Google Code, Hosting For Open Source Projects

Another new addition to the Google set of services. Google has announced hosting for open source projects on its new website Google Code.
Google’s open source program manager mentioned this:

“Stein says, “We really like SourceForge, and we don’t want to hurt SourceForge” or take away projects. Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects.”

“Stein says that Google’s hosting has a “brand new look” at issue tracking that may be of interest to open source projects, and says “nobody else out there is doing anything close to it.” At the same time DiBona and Stein say that Google’s hosting offering will not have some features present in SourceForge.net and other code repositories that open source projects and enterprise customers might want.

With the new service, Stein says Google was able to “cut out a lot of heavy structure” and apply Google’s full text search to just the features that open source projects may need. “Rather than doing queries through that [heavy] structure, we can just full text search across it all. It provides a really powerful mechanism for issue tracking, but keeps it really simple.”

The other main feature for Google Code hosting, according to Stein, is a “massively scalable Subversion repository.” Stein says Google rebuilt Subversion to store data in Big Table, a massively scalable, highly available storage technology used in Google.

Stein says that the company will have all the Google projects on there, but they’re not going out there to get projects to move. As a precaution, Stein also says that Google has a list of SourceForge.net projects, to ensure that new projects will not encroach on existing projects’ namespaces.”

Sounds pretty cool. Check it out here: http://code.google.com. You can also find the hosting FAQ here: http://code.google.com/hosting/faq.html. This provides some really good information.