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Comment by TheTon

4 months ago

No regrets here, but I did use Google Code a fair bit prior to GitHub and I had an experience that made me think maybe Google regretted that product in some ways.

Around 2005-6 I wrote a Mac OS X client for Xbox Live. The idea was I wanted notifications on my computer when my friends came online and started to play certain games, so I could turn on my Xbox and join them. This is a feature of the Xbox mobile app today of course, but back then all you could do was either be on the Xbox or sit around refreshing a web page, so the app was useful. I published the source and the binaries on Google Code, partly because I just wanted to share the app for free, and partly because I wanted to be transparent that I was handling the Xbox login credentials safely.

One day the app blew up and got a lot of coverage in tech news and link aggregators (like Digg, haha) and I suddenly had a ton of users. Eventually I figured out why. It wasn't that my app was so great exactly, but rather the idea that Google was writing a Mac client for Xbox made a great tech news story. However, that part of the story wasn't true, the project had nothing to do with Google, I was just hosting it on Google Code because it was at the time the most convenient place for a small open source project.

The episode made me wonder how often that happened. How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down?

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TheTon

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dmoy  4 months ago

> How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down?

I don't remember the exact details, and I was way in the backend (Kythe), not the frontend part of it. But my extremely hazy recollection is it probably had more to do with the gwt deprecation than anything else. There was headcount for awhile put on making an angular (?) replacement for the old gwt frontend, and I guess that didn't extend to also making a replacement for Google code.

Again, super fuzzy recollection here, from someone 2 teams away.

  • TheTon  4 months ago

    Wow, thanks for the insight. It's sort of crazy to think about how big GitHub has become, and how much Microsoft paid for it, but of course it wasn't the first product in the space at all. Right time, right place, right features, I guess, and maybe Google Code was missing a bit of each of those.

    • bsimpson  4 months ago

      As I recall, GitHub popularized (maybe even invented) the pull request. That's what enabled open source to take off - being able to send patches to (or even fork) other projects with minimal friction.

      1 reply →

plorkyeran  4 months ago

The officially given reason for shutting down Google Code was that it was never intended to be a product and was just a community service thing that they did because SourceForge had ceased to be a reasonable place to host open source projects. Once a bunch of other forges popped up (including but not limited to Github) there was no longer any real need for it.

I thought it sounded pretty plausible for that era of Google.

  • astrange  4 months ago

    I knew someone who worked on it at the time, and he was also convinced they could use it to force people to use the super-slow feature-lacking Mercurial, and was personally hurt that everyone wanted to use git instead because it let you rebase things.