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Bidding farewell to Google Code

google-opensource.blogspot.com

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Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#21

Post by packetslave »

baggachipz wrote: post #14
hsgeyfjw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you (google) get away with being such asses? i know a bunch of developers will come to your defense, and say things like it is a free service, but it's not really, because for google, users are the product, and you guys have developed a rep for constantly shutting those users down. switching costs are very real, and people just don't trust you anymore. i don't care about google code in particular, but i hate g…

I might be feeding here, but the lesson is that you can't count on things Google releases to be around very long. Even APIs for popular products, like Google Maps. Just don't expect anything they release to have a long shelf life. It's annoying and it sucks, and it is now laughable when they tag things with phrases like "free code hosting forever" and so on. For them to change, they'd have to either: 1) Support every…

you can't count on things Google releases to be around very long

code.google.com was around for 7 years. What more do you want?

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#22

Post by DannyBee »

packetslave wrote: post #21
baggachipz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be feeding here, but the lesson is that you can't count on things Google releases to be around very long. Even APIs for popular products, like Google Maps. Just don't expect anything they release to have a long shelf life. It's annoying and it sucks, and it is now laughable when they tag things with phrases like "free code hosting forever" and so on. For them to change, they'd have to either: 1) Support every…

you can't count on things Google releases to be around very long code.google.com was around for 7 years. What more do you want?

FWIW, it was 8+ years :)

It was launched at OSCON in 2006.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#23

Post by gtaylor »

f055 wrote: post #19
gtaylor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: The parent comment was flagkilled, but he was ranting about how Google should be expected to keep Google Code (and their other failed services) on life support indefinitely out of the kindness of their heart, because negative public perception. This is pretty ridiculous. It is a free service, sustained only by how long corporate wants to foot the bill. This is why it's so important to keep in mind how sustainab…

Although you are correct, it's more a matter of perception / PR image. If we are looking at Google that shuts down pretty popular projects (Reader, Code, and now G+ seems to be shifting) or pretty innovative projects (Wave, Glass) then how should we feel about becoming dependant on/involved in Google products? What if Gmail switches to paid-only model? What if the next-big-Google-thing will be closed down after a yea…

> Although you are correct, it's more a matter of perception / PR image. If we are looking at Google that shuts down pretty popular projects (Reader, Code, and now G+ seems to be shifting) or pretty innovative projects (Wave, Glass) then how should we feel about becoming dependant on/involved in Google products?

You just listed a bunch of projects that failed to get traction or lost mindshare battles. I expect an innovator to move on from failures, which is what all of your examples are. Reader: Failure, Google Code: Failure, G+: Failure, Wave: Failure. The reasons for each failure differ, but said reasons are irrelevant to this discussion. The fact is that Google attempted something, maybe enjoyed a little bit of success, but the results didn't meet their expectations. Rather than continue running these things with skeleton crews (to what effect?), they've done the right thing and closed them down.

The only exception is Glass, which was an experiment that already is impacting other current and future products. It never had a guaranteed future. It never reached consumer "1.0".

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#24

Post by reuven »

GitHub's success is due, in no small part, to their excellent interface. Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. (This, of course, ignores the many features that GitHub offers, which Google Code doesn't.)

I know of many companies that learned about GitHub via open-source projects, which GitHub hosts for free, and decided that it was so good that they should pay money. Hosting such open-source projects was a brilliant marketing move.

Google Code, by contrast, didn't seem to have a clear purpose other than hosting open-source projects. It was a kind of souped-up SourceForge, rather than a serious GitHub competitor. Google certainly had the resources to improve it, but didn't have the motivation that GitHub did -- and we see the results.

I can't say that I'm mourning Google Code, and I think that the way in which they're sunsetting it is perfectly reasonable. But it demonstrates that free services are only going to stick around so long as it is serving another purpose, and that without such a purpose, you can't reasonably expect it to stick around.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#25

Post by magicalist »

baldfat wrote: post #17
kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Google's open source code is already on GitHub and has been for quite a while: https://github.com/google

If you ever read any of my comments and down votes from Hacker News it was always this. The code on GitHub is a mirror and not an actual GIT repo that is accepting merges and being worked on.

This is true for some projects, like Chromium and golang, but AFAICT not true for the majority of projects on that page. e.g. the currently most recently updated repo that doesn't have a "mirrored from..." subtitle is [1], and you can go see all the pull request activity on it (though I'm sure there are also lots of code dump repos in that list).

[1] https://github.com/google/trace-viewer

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#26

Post by cdibona »

baldfat wrote: post #7

So the move to GitHub by Google's open source code is the next step? I kept hearing from people "in the know" that moving to GitHub was a real possibility a long time ago.

Yeah, we've moved about a thousand projects to GH over the last few years. It's where the developers are, after all...

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#27

Post by skj »

baldfat wrote: post #17
kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Google's open source code is already on GitHub and has been for quite a while: https://github.com/google

If you ever read any of my comments and down votes from Hacker News it was always this. The code on GitHub is a mirror and not an actual GIT repo that is accepting merges and being worked on.

wrong.

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/oauth2client and https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes, just to list two that I deal with.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#28

Post by oaktowner »

baldfat wrote: post #17
kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Google's open source code is already on GitHub and has been for quite a while: https://github.com/google

If you ever read any of my comments and down votes from Hacker News it was always this. The code on GitHub is a mirror and not an actual GIT repo that is accepting merges and being worked on.

Googler here.

Depends on the project. github.com/grpc is being developed github first (and accepting contributions), as are several of the projects on github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#29

Post by DannyBee »

reuven wrote: post #24

GitHub's success is due, in no small part, to their excellent interface. Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. (This, of course, ignores the many features that GitHub offers, which Google Code doesn't.) I know of many companies that learned about GitHub via open-source projects, which GitHub hosts for free, and decided that it was so good that they should pay money. Host…

"Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand."

It's really funny to hear this. If you look at press/reviews/OSS forum comments of it around launch time, people thought it had an excellent interface, because it was being compared to sourceforge.

Then github came, and by comparison, the interface looked like crap.

But you end up with this kind of weird history rewrite where the view becomes "it was always ugly", when it was probably best-around for at least 2 years, maybe more (depends on your view of early github)

"Google Code, by contrast, didn't seem to have a clear purpose other than hosting open-source projects. It was a kind of souped-up SourceForge, rather than a serious GitHub competitor. Google certainly had the resources to improve it, but didn't have the motivation that GitHub did -- and we see the results."

It was in fact, meant to be a better-than-sourceforge alternative, because Google viewed sourceforge as a harmful-to-opensource monoculture, and competition was desperately needed. github is a monoculture, but it doesn't seem, at least right now, to be harmful.

As for "serious github competitor", it was never meant to be that. It predates github by over 2 years :)

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#30

Post by lnanek2 »

That's unfortunate. I still regularly come across things on Google Code that are useful, usually just there because they were written before GitHub. There's very little chance the authors will bother moving after all this time and the resources will just disappear.

Heck, I even have several projects on there like a virtual pet one that's a good demo of how to color game sprites dynamically in Android and another that's a good demo of using the YouTube APIs. I doubt I'll both moving them, but it's sad other people won't be able to use my code any more so that Google can save a trivial amount of money.

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