News
Spam, Abuse and Dwindling Popularity Prompt Google Code Closure
- By David Ramel
- March 12, 2015
As of today, developers can no longer create projects on the Google Code open source project hosting service.
Citing a preponderance of spam and "abuse" on its dwindling platform, Google Inc. today announced it's closing the 9-year-old code repository.
With the emergence of more popular hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket, the Web giant said the need for Google Code has passed and the hassles of fighting spam and other abusive activity have outweighed its usefulness for remaining projects being hosted on the service.
"As developers migrated away from Google Code, a growing share of the remaining projects were spam or abuse," the company said in a
blog post today. "Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management. After profiling non-abusive activity on Google Code, it has become clear to us that the service simply isn't needed anymore."
To ease migration to those other services, Google is providing the Google Code to GitHub exporter tool along with standalone tools for GitHub and Bitbucket, noting that SourceForce has its own Google Code project importer service.
En route to a total closing next Jan. 26, Google will put the site in to read-only mode on Aug. 24.
"Google will continue to provide Git and Gerrit hosting for certain projects like Android and Chrome," the companys said "We will also continue maintaining our mirrors of projects like Eclipse, kernel.org and others."
Google said the company itself was going the GitHub route. "To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.