over.

Re:Seconded

[Anonymous Coward]

NO COMPANY is immune to revenue and costs. Are YOU immune to them? If your costs exceeded what you made, would you continue everything you'd been doing? Probably not.

Re:DO NOT TRUST

[Anonymous Coward]

Like... a years notice? That seems like a while to some?

It actually seems to be working for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phase 1: Acquire services

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: Profit

Google is an advertising company

[bazmail]

Everything else is just an attempt to grab personal data. What did you think would happen?

All their products should be thought of as experiments with a shelf life.

Well, isn't that something?

[duck_rifted]

It might have worked had they promoted it to people who could use it. At all. I get the feeling that they promoted it to people they could identify as rockstar indie devs and blew off the rest of us. Well, that's what you get, Google. Maybe next time you won't pretend like your service is so special that it should be gated with a crimson rope, and you'll promote it to everybody who can use it.

Google failing at advertising, more at 11.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, for a supposed advertising company, they sure do fucking suck at figuring out ways to monetize things, don't you think?

I said the same thing back when they made excuses for killing iGoogle because "no way to monetize" when there was a massive sidebar with nothing but a chat widget in it. Yes, no way at all, because iGoogle totally wasn't filled with RSS feeds for peoples INTERESTS, who cares about interests, right?
Absolute morons. Seriously.

Re:Google failing at advertising, more at 11.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have fucking paid for it man

GitHub Importer?

[GeneralSecretary]

Any bets on how long until GitHub makes a tool to import Google Code projects?

Re:GitHub Importer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably never since according to TFA Google has already made one.

Re:GitHub Importer?

[adosch]

There's Google's own 'google code project' for that .....nice.

Re:GitHub Importer?

[snookiex]

Sourceforge already has one, FYI.

I don't see what the big deal is.

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be nice if they'd extend read-only an additional year, but ultimately google code has been passed over for github and other services for quite a while now. Even google uses github. They're giving us time to migrate anything that's worth migrating. They've even made import tools for some of the services.

Very sad, indeed.

[adosch]

I better speak to this in past tense or some troll is going to attack me...

I was a big google code project user, have a handful of projects on there plus commit to quite a few professional ones as well. It's really sad to see it go. It's not really a matter of how trendy, popular and intuitive Github is and has become (google code had git functionality and you choice of svn or mercurial), I thought google code was merely fine and met the requirement.

The overall sucky part is it was a intuitive service. It worked. It was reliable for everyday project work. I don't think I ever had any problems with it. I hate to see things that worked well on the internetz go away at the cost of popularity and newhat trends.

RIP code.google.com. May I be so lucky to see you on archive.org afterlife?

Re:Very sad, indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Need Git or Mercurial? Go with BitBucket. Since it is basically the public demo of a commercial project, it's likely not going anywhere.

If you're an ancient hippie still using Subversion, go with Assembla.

If you're an ancient imbecile using CVS, please stop being an ancient imbecile using CVS.

Upgrades

[SuperKendall]

Too bad archive.org is not a dynamic thing, instead of a static view of websites past...

You could call it "parallelinternet.org", where you could fork behavior of any website at any time and have its functionality live on forever even after a company dropped support for the original.

I know that's not very feasible, but it's nice to dream.

Re:Upgrades

[tepples]

You could call it "parallelinternet.org", where you could fork behavior of any website at any time and have its functionality live on forever even after a company dropped support for the original.

AGPLv3 would make it possible.

Re:Upgrades

[bensch128]

This project aims to do exactly that. https://github.com/ikreymer/py...

It'll record your browsing experience and play it back for you later. It will even record links that you did not originally browse. (You have to configure the depth)

The developer is working on it constantly

Re:Upgrades

[SuperKendall]

Thanks for the link, although it wasn't quite what I was thinking of it's a really impressive idea, and is way more practical to pull off.

That would be a really interesting tool to reverse-engineer A-B testing going on on websites...

SourceForge next please

[Anonymous Coward]

Slow, frustrating and spammy. Someone put SourceForge our or our misery too, please.

I'm not sure consolidating everything at one or two cloud VCS sites is a brilliant idea. All I know for certain is that whenever I track down the source for something and end up at SourceForge my estimation of that project goes way down.

Re:SourceForge next please

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they want to use a superior version control system.

10x Programmers

[BlackHawk-666]

Google, with all their rockrstar 10x programmers and engineers fail yet again. What's the point of hiring "only the best" through a series of day long gruelling interview processes and obscure ego inflating (for the interviewers) exams - when all the software they write ends up in the trash. Their only good products are the search engine, gmail (getting marginal), and youtube (bought from someone else). Two hit products for such a massive company of the world's best software engineers seems like a pretty big let down.

Nothing good ever seems to come out of these massive, lumbering, over managed companies. Their two decent products came at a time when they were much smaller. All the innovation is coming from small, lean and agile companies who take risks. Google is just the next Microsoft, ready to crest the wave any time now.

Re:10x Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, okay. How exactly is this a failure? They made a pretty awesome product but at the end of the day it just didn't make money, so the company abandoned it. The implementation was great and it had a ton of features that even github doesn't have. So... what? Tell me how their rockstar programmers are to blame for this.

Re:10x Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

i blame them for shitty UIs and choosing to work for an ad company that's basically just the doubleclick of the 2000s.

Re:10x Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

The (10x) programmers are the how, not the why.

Why did Google create Google code? Someone there saw a use for hosting source repositories and putting a good web interface on it. Especially for Google's own projects and for the projects that are part of Google's ecosystem.

Plus it was cool and it might make some money.

The guys who started GitHub had a similar idea. The difference is that they were depending on it making some money.

So maybe Google code was well-made and effective. And no one who was working on it was depending on its success for their livelihood. Even if they had made G.C. the #1 repository hosting site on the web, the G.C. Googlers weren't part of and wouldn't be part of the "breadwinners" who work on core search and so many other projects directly contributing to the company's biggest money maker and most of its prestige. The G.C. team also had no big potential payday coming if their project was successful. Also, what they were doing wasn't something intrinsically world-changing, just really nice. Google will keep on going just fine without Google code and the team that worked on it has certainly moved on (maybe splitting up) when something more interesting or potentially more profitable came along.

I'd bet anything that the difference in motivations between the two teams led to way more attention and effort being put into GitHub. The athletes and performers who do best are always the ones who put in the most effort. The guys at GitHub clearly put in more effort and that's why they lead in their space.

I suspect it's very challenging to manage at Google. They are smart to discard things that aren't clearly making a difference for the company. They have whole armies of engineers dedicated to things like Android, which is mostly a big, giant business moat around search. I think those 10x engineers are also a moat. The more talent they can suck up, the better. Then they aren't working for competitors and it reduces the chances that they're going to come up with the next big thing outside the company that's going to eat Google's lunch.

Re:10x Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Android?
Chrome?
Maps?

Re:10x Programmers

[grouchomarxist]

Most software ends up in the trash anyway. That's just the way the tech industry is.

Better to shut down this product and have the engineers work on something that is more rewarding for everyone involved.

Re:10x Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Voice?
Drive/Docs?
Analytics?

Re:10x Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to list the rubbish projects, we all get those.

Re:10x Programmers

[cloud.pt]

And the actual money-making one: AdSense

Re:10x Programmers

[AmiMoJo]

You have to understand what Google products are for. Google builds stuff that it needs and isn't available. When a good alternative comes along it considers its job done and moves on. When Google Code started there were not many people offering something like that, and now there are many. It paved the way, encouraged other services to develop and now is being jettisoned because it doesn't generate any revenue.

Gmail brings in cash so will keep going. When it started there was nothing quite like it, with the "never delete anything" and "don't organize, search" philosophies. Chrome is basically a driver for new web technologies like SPDY which became HTTP/2, and WebM, and high performance Javascript engines etc.

It's a real shame because people use a lot of these products and really like them, but Google loses interest as soon as they mature and ditches them if they don't make any money. It seems a bit odd because clearly GitHub et. al. manage to pay the bills with premium accounts, but I guess Google wasn't interested. Custom Maps and Earth recently went free so maybe they are moving away from charging for premium services.

Re:10x Programmers

[zlogic]

Drive/Docs is also popular in some circles.
And Hangouts are quite popular for doing conferences, interviews and online collaboration.

Re:10x Programmers

[johncandale]

Google, with all their rockrstar 10x programmers and engineers fail yet again. What's the point of hiring "only the best" through a series of day long gruelling interview processes and obscure ego inflating (for the interviewers) exams - when all the software they write ends up in the trash. Their only good products are the search engine, .....

I take it you haven't used Google search lately to find new(not ones you lost the address to) websites? It has gotten really sucky. The first two pages are sockpuppet websites for whatever company is trying to sell you something. Example: learning a new language. You sued to be able to find real specialty sites on the web. Not so much anymore.

Re:10x Programmers

[BlackHawk-666]

I actually switched a little while ago to DuckDuckGo, after using Google for the last...um, when did Altavista start to suck? You're pretty much spot on about the first two result pages, they are filled with paid for placements. I can't seem to search on something without some retailer site(s) coming up willing to sell me the product, and I mean like 30 of them. Search for the manual for your television and you'll have to scroll right down past all the people wanting to sell that model of TV to you.

Re:10x Programmers

[BlackHawk-666]

Android - it's just Linux with a shiny front end slapped on it. Most of the work was done by volunteers outside of Google. I doubt even 3% of the code found on any given Android device was made at Google, and that's being very generous. If you count the apps downloaded to it, it would be under 1%.

Chrome - wasn't this a fork of webkit or some other browser written by other people? They did a lot of work on it, but it's by no means a Google product.

Maps - I know they acquired some companies for this, not sure the extent of it though. Streetview might well be their own baby. I don't really see it as a killer app though, it's kinda fun.

Re:10x Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Maps sucks balls.

Makes me worried for

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail.. man.. I know some of you have some kinda solution but I use gmail, my college uses gmail and 99 percent of the people I know use gmail. If google is constantly shutting down projects people use.. how long before gmail is gone too?

This was almost a joke but when I think about it... I need a real alternative.

Re:Makes me worried for

[GuB-42]

No problem with GMail, it makes them a ton of money via ads. I don't see it disappear anytime soon.
If your look for an alternative, get your own domain name and make a redirection, this way you can switch provider anytime. Unlike with GMail accounts, you actually own your domain name.

Re:Makes me worried for

[Anonymous Coward]

even if gmail didn't have ads, there's that treasure trove of user data to be compiled by reading and indexing every email sent or received by 100s of millions of accounts... plus gmail is kinda needed for andriod.. it's not like google is going to contract out a top 3 default app to hotmail or yahoo.

Good

[grouchomarxist]

So many of the Google Code projects are stuck on svn. Hope they migrate over to git.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because svn is a piece of shit like git is.

Re:Good

[david_thornley]

There's nothing wrong with svn within its limits. It doesn't do as many things as git does, but lots of people who started with svn or cvs are very comfortable with it. What's wrong with it as a centralized repository?

Re: Good

[grouchomarxist]

Git is better for productivity than svn, especially with regard to handling branches and merging. The sooner we get away from it the better.

How much work do the archivists have ahead of them

[fsterman]

It would be nice to hear from an archivist about how they plan to go about archiving the projects. How well does Archive.org's time machine cover Google Code? It would be cool if Google would post a link to a zip export of every project so you can just pul upl the last (and latest) result up on Archive.org and download the project.

Just slightly worried

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just slightly worried. Why? There was some software for a small USB gadget that shipped with ASUS motherboards called a ScreenDUO. Its a little 320x200 color led display with 3 buttons on top, 2 on the right side, and a 4-way button on the left side. There was no support for Linux out of the box, but some people have written (a little bit) of software to control the thing. Some of it is on the Google Code site, but because the volume is very low, it might not make the migration to GitHub.

When one door closes

[tHe sYtS]

It is not over, it is a new start. The pre GitHub sites like Google code are closing down. But post GitHub sites are alive and growing. At GitLab we see increasing adoption and a fast growing GitLab.com. People want free private repo's, more features and hosting based on open source software.

Re:When one door closes

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashcommentvertisement, but ontopic.

Re:When one door closes

[jeremyp]

The trouble is that version control is fast becoming a monoculture. Soon git will be the only version control solution in town and it's a bit shit really. It's popular mainly because Linus Torvalds wrote it, not because it's actually technically a good program.

Subversion hosting alternative?

[sodul]

And I mean besides sourceforge, which I used to like but not so much anymore. I have a project hosted on google code that facilitates automatic merging between subversion branches. It would be ironic to host that on GitHub.

Re:Subversion hosting alternative?

[bensch128]

Irony is the reason why you should put it on github ;-)