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

Posted by timothy on from the that's-a-shame dept.

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.

8 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Google Product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Who didn't see this coming?

    Google, where good ideas go to die.

    1. Re:Google Product by JourneymanMereel · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
    2. Re:Google Product by ralphsiegler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Google Product by N1AK · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Google Product by xonen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
  2. "Tum tum tum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Another one bites the dust!"

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

    1. Re:"Tum tum tum by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  3. Very sad, indeed. by adosch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?