Google Pulls The Plug On Google Code, Its Open Source Hosting Service

Years ago, competition for online code hosting was frenzied, but with the arrival of GitHub in 2008, they’ve all slowly wandered off into the sunset. The latest casualty is Google Code, with Google this week announcing that it’ll be shuttering the service in stages over the course of the next 10 months.

Google’s director of open source Chris DiBona explains the details over at the company’s open source blog. Essentially, many hosted projects have long since migrated to GitHub (including a great deal of Google’s own efforts, such as Chromium) and those that do remain are mostly “spam or abuse”. The time required to police these projects was proving too much and so the decision was made to put the service to pasture.

Of course, Google’s isn’t pulling the plug immediately. The most immediate change was made on 12 March, when Google disabled new project creation. Nothing much will happen until 24 August, at which point, Google Code will become read-only.

Finally, on 25 January next year, it’ll be closed completely, with the only interaction possible being the ability to download tarballs containing “source, issues and wikis” for projects. These will be available until the end of 2016.

So, you have plenty of time to move from Google Code and the company does offer tools for exporting projects to other services, including GitHub and Bitbucket.

It’s never good to see Google shutting down another one of its products, but I think we can all agree that Google Code has been well and truly outclassed by its competitors.

Bidding farewell to Google Code [Google, via Phandroid]


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