Bidding farewell to Google Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#371

Post by jamiesonbecker » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:44 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #127

[deleted] wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Not really. Unlike a lot of other hosting services, Google code required you to pick an open source license for the project. Even if there are no headers on source, you have a good argument that they were proclaiming to the world it was licensed a certain way, ... (now, third party code they may have included is a different issue, you can't get rights to that through someone else's claims, but ...)

Agreed. and that's what the DMCA was ostensibly intended for anyway. Someone who claims copyright could always make that claim in the normal fashion.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#372

Post by haosdent » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:05 AM UTC

cdibona wrote: post #2

Hi everyone. I wanted to let you know (and I know this isn't a huge surprise) that we will be shutting down the Google Code project hosting system over the next year. Wired did a nice story about Github that touches on the shutdown: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/github-conquered-google-microso... I'll be hanging around answering questions, but the short form of 'why' is that it just isn't used much anymore, ourselves…

Would you migrate Chromium Project to Github?

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#373

Post by enneff » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #34

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…

Honestly, I think he was right. Google has a really bad image problem right now where lots of people don't want to get involved with their projects because Google will most likely kill the project just like Reader and Glass. See my couple of wasted Google Glass devices that will never see an Android update again. Do you think I'll ever buy a Google Android product after they wasted $3k of mine? Do you think I'll buy…

If you joined Google's Glass Explorer program (twice?!) expecting anything but a beta-level device with a short shelf life then more fool you. I don't think they could have been any more explicit about the goals of their program.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#374

Post by mintplant » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:20 AM UTC

kibibu wrote: post #345

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because GitLab is open source, and the alternatives (GitHub, BitBucket) are not. That's not a reason to use the hosted gitlab version, that might be a reason to self host gitlab.

Not really - if you are into open source because of the ideology and not just for the price then GitLab makes a lot more sense. If I find a bug in GitLab I can feasibly submit a patch for it.

Also, if you need to, you can migrate to a self-hosted setup without switching to another platform. There's a built-in tool that makes this easy.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#375

Post by nperez » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:29 AM UTC

Honestly, I thought plans to sunset it had already been put in place. I hate every moment that I want to check out a project and find that it's hosted on Google Code. The web has moved extremely fast in the last decade (and will probably move even faster in the next decade), and I can tell that I'm looking at 2006 code. There was never a push to give it the love it needed to compete with Github.

I hope there is some level of cooperation with those who want to archive it. It's important enough to be archived. The UX is not up to standards in 2015, though, so I will bid farewell to it with some amount of satisfaction and some amount of regret.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#376

Post by soapdog » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:35 AM UTC

they should keep it on read only form. Lots of good FOSS will be lost if they pull the plug.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#377

Post by hendry » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:41 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #135

Anyone else scared of the Github monoculture? I am. For all the touted distributed version control advantages we now have one world global centralized repo. Yeah, yeah, I know you can clone it locally. But of course if all the issues, and testing, and build tools are tied to Github. Isn't it a bit disconcerting? Maybe I am just paranoid. And not saying that Google code was going anywhere, I saw more and more projects…

I confess to actually trying to get http://suckless.org/ at least mirrored on Github. But I was wrong and the current suckless system is decentralised and works.

http://git.suckless.org/ works

issue list? the mailing list

pull requests? which are imo quite painful in github still, are just patches sent to the mailing list. no login or special tooling required.

kiss,

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#378

Post by robzyb » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:53 AM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #233

rdtsc wrote: post #135

Anyone else scared of the Github monoculture? I am. For all the touted distributed version control advantages we now have one world global centralized repo. Yeah, yeah, I know you can clone it locally. But of course if all the issues, and testing, and build tools are tied to Github. Isn't it a bit disconcerting? Maybe I am just paranoid. And not saying that Google code was going anywhere, I saw more and more projects…

I don't expect Github to go away anytime soon (though if it did---yes, it would be very disruptive; your paranoia is not unjustified). I'm more concerned about compromise of a single high-value target; anyone remember when rubygems.org was compromised in 2013?

> I don't expect Github to go away anytime soon

4 years ago someone might've said the same about Google Code.

Expectations change, and then Github might go away.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#379

Post by rwallace » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:58 AM UTC

jfoster wrote: post #279

rwallace wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, when people give you something of value for free, it's not okay to respond with "But you should have given me more!" If that's not obvious to you, think of it in game theory terms: you're basically responding to cooperation with defection. The proper response to something like this shutting down is "It's a pity it has to end, but thank you for running the service all those years."

Can you explain the game theory behind that? I would've expected that, in this case (where the worst case for a user is what will currently happen), responding with a request for more rather than cooperation is actually the rational behaviour.

No, the best case for the user is what would have happened anyway. The worst case is the people who provided that free service, and maybe other people who see the thanks they got, end up thinking "well, damned if we're going to give those ungrateful bastards anything else for free."

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#380

Post by krapp » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 3:10 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #368

krapp wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the intervening years, no one running a news server thought to back theirs up, no one crawled Google and made torrents? This is software, not ancient manuscripts written by scribes on now crumbling vellum - there is no excuse for there to be one canonical copy of anything . Every pornographic movie ever made has multiple redundant backups on decentralized peer to peer networks and darknets. I understand the im…

Why would they run their own Usenet archive? Google had the Usenet archiving business sewn up, and by the time they started showing signs of being untrustworthy it was too late and much of the 80s and early 90s stuff only exists in their archives. (Oh, and as a side note apparently a lot of the interesting porn from that era has been lost to history too.)

Trusting any one service to be the bearer of internet history carries the same risk, that the service can go down at any time, and take its data with it. If this information is to be preserved it has to be hosted somewhere, preferably multiple places. If it's to be accessible online, then someone has to pay for the servers and the power and the maintenance.

Google's an ad company, they don't have an obligation to be the arbiters of human history, whatever their slogans might be regarding 'organizing the world's information'. They care about the information that makes them money.