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Actually, Google Code was never trying to win. It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone, which it was when Goog

Actually, Google Code was never trying to win. 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".

schacon 2y ago
I'm not sure what "SF" means in this context. San Francisco? I can't figure out what you want to say Google Code was for exactly. If Google launches a major project, I find it hard to believe that it's just for fun.
- kemayo 2y ago
  Sourceforge.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ipsi 2y ago
  SourceForge, probably.
- blktiger 2y ago
  It’s short for Source Forge which is still around technically but a shadow of its former self.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    It was early example of the "enshittification" phenomenon. It was a particular bad example of advertising and other spammy distractions because sites for developers have the lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites. 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.
    - eric-hu 2y ago
      Didn’t they also start packaging malware into binary downloads?
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        Yep.
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        By then they were already desperate from the previous enshittification.
      - progmetaldev 2y ago
        Was it actual malware? I thought it was just automatically checked software like the Ask.com toolbar for Internet Explorer, along with the Oracle.com JAVA JRE. Maybe I was just more careful than most, but I have been using FileZilla for many years, and never had any of these issues as long as I paid attention to the installer and what was included.
        eric-hu 2y ago
        You got a chuckle out of me with such a specific reference that I know I got auto-installed too. I don't know, personally, but I do recall reading accounts of malware from them from around that era. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware
- wafflemaker 2y ago
  This post replied to a post talking about Source Forge. Had the same problem :)
- schacon 2y ago
  I now realize that it's SourceForge. :)
  - breck 2y ago
    I thought he was talking about SpaceForce. Wait until we get to 2050, SpaceForce develops a really shitty monoculture. That's why I came back.
- tsm 2y ago
  SF is SourceForge, which at the time effectively had a monopoly (and also sucked)
  - tadfisher 2y ago
    It still sucks, but it sucked then too.
    - DannyBee 2y ago
      I miss mitch hedberg
- noitpmeder 2y ago
  SourceForge
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- crop_rotation 2y ago
  I think it means SourceForge.
- nine_k 2y ago
  The fact that letters "SF" may need explanation in a context of code hosting and building says how thoroughly the job has been done. A number of good alternatives exist, there's no monoculture (even though some market domination is definitely in place, but now by a mysterious GH).
  - digging 2y ago
    > A number of good alternatives exist, there's no monoculture 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.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      A decent number of larger open source projects self-host.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      GitLab is relatively more widely represented, but of the projects I encounter, about 2-3% are on GitLab. I encountered projects on Codeberg, too, and even on sr.ht. 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.
      - rapnie 2y ago
        > 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.
shawabawa3 2y ago
It's a bit of a cop out to say "we were never trying to win" 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
- ulbu 2y ago
  > If you were never trying to win, that's a product failure. what?
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Different groups of people have different goals. Not every group of people has "winning" a market as their primary goal.
- DannyBee 2y ago
  > It's a bit of a cop out to say "we were never trying to win" 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.
  - 93po 2y ago
    It sucks you're getting so much anti-Google sentiment when you're not at all attached to the reasons google sort of sucks.
BSDobelix 2y ago
So wait, you tried to prevent SF to become a "shitty monoculture"? 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 ;)
- remexre 2y ago
  For a comparison on the scale of harm from the monoculture, recall that SourceForge was bundling malware with downloads, and still has a full page of ads when you download from it. If I recall correctly, SVN was also more popular than Git at the time, so migrating hosts was a lot more painful than now...
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    And then you force people to change from google code to something else just to prove a point since people then where unable to setup svn server ;) Even today you find death links from google code repos.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    SVN's model is what everyone is using. Sure you git, but almost nobody is using the distributed parts - they all sync to a central sever (github). SVN just could get user management, or merges right - those should be solvable problems but somehow were not. (I don't know enough about SVN to speculate on why they didn't)
    - rswail 2y ago
      The main reason is that SVN's model of branching/tagging is based on directories in the working directory, whereas git's model (and to a certain extent, commercial SVNs like Clearcase and Perforce) is that branching/tagging is of the entire repository and not related to the file tree structure. This is a fundamental difference and the reason that git's model works much better when branching/merging.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
[flagged]
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Curious whether you read the (pretty short?) post you replied to... 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!
  - cynicalpeace 2y ago
    Your claim is Google Cloud Code is what brought SourceForge down? 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.
    - mgkimsal 2y ago
      If the goal is to stop a competitor from slow or stop a competitor from gaining market share, and you slow or stop them from gaining marketshare, how is that failing?
      - meiraleal 2y ago
        So a third competitor appearing and taking the marketshare from both of them doesn't count? Such a great logic to get promotions. Of course it would come from google.
        mgkimsal 2y ago
        Why does it matter? 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.
deleted 2y ago
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defen 2y ago
Incidentally, this is why I don't use any Google products other than search. It's never clear to me which ones are real products that are trying to win and make money, and which ones are just fun side projects that a multibillion dollar corporation is doing out of the goodness of their hearts, but could get shut down at any time.
- bitpush 2y ago
  Business strategy is more than just launch product, make money. Companies operate in a dynamic space, and if you play any game (basketball, chess ..) you know that moving forward at all cost is not how you play the game. Sometimes you side-step, sometimes you take a step back, sometimes you sacrifice your piece. 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.
  - chrisandchris 2y ago
    That is totally fine, but Google is a case where they go into new business units and fairly often kill those units quite soon. 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.
    - adamc 2y ago
      Yeah, there are so many examples. It's one of the reasons I was unwilling to jump on board Google Stadia... I kept thinking "let's wait and see how it does". Particularly since you had to buy non-transferable game licenses. 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.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    And I worked at AWS Professional Services and sat in on sales calls all of time where one of our talking points was “a company couldn’t trust Google to not to abandon a service they were going to be dependent on”. Was that partially FUD? Probably. But there were plenty of services sales could point to.
meiraleal 2y ago
> Actually, Google Code was never trying to win. > It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone Being an insider of Google might make one be completely out-of-touch of reality. Google Video was trying to prevent Youtube from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone, too? This one clearly failed then.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  >Google Video was created to prevent Youtube from becoming a shitty monoculture, too? Like Google+ and all the other attempts: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Google is actually the good guy to prevent monopolies, we just don't understand them ;)
- omoikane 2y ago
  Being a Google insider comes with the gift of being able to see the real rationales behind many products, and also the curse that nobody outside will believe you. 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.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    I hope you never have to work for Apple ;)
- rtpg 2y ago
  different projects have different objectives? The guy literally worked on the project! There were 4 people at its peak! Why would you think that would be the source of a major initiative? 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.
JohnBooty 2y ago
All of this would have been easy to find out simply by asking I'm not a journalist, but in an ideal scenario, how would somebody have known that you were one of the key members of the project? 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?
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  The way it used to work is that tech journalists (or sports journalists, or any other type) had contacts in the industry. If those people were not directly involved, they probably could at least suggest someone else who might know. Leads were followed up, and eventually the writer got the story. 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.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    That is neat, but Scott Chacon is not a journalist, does not act like a journalist and what you are reading is not tech journalism. 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.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      I'm complaining about nothing, here.
  - JohnBooty 2y ago
    The linked article doesn't claim to have insight into the inner workings of the Google Code team, or what Google's leadership hoped to accomplish with that product. 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)
deleted 2y ago
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hintymad 2y ago
> It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone 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.
jonathanyc 2y ago
> It was not trying to make money, or whatever 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  It seems highly likely that a successful Google Code would be used as an onramp to Google Cloud. IOW, indirect monetization so it likely would still have a generous free component.
  - chubot 2y ago
    Yeah exactly, it is extremely easy to imagine this, because when Github was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, Diane Greene (who headed Google Cloud at the time) commented on this 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-greene-interview-at-next.html 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.
- DannyBee 2y ago
  "If Google Code succeeded, it’s hard to imagine that Google would not have tried to monetize it someday." 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.
shadowgovt 2y ago
The only real tragedy here is that Google really did have best-of-industry semantic search integrated into their code searching tools, something that nobody has been able to replicate. 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.
- dmoy 2y ago
  Do you mean the non-semantic indexing, which covered most of Google Code? Like grep-style supporting, but no real semantic data? 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.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    I'm talking about Kythe, and learning that it ran into issues generalizing it for non-Google-controlled APIs explains a lot of the history I thought I knew!
    - dmoy 2y ago
      Yea we never had it for even all Google controlled repos, just the ones that would work with us to get compilation units from their build system. 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.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        It almost makes me wonder if the right approach (had Google been willing to invest in it) would have been to wed Kythe and Bazel to solve that "insane build configs" problem. "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.
skybrian 2y ago
I don’t see a contradiction; it’s all part of the story. 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.
franciscop 2y ago
[flagged]
osmsucks 2y ago
> Actually, Google Code was never trying to win. 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.
- hanwenn 2y ago
  Developer infrastructure at google reported into cloud from 2013 to 2019, and we (i was there) tried to do exactly that: building products for gcp customers based on our experience with building interval developer tools. It was largely a disaster. The one product I was involved with (git hosting and code review) had to build an MVP product to attract entry level GCP customers, but also keep our service running for large existing internal customers, who were servicing billion+ users and continuously growing their load. When Thomas Kurian took over GCP, he put all the dev products on ice and moved the internal tooling group out of cloud.
svnt 2y ago
I had this theory that generations raised on the internet and exposed to it from birth would be the most humble generations ever, because we all look for ways to be uniquely valuable, and it became nearly impossible to be egotistical when faced with the entirety of even just a mature youtube platform. Instead what we got was higher degrees of selective attention, and very elaborate and obscure flip-cup tricks.
Jyaif 2y ago
> We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought at the time, and didn't see a reason to continue. 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?
- rty32 2y ago
  Well, it is hard/very distasteful to put ads on a source code hosting website, so this likely isn't aligned with Google's interest. No, I am not joking.
  - guappa 2y ago
    github shows me ads to their other tools, conferences and whatever all the time. And my company is a paying customer.
Brian_K_White 2y ago
You sound like you're proud of this work and this plan and this sequence of events. 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.
- procrastitron 2y ago
  > 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 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 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.
  - justinclift 2y ago
ThrowawayR2 2y ago
> "Actually, Google Code was never trying to win." Wasn't Google reported among the bidders for GitHub? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/github-interest-from-google-and-others-revenue-about-300-million.html 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.
gerdesj 2y ago
[flagged]
calmbonsai 2y ago
Props for serving as primary source material. One of the reasons I, basically, no longer trust "tech" journalism. 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.
olalonde 2y ago
To be fair, you "lacking taste" and "not trying to win" are not mutually exclusive. You could argue they are respectively the proximate and ultimate cause for GitHub's win.
deleted 2y ago
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theanonymousone 2y ago
This is a very bold statement, isn't it? So Google says the credit of making SourceForge (very deservedly) irrelevant is theirs and not GitHub's (or SourceForge themselves)? 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?
authorfly 2y ago
> was there, working on it, when it was 4 of us :) raises eyebrow When there were 4 of you? So about $800k a year for that time period? Just out of interest?
deleted 2y ago
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sqren 2y ago
Why make this about Google Code? It reads a little like Main Character Syndrome. 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.
deleted 2y ago
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sqren 2y ago
Whether Google wanted to win or not: Don't kid yourself into believing they _could_ have won even if they had tried. Google has a history of being terribly at executing on product ideas and Google Code never had the same "feel" that Github did. There's a reason Microsoft paid billions for Github. If Google could have created that in-house themselves they would have done it. Not saying Google tried and failed - they may just have realised that actually winning this was never an option.

schacon 2y ago

I'm not sure what "SF" means in this context. San Francisco? I can't figure out what you want to say Google Code was for exactly. If Google launches a major project, I find it hard to believe that it's just for fun.

kemayo 2y ago
Sourceforge.
deleted 2y ago
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ipsi 2y ago
SourceForge, probably.
blktiger 2y ago
It’s short for Source Forge which is still around technically but a shadow of its former self.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  It was early example of the "enshittification" phenomenon. It was a particular bad example of advertising and other spammy distractions because sites for developers have the lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites. 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.
  - eric-hu 2y ago
    Didn’t they also start packaging malware into binary downloads?
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      Yep.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      By then they were already desperate from the previous enshittification.
    - progmetaldev 2y ago
      Was it actual malware? I thought it was just automatically checked software like the Ask.com toolbar for Internet Explorer, along with the Oracle.com JAVA JRE. Maybe I was just more careful than most, but I have been using FileZilla for many years, and never had any of these issues as long as I paid attention to the installer and what was included.
      - eric-hu 2y ago
        You got a chuckle out of me with such a specific reference that I know I got auto-installed too. I don't know, personally, but I do recall reading accounts of malware from them from around that era. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware
wafflemaker 2y ago
This post replied to a post talking about Source Forge. Had the same problem :)
schacon 2y ago
I now realize that it's SourceForge. :)
- breck 2y ago
  I thought he was talking about SpaceForce. Wait until we get to 2050, SpaceForce develops a really shitty monoculture. That's why I came back.
tsm 2y ago
SF is SourceForge, which at the time effectively had a monopoly (and also sucked)
- tadfisher 2y ago
  It still sucks, but it sucked then too.
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    I miss mitch hedberg
noitpmeder 2y ago
SourceForge
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
crop_rotation 2y ago
I think it means SourceForge.
nine_k 2y ago
The fact that letters "SF" may need explanation in a context of code hosting and building says how thoroughly the job has been done. A number of good alternatives exist, there's no monoculture (even though some market domination is definitely in place, but now by a mysterious GH).
- digging 2y ago
  > A number of good alternatives exist, there's no monoculture 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.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    A decent number of larger open source projects self-host.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    GitLab is relatively more widely represented, but of the projects I encounter, about 2-3% are on GitLab. I encountered projects on Codeberg, too, and even on sr.ht. 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.
    - rapnie 2y ago
      > 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.

shawabawa3 2y ago

It's a bit of a cop out to say "we were never trying to win" 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

ulbu 2y ago
> If you were never trying to win, that's a product failure. what?
sanderjd 2y ago
Different groups of people have different goals. Not every group of people has "winning" a market as their primary goal.
DannyBee 2y ago
> It's a bit of a cop out to say "we were never trying to win" 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.
- 93po 2y ago
  It sucks you're getting so much anti-Google sentiment when you're not at all attached to the reasons google sort of sucks.

BSDobelix 2y ago

So wait, you tried to prevent SF to become a "shitty monoculture"? 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 ;)

remexre 2y ago
For a comparison on the scale of harm from the monoculture, recall that SourceForge was bundling malware with downloads, and still has a full page of ads when you download from it. If I recall correctly, SVN was also more popular than Git at the time, so migrating hosts was a lot more painful than now...
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  And then you force people to change from google code to something else just to prove a point since people then where unable to setup svn server ;) Even today you find death links from google code repos.
- bluGill 2y ago
  SVN's model is what everyone is using. Sure you git, but almost nobody is using the distributed parts - they all sync to a central sever (github). SVN just could get user management, or merges right - those should be solvable problems but somehow were not. (I don't know enough about SVN to speculate on why they didn't)
  - rswail 2y ago
    The main reason is that SVN's model of branching/tagging is based on directories in the working directory, whereas git's model (and to a certain extent, commercial SVNs like Clearcase and Perforce) is that branching/tagging is of the entire repository and not related to the file tree structure. This is a fundamental difference and the reason that git's model works much better when branching/merging.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

[flagged]

sanderjd 2y ago
Curious whether you read the (pretty short?) post you replied to... 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!
- cynicalpeace 2y ago
  Your claim is Google Cloud Code is what brought SourceForge down? 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.
  - mgkimsal 2y ago
    If the goal is to stop a competitor from slow or stop a competitor from gaining market share, and you slow or stop them from gaining marketshare, how is that failing?
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      So a third competitor appearing and taking the marketshare from both of them doesn't count? Such a great logic to get promotions. Of course it would come from google.
      - mgkimsal 2y ago
        Why does it matter? 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.

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defen 2y ago

Incidentally, this is why I don't use any Google products other than search. It's never clear to me which ones are real products that are trying to win and make money, and which ones are just fun side projects that a multibillion dollar corporation is doing out of the goodness of their hearts, but could get shut down at any time.

bitpush 2y ago
Business strategy is more than just launch product, make money. Companies operate in a dynamic space, and if you play any game (basketball, chess ..) you know that moving forward at all cost is not how you play the game. Sometimes you side-step, sometimes you take a step back, sometimes you sacrifice your piece. 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.
- chrisandchris 2y ago
  That is totally fine, but Google is a case where they go into new business units and fairly often kill those units quite soon. 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.
  - adamc 2y ago
    Yeah, there are so many examples. It's one of the reasons I was unwilling to jump on board Google Stadia... I kept thinking "let's wait and see how it does". Particularly since you had to buy non-transferable game licenses. 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.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  And I worked at AWS Professional Services and sat in on sales calls all of time where one of our talking points was “a company couldn’t trust Google to not to abandon a service they were going to be dependent on”. Was that partially FUD? Probably. But there were plenty of services sales could point to.

meiraleal 2y ago

> Actually, Google Code was never trying to win. > It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone Being an insider of Google might make one be completely out-of-touch of reality. Google Video was trying to prevent Youtube from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone, too? This one clearly failed then.

BSDobelix 2y ago
>Google Video was created to prevent Youtube from becoming a shitty monoculture, too? Like Google+ and all the other attempts: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Google is actually the good guy to prevent monopolies, we just don't understand them ;)
omoikane 2y ago
Being a Google insider comes with the gift of being able to see the real rationales behind many products, and also the curse that nobody outside will believe you. 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.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I hope you never have to work for Apple ;)
rtpg 2y ago
different projects have different objectives? The guy literally worked on the project! There were 4 people at its peak! Why would you think that would be the source of a major initiative? 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.

JohnBooty 2y ago

All of this would have been easy to find out simply by asking I'm not a journalist, but in an ideal scenario, how would somebody have known that you were one of the key members of the project? 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?

SoftTalker 2y ago
The way it used to work is that tech journalists (or sports journalists, or any other type) had contacts in the industry. If those people were not directly involved, they probably could at least suggest someone else who might know. Leads were followed up, and eventually the writer got the story. 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.
- krisoft 2y ago
  That is neat, but Scott Chacon is not a journalist, does not act like a journalist and what you are reading is not tech journalism. 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.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    I'm complaining about nothing, here.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  The linked article doesn't claim to have insight into the inner workings of the Google Code team, or what Google's leadership hoped to accomplish with that product. 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)

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hintymad 2y ago

> It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone 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.

jonathanyc 2y ago

> It was not trying to make money, or whatever 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

bryanlarsen 2y ago
It seems highly likely that a successful Google Code would be used as an onramp to Google Cloud. IOW, indirect monetization so it likely would still have a generous free component.
- chubot 2y ago
  Yeah exactly, it is extremely easy to imagine this, because when Github was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, Diane Greene (who headed Google Cloud at the time) commented on this 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-greene-interview-at-next.html 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.
DannyBee 2y ago
"If Google Code succeeded, it’s hard to imagine that Google would not have tried to monetize it someday." 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.

shadowgovt 2y ago

The only real tragedy here is that Google really did have best-of-industry semantic search integrated into their code searching tools, something that nobody has been able to replicate. 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.

dmoy 2y ago
Do you mean the non-semantic indexing, which covered most of Google Code? Like grep-style supporting, but no real semantic data? 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.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  I'm talking about Kythe, and learning that it ran into issues generalizing it for non-Google-controlled APIs explains a lot of the history I thought I knew!
  - dmoy 2y ago
    Yea we never had it for even all Google controlled repos, just the ones that would work with us to get compilation units from their build system. 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.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      It almost makes me wonder if the right approach (had Google been willing to invest in it) would have been to wed Kythe and Bazel to solve that "insane build configs" problem. "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.

skybrian 2y ago

I don’t see a contradiction; it’s all part of the story. 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.

franciscop 2y ago

[flagged]

osmsucks 2y ago

> Actually, Google Code was never trying to win. 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.

hanwenn 2y ago
Developer infrastructure at google reported into cloud from 2013 to 2019, and we (i was there) tried to do exactly that: building products for gcp customers based on our experience with building interval developer tools. It was largely a disaster. The one product I was involved with (git hosting and code review) had to build an MVP product to attract entry level GCP customers, but also keep our service running for large existing internal customers, who were servicing billion+ users and continuously growing their load. When Thomas Kurian took over GCP, he put all the dev products on ice and moved the internal tooling group out of cloud.

svnt 2y ago

I had this theory that generations raised on the internet and exposed to it from birth would be the most humble generations ever, because we all look for ways to be uniquely valuable, and it became nearly impossible to be egotistical when faced with the entirety of even just a mature youtube platform. Instead what we got was higher degrees of selective attention, and very elaborate and obscure flip-cup tricks.

Jyaif 2y ago

> We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought at the time, and didn't see a reason to continue. 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?

rty32 2y ago
Well, it is hard/very distasteful to put ads on a source code hosting website, so this likely isn't aligned with Google's interest. No, I am not joking.
- guappa 2y ago
  github shows me ads to their other tools, conferences and whatever all the time. And my company is a paying customer.

Brian_K_White 2y ago

You sound like you're proud of this work and this plan and this sequence of events. 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.

procrastitron 2y ago
> 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 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 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.
- justinclift 2y ago

ThrowawayR2 2y ago

> "Actually, Google Code was never trying to win." Wasn't Google reported among the bidders for GitHub? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/github-interest-from-google-and-others-revenue-about-300-million.html 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.

gerdesj 2y ago

[flagged]

calmbonsai 2y ago

Props for serving as primary source material. One of the reasons I, basically, no longer trust "tech" journalism. 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.

olalonde 2y ago

To be fair, you "lacking taste" and "not trying to win" are not mutually exclusive. You could argue they are respectively the proximate and ultimate cause for GitHub's win.

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theanonymousone 2y ago

This is a very bold statement, isn't it? So Google says the credit of making SourceForge (very deservedly) irrelevant is theirs and not GitHub's (or SourceForge themselves)? 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?

authorfly 2y ago

> was there, working on it, when it was 4 of us :) raises eyebrow When there were 4 of you? So about $800k a year for that time period? Just out of interest?

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sqren 2y ago

Why make this about Google Code? It reads a little like Main Character Syndrome. 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.

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sqren 2y ago

Whether Google wanted to win or not: Don't kid yourself into believing they _could_ have won even if they had tried. Google has a history of being terribly at executing on product ideas and Google Code never had the same "feel" that Github did. There's a reason Microsoft paid billions for Github. If Google could have created that in-house themselves they would have done it. Not saying Google tried and failed - they may just have realised that actually winning this was never an option.