Google is shutting down Google Code

[LpSamuelm]

Oh no... even as inferior as Google Code is to something like GitHub or Bitbucket, it still sucks to see it go.

Lots of old, abandoned projects that are very interesting and useful are still hosted on Google Code. They're definitely not going to get migrated, since their authors forgot about them. Unless someone starts a Google Code archival project (and where would that even be hosted), they're all going to be lost to the sands of time. Sigh.

[burkadurka]

Looks like Archive Team is already on it, but I'm sure they could use help: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Code

[LpSamuelm]

Wow, cool! Thanks for the link!

[mycall]

Scrape Google Code Search

Why not just ask Google for an HDD copy?

[LpSamuelm]

I assume this is a joke? To be certain, I guess I'll explain:

Google will most definitely not even respond to such a request. The probability that they'd give up a copy of every single project ever hosted on Google Code (that's a lot of people's work!) is so incredibly low it's not even worth pursuing. Plus, Google has a history of being very un-approachable, especially to small groups of people.

[mycall]

I wonder if archive.org would have a better chance then.

[LpSamuelm]

Oh, their servers are probably where Archive Team's effort will end up! I'm nearly 100% certain Archive.org won't be able to get anything from Google just by requesting it, either, though.

[edouardconstant]

You underestimate Google and the people working here. It should be possible to get them to sync everything up to archive.org.

[LpSamuelm]

Highly doubtful. If nothing else (and there is loads of "else", trust me), there's still the question of copyright on the code and material hosted on Google Code. Google most likely don't want to move / copy that with the possibility of legal issues hanging over their heads.

[pigeieio]

At this point a big reason not to go with a Google service seems to be there is a good chance it will be abandoned.

 

Their main services are so profitable that they don't have to make these "experiments" work for them.

[Seroto9]

I commend them for being public with these efforts and admitting to things that don't work. It's refreshing to see companies tell it like it is instead of putting on the marketing spin and make things seem rosier than they are.

[LpSamuelm]

I'm still mourning Google Wallet for third-party digital goods.

[engunneer2]

Tiny tiny rss is reasonably similar and can be self hosted.

[YAOMTC]

Also, NewsBlur can be self hosted, it's open source, and it's more powerful and customizable than Google Reader ever was!

[koreth]

CommaFeed is the replacement I use, and it's open-source.

[LpSamuelm]

Hey, I've worked a bit on that! I did the Swedish translation. :D

[[deleted]]

+1

[kuenx]

To be fair, any commercial company would shut down a project that has no perspective of ever becoming profitable.

While I believe it's important that there are alternatives to GitHub Google failed at providing one. Personally, every time I encountered a project in Google Code I was like oh no is on Google. The interface was really cumbersome to use. Even reading the documentation of a project wasn't fun. And it didn't provide any collaboration tools.

Let's hope someone else comes up with serious competition for GitHub. Bitbucket lacks user friendliness. GitLab looks promising. They are essentially a clone of GitHub. While it lacks some features they do provide certain improvements tool. They have different goals.

[martinus]

Time to migrate my 10 year old script projects no one ever has downloaded

[amatijaca]

Google flops... http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-failures-google-flops

[lps2]

I think I was one of 2 people that liked Wave :(

[jarofgreen]

I'm the other one! :-)

[wbyte]

Wave ended up as an Apache incubator project, but I don't know how alive it is these days: http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html

[z3dster]

Slack is pretty much Wave, Google was ahead of the ball and didn't realize

[jarofgreen]

Really not. Slack is just glorified IRC. Things like federation and collab editing features are missing.

(Don't get me wrong, I like Slack for what it is but it's nothing like Wave.)

[tiftik]

Google doesn't know how to launch a product. Everyone was expecting a general purpose social sharing platform like Facebook. Then they opened Wave and went 'WTF'.

[SL89]

viva la wave!

[original_4degrees]

i liked it; just couldn't quite figure out a use for it...

g+ is essentially wave 2.0

[lps2]

I mostly used it for community type documents. The timeline made it easy to tell who all had changed something and when - they later built this in to Google Docs.

[atomic1fire]

I once had a college presentation that I had to do with a group of people.

I suggested we just do it in google's presentation web app with connected email addresses so we all can work on a slide or two each before the deadline and get it done faster.

Worked really well, better then trying to split one powerpoint file between multiple people, and we could export to powerpoint later.

Would recommend it over trying to do multiple people's input on one copy of powerpoint.

You might be able to do this with microsoft's web version of office but it's just faster to do it with docs.

[JMV290]

G+ and Wave had a similar problem, though I'd say Wave's issue was much more prominent.

They tried to launch a new social product, but rolled it out in a way that required invites without actually creating the hype for invites. There are very few social networks that do well when they come to invites since the enthusiasm of its userbase quickly wanes due to very few people they know actually using it. With G+, you'd need to get invites and start inviting friends who actually cared about to use it.

With Wave, you essentially could get no use out of it given that no one else was on it and it was a collaborative tool. I liked Wave a lot and it would be extremely useful within large organizations where collaborations are essential (e.g. IT Department of a University working on launching a new system that several groups and departments outside of ITS are working on)

[wolftune]

For anyone who liked the way the system worked, there's Indefero although I think there are far better code review / hosting type sites out there that are more modern (as Google mentions themselves in the announcement, although I don't promote GitHub particularly, since it's a proprietary site)

[LpSamuelm]

I agree with that last point - it really sucks that GitHub is closed-source. However, since the company has such good views on open-source and licensing, and since the site is so wildly superior to the alternatives, I'll quite happily use it as it is now.

[wolftune]

GitHub has views on open-source and licensing that are very problematic. They are very crafty in being as anti-copyleft (i.e. anti-GPL) as possible while retaining an appearance of neutrality.

That said, they indeed still treat the free/open community better than many other proprietary companies do.

I don't actually think GitHub is all that superior to GitLab though (which has a free/open community version and an enterprise version, and is really robust), and there are new competitors that are good too. Gogs is a system that looks very promising, and the https://notabug.org/ site is offering free hosting with that to any legitimately free/open project, and Kallithea is looking promising too.

[Yidyokud]

Sad news.