[scott_w]

He made that claim but then conflated it by talking about "those links being gone" which isn't true.

I'm going to defend Google on this. They don't need to maintain products forever but this case is a good way to shut down a service. Allow access to existing projects but make clear that active projects need to go somewhere else. The commenter can be upset that they can't use Google Code as a product but they shouldn't misrepresent the situation by saying the code is inaccessible. I checked a university project I created 15 years ago and it's still there. The commenter is objectively incorrect.

> Too much indirection

I don't think this is a valid criticism. The web is designed explicitly to do this. You can still access the code, that's good enough.

[rerdavies]

No, it's not good enough. The service went away.

[scott_w]

You're free to expect for-profit businesses to fully support a free product forever. Just as they're free to decide they don't want to do that.

[vagrantJin]

Thats funny, no business ever does anything for free.

People/businesses who do stuff for free, ask for donations.

[rerdavies]

Sometimes businesses do things that they believe to be in their own self-interest, but is not.

Sometimes businesses do things to create good will (which has tangible value).

Sometimes businesses do things which destroy good will and create animosity (which has a tangible cost).

Google seems to have managed to have accumulated significant animosity by shutting down services that could instead have been left to die a slow death on a long tail. I still remember a time when I could plausibly believe that "Google Is Not Evil". Shutting down those services prematurely when people still depend on them is evil. That's the cost.

And, by the way, sometimes people do things for no other reason than because it is virtuous to do so. I suppose Plato does make the argument that you should do virtuous things so that you can hang out with other virtuous people, and not have to put up with *ssholes. Darwin would probably argue that people do virtuous things for free in order to increase the survival rates of their progeny. But those are both deep and nuanced arguments that are best left to incurable pessimists.