Someone has to invest the time and money to keep services running, even if only limping along. Google likes to experiment and test the waters. It's part of why they've been so successful. I hope they keep killing off their underperforming/underused services so they can keep on pushing other things forward.
However, closing down stagnant projects is very different from locking down access to previously open APIs (Google Maps). Since we're discussing the closure of Google Code, I won't get distracted with that controversial topic.
In the end, they are a for-profit business. Not a charity.
That's where GitHub is now. If GitHub closed in the same way, that would be... unfortunate.
That seems to be where Google Code was trying to go. For whatever reason, it never quite made it.
But if you're part of the scenery - and Google Code was, for a while - and not just a shack hardly anyone visits, a burden of responsibility goes with that.
Whereas an early start-up with 100 users selling a product with not much lock-in can pivot without too much side effect. The users know they are dealing with a start-up and may expect it.
'Eternity' overstates it. Plenty of vendors support projects long after they are obsolete. IBM supported OS/2, released 1992 and a marketplace flop, until the end of 2006.
That means that if I need something to be around for awhile, I'll count on IBM and not Google. Google has the perogative to make that choice, of course, and long-term support generally is associated more with the business market than with consumers. Party that's because it costs more for businesses to change, partly IMO because consumers are poorly educated customers.
EDIT: It's a little odd to see this very normal comment modded down to -1 (now -3!). Another perfectly fine comment was modded down to 0. I don't care about the points at all, but it supports my instinct that some on HN are trying to protect Google. Employees? Fans?
That's because users paid for it.
Google gave the world high-quality, free open source code hosting for eight years. I don't see how that's anything but a net positive.
I'll give you three guesses as to how much those companies still running OS/2 were paying for support in 2006.
When IBM buys a company/product, they will merrily throw everything out and declare that v.next is the next version of whatever product you are using. Then the legacy product goes in life support.
OS/2 lived on because it was widely deployed in banking for ATMs and POS, and it generated a lot of complimentary revenue. So when a company like Target had 100,000 cash registers, IBM got to sell services around deployment and maintenance, and management software like Tivoli to manage the devices.
code.google.com was around for 7 years. What more do you want?
It was launched at OSCON in 2006.
The large companies are made of small clueless people just like every other company on the face of the Earth.
(a) For things (eg. Reader, Google Wallet for Digital Goods) that could be viable businesses in their own right with some modifications, spin them off as small companies.
(b) Open source the project they no longer have interest in. (as was done for Google Wave, which arguably wasn't necessary because the level of interest in Wave at that point was quite low)
In this case (and perhaps they already have this), I would suggest that they allow anyone to discover all the projects on Google Code and export them such that they could be imported into other code hosting sites, allowing everyone else to build a Google Code alternative.
For them to change, they'd have to either: 1) Support everything into eternity, which given their propensity to release new things frequently would grow to be impossibly expensive, or 2) Be more disciplined in what they release, so that it can be supported in perpetuity. I don't see either happening, so we end up where we are now. They have to keep innovating or they'll stagnate and die.