Google Sports Project, Code Hosting

By Brice Dunwoodie | Published Jul 28, 2006

Citing their desire to encourage healthy, productive open source communities, Google has launched Google Code Hosting. Think Source Forge meets GMail and you're in the ballpark.

“One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open-source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting,” said an official Google rep.

Google's code hosting will of course directly compete with SourceForge.net, which presently hosts over 125,000 projects, has over 1.3 million registered users, and, yes, you guessed it, has quite a healthy cash flow from online ads.

When asked if the new Google service will include ads, the response was, “Not at this time.”

The new service includes code hosting with version control courtesy of Subversion (SVN), bug and issue tracking via proprietary Google tools, and some nice wiring between Google Groups and Code Hosting.

Developers have flexible access to the SVN repos, including browser access, commandline access and access via fantastic tools like Tortoise SVN.

For those considering the move, the Code Hosting FAQ is a good place to start. You may also search a number of projects which have already been created. Finally, a pleasant discovery is that there are already a few open source CMS projects floating around.

Was this article useful?