Google Announces Open Source Repository

NewsForge (also owned by OSTG) has word of Google's newest product: an open-source project repository. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier sat down for a talk with Greg Stein and Chris DiBona, who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them. From the article: "Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects. DiBona says that it's a 'direct result of Greg concentrating on what open source projects need. Most bugtrackers are informed by what corporations' and large projects need, whereas Google's offering is just about what open source developers need. Stein says that Google's hosting has a 'brand new look' at issue tracking that may be of interest to open source projects, and says 'nobody else out there is doing anything close to it.'"

SourceForge is easy to beat

Whether or not they claim to be competing with SourceForge is really beside the point. SourceForge puts all its effort into providing service for its Enterprise customers. Or at least that's my interpretation of why their free services have been plagued with extensive downtime and poor administration. When I did the first release of a personal project last year I didn't even bother to put it on SourceForge. If they can't provide reasonable uptime and notification of changes (such as the infamous CVS root change) then it's worse than nothing.

If Google provides decent uptime--which seems likely given their infrastructure--then they'll already have SourceForge beat on the most important metric. If the service actually innovates and provides some unique value, well that's just a bonus.

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

Speaking of beating things, they must be marketing to the teenage/early 20's male programmer.

Have you seen their slogan?

Release early, release often

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

If SourceForge had Google's resources they wouldn't have those problems. if the percentage of people taking advantage of opensource software and sites like SourceForge would give something back they would have those resources. I would rather of seen Google contribute to SourceForge, or Freshmeat for that matter.

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

would you rather of [sic] seen Google contribute to hotmail or yahoo mail rather than creating gmail? Or maybe they should have contributed to yahoo, msn, or altavista instead of creating their own search engine?

I investigated using the enterprise version of sourceforge about a year ago. We looked at the source code (from before they closed it) and decided it was a horrible mess and poorly designed. They may have cleaned it up after they closed it, but I wasn't impressed.

If google can do something better, they should.

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

But we do contribute back to Sourceforge. Thats what all the ads are for.

SourceForge has ads?

/me turns off adblock now... ;)

Re:SourceForge is easy to beat

As a non-project-admin user of SF, my biggest problem with SF was the period of time when their search failed to work 95% of the time due to overload. I'm willing to bet Google Code never has that problem. I could be wrong.

On a different topic, for all the times that people complain that Slashdot is posting topics that are in their best interest, topics like this show me this isn't the case. Since OSTG owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot, this posting goes against their financial best interest. They have exposed their huge audience to a competitor.

Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing

I've used sourcrforge for my project for the last four years. I have a small but constant stream of people downloading my project.

I have had numerous problems with services going offline, each time it's been annoying. recently I couldn't access the web page admin, so I haven't been able to update the site to reflect a new version of my software. As I've been working on the new release for a couple of months, this is a major issue for me.

Plus you now have to pay to get the very best service. I can't afford this, so I'm stuck with the less able service. They claim the normal free service is unnaffected, but I have my doubts. Even when everythings working it's not especially easy to use, and I don't much like some of the changes to the site they've added of late.

Their intentions may be good, and I do understand the need for funding, but non paying users are being effected, regardless of their intent. Paying users get better project admin options/tools too, and I'd rather like that. I'm a poor student though, such things are outside of my budget. I must say sourceforge has lost its appeal for me of late because of these things.

I think I may give google a try, and tramline the two for a while.

That's the open source way, the superior product survives based on how good it is.

Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing

As someone who regularly searches for projects on sourceforge, I welcome any competition. Sourceforge's search is just horrible. Every time I search for something, it brings back random things that have nothing to do with what I searched for, and will usually put projets at version 0.1 that have never been updated after their creation in the first page of the results. I mean, get a decent search rating system for god's sake! Maybe it's just me though.

Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing

Hello,

I'm an architect at SourceForge.net and I designed and implemented the search functionality that is currently running on the site. I take any complaints about the quality of the search results quite seriously. From I've seen, most of our users are quite happy with the latest revision of the search engine (launched in April of this year). However, if you could give me specific search terms that are returning poor results and some examples of what you think it should be returning I'd be happy to look into it to see if there is a bug in the search or statistics engines producing the poor results. My SF.net username is the same as my /. username, feel free to email me there.

Thanks,
--Chris

Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing

I just searched for the first word I saw when I went to sf.net: "antivirus [sourceforge.net]".

Why is "Moon Secure Antivirus", with rank at 28,000, no files, 0 downloads, registered this year, and only 82% activity considered more relevant than ClamAV?

That's just not helpful! I'd rather not see something that has zero downloads but has more occurances of "antivirus" in the description (or whatever contributed to the relevancy score).

Yes, I can change the sort order. But why make me jump through hoops to wade throug these low-quality projects?

Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing

Hi,

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll admit, Moon Secure Antivirus might not be the best candidate for the first result, but the result set returned isn't that bad. ClamAV is the second result and it appears to me that several other results on the first page are pretty good. And in this case it looks like the differentiator was simply that Moon Secure AV has "antivirus" in their project description more often.

We are looking for ways to improve how we rank the relevancy of a project. Before your post I hadn't thought about using the registration date as a metric. Making projects listed on the site longer more relevant by a little bit isn't a bad idea and I may try playing with the tuning settings on my development machine to see what happens.

I do think saying we're making you jump through hoops is a little over the top, the results don't seem to me to be as bad as you're making them out to be. And the improved UI makes it easy for you to scan the results and reject them the way you did. But I certainly don't want to downplay your problems, so please keep providing feedback so we can continue to improve the site. The development team is very motivated to make the user experience on SourceForge.net as good as we possibly can.

--Chris

SourceForge, we hardly knew ye

...who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them.

I guess they mean that in the sense that the Pittsburgh Steelers aren't intended to compete with an intramural squad playing in a park. Shall we start the SourceForge countdown clock?

Re:SourceForge, we hardly knew ye

Seeing as I had gone for the long shot and picked "July 2006" on Lance Bass, this could really be my month!

More words missing from the original post

"very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them" ****Missing from the original post**** ", but is intended to replace them." Why compete when you can crush?

No Public Domain

A quick look through the licenses mentioned in the TFA shows that public domain is missing.

Although its not a license per se, it might be nice to add that option for those projects that choose to go that route.

Re:No Public Domain

Other notable missing OSI license options: Academic Free License (AFL), Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), Common Public License (CPL), and Eclipse Public License. It would be nice to hear the selection criteria used and how those criteria combat license proliferation, as well as how holding this position matters to Google.

Re:No Public Domain

Also missing is the option for Dual Licensing of your application. GPL and MIT (with a fee), for example.

What the catch?

Can we use this Open Source Repository without something in the source code calling home like some of Google's APIs are in habit of doing?

What a pity

I was really hoping for something more exciting from google, when they announced that they'd be producing something for the open source community. Sourceforge has the occasional problem (CVS stats has been broken for how long now?), but basically it a fantastic site for open source, and easily provides all the services that any OSS project of any size needs in order to function and flourish.

I know google has done amazing things with stuff like webmail (gmail DESTROYS any previous webmail I have used in terms of features/functionality/speed/storage space, so much so that I haven't tried another since and doubt I ever will - if google decided to charge $10 a month for the gmail service I'd pay it in a heartbeat - it's that good :)). However, I just cannot see that they can bring any miraculous innovation to the table as far as hosting/supporting OSS projects goes - between forums, IRC and email, collaboration over OSS projects is already working perfectly and as I see it, that is all that google could help with - they can't really step in and do the actual development work required to create every Open source project out there.

Still, I'm sure it will be all AJAXy and perdy, maybe faster than sf.net and maybe I'll even choose them over sf.net the next time I can be bothered starting an OSS project.

Re:What a pity

OSS projects are not working anywhere near to perfect. They are working somewhat adequately, yet they're very far from perfect. SF.net is even less perfect - when you say [sourceforge] "... easily provides all the services that any OSS project of any size needs in order to function and flourish" - why do most of the large OSS projects (Free/Net/Open/DragonflyBSD, KDE, Gnome, X11, Debian, Gentoo, ...) use separate infrastructure? I can only speak for FreeBSD: We do so because Sourceforge services isn't enough, and we get more done by taking the overhead of running our own.

On to problem areas for open source in general:

• Problem report to patched, committed source with commit comment. The path is LONG - even if you have a checked out tree, you'll need to save the patch, switch windows, cd to an appropriate directory, run a patch command, run a commit command, and write a commit message.
• Ability to integrate automated testing on commit. This is possible, yet it's an utter pain in most version control systems. (Aegis gets it mostly right, of course, as this was the original reason for Aegis).
• Project search is difficult, even including SF.net and Freshmeat and Freshports and pkgsrc and Debian package metadata and CPAN and ...
• The problem report/issue tracking systems I know of are icky to use for large projects. (They're icky for small, too, but there the ickyness doesn't matter much)
• There is no way to mark up code with discussions a la a Wiki.
• There's no easy way to mark up code for high quality UML output, so people can get into projects quickly
• Every project end up setting up their own infrastructure for archiving chat logs
• Mailing list archive search is icky, and this is necessary to find why what happened. (This may, unfortunately, always end up being icky.)
• There's no (perceived as) reliable, scalable version control system that handle distributed branching/development.

I can write up points for hours - and have. Unfortunately, my last try at dealing with many of these issues (http://www.rubyarchive.org, presently so defunct that the Wiki has been spammed almost out of existence) ended up being sabotaged, and I'm sort of demotivated towards doing any more tries...

Eivind.

Obligatory

I, for one, welcome our new overl[b]oooooo[/b]rds.

Re:Obligatory

I, for one, welcome our new overl[b]oooooo[/b]rds.

And that, kids, is why we use the 'Preview' button. Durr.

I was going to say that without ads it was nice...

...before I noticed what bullshit they slipped in.

I was looking around http://code.google.com/ [google.com] when I took a look at the "Featured Projects". Pirate Island is a blatent advertisement for Dead Man's Chest, though it looks like a legit project until you go to the site. Google also did some bullshit like that with the Davinci Code too. I don't care if they want to advertise it. I have a big problem when they try to trick their users into thinking it's useful content.

Re:I was going to say that without ads it was nice

So, uh, what makes you think google created that project

Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?

Google is encouraging piracy!!! :-)

Of course, I happen to think that's a good thing, ye scurvey dogs, ye.

Brand new look?

C'mon now. How is this [google.com] better than SourceForge? I mean SF.net has its problems (CVS servers in the gunk babeeee!) but they've been honing this thing for years. How long is it going to take Google to get to the level of domain knowledge SF.net has? The folks at Google are smart, but they're not experts at everything.

Call me a cynic but I think this is just a way to get more ad revenue. Kudos for them and all, but their offering better be *far* better than Berlios, GNU Savannah and SF.net for people to sign up.

Re:Brand new look?

By "honing this thing for years", do you mean "ignoring this thing for years"? I began using SourceForge the day it was announced, and I stopped using SourceForge about two years later when it became clear that they had no plans to fix many of the ridiculous bugs and annoying usability problems that have been there from day one.

* checks SourceForge again

Yep, same issues still there. SourceForge might get the job done, but it's not exactly getting the job done well, and they don't appear to have any interest in improving things.

By the way, Google isn't running ads on the Google Code pages. This isn't about ad revenue.

but is it open source

But, is it open source? Not like sourceforge is.

Actual news on slashdot

That was _fast_. The announcement session hasn't even finished at OSCON.

Greg just mentioned that a downloads features will be coming to Google Code Hosting.

Next: Googledot?

Whats next? An extension to Google News, where nobody reads the articles, but everybody stays for the discussion? I smell a pattern here ;-)

It's all about the issue tracker

I use Sourceforge strictly for the file sharing aspect of it. I use my own provider for my source project (mainly because I use Java Web Start, which isn't allowed by SF's "Terms of Use" for the free hosting) but their issue tracker really, REALLY sucks.

I use JIRA [atlassian.com] for my issue tracking now, and I couldn't be happier. Looking at Google's current offering, I probably won't be switching anytime soon.

pretty spartan

Google will have to put some serious work into their site for it to catch up to Sourceforge. Their site is *VERY* spartan and lacking in features. They use the default, out-of-the-box subversion webdav so when viewing the source there is no syntax colouring and the bug tracker has no features what so ever. But knowing google and their vast resources it probably won't be long, if the service looks like it will garner interest, until new features start showing up by the dozen all with nifty AJAX interfaces.

Read the FAQ

The FAQ for Google's hosting service is here:
http://code.google.com/hosting/faq.html [google.com]

Let's see what they do

Right now it's sort of an 'eh' service. We've got Subversion, a simple issue tracker and a really primitive home for each project. It's no SourceForge but it is fast.

It will be interesting to see what direction they take it.

Re:Let's see what they do

People would need project page hosting

http://pages.google.com/ [google.com]

They have the majority of the code and infrastructure in place in Google Pages. From there, it's a matter of integration.

Alternative Site

Like its other non-search offerings, Google is behind the curve on this one. Sourceforge seems to be more feature packed than what Google is proposing, we have already launched a social code sharing site (see our sig) and Koders already searches millions of lines of open source code. Google strategy seems to be releaing me-too sites that are not positioned to be mafrket leaders (Google Finance, Orkut, Google Talk, etc.).

One of the best things they could do is...

MAKE IT EASY.

Granted, this is easier said than done, but it seems like reporting a bug or issue, or just providing feedback is a MAJOR hassle. Having to "sign up" and "have an account" just to report a problem is a pain, and then on top of that, having to navigate a labrynthine website to hopefully end up at the right place - I imagine that it turns away a lot of people who just don't have the time or energy to deal with it.

p is projects

I especially like that they use '/p/' in a url where sourceforge uses '/projects/'.

Beating SF ...

Beating SourceForge shouldn't be hard. Just leave out that terrible mirrors page on every binary download and they're done. I really hope there'll be a day when the SourceForge people will come up with something more convenient... (Just using HTTP Location: header forwards instead of HTML META tags would be a start!)

Re:Beating SF ...

We've been gathering input on the download system, well, pretty much since it was created. Personally, I find it painful, but there are a lot of reasons why it is the way it is today. That said, a replacement for the download system is currently in planning, and our primary aim is to allow consumers to get what they're looking for with fewer clicks. Our current phases tend to be about 90 days, and we plan to enter implementation in August.

Chris diBona eh?

I hope this gets discussed at FLOSS Weekly or This week in Tech [www.twit.tv].

Seems to be broken, a bit

I don't know how ready the service is for use yet. I've just tried to create a project for hosting the stuff I presently use a VM for at home, and twice it's failed. Each time I get a 502 error; when I attempt to redo the creation, I'm told I can't use the name I had previously picked (presumably it's partially in use).

Anyone had success in the last hour or so, creating a project?

Ugh

Subversion only, no real mailing list integration, no real web hosting to speak of. The lack of ads is nice but what I really want is more flexible revision control (I'd like to use mercurial), mail man integration (that doesn't lag like crazy like sf), and a place that I can host a wiki.

Centralized revision control is so 2002 :-)

Downloads

Perhaps they'll make it easier to download stuff from than Sourceforge. Maybe it's me, but a `download` button should let you download something, not show you some of the contents of what a working system would let you download.

At random, look at this project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ftimes/ [sourceforge.net]

You click on download...but you get taken off to some other page where you can download, seperately, some of the source files.

Whining

People complain that this Google project does not offer the same amount of features/sections as Sourceforge and thus must be worse. How often is it not that half of the sections on Sourceforge are empty (Documents is a nice example)? Resulting in completely confused visitors... Then are those that say it doesn't offer a project page, while most people using sourceforge do not keep their project pages on sourceforge either. As I see it, this Google service offers exactly what I've been looking for recently: a quick and simple method to maintain my small projects online without any application/approval periods.

Now they just need some OSS naming...

"Google Code" sounds way too professional. Might I suggest:

Google Repository for Open-Source Software
Or perhaps Google Open-source Repository Project [wikipedia.org].

From their FAQ

What is code.google.com?
        Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It's where we'll publish free source code and lists of our API services.

So it is indeed nothing like SourForge where anybody can place their code.

SF

I seriously think that sf 's main problem is speed (not when downloading files but when browsing project web/home) And the fact that the user has to deal with a gigantic list of mirrors each time you want him to download stuff. SF sure has a lot of features that currently google doesn't seem to be considering of adding. But fiu I currently don't use most of SF's features. I wouldn't go out to google though I would expect it to actually have a list of OS projects before joining. But I welcome the fact that there is going to be competence for sourceforge that might improve the things there.

So far, no luck

Trying to put something up there, and the subversion password they provided doesn't work (I get an "authorization failed" error from svn).

Could be that I just suck at subversion (entirely possible), but meh.

SourceForge.net and Google Code

We just finished listening to Greg's presentation at OSCON, and so far we're feeling pretty good about what this means for the Open Source community, and, by extension, SourceForge.net. Because, after all, what's good for the community is good for us. Greg talked a bit about how he expects that users will want to "mix and match" tools that are offered at Google Code, SourceForge.net, and other repositories. This resonates very well with us, and is consistent with our longer-term goals - flexibility is one of the cornerstones of our larger strategic direction. Developers should work using the tools they want to use. We've got a pretty good relationship with the folks over at Google, and I really believe they're launching this because they, like us, care about Open Source and want to see it continue to thrive. We've begun disucssions about integration between SF.net and Google Code - you'll notice that you can't register projects on Google Code with SF.net project names. I expect there will be a much more substantial integration as the community makes its needs known. Thanks, Ross Turk (joined by Jay Seirmarco) SourceForge.net Engineering Manager

maybe google will even remember that i'm logged in

! (sf.net's "remember me" checkbox has never done anything for me. how annoying.)

One huge improvement over SF

I can't think of any implementation of forums worse than SF. None. The format and organization is horrendous. Google groups is already a better solution and I haven't even tried it yet. The SF public forums could be improved upon by anybody by accident.

Confusied

What exactly is the relationship between the projects at http://code.google.com/projects.html [google.com], SourceForge, and Google?

They are all hosted at SourceForge, have identical googlified home pages, but don't look to be "owned" by Google (and why would Google host their own projects at SF, anyway?).

What gives? Are they community projects of some kind that have Google's blessing and branding?

Microsoft monopoly a good thing?

I wonder - if Microsoft was not such a big player, but rather there were several somewhat smaller players, like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, would there be any large companies that invest in open source as IBM does now? I mean, it seems like one of the big reasons that IBM and Google invest in FOSS is because it is a good way to strike indirectly - and often directly - at Microsoft. If there was no "king of the hill," would we still see this level of investment?

Re:Microsoft monopoly a good thing?

IBM don't invest in Linux out of philanthropy, and they don't do it to "get at" Microsoft. They invest because Linux is a huge cash-cow, IBM knows how to milk it, and thus it makes them large amounts of cash. And that's what matters to a big company. They make money, we get something like a billion dollars a year invested in Linux, and everybody's happy.

Except MS. But that's their problem ;o)

Chris DiBona and SourceForge non-compete?

Wasn't Chris DiBona [sourceforge.net] at SourceForge prior to Google? It's nice to see those non-compete agreements are not enforced. Good thing he didn't work for Microsoft, or he'd get a chair in the head. ;)

No Disclaimer?

Isn't Sourceforge owned by Andover, which also owns Slashdot?

Isn't it generally policy to note such potential conflicts of interest?

Yay!

I love google.

Sourceforge quality

I think Sourceforge needs to improve their quality if they are going to remain as central as they have been for open/free software development. There exists many alternatives these days, JForge for instance, or java.net, Codehaus...

I have a collegue who is one of the submittors to JRuby. He told me they had huge problems with Sourceforge last 6 months. Servers were down all the time, which slowed down development. I blieve they almost didn't get the demo finished before Java ONE because of this, and now they have moved to CodeHaus [codehaus.org] instead. Subversion, JIRA for bug tracking, and so far very stable servers, so they are very pleased.

Feature I Need: Migrate Project from Sourceforge

If they would have a feature entitled "Migrate Project from Sourceforge" that would require only 1 click then I would use it.

Of course, since it is Google...

all your uploaded source may be processed in order to serve you targeted advertisements.

Perhaps this is to discourage FOSS developers from using their Gmail accounts as CVS.

Re:Wait wait

I believe they were referring to

'brand new look' at issue tracking

when they said

'nobody else out there is doing anything close to it.'

, not Open Source hosting.

Re:One word...

Because SourceForge seems to be dying--no CVS services for several weeks tends to kill the faith people have in you.

On the other hand, I'd have said the same about AOL, too.

Not that I'm arguing with the decision--it's good to have multiple repositories in case one goes down.