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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.
Taken a look at the top projects lately?
Who didn't see this coming?
Google, where good ideas go to die.
Another one bites the dust!"
More seriously though, I'll never understand people who rely on Google's applications.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google has proved quite Evil as in they are not immune to the al mighty dollar..
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.
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.
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.
Like... a years notice? That seems like a while to some?
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.
Any bets on how long until GitHub makes a tool to import Google Code projects?
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?
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
I'm pretty sure the only emails Google doesn't read are the ones addressed to it.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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?
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
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.
So many of the Google Code projects are stuck on svn. Hope they migrate over to git.
Unfortunately, that's quite accurate.
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.
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.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
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.
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?
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.
So what you're saying is that the GGP should himself or herself a letter about it. Sounds like a solid plan to me.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
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.
It IS possible to delete from the Git history, though. Instructions here.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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,
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.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!