Google Code is dead
Every now and then I stumble upon project websites hosted on Google Code. Not nearly as much as those hosted on Sourceforge, Codeplex or everybody's darling GitHub but regularly enough to know that it is a contender in the project hosting vertical.
Google announced today that it made the decision to close Google Code for good. The company released a timeline detailing various steps in the process.
Today, new project creation has been disabled on the site. This does not change a thing for existing projects which can still be updated and accessed both by project members and interested third-parties.
The next step turns the site into a read-only repository. From August 24, 2015 on all projects on Google Code become read-only.
They remain accessible on the Internet but project members cannot upload updates to the site anymore.
Finally, on January 25, 2016, Google Code is closed for good. Google announced that it will created tarballs of project sources, issues and wikis and that authorized users can download them throughout 2016. After 2016, this option goes away and all data becomes inaccessible.
The company notes that some projects hosted on Google Code will remain accessible. This includes Android and Chrome, as well as projects that Google maintains mirrors for such as Eclipse.
Google has created a migration tool to export a project to Github which Google Code project members can access on this page.
Google notes that only public issues will be exported to GitHub and that restricted view issues won't. Subversion and Mercurial repositories will be converted automatically to Git as GitHub supports only that.
The FAQ created for the exporter tool answers additional questions about the process. It is interesting to note that some projects cannot be exported to GitHub, for instance projects with 1000 or more issues and that a manual export is necessary in this case.
Standalone tools are also provided to export code to Bitbucket while SourceForge offers access to a Google Code importer on the site.
Google will auto-redirect links pointing to project websites provided that project owners set the project moved flag after moving the project to another location. Since it is likely that this won't happen for all projects, webmasters who have linked to Google Code projects before may need to update links manually as a consequence.
We have 125 references to Google Code here on Ghacks alone. While some will be auto-redirected, it still means to go through all articles referencing it to make sure there are no dead links after January 2016.
Internet users may feel the impact of this change as well as it is fairly certain that they will encounter dead links after January 2016 pointing to projects on Google Code that have not been moved or where the moved flag has not been set.
The question is also whether just a code repository service like Google Code is differentiated enough and has high enough value, or the market will start going up the stack to more integrated solutions like IBM Bluemix and WSO2 App Cloud – and thus get not just the code storage but the whole set of tools you need to develop and run the apps: cloud IDE, databases, testing, lifecycle management, app hosting, etc.
google this, google that, google some other…
Google with all it’s expertise can’t realize that putting “google” in our its products is doomed to fail.
YouTube almost did!
Why can’t they just create a product without the ‘google’ word on it?
google docs, google drive, google icecream, google cola, google cafe, google car, google this google that…. enough already!
It is good for a company to expand its branches. but ‘google’ brand is kind washed out.
I migrated to duckduckgo.com search. it is less intrusive than google and gets me where i need.
google could do way much better if split in “affiliated” companies.
So you’re mad at Google ’cause they sign their stuff?
Did you know Youtube is Google’s? Yet it’s not called Google Youtube… do some research :)
Yeahh, google killed yet another non-profit project. I’m not angry because all was free but I not understand this decision, hyped products always gets bumped and good projects gets randomly killed for no good reasons. Glad I’m switched to BB and GitHub long time ago, git was already faster since the beginning in merging.
Hey!
Maybe they killed it because everybody moved on to some faster technology long ago… ?
Ever considered that?
Is this a typo?
Yep, thanks!
ArchiveTeam is in the process right now of saving/archiving ALL projects (inactive or not) that are hosted on Google Code.
That is great, thanks!
It’s depressing to see that they don’t care if even maybe just 2% of users are using the service. Every now and then I saw an interesting project on Google Code, and if this goes away… wow. At least it will stay read only for a while… So you are absolutely right with your text Martin:
“Internet users may feel the impact of this change as well as it is fairly certain that they will encounter dead links after January 2016 pointing to projects on Google Code that have not been moved or where the moved flag has not been set.”
Sad, but at the same time, probably better since it drives more traffic away from Google and on to other more open sites. Hopefully people are starting to see a trend, that is, don’t rely on Google to keep this or that product going, because it’ll likely end up going the way of Google Reader or any of the multitude of other popular sites they’ve closed.
Isn’t Ad-Away for Android on Google Code? Wonder what they’ll go to.
kinda sad
Should be January 25,2016.
Right, corrected and thanks!
Every now and then… (needs a y).
Corrected as well, thanks!