Shutdown begins now, completely dead by January 2016
Google killing off its own software projects is nothing new, but the Mountain View goliath will soon kill your software projects, too, if you host them on Google Code.
The online advertising titan said on Thursday that it is shutting down its code collaboration service, which was launched in 2006, effective immediately. The service hosts many projects including research produced by Google's own Project Zero security experts.
The reason for the cancelation is said to be because most developers prefer superior options, including GitHub and Bitbucket, and that as a result, maintaining Google Code was too much work for the actual return.
"As developers migrated away from Google Code, a growing share of the remaining projects were spam or abuse," said Google's Chris DiBona in a Thursday blog post. "Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management."
Your humble Reg hack will leave it to you, dear reader, to come up with as many witty retorts as you deem appropriate. The important thing is that Google Code is no longer accepting any new projects, beginning on Thursday.
Come August 24, you won't be able to commit any code changes to existing projects, either, because that's when the site goes read-only.
Finally, on January 26, 2016, Google Code will be officially closed. You'll still be able to download tarballs of all your project's files through the end of the year – including source code, issues, and wikis – but after the end of 2016, all bets are off.
Google points out that there are already numerous easy ways to migrate your projects to alternative code hosting services. Google Code itself provides a tool that can export projects to GitHub, for example. SourceForge, similarly, has an import service, and Google provides standalone tools for exporting to GitHub and Bitbucket.
"We will also make ourselves available over the next three months to those projects that need help migrating from Google Code to other hosts," DiBona said.
While the public Google Code service will shut down, however, Google plans to continue to host its own high-profile projects, such as Chrome and Android, and it will still maintain mirrors of other key open source projects, such as the Linux kernel and Eclipse.
"We know this decision will cause some pain for those of you still using Google Code and we're sorry for that," DiBona said. "We'll continue to do our best to make the migration process easy for you." ®
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