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Bidding farewell to Google Code

google-opensource.blogspot.com

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Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#111

Post by ericfontaine »

Animats wrote: post #95

What's the median lifetime of free cloud services? It seems to be around 5 years. Someone probably tracks that. With SourceForge putting ads in installers, they're no longer a good option. This leaves GitHub in a monopoly position, which is worrisome. Especially given the terms: "GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Serv…

"We need some way to distribute open source projects so they're on at least two services simultaneously, synched."

google "git sync mirror" and a bunch of solutions appear.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#112

Post by nothrabannosir »

[deleted] wrote: post #89
btown wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to do an Internet Archive style project on all these repositories, put them up on Github, and make sure that they are indexed properly by search engines (i.e. intro pages become README.md, wikis are migrated, etc.).

[deleted]

Not at all, that's 100% the point of most open source licenses. Which are compulsory for a project on GC.

E.g. MIT:

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
    of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to
    deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the
    rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or
    sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
    furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
    all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
    IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
    FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
    AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
    LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
    FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
    IN THE SOFTWARE.
Specifically, note "Permission is granted" and "distribute".

Comply with those terms (i.e. include that piece of text when you redistribute) and you satisfy MIT.

GPL, &c, they all have similar clauses. In fact, MIT goes much further. I could take all those projects, mirror them, and charge people insane amounts of money for it.

If you can't even rehost on Github, what good would copyleft be?

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#114

Post by BinaryIdiot »

sytse wrote: post #57

Hi Chris, GitLab CEO here. What do you think about mentioning Gitlab.com as an alternative for people to move to? It has unlimited (private) projects and unlimited collaborators. It is based the open source GitLab project.

I've used GitLab before as an enterprise type installation and it was okay but I had no idea you offered GitHub like hosting. When I visit your site it looks like there are no free options but Google Code was meant to house open source projects for free just like GitHub and BitBucket.

Do you have free hosting for open source? If not then I don't think it makes sense for them to mention your service.

Edit: As pointed out below GitLab.com actually has free public and private repository hosting. It took me a while to find it on the website. That's pretty cool!

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#115

Post by gtaylor »

munificent wrote: post #75
gtaylor wrote: post #5

I'm sure some are going to immediately say "Yet another Google casualty", but I feel like this one probably needed to happen. It's been stagnant for years, and they have been on the mindshare decline since the first two years. I dread having to deal with open source software that is still on Google Code. Admit failure, provide plenty of notice (like they're doing), and close up shop so resources can be spent on more…

How is this even a failure? Google Code was the best at what it did for several years. Now it's not. That doesn't eradicate the time in the past where it provided real value to millions of users. A party isn't a failure just because everyone eventually has to go home. It just means even successful things have ends.

> How is this even a failure? Google Code was the best at what it did for several years.

Google Code had a few good years, and I am grateful that it happened. However, it did fail to win the software forge battle as the space heated up. It failed to evolve enough to keep up. It failed to keep the mindshare it built in those two initial years as Github and others blew past it over the next six.

So call it for what it is: A project that had two good years out of eight. Like many failures, there were successful moments and positive impacts on the greater community. But closing down due to losing constitutes failure.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#116

Post by mikelat »

This doesn't come off as much as a surprise, because there are better alternatives because google code stagnated and wasn't a priority. Google code still has very old looking interface (especially when contrasted to their active products like G+ and gmail), google code only declined because google didn't want to work on it.

This doesn't do google any favours, as with every product they launch I'll be asking myself if it's worth investing time or money into just for it to stagnate.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#117

Post by morbius »

pdknsk wrote: post #104
sytse wrote: post #57

Hi Chris, GitLab CEO here. What do you think about mentioning Gitlab.com as an alternative for people to move to? It has unlimited (private) projects and unlimited collaborators. It is based the open source GitLab project.

https://about.gitlab.com/ "Better than GitHub" That's quite a motto.

It's a ballsy and maybe foolishly ambitious motto, but in Gitlab's case they actually deliver on it -- which, considering the current monopolization of project hosting is quite a feat unto itself.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#119

Post by gjtorikian »

sytse wrote: post #84
some_furry wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this motion. GitLab is amazing. It's open source and easy to deploy on your own hardware so you don't need to trust another provider. Github is really great for the social experience, but I've been debating switching over to GitLab for all of my development projects.

Thanks for the love furry! We're seeing more people switch, including many from Gitorious. We try to combine the advantages of a good interface and free repositories.

> including many from Gitorious

That's a bit disingenuous. GitLab purchased Gitorious--of course people are switching.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#120

Post by fafner »

DannyBee wrote: post #29
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 v…

Google Code was such an improvement over SourceForge. I think the real problem of Google Code was that it took them too long to support git. When GitHub started Google Code was still SVN only and later they only added Mercurial support. This made people look at GitHub and GitHub could shine with some new ideas, like making code contributions extremely easy and placing the code first. Which of course further increased the popularity of git and so on. By the time Google Code added git support many major projects had moved and GitHub was simply the place to be.
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