Launched in 2006, Google Code was an open-source project hosting service. On March 12, the project has stopped accepting new sources. The site will become read-only in August, and on the 25th of January, 2016, it will be completely closed. Any Google projects hosted by the platform will have to move to GitHub.
Chris diBona, Google open source director, told the followers of his blog that the project was initiated in a time when the open-source project hosting market was relatively small, and Google wanted to offer an alternative to open-source developers. However, as things have changed a lot in the last decade, with platforms like GitHub and Bitbucket specializing in project hosting services, the corporation who powers the largest online search engine decided to move its open source projects to GitHub, like many of the Google Code users had already done. DiBona said that, because the most important open source projects had started moving from Google Code to other platforms, the project hosting service was invaded by spam and mock-projects. Much of the site-administration tasks were being reduced to deleting abuse.
GitHub and Bitbucket are prepared to take over the remaining Google Code developers, and DiBona said that instructions on how to transfer your project to the other platforms will be provided. A thousand Google open source projects were already moved to GitHub. Chris DiBona has apologized for the inconveniences provoked to Google Code users by having to migrate to another platform, but critics say that the online giant’s move wasn’t completely fair, given that Google continues to host widely used projects, like Chrome and Android, as well as mirrors of the more important open-sourced platforms like Linux and Eclipse.
Interest in GitHub seems to be on the rise. Microsoft started moving its .NET Compiler Platform (known as “Roslyn”) from CodePlex to GitHub in January. The platform offers open-source C# and Visual Basic compilers with rich code analysis APIs (application programming interfaces) – the same APIs used by Microsoft to implement Visual Studio. CodePlex was launched in 2006, the same year as Google Code. Now, hundreds of former CodePlex projects migrated to GitHub.
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