How is this even a failure? Google Code was the best at what it did for several years. Now it's not. That doesn't eradicate the time in the past where it provided real value to millions of users.

A party isn't a failure just because everyone eventually has to go home. It just means even successful things have ends.

> How is this even a failure? Google Code was the best at what it did for several years.

Google Code had a few good years, and I am grateful that it happened. However, it did fail to win the software forge battle as the space heated up. It failed to evolve enough to keep up. It failed to keep the mindshare it built in those two initial years as Github and others blew past it over the next six.

So call it for what it is: A project that had two good years out of eight. Like many failures, there were successful moments and positive impacts on the greater community. But closing down due to losing constitutes failure.

It actually can be considered a success in the style of the original intent of Chrome, Fiber, the Nexus line, and who knows, maybe the upcoming MVNO: to spur innovation and increased investment in a stagnating product area.

When Google Code came out Source Forge was horrible, and Github didn't exist. Google Code helped both open source software and the market for code hosting. Now there's a dominant, but so far so great, offering with Github, and several very good competitors.

Google Code wouldn't have even launched today, it's both necessary to projects and to Google.

Yeah, it's tempting to take a small bit of credit for the existence of the new generation of project hosting services. Google Code showed that there was room for new players, so it did open the door, but you have to give credit to GitHub for the concept of social coding. I never understood it and it goes against my personal OSS DNA, so I would never have made that leap.

Another way to (very charitably) count Google Code's success is to look at the role it played in Google. One of the largest users of Google Code has always been Google itself. In 2005, Google had released like 8 project tarballs on SF, kind of tentatively. Having Google Code as a home field endorsement allowed that to grow into the thousands. Now, OSS releases seem pretty routine for Google and feel more integrated with the community than ever.

> However, it did fail to win the software forge battle as the space heated up.

This is just the wrong metaphor entirely. It's not a battle because battles, and even wars, have ends.

But you're implying that somehow today is special and marks the end of the battle and therefore GitHub "won" because it's the most popular right now. But will it be in twenty years? If not, will you have to go back and edit your comment?

There's no winning and losing here. It's just an endless continuum of time where popularity waxes and wanes, where things end and new things begin. Google Code had a good run. So did SourceForge before it, and CVS and FTP sites before that. Something will come along to replace GitHub eventually.

The computer world is new enough that we haven't gotten used to the idea of software technology having a finite lifespan, but it absolutely does. That's OK. The goal of every product on Earth doesn't have to be to live forever.

Basically, this. In case others didn't read the post, you'll have almost a year to take your projects off. We wanted the handful of projects that were still active to have plenty of time to migrate.

Is it possible, when code goes cold, to redirect URLS to archive.org rather than 404ing them?

I have been known to make use of ancient, forgotten code from geocities pages, and keeping the integrity of hyperlinks together matters to me. Think of the blog posts that currently link to Google Code pages; those will never be updated.

There are thousands of independent/homebrew projects that call Google Code their home that will probably vanish overnight. And not everyone likes using Git to begin with.

I don't see why they don't put stricter requirements on starting a project page or contributing instead of making this move.

> And not everyone likes using Git to begin with.

FWIW. Mercurial can use Git as a backend which would ease the tension for those not enamored with it.

I agree, a lot of google shutdowns are really awesome products that just have a small userbase. Stuff like Reader didn't even have good alternatives when it shutdown.

Google Code isn't that great of a product, it has a small userbase, and there are many alternatives.

Yeah. I don't think anyone is surprised by this, and it's very different from a Google Reader situation. The writing was on the wall when Google projects started moving off of it and onto Github.