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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?
This was my thought exactly. Sadly, Google has proven themselves to be very unreliable.
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
slashdot does that too, you know.
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?
There's Google's own 'google code project' for that .....nice.
Sourceforge already has one, FYI.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
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.
I'm pretty sure the only emails Google doesn't read are the ones addressed to it.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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?
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.
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.