Bidding farewell to Google Code

No, not that Google Code is shutting down, per se. The alternatives are better and for active projects there is plenty of time to migrate.

What I object to is that the site will only be preserved in read-only mode for 5 months, despite its popularity and the resulting large number of deep links into it on the Web. Why not forever? git, hg, and I believe svn can all provide read-only access (with some bandwidth overhead) by publishing static files over HTTP. With the addition of a static export of the Google Code pages (mostly doable by crawling; some pagination issues would need to be worked out), Google could host the site going forward on a simple HTTP server without needing to maintain its server-side codebase. And Google is lacking in neither HTTP servers or bandwidth... Belated abuse complaints would remain a problem, but it's easy enough to delete things on request.

Google is obviously not legally obligated to keep the site up, and under current mores I suppose it's not socially obligated either. But I think that when the owning company continues to be highly financially successful and maintenance is easy enough, there should be a social obligation for some kind of archival.

Or at least redirect the subdomain to whatever Archive Team comes up with...

Which is why I said the blogpost would be fairer to just post the wikipedia comparison link. I never said that gitlab should "deserve" a pitch on the blog. I did say it was fair for GitLab to pitch their services, as the CEO has done here, but that is different from "deserving" a pitch.

It is hard to objectively determine what is the better hosting, but based on people's individual preferences, they can subjectively decide for themselves, which the wikipedia article helps out by clearly explaining the differences. Everyone who uses google code knows about github anyway, but might not be aware that there are other services.

We saw gitorious, an entirely-opensource service, fail due to lack of revenue. And we've seen Google Code, an entirely-proprietary solution, fail. For those concerned about the longevity of their hosting setup, they may want a hosting provider that both has a steady source of income to help guarantee longevity and that is based significantly on opensource software (maybe for reasons of philosophical principle in that opensource development should use opensource infrastructure, or for pragmatic reasons such that they can always fork the hosting service code). GitLab fills this niche nicely, in that the community edition is based on fully open-source code, while the enterprise edition (that the their commercial service gitlab.com is based on) uses proprietary extensions.

"The projects with the most stars on gitlab s gitlab itself with 221 stars right now. Even the smallest nodejs project achieves that popularity on github."

The lack of stars on gitlab projects may simply be due to the first-mover advantage of github, but does not necessarily represent any fundamental deficiencies is the hosting service.