On what planet is shutting down a service, with months and months of notice, evil?

I get it, we all hate Google on HN (for reasons unclear to me) but this is ridiculous. If these projects are truly important than donate some time and move them over yourself. To demand that google invest time and resources into the migration of these migrations or to keeping this running forever is just silly.

Hell tools like https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ even exist.

Shutting down Google Code is equivalent to destroying a storage full of handwritten articles, some of which exist only in a single copy and some of which are incredibly valuable.

Why valuable? For example computer science researchers had been using Google Code to host supplement code for their research publications for years now. These repositories are not maintained by these researchers any more, yet the code some times is incredibly valuable, because it allows to reproduce research results. The reason why researchers were using Google Code, is because it was supposed to be as stable as the underlying company. Yet now, in 10 months, these repositories will be destroyed.

If the code is that valuable, then perhaps they should put some time into maintaining the code, moving it to another provider, or convincing somebody to pay for hosting.

Example. A cancer researcher, publishes a paper in Nature Genetics. Like this one: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v42/n3/abs/ng.522.html

In that paper she publishes a link to a Google Code repository as supplement materials. For example, in the aforementioned paper there is a link to the following repository: http://code.google.com/p/glu-genetics/

Given she published the paper and link, she should either a) take responsibility for the general availability of the materials, and b) make sure that if people email her for the materials (after finding that they're not available on Google Code) she shares them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for retaining the materials and knowledge, etc etc. I'm just having a hard time understanding why you expect Google to do the work and maintain it? What if she uploaded her materials to Megaupload, or any of the hundred other filesharing sites - would you hold them to the same standard? Why doesn't the journal that published the paper (which, has a revenue stream) host the material, given that it directly supports their work?

Megaupload did not hold itself out as a repository for original work.

Megaupload is not run by Google, with the stated mission of organizing the world's information.

Megaupload is bankrupt. Google is one of the richest technology companies in history.

This is not Megaupload throwing away its hoard of 90's B movies. This is Google, knowingly and literally throwing away coding history. We don't even know what might be thrown away.

What if some currently unknown researcher wrote his first code and uploaded it to Google code and forgot about it, and turned out to be the next Zuckerberg or even Turing?

What if some valuable research that was entrusted to Google from a deceased researcher suddenly disappears?

There are likely many more unintended consequences stemming from such an act, and I don't think we should give Google a pass, especially since Google controls possibly the largest collection of computers on the planet. (besides, source code tends to compress pretty well!)

Seems like the least they could do is stick it in an 'unlimited' Google Drive and lock it as read only.

Great example. In 2-10 years from now, someone will want to find that repository.

Does anyone know of an effort to maintain this, like is done with sequencing data at the NIH? Something like PubMed Central?

I have first hand experience with this on the biology side, looking for reagents or even protocols from a 10 year old paper...and coming up completely dry. It's kind of a travesty, but the world collectively shrugged.

Handling and archiving supplementary materials should be the responsibility of the journal (like distributing and archiving the article itself). They should discourage linking to 3rd party websites where the author published his/her work.

I'm pretty sure that Google Code had a TOS where they stated that they don't guarantee that your repository is safe there forever.

There could be several reasons for closing a repository including Google going bankrupt. The availability of a scientific article should be much longer (ideally infinity) than the lifetime of any company.

It may not be valuable to the author. That does not mean it's not valuable to some future searcher.

Right.

Researchers would kill to have the balled-up scraps of paper that (e.g) Shakespeare threw in the trash.

Are we supposed to believe that Google does not understand the value of CITATIONS and PERMALINKS?

In actuality, I've found most HN users seem to love Google. To the extent that almost any criticism of Google gets downvoted to death.

Case in point, this comment just dropped three points. ;)

Don't sweat it. Don't let imaginary internet points make you feel bad... or good.

FWIW, Google were happy for a lot of other people to invest time and resources into putting their projects there in the first place - you don't think there's some reasonable expectation that Google would expend some extremely minimal resources at their scale - to ensuring those peoples effort wasn't wasted/lost?

Having said that, I'm not part of any movement to "demand Google do something different", but I've been a longtime member of the "Warn friends/family/colleagues about the dangers of participating in Google services in any way that'll have any downside when they close it down, because they've got a strong track record of doing that" movement.

If _I_ were the person making this decision at Google, my announcement would have been more along the lines of "blah blah shutdown blah blah apologies/excuses blah blah, so we're going to donate enough to archive.org to ensure everything on code.google.com gets archived permanently, and automatically redirect all future code.google.com requests to that permanent archive".

> On what planet is shutting down a service, with months and months of notice, evil?

The current planet? Open source projects have a lifetime of years so five months is not that long in the scheme of things. People put there code on there and participated (providing Google content that they were able to use and drive traffic) with the expectation that it would be there for the long term.

This is a rather watery definition of evil. It is fairly close to saying a restaurant is evil for not keeping a menu item you like.

Would it be ok for Google to delete Usenet archives?

Or a library to burn down its own buildings? Or Google to delete all scans of old books?

History matters, because citations to "old" research/code may become more valuable with new requirements and research. Surely a company that "organizes the world's information" needs no explanation of these topics.

>Would it be ok for Google to delete Usenet archives?

If it's their archives, yes.

And if those are the only archives of Usenet in existence, then it's not Google's fault no one else cared to back it up.

Somebody else did have a usenet archive - Google bought them, mashed up a bunch of other nn-usenet Google stuff into it, then let it bitrot until it was effectively useless, and then removed the only search features that worked...

(Admittedly, if I recall correctly, Dejanews had already gone broke trying to maintain that archive before Google bought it, so arguably Google didn't kill it, they just bought the dying corpse and kept it animated in a zombie-like state for a decade or so past it's natural death...)

And in the intervening years, no one running a news server thought to back theirs up, no one crawled Google and made torrents?

This is software, not ancient manuscripts written by scribes on now crumbling vellum - there is no excuse for there to be one canonical copy of anything. Every pornographic movie ever made has multiple redundant backups on decentralized peer to peer networks and darknets.

I understand the importance of maintaining references, but realistically, expecting URLS to be permanent is shortsighted at best, unless you own that domain and the server it's on and expect to have the money to keep the rights to it in perpetuity. You can't expect a third party host to be willing to keep the servers on forever.

But as far as the historical record and the data itself - Google's given warning, people can move their data or lose it. Fork and move on.

Why would they run their own Usenet archive? Google had the Usenet archiving business sewn up, and by the time they started showing signs of being untrustworthy it was too late and much of the 80s and early 90s stuff only exists in their archives. (Oh, and as a side note apparently a lot of the interesting porn from that era has been lost to history too.)

Trusting any one service to be the bearer of internet history carries the same risk, that the service can go down at any time, and take its data with it. If this information is to be preserved it has to be hosted somewhere, preferably multiple places. If it's to be accessible online, then someone has to pay for the servers and the power and the maintenance.

Google's an ad company, they don't have an obligation to be the arbiters of human history, whatever their slogans might be regarding 'organizing the world's information'. They care about the information that makes them money.

Porn is never lost... Only siloed. Some old guy in Missouri has ALL of that.

> It is fairly close to saying a restaurant is evil for not keeping a menu item you like.

Actually closer to saying they are evil for destroying humanity's only copy of the recipe.

After shouting loudly they are going to destroy it and waiting months for anyone to come copy the recipe.

It would be the open-source world's equivalent to Geocities shutting down. There are still times when I'm trying to search for something (usually some obscure programming or hardware hacking topic) and the only source of information was a Geocities site. I can't imagine how much of a royal pain in the ass it will be if Google Code experiences the same fate.

> I get it, we all hate Google on HN (for reasons unclear to me)

The reasons should be clear to anyone with historical context; this isn't the first time Google has spontaneously pulled the plug on some "non-core" project it decided wasn't making quite enough money, in complete disregard of said project's use by the real world. It's these sorts of things that make me very reluctant to invest heavily in Google's ecosystem; I've personally been burned in the past by these sorts of things.

A part of me wants XKCD #1361 to come true.

I like how that project is hosted on Google code

It's not a googlecode-hosted project: there is no /p/ in the middle, and you can't see its source (not that there'd be much to see). It's a tool made by the googlecode team to help migrate.

I seriously doubt Github would ever agree to that automation. First, what accounts would all these orphan repos go under? Second, how much spam would they be agreeing to host by saying yes to that?

This is a much better job for The Internet Archive or a read-only google code in perpetuity.

edit: in fact, it looks like they're planning on making a read-only version, but the definition of "legitimate" is going to be very important to nail down:

> cdibona: We are planing on taking the majority of these legitimate, open source, 'abandonded' projects and putting them up in cold storage in a git repo on googlesource.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192554

> What Google is doing makes sense from a business stand point but totally shameful from a company that boasts itself doing "no evil".

Oh come on! I'm not a fan of everything Google does, and I can see, and in part agree with, the point you are trying to make, but this is just grasping at straws. You just lost all credibility with this comment.

Yes, I can see unmaintained code being lost here, and that is unfortunate. But Google provided this service for free, a service they started to promote open source software development. They noticed that there was a big move to other hosting platforms, that they themselves also believe are better than theirs. This has led to support for this platform to be little more than dealing with abuse cases, and they feel that the benefit to the community no longer outweighs the cost of the platform.

They have gone out of their way to provide ways to migrate code from Google Code to these other "better" platforms, and they are giving people over 18 months to migrate their code:

> January 25, 2016 - The project hosting service is closed. You will be able to download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis. These tarballs will be available throughout the rest of 2016.

They really didn't have to provide any of this.

None of this is "evil". There are plenty of acts that Google do that border on "evil", but this is really just the wrong one to choose to call them out on.

What do you really expect them to do here?

> that will be lost no question

We have over a year. There will be backups of all of google code made, and even then the Internet Archive will certainly have a backup of all the software projects on it. I doubt any code will be lost - active participation might be, from developers who don't want to relearn how to do things on github.

A sibling comment already pointed this out, but the existence of https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ and its explicit mention in the post along with the clear language that they did work with GitHub and Bitbucket, leads me to believe that you did not read the post.