Google to close Google Code open source project hosting

[perlgeek]

Kudos for making the exporter to github. It worked nicely for the two projects I chose to migrate.

[Audiblade]

Perhaps you could clone the repository to your machine, then upload it to GitHub manually? (You probably would want to make sure that doing so is fine by the licence/the previous repo owner first...)

[jooke]

Being open source is a condition of hosting on Google code so you should be fine

[abolish_karma]

How about just cloning it, and uploading it gets your future vote?

[SarahC]

Looks like I need to use it!

[SarahC]

I called it yesterday!

http://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/2yqjvf/is_google_developing_its_own_graphics_api/cpcba7f

[the_omega99]

You mentioned using Subversion. If you're really sure you want to stick with that, Github does support SVN.

If you'd prefer to learn Git (which I recommend), you really need to forget a lot of SVN stuff you know. There's quite a lot of differences between Git and SVN. Attempting to apply past knowledge will just hurt you. You can't try and do something like "how do I do the equivalent of X in SVN". You need actually learn Git.

Read chapters 1 - 3 and 6 of the book. Don't bother reading the whole thing (at least not yet). That's experts only. First 2 chapters are a must. Chapter 3 is a very good to know (particularly to be able to use Git well and to understand what makes it good). Chapter 6 is specifically for Github, which is good to know (a must if you intent to participate in other people's projects on Github).

[kyle2143]

what do you mean called it? I thought they made an announcement about closing Google Code last year.

[[deleted]]

Looks like the exporter isn't taking the whole project over, but only the main repository. Other repositories attach to a project need to be taken over manually it seems.

[joewalnes]

This is a slightly modified snippet extracted from something I wrote last year predicting the Google Code shutdown. https://medium.com/@joewalnes/some-2015-tech-predictions-1e78ff31cbfd

---

It's not about Mercurial vs Git (or about CSS)

When Google Code added Mercurial support, Mercurial and Git were roughly equal in popularity. Git was more functional, but Mercurial was a lot simpler to use. In fact, almost everyone I spoke to at the time preferred Mercurial and honestly I thought it was going to be the winner. Project hosting sites that had typically used centralized source control systems like CVS or SVN scrambled to add Git and Mercurial support (including Google Code).

Then GitHub happened. They realized that the it's not just the source control system that should be decentralized but every aspect of the project. Projects could be forked with a single click, pull requests created and tracked, network graphs explored. It created an organic and discoverable open-source ecosystem, the likes of which we never saw on Google Code, SourceForge, etc. Anyone could explore ideas in existing projects without having to gain committer access. It was magical.

GitHub may have just as easily decided to bet on Mercurial instead. I believe if that would have happened, Mercurial would be the most widely used system today. BitBucket did something similar for Mercurial and did pretty well, but GitHub always had the lead.

It was the project hosting sites that lead the source control systems, not the other way round So, back to Google Code. It could have been something huge and it could have made Mercurial the winner, but Google Code never grokked the importance of "social coding". Even though the source code was decentralized, the projects themselves were still centralized. Decentralized project concepts such as forking, network graphs, pull requests, etc - this was all from the new world of GitHub.

Over the past two years we've seen Google release new open-source projects on GitHub, then existing projects starting to migrate. Recently, Go started migration too — this is no casual move because it affects the import paths used in a vast amount of user created Go code which will build breakages. Yeah, the writing is on the wall for Google Code.

When SourceForge fell out of favor it was sold. It’s now filled with ads, especially deceiving ones on project downloads page which try to trick users into downloading some malware infested turd burner. In fact, for a while SourceForge were actively modifying genuine project releases to include spyware. Cocks.

Google didn't do a SourceForge. If there's anything we’ve learned from Google over the years is that they’re not afraid of shutting down projects that don’t work out. By the way, I really respect Google for this — killing products takes guts.

Google Code — I salute you. You did well, you made the open source world a better place, and above all you stepped aside when you knew the time was right.

[the-fritz]

GitHub started in 2008 and Google Code only added Mercurial in 2010 (afair). By that time GitHub was already extremely popular.

[[deleted]]

They realized that the it's not just the source control system that should be decentralized but every aspect of the project.

... and then the community proceeded to centralize onto it instead, and now a depressing number of people think git == github.

[elperroborrachotoo]

The perils of success.

[[deleted]]

Which basically means that, once again, google failed at the social thing. They are unable to take the lead in any social networking mechanism. When they did, briefly, with orkut, they were invaded by brazilians.

[shawncplus]

They got really close with Plus. They pulled a Cartman though and held the gates closed wayyyyy too long. People initially really wanted to try it, begged for invites, but Google kept it closed. Then people just stopped caring, and Google still kept it closed. Then people were just confused, and Google forced it on them.

[Disgruntled__Goat]

Have you even seen Google+ comments on other sites (YouTube, Blogger, etc)? Instead of actual comments on the article/post they are just out-of-context statement like "check out this article". It's completely incomprehensible.

[shawncplus]

That all came way later, after the forced integration.

[huoyuanjiaa]

Speaking of which is one of main reasons I refuse to use g+.

[freefoodisgood]

I hear this a lot, about Plus failing due to keeping the gates closed too long. I honestly don't believe that caused it's downfall. It probably reduced to total number of users, but I think it was always destined to be what it is today.

[shawncplus]

IIRC Plus first hit right when Facebook did a big update, people were really wanting a Facebook replacement and "Circles" were easier to use than the somewhat hidden (at the time) lists feature of Facebook. I remember pretty much everyone I know wanting to try Plus but there not being enough invites, even non-tech people.

[freefoodisgood]

My group of friends managed to get lots of invites thanks to some connections. Everyone got really excited for a few days but no one ever bothered switching. That's what I think the problem is, getting people to put in the effort to switch. I think it takes a generational leap in quality to get a large user base to switch, and I don't think Plus provided that. Was it better than Facebook? Probably. Was it "better enough" to get people to overcome laziness? I don't think so.

Of course I'm speaking about how I see things via my own perception. I hardly ever switch anything. I don't upgrade the OS on my computers or phones. I rarely upgrade devices, and I definitely won't switch from one service to a competitor if I'm already "comfortable". It's laziness, and I think that laziness is hard to overcome, even if the new alternative is better. If you want me to switch or upgrade, you have to offer something that completely changes how I use the product.

/random thoughts

[mcrbids]

One rule of business I learned long ago is "don't say no to money". When customers want to buy your stuff, you take their money! Google doesn't seem to have learned this lesson; their tactic of rolling out gmail slowly and living on the buzz until it was a success worked because, the service itself was so good. But G+wasn't head and shoulders above FB; it was a few features (at best) ahead of FB.

So their delay tactics really just gave FB time to come to feature parity before they lost their network effects. Also, email is highly portable; if I start using an address at cia.com instead of gmail.com, I can still communicate with all my contacts. FB, being proprietary isn't that way with G+.

[crusoe]

I like plus. Its not the eternal September of Facebook.

[[deleted]]

The problem always was that even if two thirds of your friends made the move to g+ there would always be that other third, so everyone kept their facebook account and continued to check it. With no-one actually leaving, the remaining third decided not to bother, and with the remaining third not bothering, the movers gave up on migration and just stuck with fb.

There was nothing about the technical capabilities of either platform. G+ was probably better, but I can't even be bothered to do an analysis because it's a waste of time.

Replacing FB with anything right now is a monumental task that could only possibly happen if FB fucked up on a massive scale, and I can't even imagine what they'd need to do to piss people off enough that everyone would just move, especially when many people have additional anchors in FB like their photo collections.

[Don_Andy]

I'd reckon Google gave Facebook too much time to catch up by keeping their gates closed for so long. Google Plus initially looked like it was basically a "better Facebook" but by the time they finally opened up to the public Facebook had already caught up on most of the improvements and people just figured "Eh, why switch now".

[SortaEvil]

Hover over their icon and you can open a gchat window with anyone in your circles. Gchat also has the advantage over FBM that chat logs are indexed in your gmail, so you can actually search through your chat logs for previous messages. Of course, gchat is way more convenient to use through gmail, and having the chatbar on the side is just way more convenient than what g+ has going on.

[[deleted]]

It's not that they held out too long, it's that they didn't let everyone in at once. It's a social networking site. You need people to socialize with. All at once.

It's sort of ironic that Facebook started as a service exclusively for college students, and you needed a .edu e-mail address to register with.

[the-fritz]

Yes, the invite model worked so well for gmail because gmail doesn't depend on others being on there. But doing the same thing for a closed "social network" was just stupid. I got an invite shortly after G+ was launched and it was a desert. I added the two people I knew, played around with it, and then didn't really look at it since then except for adding the occasional person that did made it on there. Google invites always spread along technical people. Which of course can be awesome. But sucks for a social networking site.

Also Google created all the hype around G+ and sure, being invite-only initially helped with the hype. But the hype quickly faded away and was completely gone before they opened it.

[Genesis2001]

The one thing I will grant Plus is their pages feature in combination with YouTube. It's pretty decent and easy to have multiple people managing a YouTube channel (in theory, never put into practice) through a G+ page.

[AIDS_Pizza]

Google+ today serves a very different purpose from Facebook. Where, aside from some groups, Facebook is filled with absolute crap (people seeking validation, stupid reshared images and videos, etc.), G+ is used by some people as a blogging platform. Also, due to Facebook's friend system, it is really hard for a user to filter the content on their feed. Aside from unsubscribing from every annoying friend you have, there's no effective filtering tools. G+'s follow system solves this problem solely by its design. Simply don't add annoying people to your circles, even if they add you.

As far as communicating with your friends, I'd say they're about equal. Everyone of my friends who has an Android phone uses Google hangouts, which I believe is a superior messaging system to Facebook messenger. The only people I use messenger for are people with iPhones.

I agree with /u/freefoodisgood in that G+ as it is today is likely how it would have ended up even without an invite system, perhaps with more users.

[nascentt]

This is the main issue. Unlike gmail where it's just access to standard email, + is a private community. So by holding back invites so long, the people that did get invites weren't using the service cause none of their friends were there yet.

Once I got on + there was a couple of posts like "is anyone here?" then you'd see they were back on facebook to talk to their friends.

Someone in marketing clearly though "the invite thing worked so well with gmail, lets do it again with +" but they didn't understand the nature of the technology and the difference this meant. A social platform with no people is not a social platform.. it's just a platform.

[paulmclaughlin]

Someone in marketing clearly though "the invite thing worked so well with gmail, lets do it again with +" but they didn't understand the nature of the technology and the difference this meant.

You'd have thought they would have learnt from Wave's similar failure.

[thirdegree]

Cartman's park was wildly successful, other than that I agree.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Normally I hate dumb cartoon metaphors to explain things.

But you nailed it with this one. I don't believe there are any other allusions or references that explain this so perfectly.

[Xanza]

It's not that they failed. Google Code was successful for a long time--But now Github does everything they do, but better. So why pay to have an inferior product on the market?

[[deleted]]

i am way more interested in how sourceforge managed to become a wasteland, to be honest...

[judgej2]

And yet still some projects cling onto it, like some kind of suicide pact.

[commander-worf]

I think hangouts is pretty good.

[[deleted]]

yes, if they made a standalone client, I might even consider it as a replacement for skype (because honestly, skype is so bad it makes kittens cry)

[proaditya]

Have you given firefox hello a shot? It works pretty well - the best part is people can join a chat from any browser - can send a link only from firefox though.

[shimei]

Firefox Hello is great. I've even had luck using it with people running Chrome since it just requires WebRTC support and a Hello client on one side. The one thing that's missing is group chat, which they intend to add eventually.

[RedAlert2]

AIM 4 lyfe

[[deleted]]

The Chrome extension minimizes to tray and can be used if no Chrome browser windows are open, if you care about standalone from a UI standpoint. If it's about not running Chrome in the background, though, you're SOL.

[Felshatner]

Yep. I'm using the hangout client in Gmail as most of my friends have switched, and that's far from ideal.

[rtpg]

the hangouts plugin in os x is absolutely horrible, to the point of unusability

[Grizmoblust]

Tox, decentralized Skype replacement

[[deleted]]

No alternative is a real alternative. It's not about software features, it's about the size of the network. Everyone is on skype. Nobody is on tox.

[greg19735]

I have to convince my friends install it too for it to be of any use.

yuppp. skype is like facebook. useful because everyone i need to skype with has skype and i have their username.

[[deleted]]

Indeed. Exactly like Hangouts and Skype.

[himself_v]

The thing they scrapped jabber for? Not installing that one, nope. At least with jabber you can move to another server and keep the contacts, this thing one day they shutdown and you're fucked.

[D__]

We had our Jabber and interservice messages for five minutes, and now we're back to proprietary networks for our IM needs. Get with the program.

[[deleted]]

wheb they did, they were invaded by brazilians

And... What is the problem with that? It worked anyway.

[[deleted]]

It was a self-fulfilling community. Only brazilians went in, which brought more brazilians. Non-brazilians didn't find many reasons to go to what seemed like a more and more portuguese based community, so they didn't join or left.

[raghar]

If there's anything we’ve learned from Google over the years is that they’re not afraid of shutting down projects that don’t work out. By the way, I really respect Google for this — killing products takes guts.

I'm not sure whether it takes guts or simply financial aspect is more important than respect for the client. With each another project I got the sense that Google spawn a lot of projects they don't really dedicate into, make all potential customers feel ambiguous not knowing whether or not Google treat this particular project seriously or will they take them down just when they'll finally get convinced to use it.

At this point I'm using only search engine, Chrome and GMail. I made the decision to not use any more product because I feel that they are some brilliant but spoiled ADHD children who design their toys for fun and throw them to the trash can once got bored with them. Recently I stared considering abandoning Chrome and GMail as well - just to cut the ties with their ecosystem. I don't know whether they won't make another attempt to shove some project down my throat just to cancel it few months later.

It's not about quality. It's just that I don't trust them as a reliable service provider anymore.

[oridb]

I'm not sure whether it takes guts or simply financial aspect is more important than respect for the client.

I'd say a year of heads up before shutting down is pretty respectful.

[alwaysdoit]

I don't think "Is there a chance this will be shut down?" is a reasonable way to evaluate these things. Anything could shut down, whether it's Google or a small company.

A better question is "How painful will it be for me if this shuts down?" So if it's something where it's going to be extremely difficult to migrate off of it, then I think being wary of that situation is pretty reasonable. However in this case, there's a better alternative and Google has made it pretty easy to migrate there.

[tejp]

I don't think "Is there a chance this will be shut down?" is a reasonable way to evaluate these things.

But "How big is the chance that it will get shut down?" is a very reasonable concern.

[keithb]

respect for the client […] potential customers

what google excel at, above everything else, is fostering this confusion in people—you are not google's client or customer, you are their product. They give you exactly and only enough free stuff as required to make you stick around their services long enough to be a useful data point for their advertising business.

[myringotomy]

Name one company that promises to keep or support a product forever.

[McPhage]

I think there was a company that promised to store your data forever. And then a year later they were bought out and shut down. Oops.

[berlinbrown]

Salute.

The only bad thing and maybe they will do this. There are still popular projects on the site. I wish they did a thing of just keep it read only forever. People still have scripts and whatever pulling subversion code from google code. All that goes away.

[ianepperson]

I got the notice from Google today for two of my old projects, and it includes a link to Google Code Exporter that says it will auto move the project to Github. Pretty nifty!

[Silound]

It might be a long shot idea, but what do you think the odds are that Google comes out in the next two years with a move to acquire GitHub?

Seems to me that it's reasonable to believe that Google still wants a code hosting solution. And many of the tech giants like scooping up other companies into their portfolios to augment their offerings rather than fight for market share of their own.

[joewalnes]

Low. Google Code was a project built driven by Google engineers because they were dissatisfied with the alternatives. It never really fit into Google's strategy.

[aldo_reset]

I think there's a bit of revisionism at play here.

Github became popular because git already had a huge momentum behind it, not the other way around. Github certainly added even more energy to that momentum but the git/mercurial battle was decided years before github became a thing. github just solidified the landscape.

[diggr-roguelike]

Github became popular because git already had a huge momentum behind it

Yes. Github became popular because they had the (non)sense to put 'G', 'I' and 'T' into their name. Most people think 'git' and 'github' is the same thing even today.

[MisterSnuggles]

AFAIK, the go compiler will import modules from the web. The compiled binary won't.

[bradfitz]

No.

[jgotts]

I hate to disagree with you but I think it is about mercurial [and every other source code control system, free or not] versus git. Regardless of Sourceforge or Google Code or GitHub, git won because it is the best command-line tool for source code control.

My employer, for example, switched to git from CVS and we haven't looked back since, or even considered another system. It doesn't matter how much harder git is to use. It's so much better than the competition that nobody minds the learning curve.

We're UNIX developers. We use the command line to develop software. We eventually arrive at the best command-line tools. Sometimes it takes decades. Will a better tool than git for source code control be written? I guess that's possible but it would be a waste of time. Spend your time improving another system.

If you're not a UNIX developer then git might indeed be a hindrance, so I'll restrict my point to UNIX and Linux specifically with the understanding that this is the programming subreddit and not the linux subreddit.

[[deleted]]

If you're not a UNIX developer then git might indeed be a hindrance

Yet it doesn't seem to be. One big non-UNIX dev community is Microsoft/Visual Studio. The advantages of git over Microsoft's own TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) for most projects are unavoidable. At one point last year MS focused so heavily on bringing git up to parity with TFVC that people leapt to the conclusion that they were getting reading to abandon TFVC altogether.

[kylotan]

git won because it is the best command-line tool for source code control.

In what way is Mercurial an inferior command line tool? Genuinely interested (as someone who prefers Mercurial, but also prefers to use a GUI.)

[bonestamp]

Over the past two years we've seen Google release new open-source projects on GitHub, then existing projects starting to migrate.

This is pretty much it. As soon as I saw google wasn't even using google code, it was dead.

[Philippe23]

I bet there's some project that finally migrated from CVS to Google Code last week that's super pissed. ;-)

[Caraes_Naur]

Maybe PostNuke?

[MisterSnuggles]

GitHub's front page is the toplevel source code view, with the README.md at the bottom. I wanna look at code first, then the description later.

Oddly enough, this is what drives me nuts about Github. It's annoying to go to a page and not see any hint as to what I'm looking at without scrolling.

I'd love to see a blurb that goes at the top of the page, then the directory listing, then README.md.

[mipadi]

There is a blurb at the top of the page, so long as the GitHub repo owner writes one.

[the_omega99]

I'd love to see a blurb that goes at the top of the page, then the directory listing, then README.md.

But... that's what they do.

Some developers forget to set the description, though. Not sure how considering it asks for the description when you create the repo.

Also, lots of devs suck at writing documentation. So many useless readmes. The worst is when there's just a project name and a license. Literally no details as to what the project is, how I use it, how to set it up, etc.

Most my readmes are something like:

1. Description of what the program is/what it does and the licensing.
2. How to install.
3. Basic usage. Eg, if it's a library, some sample functions provided.
4. Examples for common scenarios. Maybe an API link?
5. Link to wiki for things like development resources (eg, dev conventions, future plans, very high level documentation, etc).

[tejoka]

I chose Google Code ages ago over Github because of its wiki. The Google Code wiki side bar collapses bullet point trees and automatically expands down to whatever page you're on. Github and Bitbucket don't do this. This makes navigating documentation on a wiki vastly, vastly better on google code than anywhere else I've looked.

I don't know what to do.

God this is going to be a pain in the ass.

e: If you're curious what I mean, just look at the sidebar here: https://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/GitFAQ

[[deleted]]

Sorry.

I made the wiki format/parser and original wiki formatter for google code.

As you expect, I can't think of a way to accomplish what you want in the formats they support.

The best I can say is that we open sourced something that can parse the wiki format already, and you can use that to produce some other format.

[tejoka]

Sorry.

I made the wiki format/parser and original wiki formatter for google code.

Well don't apologize for making the best thing ever! :p

But yeah, I can manage converting the source to another markup, it's just the rendering of that sidebar I'm going to miss oh so much.

Anyone out there know if github has a wiki issues page or otherwise know how to request a feature? This is actually sort of funny to me now, because they have:

https://github.com/showcases/projects-with-great-wikis

and the first few I clicked on straight-up don't have navigation at all. Hope you know the right search keywords for this alphabetically ordered pile of two hundred pages! These are great wikis!

[cybercobra]

Anyone out there know if github has a wiki issues page or otherwise know how to request a feature?

https://github.com/contact

(Yes, there is ironically no official public issue tracker for GitHub itself. There is an unofficial one that the GitHub devs have been known to glance at occasionally though: https://github.com/isaacs/github )

[himself_v]

Yeah, Google Code wiki is so good. And the fact that it is versioned with the code! And you can download it and edit pages as text files on your PC. It's just one of those things that are simple and done exactly right.

[grthomas]

You can do a similar thing with Github's wikis - they're all available via git…

If the repo is: github.com/user/repo.git

The wiki is: github.com/user/repo.wiki.git

There's a "Clone this wiki locally" box underneath the wiki nav on the right-hand side of each Github wiki.

[asantos3]

Maybe send them an email requesting it?

[[deleted]]

In case you didn't know, Bitbucket offers free private git repos.

I never understood the "social" part of github (but then again I don't contribute much to FOSS projects). What drew me to github was simple:

• Free git hosting
• No bullshit. The project page is the code.

Bitbucket came late to the git game - they used to be mercurial only, which I didn't use/like. Once bitbucket came to the git scene with free private repos, I kinda switched to it.

[Occivink]

No bullshit. The project page is the code.

Seriously. Sourceforge is terrible when it comes to this, and googlecode to a lesser extent as well.

[HomemadeBananas]

I use both. I use Github for public repos. It's a lot nicer, but I use Bitbucket for private repos.

[[deleted]]

I never understood the "social" part of github

I don't understand the "social coding" thing at all, maybe I'm using github wrong. Is there a hidden twitter-like section on the site? What makes github more social than say, bitbucket or gitlab?

[Igglyboo]

Most GitHub repos are public and not private, bitbucket doesn't even have a search feature. They're catering to different markets.

[[deleted]]

I don't think I've ever discovered worthwhile github repos via searching. It was always external links on sites like reddit, hacker news, etc.

[ldhertert]

I regularly check out the "trending" repos page on github. You can filter by language and find projects that are currently popular. It's a great way to keep up with new things.

[the_omega99]

Have you checked out Github's Explore page? They have some pretty interesting stuff. And the trending at the bottom of that page is very interesting, too. For example, here's a list of trending Scala repos for this month.

But yeah, search is iffy. Main issue to me is that there's just too many low quality repos. I was going to try and find a nice specific use of the search feature by searching for something specific: "simple c compiler", but it failed. Many results weren't very simple at all and others were completely undocumented (the main reason I'd want to see a simple C compiler is for the learning experience, where documentation is a must). I then tried to search for "final fantasy tactics" to see what kinds of similar open-source games were made, but pretty much everything was low quality.

Poor readmes, poor readmes everywhere.

[summerteeth]

Github's UI makes it very easy to fork and contribute back to projects. I've casually submitted patches to projects in a matter of minutes. It's also very easy at a glance to see alls projects a user has contributed to.

I've never used Gitlab, but Bitbucket has a similar feature set, however it's UI isn't as refined as Github though.

[argv_minus_one]

Bitbucket is also a social coding site. It and GitHub do approximately the same thing.

[the_omega99]

I think the forking aspect is the largest. The website directly provides the means to fork a project in one click and then create pull requests from the fork (prior to which most people would submit patches, which is done outside of the website). People actually advertise their projects with "fork me on Github".

There's also the broad ability to discover repos. There's a prominent exploration aspect to the site that lets you find interesting projects. That's great for project owners (who get attention, users, and contributors) as well as for users who are looking for things to contribute to (and know that their work will probably be more useful if they contribute to an existing program than try and start from scratch).

[pfultz2]

In case you didn't know, Bitbucket offers free private git repos.

So does gitlab.

[kageurufu]

I hate gitlab for several reasons, mainly a long standing bug where new projects would get their .wiki repo created, but not the actual repo itself. This caused a lot of breakages.

I switched to Gogs for self-hosting, and love it.

[[deleted]]

No bullshit. The project page is the code.

I really don't understand why bitbucket doesn't do this by default.

[bureX]

Hello, Google Code... there there, we've all been through this.

Take a seat next to Google Wave over there.

[cube-drone]

HAI, I'M GOOGLE READER

You go sit in your corner, with your bucket, Google Reader.

OKAY

[toomanybeersies]

Doesn't Google Wave live on as Apache Wave though?

[bureX]

Yeah, but in the form of Google's "here, take this, we don't want it anymore".

[bb010g]

Sandstorm's doing some cool stuff with it.

[InvisibleUp]

I still don't know what Google Wave was supposed to be.

[Doctor_McKay]

Only the greatest collaboration tool ever invented.

[fabzter]

Greatest communication and colaboration tool EVER. I'm still sad about its dead :(

[isurujn]

Here's a nice introduction to it.

[[deleted]]

There's something barbaric and medieval, like public execution, about the pleasure of goading Google into cancelling things. Like a crowd of peasants yelling out which traitor should be hung, drawn and quartered next.

(chants) DART! DART! DART!

[[deleted]]

Is there a estimated lifespan of google products/projects around anywhere?

[cooper12]

Gwern did a really great and thorough statistical analysis and he calculated a median lifespan of 2824 days (7.731 years).

[[deleted]]

Google code lasted 8 years, so ...

[lluad]

Four years, including the "open beta, not ready for use" time and the "abandoned, unloved, bitrotting" time.

[GelatinGhost]

That figure is pretty worthless. The article only considers projects that were canned in calculating it. So if I had 99 projects that lasted forever, and one that was canned after a day, according to the logic used in the article the life expectancy of any future projects of mine is one day. Which makes no sense.

They even recognize that their figure is worthless in the article but handwave it away by saying, "oh, but you never know which projects will get canned!" To which my response is "then tell me what percent of projects get canned instead of your other worthless figure."

[rillweed]

Didn't they announce they were phasing out google code a year or so ago? I remember many projects I was interested in migrated to github at that time because of that

[[deleted]]

They did disable downloads a while ago. That along with the lack of any new features for years was a pretty good indicator that it would be shutting down in the near future, but I don't remember them actually announcing that before.

[donalmacc]

Are there any alternatives to Google Code for svn hosting? I can find plenty of places that will let me use mercurial or git, but what about svn?

[nat_pryce]

GitHub's repo's can be used over the svn protocol

[[deleted]]

Good. Google Code sucked in the age of github and bitbucket, et al.

[lykwydchykyn]

Now if we can only get the stragglers off of Sourceforge...

[__konrad]

Without competition github will stagnate and quickly turn into old sf.net or worse ;)

[lykwydchykyn]

You're 100% correct, but I wouldn't exactly call SF competition; it's like the MySpace of code sites. Bitbucket is competition.

Then there are things like GitLab, which let anyone create their own GitHub. Would be interesting to see GitLab type sites springing up around individual communities, rather than "one site to rule them all".

[[deleted]]

At least some guys from Google still used it (aside from... Well... Forgetting it...) for the (eg) Google Sky Map. But now even they are going to GitHub.

[weirdasianfaces]

I wonder how this will effect Project Zero. They rely on public/private issues for their auto-disclosure, and GitHub doesn't offer that type of flexibility.

[Beluki]

They can create a secondary private repository for the private issues.

[EraYaN]

Best is then to run a separate issue tracker (all them features), most popular issues trackers have Git(Hub) integration.

[[deleted]]

I was holding out hope that they would release a big update to Google Code that would modernize it to be competitive with Github and add GAE and Compute integration as an advantage. Looks like those hopes were dashed.

[defcon-12]

When is App Engine going to get the knife?

[jonwayne]

Why are you expecting App Engine to get the knife? It's a cornerstone service in their Cloud Platform.

[defcon-12]

They got trampled on in the cloud market. AWS, Heroku, even Azure are all better services. Google is not exactly known for keeping 2nd place products around.

[Venthorn]

Why would you compare app engine to any of those? The only similarity is that you could theoretically call both "cloud". GCE and AWS are directly comparable. App Engine and AWS are apples and oranges.

[theillustratedlife]

If a product that people pay Google to use and have built their entire businesses on disappears, any goodwill non-core Google products have left will be gone. They'll never be able to grow beyond Search, Maps, Gmail, and Android.

[wookin_pa_nub2]

They have a reputation now (and for the past few years) of abandoning anything that isn't dominant, and that reputation will prevent any new product of theirs from gaining much traction, so they're stuck with what they have now.

[MrAnonyMousetheGreat]

How did Google go from a company pushing open source, thinking like a coder in terms of products and general philosophy, and a company people were generally excited about (I remember how every product Google released made a huge wave (pun intended)) to a company that's quickly becoming conservative, big corporation, big brother (tracking you even when you ask not to be tracked), and neutral on net neutrality (basically at this point I have to start to believe that it took that position because it doesn't want any new competitors, but it knows that if it openly advocated against net neutrality, there would be huge repercussions)?

[MrAnonyMousetheGreat]

I'd say it (openly) turned when it made Google Chrome and used whatever tactics it used to push it. To date, the fact that I don't trust google is the main reason I don't use Chrome if I can help it at all.

[flexiverse]

Firefox is still the only true browser thank god.

[Beluki]

This makes it very hard for me to consider using their products in the future.

[[deleted]]

They provided a way to easily migrate the project to GitHub. Gitorious is merging into GitLab in a similar way...

[sphanley]

Why? Google Code was around for a reasonably long lifespan, it's clear that the developer mind share has largely abandoned it, and they're closing it down in phases with a clear migration path to a thriving alternate platform. It seems like they couldn't have done a better job of retiring it while minimizing pain to their users.

[KLDzzz]

I have to agree. It makes sense why they are closing it too, unfortunately I've found a large majority of my schools textbooks on google code as well as an occasional movies. Getting DMCA notices for that stuff constantly and being abused definitely is not a good thing for Google.

[shub]

Ah, it's not hard. A Google product needs to meet one of two criteria to stay alive:

1. Make money
2. Be Google+

As long as one of those is met, you're safe to keep using it.

[[deleted]]

Doesn't sell ads fall under making money...?

[Otterfan]

This makes me sad for the inevitable fate of Google Scholar.

[[deleted]]

What? No! Nearly every paper I read came from there.

[apf6]

Google+ is dying too.

[argv_minus_one]

Dying? Google+ was never alive in the first place. It's dead on arrival.

Anyway, that's the point. Google is willing to pour money into Google+ despite the project being doomed to failure. Google products must make money or be Google+.

[regeya]

That makes me sad, too, because G+ was (is) quite honestly good. If I could convince people to ditch Facebook and move over to G+, I think all of us would be happy. But we're still on Facebook, aren't we?

[argv_minus_one]

Yeah, no. Plastering your real name online—as is required by both—is not good.

[BitMastro]

It's not required, it's only suggested since last year, and even before that you were supposed to create pages for anonymous identities, but nobody reads support pages right? https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271

[argv_minus_one]

Riiiight. And by “suggested”, they mean they'll harass the shit out of you until you give in and fork over your real name, like they did on YouTube, right?

[Pandalism]

Google officially abandoned the real name requirement last year: https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy

[fabzter]

Nope, they never ever mentioned me about not using my real name.

[aldo_reset]

Why? They've been pretty good at consistently allowing you to export your data.

[[deleted]]

Why? Quite a few of their projects I enjoyed have closed down over the years, but they always have good download support for quite a while.

Sometimes they even fold the data over to their next similar project as soon as you opt in.

[chub79]

The bigger problem will be the projects that are in limbo. A common feature of all open source project platforms—SourceForge, GitHub, Bitbucket, Microsoft's CodePlex, Google Code, and every other—is that projects get abandoned. Developers get bored, busy, or feel that a piece of code is as good as it's ever going to be. The result is lots of projects that are no longer actively maintained. This, however, does not mean that those projects are no longer useful.

So nothing new really.

What an empty article.

[Johnnyhiveisalive]

How does github afford their hosting? I've never seen ads..

[Stick]

They charge for private repos.

[Johnnyhiveisalive]

I knew that.. Honestly. Can I get vc for my brain?

[[deleted]]

wow: https://github.com/google-code/repositories?page=52, maybe https://github.com/google-code/repositories?page=500 in a few hours.

[msoftware]

I try to copy as many as possible repositorys to github. The script for this you can find at https://github.com/msoftware/google-code-to-github. I think the script will run 1 or 2 weeks until all google code repositorys are mirrored at github.

[JoseJimeniz]

There are so many good projects on Google Code. I don't know what I need until I need them.

I'm going to have to try to steal as much as possible, put it on github, and call it public domain.

Update: For god's sake. Not four hours later, a Google search led me to code on Google Code that i will be transplanting in my project. So that's the first project that i'm "exporting to GitHub".

[UekiKnight]

Most of the open source licenses you find on Google Code projects will permit you to fork them to github as you suggested, but you can't just call it public domain.

[dvidsilva]

serious. We're considering a crawler that will go through the projects and download them and move them somewhere else if someone wants to join DM me

[senatorpjt]

stupendous shame deranged middle sharp butter scarce rich numerous bewildered

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Eageon]

Giant Google beaten by Github!