The End of Google Code

In the 21 January 2014 post Google Code is dead, Evert Pot referenced the post A Change to Google Code Download Service and wrote that "It's been sort of obvious for a while that [Google] stopped caring about their code hosting." The title of Pot's post was borne out with the announcement this past week that Google is Bidding farewell to Google Code.

According to the post Bidding farewell to Google Code on the Google Open Source Blog, "To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub." That post also outlines the final days of Google Code. No new projects can be created (as of 12 May 2015) and the site will become read-only on 24 August 2015 with closure of the project hosting on 25 January 2016 (though tarballs will be available throughout 2016).

I recently posted on the fall of Codehaus and mentioned several useful projects that were (or are) hosted there. Google Code also saw its share of important and useful projects in its heyday. These include Google's Guava (now on GitHub), Mockito (now on GitHub), charts4j (now on GitHub), easyb, Google's Go programming language (now at https://golang.org/), Google's Google Web Toolkit (now at http://www.gwtproject.org/), and Google's Chromium(now at http://www.chromium.org/).

Coman Hamilton concludes his article Google Code is dead – but today is a good day for open source with the statement, "Rather than lament the loss of one significant member of the open-source hosting community, we should rejoice in the fact that there are so many other great open-source hosters, that not even Google can compete."