Google Code Disables New Project Creation, Will Shut Down On January 25, 2016 140
An anonymous reader writes GitHub has officially won. Google has announced that Google Code project creation has been disabled today, with the ultimate plan to kill off the service next year. On August 24, 2015, the project hosting service will be set to read-only. This means you will still be able to checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis, but nobody will be able to make changes or new commits. On January 25, 2016, Google Code will be shut down. Google says you will be able to download tarballs of project source, issues, and wikis "throughout the rest of 2016." After that, Google Code will be gone for good.
SourceForge should be next. (Score:2)
Taken a look at the top projects lately?
Sourceforge should be blocked by browsers (Score:1, Informative)
It is nothing but an adware site if you try to download on windows now. Completely irresponsible management of what is little more than a husk.
Google Product (Score:1, Insightful)
Who didn't see this coming?
Google, where good ideas go to die.
Re:Google Product (Score:5, Insightful)
This was my thought exactly. Sadly, Google has proven themselves to be very unreliable.
Seconded (Score:2)
Google has proved quite Evil as in they are not immune to the al mighty dollar..
Re:Google Product (Score:4, Interesting)
So much for it being a reliable store of data. That's the unreliable bit.
They want you to put all your data in the cloud but then don't guarantee it will be stored properly.
Re:Google Product (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Google Product (Score:5, Insightful)
A year is not long. Only young people think a year is long. It might as well have been a week.
Some people just want to put their code in 'the public domain'. It may be code they are not maintaining, not commercial, or targets a very small niche.
Sometimes you want your code just published - shared with the world - forever, for the next one to find it useful.
Google promises such service. One would think 'google, they know how to store data'. Even google engineers use the service themselves. And then, one day, they announce the service will cease in 2 years.
Google should NOT HAVE STARTED SUCH SERVICE. They mislead developers, and now put them up with the extra hassle of moving stuff. If they wanted to kill it, they should have said 'testing' 'alpha' 'beta' 'do not use for your project' etc.
I'm totally with the some of the other people here, Google has proven to be unreliable. Any service they not like could be gone at ant time they choose, no matter how well it works or how succesful it is. Your gmail account may well be next.
I don't mind google cleaning up beta projects. But Google Code was anything but a beta project. Ok, they were not the largest player in the market, how bad is that? I do like choice, and multiple players can learn from eachother.
So.. My personal conclusion: a very very bad move of Google which will steer many people away from their current and future projects.
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Google should partner with github to let them replicate the projects including giving htem the public keys so that if any devs want access after the fact it can be already-working.
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Christ Almighty, Richard Stallman, who the hell shit in your Wheaties this morning?
You shills better get better at writing your articles - the odd shrillness of the message coupled with the vagueness about how somehow losing their project hosting injures them to this great of an extent gives you away - you've already taken the time to write the code. A bit more coding/work to migrate the projects? Dude, it's not that much work. Inconvenienced by only a year's migration time? Yes - that I could believe. Redu
Re: Google Product (Score:1)
Time to move off gmail. Good write up.
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So what happens when you have uploaded 100TB to Google NearLine and in a year they discontinue it?
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NearLine is product that people pay money to use, and has so has service level agreements and etc; not relevant.
You know, I have a lot of complaints about Google, but this article's issue is not one of them.
Discontinuing free offerings in a responsible way, so people don't lose their data and can migrate, is fine.
Re:Google Product (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not unreliability...
If it's not worth spending money to keep developers on the project, then better to shutter it, and have people move off than just let it sit abandoned indefinitely... right?
I mean, that's what makes sense in the real world...
Re:Google Product (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it is. When I am choosing a service one important consideration is how much effort getting onto that solution is, and how likely it is it will last. Even if Google provides a better service, I reconsider using it over a slightly inferior alternative because they're track record is terrible on this front.
I understand completely why they want to kill of unpopular projects, but from a user perspective it sucks that they launch a service, try and persuade people to put the non-negligible effort in to learn it, then kill it because they screwed up and couldn't make it worthwhile maintaining.
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I mean, that's what makes sense in the real world...
I don't mean to alarm you - but you posted that on slashdot.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sorry, but to me that seems a quite responsible way to shut down a project that they've decided not to continue. There have been many times in the past when they deserved criticism for how they handled shutting down a project, but this doesn't appear to be one of them.
"Tum tum tum (Score:1, Insightful)
Another one bites the dust!"
More seriously though, I'll never understand people who rely on Google's applications.
Re:"Tum tum tum (Score:5, Insightful)
More seriously though, I'll never understand people who rely on Google's applications.
1. Good enough.
2. Free.
3. Familiar.
4. When they shut down, they usually give you a way to get your data.
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Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is weird in that they'll quickly abandon anything that they aren't #1 or #2 in, or that they don't think they're going to achieve that (rationally or not). So you have to consider that when you look at their offerings. Gmail isn't going anywhere, because it's #1. Same with search, same with Youtube, same with Google Maps. Anything else is more iffy. Google Fiber is probably pretty safe, since there isn't any good competition for it in its local markets. G+ seems to be safe for now because they refuse to give it up, but I wouldn't rely on it. Google Docs seems fairly safe, since its main competition is Office365 but again you never know. But anything smaller, I wouldn't rely on it because it's just too likely they'll pull the carpet out from under your feet.
It's really odd, and honestly a shame. A healthy market requires more than 2 strong competitors, and lots of other companies are perfectly happy to be #3, #4, or #5, or even farther back. Just because you're a big company doesn't mean you need to be #1 in everything you do. Just look at a lot of the Japanese conglomerates: they hang in there for ages, as long as they're profitable. At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit? If so, you're succeeding. It's when you're in the red and it doesn't look like you're going to pull out that you need to throw in the towel and try something else.
Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty sure the only emails Google doesn't read are the ones addressed to it.
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So what you're saying is that the GGP should himself or herself a letter about it. Sounds like a solid plan to me.
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I'm sure they have, their business methods are different. Instead of being like Japanese or Korean conglomerates, they have an American business philosophy, which is basically to concentrate on fewer things and then maximize profit from them, except they're taking it to an extreme even for American companies.
The problem with this philosophy is that it isn't very successful in the long term. Those Asian conglomerates have very long lifetimes and employ lots of people in their societies. If you care about
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It brings (well, brought) mindshare, and that's pretty important. When someone likes one thing your company provides, they'll want to use other things from your company too.
And now, by sacrificing mindshare by axing every product that isn't generating a lot of profit, they're making it so they can't enter any new markets: every time they try to try something new with their "let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" approach to business, people are going to say to themselves "well this isn't a well-
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I came to that conclusion about Google several years ago. There's a reason that I never bother to look at my Google+ account even though I created one. I didn't trust it to not go away, so why bother. And that was almost four years ago.
We're well past the point where new Google services should be presumed DOA. My general assumption at this point is that unless it is a major source of ad revenue or they spent at least triple-digit millions to acquire it, they don't care about it.
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At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit?
Maybe that applies to the Japanese conglomerates you speak of. For publicly traded American companies, what really matters in business is: are you extracting every last possible penny of revenue, actively slashing your salaries and expenses each successive quarter, and maximizing profit as much as possible?
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Unfortunately, that's quite accurate.
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I think it's worth mentioning that Google didn't necessarily want to go public, they were forced to do so in 2004 because they had a certain valuation and a certain number of shareholders. 10 or 11 years ago, I really believe that "don't be evil" was part of Google's culture. Once they were wedged into becoming a publicly traded company, all bets were off. Shareholder profits uber alles.
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Google does stuff either because it hopes it can find a way to make money out of it, or because it needs something and it doesn't exist.
Services like Reader were attempts to make money that didn't work out. Like many start-ups they never figured out how to monetize it, despite getting millions of users.
Projects like Chrome are there to push web technology forward, because Google needs it to move faster than it was previously. Google Code was the same, when it started back in 2006 there wasn't much except fo
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And that is probably exactly what google is doing with google code -- in the red. So they chucking in the towel.
Services/Product that I IMO I believe are safe to use, and not going anywhere -
Search
Chrome
Gmail
Drive
Docs (sheets, docs, etc)
Calendar
Youtube
Maps (+google earth)
Apps (or at least apps for business)
Android
Was going to add sketchup -- didn't realize it was sold though.
Maybe a couple products/services I am missing. I would be comfortable using all of these services and not worrying about it shutting d
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I go looking for a review of a movie and half of the google results are
In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s)
The automated DMCA removal requests are turning google search into a joke.
Re:DVCS is now CVS. (Score:5, Informative)
The "D" is for Distributed. Git doesn't require you to use a single server; it's pretty much trivial to move your project history from Github to a competing service, since you're copying the entire project history every time you clone your repo anyway. So even if Github instantly vanished tomorrow, all the project authors would easily be able to re-clone their repos on a different service. That's the advantage of DVCS.
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You can, but who does?
Most SVN users just check out what they need, and that's it. They don't do full client-side clones if they don't have a good reason for it.
With Git, every user has a full client-side clone.
So, when the central server you're using suddenly disappears, with SVN you're hosed if you didn't specifically prepare for this, but with Git it's no big deal at all.
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That also means a git repo can get a bit bloaty, should a repository be very old and/or active.
There's pros and cons to each approach.
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No, you're right, but that's not the aim of a FOSS DVCS like Git. Unlike some proprietary software solutions, it does not aim to include every conceivable thing you need for any task, it just focuses on one task and does it well. If you want bug-tracking, you use something like Bugzilla, if you want a forum, you use something else, etc.
Yes, if Github vanishes suddenly, the bug tracker and forum etc. will be gone if someone didn't back them up somehow. But the code, and its history, is easily the most imp
Read the comments (Score:5, Informative)
If you have code in Google Code, read through the comments in the first link - there is some important Q&A going on there, including a flag you can set in advanced project settings when you've migrated off Google Code, that will forward on links looking at Google Code to the new home...
I didn't see it stated explicitly but I'm thinking they are only supporting migration to GitHub for forwarding compatibility? I don't have a Google Code account so I can't check what the setting says it does.
Google is an advertising company (Score:2, Interesting)
All their products should be thought of as experiments with a shelf life.
Well, isn't that something? (Score:1)
GitHub Importer? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:GitHub Importer? (Score:4, Informative)
Sourceforge already has one [sourceforge.net], FYI.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Upgrades (Score:2, Interesting)
Too bad archive.org is not a dynamic thing, instead of a static view of websites past...
You could call it "parallelinternet.org", where you could fork behavior of any website at any time and have its functionality live on forever even after a company dropped support for the original.
I know that's not very feasible, but it's nice to dream.
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You could call it "parallelinternet.org", where you could fork behavior of any website at any time and have its functionality live on forever even after a company dropped support for the original.
AGPLv3 would make it possible.
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This project aims to do exactly that. https://github.com/ikreymer/py... [github.com]
It'll record your browsing experience and play it back for you later. It will even record links that you did not originally browse. (You have to configure the depth)
The developer is working on it constantly
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Thanks for the link, although it wasn't quite what I was thinking of it's a really impressive idea, and is way more practical to pull off.
That would be a really interesting tool to reverse-engineer A-B testing going on on websites...
SourceForge next please (Score:1)
Slow, frustrating and spammy. Someone put SourceForge our or our misery too, please.
I'm not sure consolidating everything at one or two cloud VCS sites is a brilliant idea. All I know for certain is that whenever I track down the source for something and end up at SourceForge my estimation of that project goes way down.
10x Programmers (Score:5, Interesting)
Google, with all their rockrstar 10x programmers and engineers fail yet again. What's the point of hiring "only the best" through a series of day long gruelling interview processes and obscure ego inflating (for the interviewers) exams - when all the software they write ends up in the trash. Their only good products are the search engine, gmail (getting marginal), and youtube (bought from someone else). Two hit products for such a massive company of the world's best software engineers seems like a pretty big let down.
Nothing good ever seems to come out of these massive, lumbering, over managed companies. Their two decent products came at a time when they were much smaller. All the innovation is coming from small, lean and agile companies who take risks. Google is just the next Microsoft, ready to crest the wave any time now.
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Android?
Chrome?
Maps?
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Drive/Docs is also popular in some circles.
And Hangouts are quite popular for doing conferences, interviews and online collaboration.
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Android - it's just Linux with a shiny front end slapped on it. Most of the work was done by volunteers outside of Google. I doubt even 3% of the code found on any given Android device was made at Google, and that's being very generous. If you count the apps downloaded to it, it would be under 1%.
Chrome - wasn't this a fork of webkit or some other browser written by other people? They did a lot of work on it, but it's by no means a Google product.
Maps - I know they acquired some companies for this, not sure
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Most software ends up in the trash anyway. That's just the way the tech industry is.
Better to shut down this product and have the engineers work on something that is more rewarding for everyone involved.
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You have to understand what Google products are for. Google builds stuff that it needs and isn't available. When a good alternative comes along it considers its job done and moves on. When Google Code started there were not many people offering something like that, and now there are many. It paved the way, encouraged other services to develop and now is being jettisoned because it doesn't generate any revenue.
Gmail brings in cash so will keep going. When it started there was nothing quite like it, with the
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Google, with all their rockrstar 10x programmers and engineers fail yet again. What's the point of hiring "only the best" through a series of day long gruelling interview processes and obscure ego inflating (for the interviewers) exams - when all the software they write ends up in the trash. Their only good products are the search engine, .....
I take it you haven't used Google search lately to find new(not ones you lost the address to) websites? It has gotten really sucky. The first two pages are sockpuppet websites for whatever company is trying to sell you something. Example: learning a new language. You sued to be able to find real specialty sites on the web. Not so much anymore.
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I actually switched a little while ago to DuckDuckGo, after using Google for the last...um, when did Altavista start to suck? You're pretty much spot on about the first two result pages, they are filled with paid for placements. I can't seem to search on something without some retailer site(s) coming up willing to sell me the product, and I mean like 30 of them. Search for the manual for your television and you'll have to scroll right down past all the people wanting to sell that model of TV to you.
Good (Score:2)
So many of the Google Code projects are stuck on svn. Hope they migrate over to git.
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There's nothing wrong with svn within its limits. It doesn't do as many things as git does, but lots of people who started with svn or cvs are very comfortable with it. What's wrong with it as a centralized repository?
Re: Good (Score:2)
Git is better for productivity than svn, especially with regard to handling branches and merging. The sooner we get away from it the better.
How much work do the archivists have ahead of them (Score:2)
It would be nice to hear from an archivist about how they plan to go about archiving the projects. How well does Archive.org's time machine cover Google Code? It would be cool if Google would post a link to a zip export of every project so you can just pul upl the last (and latest) result up on Archive.org and download the project.
When one door closes (Score:1)
It is not over, it is a new start. The pre GitHub sites like Google code are closing down. But post GitHub sites are alive and growing. At GitLab we see increasing adoption and a fast growing GitLab.com. People want free private repo's, more features and hosting based on open source software.
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The trouble is that version control is fast becoming a monoculture. Soon git will be the only version control solution in town and it's a bit shit really. It's popular mainly because Linus Torvalds wrote it, not because it's actually technically a good program.
Subversion hosting alternative? (Score:3)
And I mean besides sourceforge, which I used to like but not so much anymore. I have a project hosted on google code that facilitates automatic merging between subversion branches. It would be ironic to host that on GitHub.
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Irony is the reason why you should put it on github ;-)
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Like... a years notice? That seems like a while to some?
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No problem with GMail, it makes them a ton of money via ads. I don't see it disappear anytime soon.
If your look for an alternative, get your own domain name and make a redirection, this way you can switch provider anytime. Unlike with GMail accounts, you actually own your domain name.