To be fair they did give ten months notice so people had time to manage the change, and what we are talking about here isn't "correct" use for that service anyway (it was for source and issue management, not library hosting or a more general CDN).

Doesn't help the fact that Google repeatedly shut down services that are in use. It is getting harder and harder to use Google services in business because it has become a liability.

"it" being "The idea they might shut down a free service with only 10 months notice".

If your company relies on Google to this extent, and does not have the staff to fix the issues inside 10 months then you need to reconsider your business plan.

Google has googleapis.com for hosted libraries and fonts, which is free to use. I doubt many people were hotlinking directly to google code repos.

If they were, I have little sympathy. It's entirely inappropriate to co-opt a repository hosting service as a CDN.

Google code has been shutdown since last May.

AFAIK, Google uses code to host internal projects as well as open source projects.

Apparently some users were spamming and/or hosting illegal content for download. Instead of spending resources fixing what is essentially a free service to the public, they just shut it down and converted all repos to read-only mode.

At this point, I pretty much assume that any service that Google offers for free sans advertising exists to attract free beta testers. Eventually, it'll be converted to either a paid service or internal-only use.

Source: lots of time wasted migrating projects to GitHub.

Services come and go, Google or else. Unlike Reader, code.google.com is not something I will personally miss.