[k3n]

Google hates anything that requires a human's touch, and per the article:

> Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management.

They see Google Code as a time-sink, and they're probably right, and it's not surprising to me that they'd drop something that is no longer serving it's intended purpose, but instead has negative implications for their model. Keeping it going forward would require even more hands-on humans, so they scrap it.

As for the deep links, one of the Google Code devs did mention[1]:

> I work on Google Code, and we will be putting a service in place to redirect deep links to project homepages, issues, etc. to their new locations.

His comment also contains a link to a wiki with more information on how to opt-in to this service.

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/03/farewell-to-go...

[aikah]

> I work on Google Code, and we will be putting a service in place to redirect deep links to project homepages, issues, etc. to their new locations.

And this is an opt in service, nothing is automated. They could ,AT LEAST, partner with Github or someone else to have the whole thing automated... Seriously... the really want to put 0 money in that stuff,they don't give a damn.

There are seriously good projects that will be lost no question.Open source code is a community wealth,even in funky languages nobody use anymore. What Google is doing makes sense from a business stand point but totally shameful from a company that boasts itself doing "no evil".

[enjo]

On what planet is shutting down a service, with months and months of notice, evil?

I get it, we all hate Google on HN (for reasons unclear to me) but this is ridiculous. If these projects are truly important than donate some time and move them over yourself. To demand that google invest time and resources into the migration of these migrations or to keeping this running forever is just silly.

Hell tools like https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ even exist.

[dchichkov]

Shutting down Google Code is equivalent to destroying a storage full of handwritten articles, some of which exist only in a single copy and some of which are incredibly valuable.

Why valuable? For example computer science researchers had been using Google Code to host supplement code for their research publications for years now. These repositories are not maintained by these researchers any more, yet the code some times is incredibly valuable, because it allows to reproduce research results. The reason why researchers were using Google Code, is because it was supposed to be as stable as the underlying company. Yet now, in 10 months, these repositories will be destroyed.

[NeutronBoy]

If the code is that valuable, then perhaps they should put some time into maintaining the code, moving it to another provider, or convincing somebody to pay for hosting.

[dchichkov]

Example. A cancer researcher, publishes a paper in Nature Genetics. Like this one: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v42/n3/abs/ng.522.html

In that paper she publishes a link to a Google Code repository as supplement materials. For example, in the aforementioned paper there is a link to the following repository: http://code.google.com/p/glu-genetics/

[NeutronBoy]

Given she published the paper and link, she should either a) take responsibility for the general availability of the materials, and b) make sure that if people email her for the materials (after finding that they're not available on Google Code) she shares them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for retaining the materials and knowledge, etc etc. I'm just having a hard time understanding why you expect Google to do the work and maintain it? What if she uploaded her materials to Megaupload, or any of the hundred other filesharing sites - would you hold them to the same standard? Why doesn't the journal that published the paper (which, has a revenue stream) host the material, given that it directly supports their work?

[DaveWalk]

Great example. In 2-10 years from now, someone will want to find that repository.

Does anyone know of an effort to maintain this, like is done with sequencing data at the NIH? Something like PubMed Central?

I have first hand experience with this on the biology side, looking for reagents or even protocols from a 10 year old paper...and coming up completely dry. It's kind of a travesty, but the world collectively shrugged.

[leni536]

Handling and archiving supplementary materials should be the responsibility of the journal (like distributing and archiving the article itself). They should discourage linking to 3rd party websites where the author published his/her work.

I'm pretty sure that Google Code had a TOS where they stated that they don't guarantee that your repository is safe there forever.

There could be several reasons for closing a repository including Google going bankrupt. The availability of a scientific article should be much longer (ideally infinity) than the lifetime of any company.

[jamiesonbecker]

It may not be valuable to the author. That does not mean it's not valuable to some future searcher.

[Turing_Machine]

Right.

Researchers would kill to have the balled-up scraps of paper that (e.g) Shakespeare threw in the trash.

[walterbell]

Are we supposed to believe that Google does not understand the value of CITATIONS and PERMALINKS?

[ocdtrekkie]

In actuality, I've found most HN users seem to love Google. To the extent that almost any criticism of Google gets downvoted to death.

[ocdtrekkie]

Case in point, this comment just dropped three points. ;)

[markcerqueira]

Don't sweat it. Don't let imaginary internet points make you feel bad... or good.

[bigiain]

FWIW, Google were happy for a lot of other people to invest time and resources into putting their projects there in the first place - you don't think there's some reasonable expectation that Google would expend some extremely minimal resources at their scale - to ensuring those peoples effort wasn't wasted/lost?

Having said that, I'm not part of any movement to "demand Google do something different", but I've been a longtime member of the "Warn friends/family/colleagues about the dangers of participating in Google services in any way that'll have any downside when they close it down, because they've got a strong track record of doing that" movement.

If _I_ were the person making this decision at Google, my announcement would have been more along the lines of "blah blah shutdown blah blah apologies/excuses blah blah, so we're going to donate enough to archive.org to ensure everything on code.google.com gets archived permanently, and automatically redirect all future code.google.com requests to that permanent archive".

[jayvanguard]

> On what planet is shutting down a service, with months and months of notice, evil?

The current planet? Open source projects have a lifetime of years so five months is not that long in the scheme of things. People put there code on there and participated (providing Google content that they were able to use and drive traffic) with the expectation that it would be there for the long term.

[oldmanjay]

This is a rather watery definition of evil. It is fairly close to saying a restaurant is evil for not keeping a menu item you like.

[walterbell]

Would it be ok for Google to delete Usenet archives?

Or a library to burn down its own buildings? Or Google to delete all scans of old books?

History matters, because citations to "old" research/code may become more valuable with new requirements and research. Surely a company that "organizes the world's information" needs no explanation of these topics.

[krapp]

>Would it be ok for Google to delete Usenet archives?

If it's their archives, yes.

And if those are the only archives of Usenet in existence, then it's not Google's fault no one else cared to back it up.

[Angostura]

> It is fairly close to saying a restaurant is evil for not keeping a menu item you like.

Actually closer to saying they are evil for destroying humanity's only copy of the recipe.

[npizzolato]

After shouting loudly they are going to destroy it and waiting months for anyone to come copy the recipe.

[yellowapple]

It would be the open-source world's equivalent to Geocities shutting down. There are still times when I'm trying to search for something (usually some obscure programming or hardware hacking topic) and the only source of information was a Geocities site. I can't imagine how much of a royal pain in the ass it will be if Google Code experiences the same fate.

> I get it, we all hate Google on HN (for reasons unclear to me)

The reasons should be clear to anyone with historical context; this isn't the first time Google has spontaneously pulled the plug on some "non-core" project it decided wasn't making quite enough money, in complete disregard of said project's use by the real world. It's these sorts of things that make me very reluctant to invest heavily in Google's ecosystem; I've personally been burned in the past by these sorts of things.

A part of me wants XKCD #1361 to come true.

[asfaltboy]

I like how that project is hosted on Google code

[skj]

It's not a googlecode-hosted project: there is no /p/ in the middle, and you can't see its source (not that there'd be much to see). It's a tool made by the googlecode team to help migrate.

[magicalist]

I seriously doubt Github would ever agree to that automation. First, what accounts would all these orphan repos go under? Second, how much spam would they be agreeing to host by saying yes to that?

This is a much better job for The Internet Archive or a read-only google code in perpetuity.

edit: in fact, it looks like they're planning on making a read-only version, but the definition of "legitimate" is going to be very important to nail down:

> cdibona: We are planing on taking the majority of these legitimate, open source, 'abandonded' projects and putting them up in cold storage in a git repo on googlesource.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192554

[tcheard]

> What Google is doing makes sense from a business stand point but totally shameful from a company that boasts itself doing "no evil".

Oh come on! I'm not a fan of everything Google does, and I can see, and in part agree with, the point you are trying to make, but this is just grasping at straws. You just lost all credibility with this comment.

Yes, I can see unmaintained code being lost here, and that is unfortunate. But Google provided this service for free, a service they started to promote open source software development. They noticed that there was a big move to other hosting platforms, that they themselves also believe are better than theirs. This has led to support for this platform to be little more than dealing with abuse cases, and they feel that the benefit to the community no longer outweighs the cost of the platform.

They have gone out of their way to provide ways to migrate code from Google Code to these other "better" platforms, and they are giving people over 18 months to migrate their code:

> January 25, 2016 - The project hosting service is closed. You will be able to download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis. These tarballs will be available throughout the rest of 2016.

They really didn't have to provide any of this.

None of this is "evil". There are plenty of acts that Google do that border on "evil", but this is really just the wrong one to choose to call them out on.

What do you really expect them to do here?

[zanny]

> that will be lost no question

We have over a year. There will be backups of all of google code made, and even then the Internet Archive will certainly have a backup of all the software projects on it. I doubt any code will be lost - active participation might be, from developers who don't want to relearn how to do things on github.

[scott_s]

A sibling comment already pointed this out, but the existence of https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ and its explicit mention in the post along with the clear language that they did work with GitHub and Bitbucket, leads me to believe that you did not read the post.

[chernevik]

But the parent comment gave a very plausible suggestion for how Google can do this in a very low maintenance way. Yes, there is abuse management, but now that they're read-only I'd expect this to fall off pretty fast.

Google's first business is access to information about links. You'd think they would be more careful about propagating link rot.

Unless they _want_ link rot, as they're much better positioned to handle changes in links than any search engine entrant?

[userbinator]

Unless they _want_ link rot, as they're much better positioned to handle changes in links than any search engine entrant?

That does make sense - the more people who stumble upon broken links an choose to use them to find information, the more traffic they get and can earn from ads with. Remember their experiments with Chrome hiding the URL(!) last year?

[shmerl]

> Google hates anything that requires a human's touch

I guess robots will soon make decisions in Google too ;)

[bigiain]

"Google hates anything that requires a human's touch"

Perhaps they should stop offering products to humans then?

Seriously, why would _anybody_ use/recommend a Google product, when the expectation of "customer service" is "maybe some other poor schmuk on some poorly maintained and difficult to search Google group once had the same problem and they (or some other non Google person) worked out a fix and bothered posting it".

Yeah, you're not paying for it - it's worth exactly that when anything goes wrong. (Unless you're running 5 or 6 digits a month in Adwords spend, then they're _remarkably_ good at CS...)