Back then it felt like it was actually just possible that they just were that cool. Noughties Google was really something compared to the staid, implacable incumbents. 15GB (with a G!) of email storage that would grow forever! Google Earth! YouTube! Live long enough to see yourself become the villain indeed.
DoubleClick was the year after Google Code. They had a good few years of being considered cool and, well, Not Evil. Google Earth was 2001, Gmail, Scholar and Books was 2004, Reader and Gtalk (RIP x 2) 2005, Patents in 2006 and dropping 1.65 billion plus (which sounds trivial now that everyone and their mum's are worth billions for whatever dog-walking app, but not then) on YouTube that year, even though it was only a year old. Mad times, you could barely sign up for a beta before another one landed. The search engine itself was of course revolutionary and peerless. And you could use it on your WAP phone until something called the "iPhone" happened.
For those of us who were young and, yes, naive, and who weren't paying attention in the first dot com crash in those newspapers adults read while we played (8 year olds in the 90s rarely using IRC to get the lowdown on Silicon Valley), it seemed like it was possibly a new age. "Going public" in 2004 wasn't yet another obvious "oh here we go again" moments, because they were among the first in the generation, with the pervious generation mostly fizzling before pervasive internet access (Amazon made it, but it was a slower burn).
Chrome and Android was 2008, and I remember first hearing around then the phrase "Google Mothership". Though I never stopped using Firefox (and Opera, I don't remember when I switched to Firefox), Chrome was undeniably a technical coup at the time. Being cool and shiny and actually good at being a browser, while kicking that evil Microsoft in the teeth helped too. It took time to burn though that goodwill. Even today, very many otherwise FOSSy people won't move from Chrome.
Dialects are always in flux and there are plenty of languages out there they haven't conquered, so ... I'd guess they're just leaving it running to detect new speech or languages or dialets or ... personal data gathering or... ?
The speech patterns also differ heavily, with Youtubers (usually) talking in a presentative manner and speaking very clearly.
I think the way people talk in private phone calls, as well as the call audio quality, are much more similar to that of someone speaking to an assistant.
In fact, Google Voice on Android was supposed to make calls via data-only (no minutes usage) on a smartphone, but carriers would not allow Google to do that. Hence the strange random-number dialing which utilizes a 3 way call to make a 2 way call by default. Years later, they quietly allowed calls over data but by then GV was already on lifesupport.
The only reason that merger was even allowed to happen was because it was extremely clear that Sprint would not have been a going concern into the next year if it would stay independent.
I feel like Sprint failing may have been better for the market; I expect more Sprint customers would have switched to AT&T or Verizon than to T-Mobile, and T-Mobile would still have to fight for customers.
Instead, T-Mo has jacked up prices just like everyone else, reduced nice perks, and their "uncarrier" movement is but a memory.
In all seriousness, though: if I were a user of Google Voice, I'd be seriously concerned that they would shut it down in a way that caused me to lose access to my phone number (even if only indirectly, as happened recently with their divesture of Google Domains or whatever their registrar was called)... you are much braver than I ;P.
Like Google Domains?
It would also be pretty shortsighted from a business perspective, IMO. Voice could still be extended to compete with iMessage and WhatsApp, like they sort of tried to do back when they were going to merge it with Hangouts.
God please no more messaging apps from Google for the love of god.
I do miss when GV and SMS were integrated with Hangouts though... was imo a much better experience than you get today with all the broken out apps.
Frankly, I’m just as shocked they didn’t go full throttle with it either, because talk about a data selling gold mine with all that traffic
While I’m on that subject, it could have been a real opportunity for them to push fiber + YouTube TV as a package. Google isn’t good at making original content but at some point they have made a software + services play that makes such a package more palatable and user friendly, imagine subscribing to a YouTube channel and it becomes a channel as part of the TV app for instance. A lot of people watch channels like this as it is.
I don't feel any difference over our previous 1G service, other than it never lags, even if multiple kids are streaming video and I have a backup running. The biggest difference is that it's half the price of the 1G service that ran over AT&T's fiber.
IIRC, Google doesn't sell user data. But it's plenty valuable to them all locked up.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
DuckDuckGo is great for most purposes.
The best product Google has is Maps. That's about it.
I’ve been using Google and Duck on different kinds of searches these days, because neither is universally better but I might try Bing again.
Edit: NM, Bings UI is still annoying. It slides stuff in from the side when you scroll down.
It didn’t. The person you’re replying to is either exaggerating or uninformed.
Maybe give Ecosia a try. The interface is decent and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results.
Are we just going to pretend that Chrome and Android don't exist just like that, or do I have a different definition of "has"?
You have to look at what teams at Google are using Flutter. Any dev tool Google officially releases tends to be funded by some product that actually likes/uses it.
Current list from https://flutter.dev/showcase: GPay, Earth, Ads (this is a big one), and others.
There are a lot of teams using it, which is why it's still getting so much support. If you see Google apps moving away from it, then it's time to start looking for an alternative.
It's also why AngularDart still exists and is getting updated. There are large projects that use it, so they will keep supporting it.
How is Ads using Flutter? It likely doesn't, or uses it for some largely irrelevant things like mobile SDK integrations
Wasn't it Analytics which had Dart? But I do remember something about Ads saving it.
> they weren't into doing yet another rewrite.
It all depends on politics within the company. For example: youtube was hastily rewritten using alpha/beta versions of Polymer targeting Custom Elements v0. The moment they did that v0 was deprecated.
So within next 4 years they rewrote Youtube again with Polymer version targeting Custom Elements v1. The moment they did that, Polymer was deprecated and replaced with lit.
Even though they haven't rewritten Youtube, they've now spent time integrating Wiz, an internal Google framework (that also got merged with Angular).
The costs of rewrites don't matter at Google as much as promotions.
If Flutter and Dart were donated to the community, they would most likely slowly die because no one outside of Google gets enough benefit from them to justify maintaining an entire programming language.
You could suggest using AI to OCR the canvas but even that would be subpar because most sites that use HTML provide multiple screens worth of info but sites that render to a canvas render only what's visible. The rest of the data is internal. You'd not only need the AI to successfully OCR the text, you'd need it to interact with the page get it to render what's not currently displayed.
I think you should ask the opposite question instead, and this goes for any project that is corporate "owned"/sponsored like Flutter: why should we expect the community to maintain it if the company abandons it?
Are there any non-Googlers with commit access to the project? Do non-Googlers comprise a decent percentage of contributions? If not, the bar goes up quite a bit for a fork, or for a "peaceful handoff" of the existing project.
More Google style would be shortly after shutting down Google Code starting up a new code hosting project, migrating several times to always slightly incompatible frontends requiring developer changes, shutting down the project, and shortly afterwards starting up a new code hosting project...
If you expect you team to just go-go-go, you might something in the short term but you'll fail miserably in long-term.
It's not like they're doing cereals and now they're doing other cereals, so you can fall back to their previous cereals. You always have to find a new supplier, or then just start buying bread.
And, of course, they shut it down. At this point, Google is going to have to be in a space for at least 5 years and clearly be highly successful before I would even think about using them.
Was that partially FUD? Probably. But there were plenty of services sales could point to.
because of ordering by vote, we can't see how quickly it happened in this case. in godwin's law the likelihood increases by length of discussion, implying a slow/linear kind of probability, but for google product sunset i would argue that the likelihood ramps up very aggressively from the start.
i hereby dub this `jiveturkey's law`.
like godwin's law, the subthread becomes a distraction. unlike godwin's law, the sunset distraction is always a legitimate point. it's just that it has become tired.
With all the Big Corp asterisks, Microsoft Business Basic can be a pretty great deal at 6 USD/month. Solid reliability, aliases, (too many) config options, 1TB of OneDrive storage, cloud MS apps, etc.
other popular options are fastmail, migadu, and mxroute.
I then used some other platform that was quite "old school" that is recommended here. The Mail Admin was very opinionated which lead to some mail being blocked. That wasn't cool.
I'm now with Migadu on the cheapest plan and it's been fine. Had a few outages here and there, but otherwise solid.
I'd happily rec Fastmail or Migadu.
Either now is probably a good choice.
Google currently has a quarterly revenue of $70-80B.
Imagine an internal team launches a new product to collect $100M in quarterly revenue. An earth-shattering success for any entrepreneur.
For Google...it doesn't even move the needle. Does nothing for stock, it's not strategic, and may become a liability later on.
You would need to launch a multi-billion new sub business for it to be of any interest to Google, which is impossibly hard.
Otherwise, with those expectations, it's impossible to build something good and impactful.
If done inside a conglomerate, it can be the best of both worlds. Access to Google tech and funding, but free from rigid corporate hierarchies, at least at the beginning.
Issue for Google: They have to be carful for Anti-Trust not blocking the acquisition for some reason.
GMail isn't going anywhere either.
YouTube is a bit less clear: it doesn't really have any competitors, and is extremely popular and widespread, but it surely costs a fortune to keep running.
It'd be interesting to see the financials on these different business units to see which are the healthiest and which aren't.
Gmail, on the other hand, like any email service, is much harder to switch. Until we get mandated email address portability, like was done with phone numbers some years back.
As far as I know, there is no other map application that does that.
Right, and that's where most of Google Maps' value is: it's really a business directory combined with a navigation system. I'm not going to look up an address for some place, I want to just search for "<business name> near me" and find all the nearby locations and pick one and go there. Even better, Google Maps has reviews built-in so you can see if people hate a certain place.
>but I'd guess that they don't apply to the majority of people.
If you think the majority of people keep business names and addresses in a contacts list, you're really out of touch.
Also, GMaps has features competing systems usually don't, depending on locality. Here in Tokyo, it's tied into the public transportation system so it'll tell you which train lines to ride, which platform to use, which car to ride in, which station exit to use, when a train is delayed, etc. It'll even tell you exactly how much each option costs, since different train lines have different costs. Then, inside many buildings, it'll show you level-by-level what business is on what floor.
I am aware of plenty public transports in European countries that you better print out those PDFs, from their website, assuming they have them in first place.
This is not at all what they were saying, and I'm not sure where you got that. What they're saying is that Google doesn't have a monopoly on business location data, so searching for a business on a competitor (especially a large one like Apple, but mostly even OSM) does just work.
There was a brief moment when it looked like Twitch would kill YouTube; then, much like Instagram responding to SnapChat, they took the best parts of it and added them to itself. I'd be amazed if YouTube wasn't profitable now with the combination of more ads, more subscription/superchat options and the pandemic-era boom in streaming.
All of this would have been easy to find out simply by asking
It's not like Google (or anybody else) makes this easy to know. And call me jaded, but something tells me official Google PR channels would not have been really helpful for this.
And also - are most engineers in your sort of position even free to remark on such projects w.r.t. NDAs, etc?
It's not about asking me, it's about not asserting things you don't know.
Instead of saying "people did x for y reason" when you have literally no data on x or y, you could say "I don't know why x happened, i only know about z". Or if it's super important you try to put something there, beforehand, you could say "hey does anyone know why x happened? I'm working on a blog post and want to get it right".
Then, someone like me who saw it could happily email you or whatever and say "hey, here's the real story on x".
Or not, in which case you can leave it at "i don't know".
The right answer is not to just assert random things you make up in your head and force people to correct you. I'm aware of the old adage of basically "just put wrong stuff out there and someone will correct you", but i generally think that's super poor form when it's about *other people or things and their motivations". I care less when it's about "why is the sky blue".
In this case, it also happens that there are plenty of on-record interviews and other things where what i said, was said back in the day.
So a little spleunking would have told them the answer anyway.
You can see how as the article develops, they go from being "uncertain what made GitHub succeed" to definitively being sure about why it succeeded. It doesn't surprise me that details were glossed over as the story rose to the ultimate crescendo of "GitHub dominates".
This is how a good tale is spun and the people lap it up. What's a good tale without a bit of embellishment? (said every bard since antiquity)
— Charlie Munger, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
He's not just providing primary source testimony from his point of view, he's trying to pretend he has primary source testmony on what others were doing as well.
If he left out the parts where he has no data (or said i don't know), it would have IMHO been a better post, and actually primary source testimony.
You also don't run into the Gell-Mann amnesia problem this way.
To each their own, of course.
Tough cookie, he succeeded via provocation. The norms you are advocating for as an alternative boil down to, "Google decides."
Are those polite norms even worthy? You are speaking your truth on a semi-anonymous social media forum! It has really touched a nerve for you. The moderators here delight in the mildly miffed author responding to comment after comment. This is the opposite of however your "on-record interviews" were formatted before this little blog post - they weren't notable at all, they're still not notable, and here you are setting your record straight. It's great!
Putting out a general inquiry of "why did x happen?" also has a lot of stigma attached to it in RTFM, LMGTFY internet culture. The result will not be a cloud of other people interested in the answer upvoting the question to make it visible to folk who might actually know. Snide comebacks notwithstanding the question will languish forgotten in a dusty corner of whichever forum it was asked within.
But bold assertions based on plausible conjecture? That can earn upvotes, drive engagement, draw ad clicks, and sometimes even prompt corrections from actual experts.
Certainly not an ideal situation but this does appear to be where we're at.
No more than a movie critic has an obligation to speak with the director before printing their review. He is comparing/contrasting GitHub with Google Code, the product you released. That is all.
As for his claims, I don't even see how the linked article significantly contradicts what you yourself have said about the genesis and goals of Google Code.
You claim that the purpose of Google Code was mainly just to break the SourceForge monoculture. In other words, it wasn't a product intended to be a polished worldbeater. Not something great. Not the next Gmail. Just something functional. A monoculture-preventer.
Okay.
(I am a software engineer as well, so I understand that even this level of creation involves many thousands of engineer-hours of blood, sweat, and tears. Not a knock.)
So yeah, it doesn't sound like you created Google Code with "taste" which the linked article seems to be using as shorthand for "lots of product passion and UX polish."
While the tone of the linked article seems a little more aggressive than it needs to be it... seems correct, based on what you've said?
From the article I'm going to quote Google Code mentions.
There are other assertions about Google's internal adoption of Git, but these seem to be backed up by e.g. the email he screenshotted.
Furthermore, the players (Sourceforge, Google
Code, etc) who eventually did care, after seeing
Git and GitHub rising in popularity, simply had
no taste.
In 2011, both Google Code and BitBucket added Git
support, which I’ll mark as the year that the nail
was in the Mercurial coffin.
Just 4 years later, in 2015, Google Code just
completely gave up and shut it’s service down. In the
email they sent out, they basically said “just move to
GitHub”.
So, Why Not Google Code?
The original article is correct, the other
hosts focused on distribution and revenue streams.
We cared about developers.
Is this really the point of contention?
I read the article in the context of "a guy who worked at Github talking about his experience at Github, which unavoidably will also mention externalities like the competition" and not at all in the context of "hey! this is the inside scoop on google! I got facts about Google's inner workings!"
I just don't think there's a reasonable assumption that this should have been like, a rigorously fact-checked statement.
Expecting a personal blog to adhere to the standards of some other kind of publishing is misguided and unrealistic. This is clearly a personal account and I'm just baffled that anybody would confuse a personal account like this with capital-j Journalism.
This probably reads as pedantry (if anybody actually reads this post) but it's really, an honest attempt to understand.
I'm not sure how it works now, cynically I would suggest that the writer asks an LLM to write the story, gets a rehash of Wikipedia and other sources, and they maybe makes some attempts at firsthand verification.
You are reading the personal diary of someone with personal connection to a topic and complaining that it is not up to the standards of professional journalism.
Rather, he is comparing the actual released products.
Specifically, he says that competitors to Github had no "taste", which he seems to be using as shorthand for "making a polished product and really focusing on developer/user experience."
You don't need to interview the folks who worked on Google Code to make that claim, any more than I need to interview Steven Spielberg before I comment on one of his movies.
(Based on my memories of Google Code, I'd say the linked article's observations about Google Code are also absolutely correct, although that's really beside the point)
Just flat out saying they had no taste in product development, however, is a bit of trash talking for no reason.
Understanding your (Google’s) motivations explains why Google Code didn’t improve as much. It doesn’t contradict that Github had better UI, or their explanation of their motivation to build a better UI.
I'm contributing to someone's software that started as an academic project. The current version is on GitHub with history back to 2014 but early releases back to 2008 (from before the author started using version control) are on SF in the form release_1.0.tgz, release_1.1.tgz, etc. I stumbled on these old versions this weekend while looking for related material. Once I decompressed them I found that they contained notes and old code that really helps to understand the current project's evolution and structure.
Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the "Big Green Download" button.
SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open source projects.
... and for that matter didn't they stir up some controversy a long while ago for tampering with project artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware / nagware / **ware?)
Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public CVS server to host your open source cool project was cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big green download buttons.
It looks almopst impossible today, but launching a service was really hard and expensive back then. It cost a lot of money/effort in just software. All that stuff you can just download and it actually works? No way man, didn't exist yet.
That is why LAMP stack was so great back then, it was free, working and reasonably low-maintenence and super easy to set-up.
It is super hard to break through a two-sided market but it is possible when a competitor has given up entirely on competition, which might have happened in the SourceForge case because the money situation was so dire they couldn't afford to invest in it.
...lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites.
I am skeptical of claims that “advertisers want to target young people because they have a lifetime of consumption ahead of them”. Maybe that is true of Proctor and Gamble (who expect to still be selling Dawn and Tide 50 years from now) but few advertisers are thinking ahead more than one quarter, if that —- particularly in the internet age where an ad click can be tracked to a transaction.
People today will say all the ads on TV target oldsters because only oldsters watch TV but circa 2000 there was no streaming and watching TV made me think “I want to die before I get old” because there were so many ads for drugs and embarrassing health conditions and personal injury lawyers and relatively little for things you would spend your own money on because not a lot of people in the audience have money to spend particularly after paying the cable bill.
I suppose I would call what I saw "Grayware" [1], which is debatably not malware (but debatably is, too). It was enough of a smell for me to stop using their site, though. I'd actually just forego software I was seeking out from them instead.
As for the Windows fear, I understand that. That was me 10+ years ago, and I _am_ less knowledgable at helping people with Windows these days. I can still figure some things out by searching, and "I couldn't figure it out after 5-10 minutes" has turned out to be an acceptable answer too sometimes :)
This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a project, make some changes, and then e-mail the author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.
Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS, running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box in a dorm.
SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble. They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums, and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number of mirror sites which enabled a level of high availability most projects could never have had previously.
Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers. SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer to install the FOSS application and some bullshit AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one.
As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC, MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by the AdWare bundling at various points.
A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub enshittified had they not been bought by a money fountain.
Part of the enshittification story is the tragedy of the non-profitable site that has a large user base. Here is a recent example
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41463734
Potentially investments in a site could have huge leverage because of the existing user base.
I (and most of my team) lost our jobs at one of the most well-loved open accessing publishing sites in the world because of a complex chain of events that was rooted in the site not having a sustainable funding source despite the fact that it was fantastically cheap to run if you divided the budget by the number of daily users. Fortunately they figured it all out and the site is still here and if you work in physics, math or cs you probably used it today.
Still it was painful to see “new shiny” projects that had 4x the funding but 1% the user count at most, or to estimate we could save users $500M a year with a $500k budget.
Thus you can overthrow SourceForge but cannot overthrow something profitable and terrible such as Facebook, Match.com or the “blob” of review sites that dominate Google, see
Can you provide an example?
GitHub could have easily enshittified in an effort to make money had they not been bought by someone with deep pockets.
It did not. Free software did. The term "open source" was coined by Christine Peterson at a meeting in January of 1998, as Netscape was contemplating releasing their source code as free software. The Open Source Initiative was founded a month later, and forked the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written by one of the OSI founders, Bruce Perens. This was a deliberate marketing exercise, both to avoid the unfortunate "as in beer" connotations of free software, and to distance the concept from the FSF and Richard Stallman.
All of this is well documented.
> Most of you kids probably don’t remember a time where there weren’t millions of open source projects around, but the phrase was only coined in 1998.
100% and unambiguously true.
Open source software existed before 1998. I don't know why you're trying to quibble about the exact branding, just because the Open Source Software term wasn't coined until a certain date doesn't mean that is the start of all software with open licenses or people publicly releasing the source of their software. The GPL, MIT, and BSD licenses are all from the 80s.
You said this:
> Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.
I've illustrated two things: it is not true that the term "open source" existed before 1998, and, the Fine Article's claim is, to quote it again:
> Most of you kids probably don’t remember a time where there weren’t millions of open source projects around, but the phrase was only coined in 1998.
That is, it is explicitly a claim about the phrase, meaning no possible interpretation of your expressed contradiction of the article can be correct.
All of your points could have been made without incorrectly stating that the author was wrong. In that case I would have upvoted and moved on.
I believe GitHub's underlying use of the Git SCM, as well as the interface that allowed web users to look at "pull requests" as a concept was the real value in GitHub, far before hosting binaries or attracting the attention of Microsoft. The attraction to Microsoft was the ability to pull in the growing network of git users, the popularity of GitHub to a growing number of developers, and the ability to integrate the service into their developer offerings (this was the key that would have made the other two "positives" worthless to them).
I think any tool or technology you should have an "out", in case another corporation/company takes over and doesn't align with your values. Being stuck on SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. is a recipe to lock yourself into being put down to pasture because you couldn't adapt and realize that there is a huge world out there, and tools and tech come and go. Always have something as an alternative for whatever you do, because things change too quickly, plus you get another point of view with solving problems (if that's your thing, and you aren't just developing for the money, which is fine if you can admit it to yourself). The fact that you are able to dive back into time with SourceForge tells me you are one of those people that have been into technology since pre-dot com bust, but probably got burned by Microsoft in some form. I'm not defending Microsoft for their past practices, only coming at this from what they have done with GitHub to this point. Hopefully I'm not wrong, but I do have a plan in place in case I am, and I think that's the most important thing in software.
To be clear I'm not trying to be down on GitHub here. They made a good product and a very good alternative to SourceForge. I think they just got lucky getting bought by Microsoft when they did. By 2018 I think they'd gotten to the point where their costs would have required to start chasing revenue.
That doesn't sound true to me at all, except maybe in some very small niches. I've used Bitbucket at exactly one job; I've found Codeberg, but no project I've used was actually hosted there; and literally everything else I see or use is on Github.
A bunch of larger projects have a mirror on GitHub for easier access.
BTW there's launchpad.net which is often overlooked, bit it's vital for Ubuntu-specific projects.
At paid day jobs, I had to use BitBucket at least twice, and I miss better code review tools, like Phabricator.
GitHub definitely dominates the market, partly due to the network effects, but I don't think they have a lot of moat. If something goes badly enough wrong there, there will be plenty of viable alternatives with an easy to trivial migration path.
Their moat is a billion development tool vendors that have "integrate with Github" as a must-have and expected functionality.
It's overlooked because in true Canonical fashion they went hard in on their not-invented-here-syndrome VCS that nobody asked for or wanted. That and also the integration with Ubuntu and nothing else.
There is also a lot of stuff on Gitee (China), but due to langauge barrier, it's hard to judge.
Herein lies the tragedy. Google could've offered, even sold, its internal development experience (code hosting, indexing and searching, code reviews, build farms, etc...) which is and was amazing, but it decided that it wasn't worth doing and let GitHub eat its lunch.
Initially I thought SF means San Francisco, and I thought "Wow, what kind of monoculture can be prevented by Google Code", and then I realized that SF meant Source Forge.
Instead what we got was higher degrees of selective attention, and very elaborate and obscure flip-cup tricks.
In 2018, MS bought Github for 7B.
Google Code started to be shutdown mid-2015. In 2015 it wasn't clear yet that it would be valuable for Google to host the world's code?
GitHub is great, but it's absolute ass for search. To the point where for any nontrivial question I have to pull down the repo and use command-line tooling on it.
i'm only remarking on this because of the context in the parent you are replying to, whom i agree with. local tooling is better than what github provides. as a standalone comment i would simply upvote you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Kythe
https://youtu.be/VYI3ji8aSM0?si=D3Z3FIsB8wa7MTE6
Think jump-to-def and listing cross references working with c++ aliases, across generated code boundaries, etc.
ouch just OUCH
Or are you talking about the few repos that had semantic indexing via Kythe (chromium, android, etc)? We never got that working for generic random open repos, primarily because it requires so much integration with the build system. A series of three or four separate people on Kythe tried various experimentation for cheaply-enough hooking Kythe into arbitrary open repos, but we all failed.
I was the last one to try (and fail) at getting arbitrary repos to extract and index in Kythe. We never found a good solution to get the set of particular insanity that is Kythe extraction working with random repos, each with their own separate insane build configs.
"Okay, you want generic search? Great. Here's the specific build toolchain that works with it. We'll get around to other build toolchains... Eventually maybe."
Would have been a great synergy opportunity to widen adoption of Bazel.
I remember there were docs how to onboard a repo to that list.
If Google Code succeeded, it’s hard to imagine that Google would not have tried to monetize it someday.
This also reminds me of Google’s (also initial) position on Chrome vis-a-vis Firefox: create a product “not trying to make money, or whatever” but just to limit the market share of a competitor.
The less flattering term for this in the context of anticompetitive behavior is “dumping”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
It sounds like Google would have paid some amount of billions for Github, but not the amount that Microsoft paid
I personally don't think Google would have tried to monetize Google Code, even if it had 10x or even 50x the users that it eventually had. (And I say that having worked at Google, and on Google Code briefly!)
I think it made more sense as complementary to another product (which in some sense explains a big problem with developing products at Google)
---
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/24/google-cloud-ceo-diane-green...
CNBC previously reported that Google was looking at buying GitHub, but Greene wouldn’t confirm the report.
“I think the only thing I’ve said is that I wouldn’t have minded having them,” said Greene.
Google code did succeed in that sense. It had hundreds of thousands of 30-day active projects, and some insane market share of developers.
I don't honestly remember if it was even shrinking when we decided to stop taking in new projects.
I doubt we would have monetized it directly (IE sell an enterprise version) - the entire market for development tools is fairly small.
In 2022 it was ~5 billion dollars, and future estimates keep getting revised downwards :).
CAGR has been about 10-14% in practice, sometimes less.
I don't remember if it's still true, but most of that 5 billion dollars was going to Atlassian (80% at one point).
Now, if you project backwards to 2006, and compare it to other markets google could be competing in, you can imagine even if you got 100% of this segment it would not have actually made you a ton directly.
Indirectly, eh, my guess is you still make more off the goodwill than most other things.
It's actually fairly rare to make any significant money at development tools directly.
Nowadays, the main source even seems to be trying to sell AI and productivity, rather than tools.
> Actually, Google Code was never trying to win.
> It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone
Like Google+ and all the other attempts:
Google is actually the good guy to prevent monopolies, we just don't understand them ;)
This is perhaps true of all big companies, but Google also seem to adopt a more passive PR strategy and don't try too hard to explain things, and it's just that much more difficult to understand Google when everyone else is louder.
Though there probably is some deeper critique about how you have a pretty amazing service running with "just" 4 people and aren't able to turn that into something useful beyond that objective. Innovator's Dilemma I guess.
For me, GitHub had only entered my sphere of knowledge when the Google code phase out started. It was pretty painful because I was already struggling to teach myself to code and git seemed incomprehensible compared to svn. Sourceforge was up there with cnet as being a somewhat sketchy site which could occasionally have something genuinely interesting to download, but usually did not. So I can kind of believe that GC/Codeplex weren't necessarily aiming to be profitable products. Selling access as an enterprise product was a common model even back then, and it would've been an obvious route if they were actually aiming for profit.
That post said that their goal was to make sure SourceForge, which was truly awful and also the only game in town back then, did not become (or remain) dominant.
Pretty hard to argue they failed at that goal when SourceForge is so not-dominant today that some people here didn't even recognize its acronym!
And why is it a believable goal that as long as you bring down a competitor, it's OK if you fail?
No one (sane) has such a goal.
I've been super-consistent on this for at least 10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8605689
It was also written in our OKRS, etc at the time. I probably have plenty of internal evidence.
In the end, we would have been happy if SF had become a great and reliable place as well. You are assuming the goal was to destroy it. But in practice, we expected them to compete for real and become better as a result.
The goal was to get SF to not be a shitty monoculture. Ideally by SF being forced to compete with us, and making their product less shitty. It does not require destroying or harming SF to achieve this goal.
They chose, ironically, not to compete, and were destroyed as a result of their own choice.
It also happened that third parties came along and helped make it both not shitty, and not a monoculture.
Goal achieved. Why does marketshare have to enter into any of it?
Nobody was trying to destroy anything. The person who started the project (dibona) came from VA linux and slashdot, and was very good friends with the people who ran both (still is!).
He also started summer of code and lots of other things.
Stop being so amazingly cynical.
If you send troops to block the enemy from advancing, if those troops block the enemy from advancing, they've succeeded. Even if those troops didn't "win the war". Even if they all died in combat. The mission was a success.
If you want to say this is revisionist history from a googler... sure - make that case. But simply deploying a service to try to 1) prevent a competitor from gaining marketshare and/or 2) get the competitor to suck less... it's a valid move.
Personally, I don't think google code alone made much of an impact on SF directly, but google code and ms codeplex together probably did get people to start considering using something beyond SF.
Because the truth matters? it is quite annoying to see people trying to bend reality to make themselves or their projects more important than they really were. Google code sucked, like many google projects.
Github wasn't successful because Google Code made people "start considering using something beyond SF". Github succeeded because git is great and social network features allowed it to reach a much bigger audience.
A lot of what the OP wrote rings true to me, Github obviously hit on a better model, but they clearly had different goals.
I'm sympathetic to people who came into this landscape after Github was already around feeling like google code was a lame also-ran, but as someone who thought "why is everything hosted through this shitty SourceForge website" when I first started using open source, it was a huge improvement.
It just says that the original post says their goal was for SourceForge to not be the shitty but dominant monoculture that it was when they started, and that fast forwarding to today, it clearly is not.
It may well be the case that they had absolutely nothing to do with that! But the goal, as stated, was achieved either way.
> And why is it a believable goal that as long as you bring down a competitor, it's OK if you fail? No one (sane) has such a goal.
I just can't fathom why you think this. Can you explain it more? You have stated it a few times, but not yet explained it.
I can't speak to modern Google, but old Google definitely did things to ecosystem-shape. It wasn't "sane" in the sense that, yes, it does buck simple calculations of profit-maximization; being able to avoid those simple calculations is the reason the founders structured the IPO to maintain executive control, so they could make wild bets that broke with business tradition.
First: That sounds completely not like Google
Second: Now you have GH as the "shitty monoculture" (owner is MS and erases your license for Co-pilot)
Third: >>We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought at the time, and didn't see a reason to continue.
Yeah ok that sounds like Google, try's to enter another market just to hurt them then folds ;)
At that point, SF was serving malware and stuff. It was really not a great time.
Github became a monoculture years later when others folded. Google code was shut down in 2016. Github wasn't quite a monoculture then.
I also said, back in 2014, that it might be necessary to do something like google code again in 5-10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8605689
10 years later, here we are i guess :)
Though i think what i said then still holds - Github is not anywhere near as bad or unreliable as SF was.
Not just because I like gerrit, but because the github monoculture is wearing on me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy
After slashdot was purchased from condenast (i think?)
(And yes, fake download buttons on a site serving binary downloads went exactly where you'd expect.)
Yes and today Ad-Sense (Google) took the Crown from being then biggest Scam AD's deploy-er.
And really i don't think that's true before they where sold, ad's sure, scam/malware stuff? I don't think so...at least i cant remember.
But SF had FTP, Websites, SVN hosting and i think even a WIKI, so you can hardly compare it with Google-Code...and hey at least they opensource'd their "forge":
IDK i don't have such bad memory's about SF, even today you serve big files over SF because of GH limits.
True after slashdot got buy'd, they also served malware AFTER the takeover (2013), and now look at that year:
Allura graduated from incubation with the Apache Software Foundation in March >>2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Allura
Google-Code was in 2006 right?
If I recall correctly, SVN was also more popular than Git at the time, so migrating hosts was a lot more painful than now...
This is a fundamental difference and the reason that git's model works much better when branching/merging.
Even today you find death links from google code repos.
If you were never trying to win, that's a product failure
You should have been trying to win, you should have built a strong competitor to GitHub and you shouldn't have let it rot until it was shut down
The world would have been a better place if Google code tried to be as good as GitHub
It's literally not? We had a goal from the beginning - create enough competition to either force SF to become better (at that time it was infinite ads and malware), or that someone else wins.
> You should have been trying to win, you should have built a strong competitor to GitHub and you shouldn't have let it rot until it was shut down
That's your goal, not mine (or at the time, Google). Feel free to do it!
You don't like what we had as a goal - that's okay. It doesn't mean we either failed, or had the wrong goal. We just had one you don't happen to like.
> The world would have been a better place if Google code tried to be as good as GitHub
One of the things to ask before you either start something or keep doing something is "who actually wants you to win?" If the answer is "nobody", it might not make any sense to do.
It's not obvious in 2016 anyone would have wanted us to win. By then, Google had lived long enough to see itself become a villain. There was reasonable competition in the space.
I don't believe we would have really served people well to keep going.
what?
code.google going away, without the excuse that google itself was going away, after I had started to rely on it and link to it in docs and scripts all over the place, is what taught me to never depend on google for anything.
If google had said "The purpose of this service is an academic goal of Googles, not to serve users needs. This service will be shut off as soon as Googles academic purpose is met." I would not have used it.
But Google did not say that. Google presented the service as a service whos purpose was to be useful to users. And only because of that, we used it.
Do you see the essential problem here? Effectively, Google harnessed users for it's own purposes without their consent by means of deception. The free-ness of the service that the users received doesn't even count as a fair trade in a transaction because the transaction was based on one party misinforming the other.
So thanks for all your work making the world a better place.
1. A well-known major company sees that people are relying on something broken and it's hindering progress.
2. The company decides to compete with that thing, but it's not part of their mission, so they make it free.
3. Because the new thing is free, and run by a major company, lots of people come to depend on it, even though it's intentionally not the best.
4. Another company builds more competition and works to actually be the best.
5. The major company sees that their original objective of replacing the bad version is fulfilled, so they sunset the thing.
6. People who came to depend on the thing feel betrayed.
Microsoft is a different beast because so much of their revenue is B2B. Continuity of operations is kind of their whole deal. Google Workspace is the equivalent Google product and they're much less likely to dump a service, unlike the rest of Google.
There's also some pretty decent integration features for DevOps projects with source control in GitHub for that matter iirc. Not to mention the potential upsell to/from GH Enterprise and/or Azure DevOps.
I can imagine at some point, GH Enterprise and Azure DevOps may become more similar and share more infrastructure over time.
So I think it is core to the way Microsoft expands and holds market share. And that market has changed to not only want windows only tools, so they change with it. Microsoft culture has always been kind of pragmatic. They were a walled garden for developers when they could get away with it (and still are for some), but now they have opened up a bit out of need.
It didn't go away, though. It got archived and that archive is still up and running today. Those links you put all over the place should still be working.
> If google had said "The purpose of this service is an academic goal of Googles, not to serve users needs. This service will be shut off as soon as Googles academic purpose is met." I would not have used it.
That's not an accurate representation of what DannyBee said. Moreover, what DannyBee did say is in line with what Google itself said was its goal when the service launched: https://support.google.com/code/answer/56511
"One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting."
> Effectively, Google harnessed users for it's own purposes without their consent by means of deception.
This does not appear to be a good faith argument.
None of what DannyBee said in their comment aligns with that interpretation. Neither does that interpretation line up with Google's publicly stated goals when they launched Google Code.
"It got archived" means it went away for actual use. i.e. in not-just-read-only fashion
Putting a service like code.google into read-only mode is pretty much the ideal outcome for a discontinued service.
Google should be praised for how they behaved here.
Also, "Google sunset their project really well" is damning with faint praise.
Sure, but this is the danger you get when you rely on an outside vendor's service for anything. If you don't want to deal with this danger, then you should never, ever use an external vendor's service for anything; you should only use your own self-hosted solutions.
Of course, Google does have a worse track record than some when it comes to their services being EOLed if they aren't search, Maps, etc., but still, this can happen with anything: it can be shut down, or bought out by a competitor, etc.
>Also, "Google sunset their project really well" is damning with faint praise.
I don't think so in this case. I'd say Google has done a poor job of sunsetting other projects of theirs, but if this one actually keeps all the links alive albeit in read-only mode, that's really a lot better than most other EOLed or shut-down (like due to bankruptcy) services (from Google or anyone else), where it just disappears one day.
Yes, that's the point of the above comments. The repeated lesson is that there's always a risk of shutdown, but don't trust google in particular to keep services running.
> Actually, Google Code was never trying to win.
> It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture ... . Google was 100% consistent on this ...
And
> One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting.
These are not the same. One of these makes it out to be the singular goal. The other does not.
I'm trying to participate in a discussion. Not write comms that go to hundreds of millions of people. That is why the rules of hn are very clear on assuming the best, not the worst.
I think this is misrepresenting what the commenter stated. He appears to have stated the project hosting service "went away". This fits with the context of the OP which is comparing project hosting services, e.g., Google Code, Sourceforge, Github.
If the context was software archives, e.g., software mirrors, instead of project hosting, then we could indeed claim "Google Code" still exists. However, the context is project hosting. And no one can upload new projects or revisions to Google Code anymore. Google Code project hosting did in fact "go away":
https://codesite-archive.appspot.com/archive/about
The old https://code.google.com/p/projectname URLs need to be redirected to https://code.google.com/p/archive/projectname
Google then redirects these /archive URLs to storage.googleapis.com
Too much indirection
https://code.google.com/p/projectname becomes
https://storage.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/google-...
Downloads
https://storage.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/google-...
I'm going to defend Google on this. They don't need to maintain products forever but this case is a good way to shut down a service. Allow access to existing projects but make clear that active projects need to go somewhere else. The commenter can be upset that they can't use Google Code as a product but they shouldn't misrepresent the situation by saying the code is inaccessible. I checked a university project I created 15 years ago and it's still there. The commenter is objectively incorrect.
> Too much indirection
I don't think this is a valid criticism. The web is designed explicitly to do this. You can still access the code, that's good enough.
People/businesses who do stuff for free, ask for donations.
Sometimes businesses do things to create good will (which has tangible value).
Sometimes businesses do things which destroy good will and create animosity (which has a tangible cost).
Google seems to have managed to have accumulated significant animosity by shutting down services that could instead have been left to die a slow death on a long tail. I still remember a time when I could plausibly believe that "Google Is Not Evil". Shutting down those services prematurely when people still depend on them is evil. That's the cost.
And, by the way, sometimes people do things for no other reason than because it is virtuous to do so. I suppose Plato does make the argument that you should do virtuous things so that you can hang out with other virtuous people, and not have to put up with *ssholes. Darwin would probably argue that people do virtuous things for free in order to increase the survival rates of their progeny. But those are both deep and nuanced arguments that are best left to incurable pessimists.
>You imply their time has no value
They have chosen to risk wasting their own time. Absent longevity guarantees from Google, the responsibility for GP's choice to use Google Code lies with GP, not with Google. (I'm not saying it was a bad decision at all -- for, say, personal hobby projects, I actually think it would have been a very sensible choice to take the value on offer -- and accept the risk that it could all just go away at a moment's notice.)
>and will not be factored in future decisions in what concerns "Google" and "code hosting".
I don't understand this part, sorry.
If so: Watch how much I give.
Whats the solution? Is the future self hosted? Making it accessible for non-technical people?
Every profitable company on earth, ever.
Wasn't Google reported among the bidders for GitHub?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/github-interest-from-google-...
Maybe Google Code itself was never trying to win but tendering an significant offer to the auction suggests Google was trying to win something.
Aside from too many hit/bait/paid-for pieces, writers have simply gotten "lazy" as they're no longer incentivized to "get it right"--just "get it out".
Granted, this post is, essentially, meant to be a whitepaper for their product offering, but c'mon guys, you had the references to reach out, but were lazy for...reasons?!
AWS also has a history of some of these "buit-to-marketize" products (e.g. CodeCommit), but at least there's a "solid core" of a stack to re-build these niche services from-scratch.
What's Google "reliable core" anymore aside from Compute Engine and Search? Don't get me started on Cloud SQL.
As a complete nobody, why can't I think that in every example of a product launch, if it wins it wins, and if it fails, I can claim it was never intended to win?
raises eyebrow
When there were 4 of you?
So about $800k a year for that time period?
Just out of interest?
Github beat basically every Code hosting platform out there. Probably dusins of Github-like startups tried and failed because Github did so well.
So whether Google Code "wanted to win" or not doesn't really take away anything from the posts argument that Github won due to timing and taste.
Not saying Google tried and failed - they may just have realised that actually winning this was never an option.
It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone, which it was when Google Code launched. Google was 100% consistent on this from the day it launched to the day it folded. It was not trying to make money, or whatever
I was there, working on it, when it was 4 of us :)
So to write all these funny things about taste or what not, is totally besides the point.
We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought at the time, and didn't see a reason to continue.
People could get a good experience with the competition that now existed, and we would have just ended up cannibalizing the market.
So we chose to exit, and worked with Github/bitbucket/others to provide migration tools.
All of this would have been easy to find out simply by asking, but it appears nobody bothers to actually ask other people things anymore, and I guess that doesn't make as good a story as "we totally destroyed them because they had no taste, so they up and folded".