3 ms·

GitHub's success is due, in no small part, to their excellent interface. Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand.

by reuven 12y ago

GitHub's success is due, in no small part, to their excellent interface. Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. (This, of course, ignores the many features that GitHub offers, which Google Code doesn't.) I know of many companies that learned about GitHub via open-source projects, which GitHub hosts for free, and decided that it was so good that they should pay money. Hosting such open-source projects was a brilliant marketing move. Google Code, by contrast, didn't seem to have a clear purpose other than hosting open-source projects. It was a kind of souped-up SourceForge, rather than a serious GitHub competitor. Google certainly had the resources to improve it, but didn't have the motivation that GitHub did -- and we see the results. I can't say that I'm mourning Google Code, and I think that the way in which they're sunsetting it is perfectly reasonable. But it demonstrates that free services are only going to stick around so long as it is serving another purpose, and that without such a purpose, you can't reasonably expect it to stick around.

DannyBee 12y ago
"Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand." It's really funny to hear this. If you look at press/reviews/OSS forum comments of it around launch time, people thought it had an excellent interface, because it was being compared to sourceforge. Then github came, and by comparison, the interface looked like crap. But you end up with this kind of weird history rewrite where the view becomes "it was always ugly", when it was probably best-around for at least 2 years, maybe more (depends on your view of early github) "Google Code, by contrast, didn't seem to have a clear purpose other than hosting open-source projects. It was a kind of souped-up SourceForge, rather than a serious GitHub competitor. Google certainly had the resources to improve it, but didn't have the motivation that GitHub did -- and we see the results." It was in fact, meant to be a better-than-sourceforge alternative, because Google viewed sourceforge as a harmful-to-opensource monoculture, and competition was desperately needed. github is a monoculture, but it doesn't seem, at least right now, to be harmful. As for "serious github competitor", it was never meant to be that. It predates github by over 2 years :)
- fafner 12y ago
  Google Code was such an improvement over SourceForge. I think the real problem of Google Code was that it took them too long to support git. When GitHub started Google Code was still SVN only and later they only added Mercurial support. This made people look at GitHub and GitHub could shine with some new ideas, like making code contributions extremely easy and placing the code first. Which of course further increased the popularity of git and so on. By the time Google Code added git support many major projects had moved and GitHub was simply the place to be.
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    " I think the real problem of Google Code was that it took them too long to support git." Yeah, this is true. Part of it was that it was going to require a ton of work to fit Git's concepts and protocols (remember, git only started supporting smart http in 2010) into the infrastructure we had. It wasn't until the storage backend for code was completely rewritten, and better http support was added to git that it really became feasible. (Note that Google code has a completely replicated storage backend infrastructure. It's not just a ton of git/mercurial/svn setups)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
magicalist 12y ago
> Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. Er, do you remember 2006? Google Code was a breath of fresh air, and a huge huge improvement over what was available at Sourceforge. This isn't damning with faint praise either, it really was clean and fast and easy to use as a developer and user. It didn't do everything you wanted it to, but it did what it did so much better than basically anything else at the time. The problem was that its interface was never given any attention, and the web is a very different place than it was in 2006, and then things you wished it did back then you still wish it would do now. Its not surprising at all that it now feels clunky and slow. Online interfaces for code hosting is not a solved problem yet, so while it would have guaranteed nothing, it's certainly necessary for a code hosting site's continued success that someone is actually continually working on improving it.
- aikah 12y ago
  > Er, do you remember 2006? Google Code was a breath of fresh air, Yet the product interface was stuck in 2006. It feels like a project that was "okayed" by some management but then "we don't want to put a cent on it".
ginko 12y ago
"It was a kind of souped-up SourceForge, rather than a serious GitHub competitor." You have no idea how much better the user experience of Google Code was compared to SourceForge. Especially from the project maintainer side. I have no idea if SF still does this, but not too many years ago to upload your files you had to upload them using SSH into a folder shared between all projects, then select your download file out of those when creating the download link.
- brondsem 12y ago
  SourceForge has come far since way back then. All the tools have been rewritten on an open source platform in the past few years. https://sourceforge.net/create/ https://sourceforge.net/create/ And the weird upload system... that was replaced 7 years ago: http://sourceforge.net/blog/download-system-improvements/ http://sourceforge.net/blog/download-system-improvements/

by reuven 12y ago

DannyBee 12y ago

"Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand." It's really funny to hear this. If you look at press/reviews/OSS forum comments of it around launch time, people thought it had an excellent interface, because it was being compared to sourceforge. Then github came, and by comparison, the interface looked like crap. But you end up with this kind of weird history rewrite where the view becomes "it was always ugly", when it was probably best-around for at least 2 years, maybe more (depends on your view of early github) "Google Code, by contrast, didn't seem to have a clear purpose other than hosting open-source projects. It was a kind of souped-up SourceForge, rather than a serious GitHub competitor. Google certainly had the resources to improve it, but didn't have the motivation that GitHub did -- and we see the results." It was in fact, meant to be a better-than-sourceforge alternative, because Google viewed sourceforge as a harmful-to-opensource monoculture, and competition was desperately needed. github is a monoculture, but it doesn't seem, at least right now, to be harmful. As for "serious github competitor", it was never meant to be that. It predates github by over 2 years :)

fafner 12y ago
Google Code was such an improvement over SourceForge. I think the real problem of Google Code was that it took them too long to support git. When GitHub started Google Code was still SVN only and later they only added Mercurial support. This made people look at GitHub and GitHub could shine with some new ideas, like making code contributions extremely easy and placing the code first. Which of course further increased the popularity of git and so on. By the time Google Code added git support many major projects had moved and GitHub was simply the place to be.
- DannyBee 12y ago
  " I think the real problem of Google Code was that it took them too long to support git." Yeah, this is true. Part of it was that it was going to require a ton of work to fit Git's concepts and protocols (remember, git only started supporting smart http in 2010) into the infrastructure we had. It wasn't until the storage backend for code was completely rewritten, and better http support was added to git that it really became feasible. (Note that Google code has a completely replicated storage backend infrastructure. It's not just a ton of git/mercurial/svn setups)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

magicalist 12y ago

> Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. Er, do you remember 2006? Google Code was a breath of fresh air, and a huge huge improvement over what was available at Sourceforge. This isn't damning with faint praise either, it really was clean and fast and easy to use as a developer and user. It didn't do everything you wanted it to, but it did what it did so much better than basically anything else at the time. The problem was that its interface was never given any attention, and the web is a very different place than it was in 2006, and then things you wished it did back then you still wish it would do now. Its not surprising at all that it now feels clunky and slow. Online interfaces for code hosting is not a solved problem yet, so while it would have guaranteed nothing, it's certainly necessary for a code hosting site's continued success that someone is actually continually working on improving it.

aikah 12y ago
> Er, do you remember 2006? Google Code was a breath of fresh air, Yet the product interface was stuck in 2006. It feels like a project that was "okayed" by some management but then "we don't want to put a cent on it".

ginko 12y ago

"It was a kind of souped-up SourceForge, rather than a serious GitHub competitor." You have no idea how much better the user experience of Google Code was compared to SourceForge. Especially from the project maintainer side. I have no idea if SF still does this, but not too many years ago to upload your files you had to upload them using SSH into a folder shared between all projects, then select your download file out of those when creating the download link.

brondsem 12y ago
SourceForge has come far since way back then. All the tools have been rewritten on an open source platform in the past few years. https://sourceforge.net/create/ https://sourceforge.net/create/ And the weird upload system... that was replaced 7 years ago: http://sourceforge.net/blog/download-system-improvements/ http://sourceforge.net/blog/download-system-improvements/