Google has several projects that they put serious effort and resources, the rest is just either abandonware or with very low activity. Google code was on such example. Half baked, limited, ugly and unchanged for years. I never understood why anyone would choose to host his project on google code.
Sourceforge on the other hand was a really great site to host your project, actively developed etc I think the reason why they lost the #1 place is that they were a bit messy design wise and github is much simpler to use. Also most people migrated to git so they did not care about svn support and many of the features that Sourceforge offers. Suicide is to kill yourself and Sourceforge is far from dead, as a matter of fact is still a very popular destination for freeware and open source. And to return back to the original topic of the thread lets say you nuke Github from orbit right now. What you going to lose. issues / bug reports ? big deal people will report those bugs again in your future web host wiki ? Seriously why use Github wiki, its very limited and most github projects dont or do so in a very limited extend website ? Again github hosted website tend to be super simple comments on commits or discussions around design decisions ? sure that is something really valuable but still can live without Git is local hosted version control system. As long you have an updated repo which will be the case anyway if you are an active developer you lost nothing that would really hinder the progress of your project. The repo is already in your hard drive. And there are solutions out there to backup Github data , since as I already said the Github API gives you access to all its data and much more. On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 8:29 AM Ben Coman <b...@openinworld.com> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 4:34 AM, Dimitris Chloupis > <kilon.al...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Google is king of abandonware , they have closed down half of their > software > > projects, Google Code was just the tip of the iceberg . The other half > is > > close to be abandoned or at least heavily outdated. Moreover google code > was > > crappy anyway, its close down went unnoticed. > > > > Github is nowhere anything like Google and its insult to even compare the > > two. > > > This is an interesting comparison. Google have experimented in many > different directions away from their core business of search, that end > up coming to an end. Indeed if you look at the reason googlecode was > shut down, google says: "when it started Google Code when project > hosting options were limited, but since launch in 2006, it's seen a > "wide variety of better project hosting services" such as GitHub and > Bitbucket rise to the forefront. ... Google itself has transferred > nearly a thousand of its own open-source projects to the popular > coding repository GitHub." [1] > > A service shutting down sometime should be considered, but its a > different scenario that the one asked -- of new corporate overlords > extorting money from users. Probably the worst example of this is > Sourceforge. Once the darling on the open source community, > Sourceforge have committed reputational suicide [2] taking over > projects that moved elsewhere, and then bundling Adware with their > installers. [3] digs into the possibility the same could happen to > Github. > > Nothing is certain, but at least considering whether Github might do > something similar: > * AFAIAA Sourceforge never had paid developer accounts. They tried to > monetize the proejct's users. Github makes money from businesses > wanting private repositories. > * Reputation is fragile Sourceforge's plummet serves a cautionary tale. > * Sourceforge projects were hosted as sub-domains (e.g. > http://project-name.sourceforge.net) -- so while projects could move > away from Sourceforge, Sourceforge remained in control of their old > site. Github on the other hand allows you to host your repository on > your *own* domain [4]. So when you on from Github, your domain can > move too in a way that is largely transparent to the community. If > you want to be defensive, you should host github on your own domain. > > [1] > http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/13/8206903/google-code-is-closing-down-github-bitbucket > [2] > http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929732/open-source-software/sourceforge-commits-reputational-suicide.html > [3] > https://www.wiredtree.com/blog/could-github-eventually-suffer-the-same-fate-as-sourceforge/ > [4] > https://help.github.com/articles/about-custom-domains-for-github-pages-sites/ > > cheers -ben > > > > > > On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 10:26 PM Eliot Miranda <eliot.mira...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > >> > >> On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo > >> <emaring...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>> > >>> 2015-12-17 17:08 GMT-03:00 Nicolas Anquetil <nicolas.anque...@inria.fr > >: > >>> > > >>> > > >>> > On 17/12/2015 20:46, Peter Uhnák wrote: > >>> >>> > >>> >>> Ah, that's interesting. So my concern is whether github is a safe > >>> >>> long-term bet. Specifically what is there to prevent some third > >>> >>> party from > >>> >>> buying github, or of github going public and the board taking the > >>> >>> decision, > >>> >>> or github on its own, deciding to charge for hosting, keeping the > >>> >>> data > >>> >>> hostage to extract payment? What safeguards are in place to > prevent > >>> >>> this? > >>> >>> I'm not interested in "this will never happen" arguments. I'm > >>> >>> interested > >>> >>> in hard data please. > >>> >> > >>> >> GitHub explicitly reserves the right to shut down without notice, > >>> >> however considering they have ~10M users and ~30M repositories > >>> >> (ranging from small one-person projects, over programming languages, > >>> >> to governmental programs), do you really think it is a real > scenario? > >>> > > >>> > well, googlecode closed didn't it? > >>> > and it was not a small affair either > >>> > >>> Google code was really small compared with Github. > >>> > >>> GitHub is monumental. It's to source management what Gmail is to email. > >>> > >>> > you never know what might happen in the future (trust a divorced man) > >>> > >>> You get half the code? (the part that needs refactoring probably) > >> > >> > >> > >> ROTFL > >> > >> _,,,^..^,,,_ > >> thanks, Eliot > >
