| Google Project Hosting won't compete with SourceForge? really? |
Jul. 28, 2006
Google announced a new Project Hosting service for open source developers, at OSCon in Portland, Ore. on July 27. Project Hosting, which is part of Google Code, is intended to enable developers to upload their own open source projects and search for others.
If that sounds familiar, it should. Greg Stein, a Google engineering manager and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, explained that Project Hosting is not meant to compete with SourceForge, the popular online community code repository, however.
SourceForge claims to be the world's largest open-source software development website, with more than 100,000 projects and over 1,000,000 registered users
Stein said the Google Project Hosting relies very much on Google's powerful text searching abilities, and cuts away much of the "heavy structure" of hosting sites, which developers don't need.
Still, Project Hosting does enable developers to assign project members, have group communications via Google Groups, provide a summary and labels, and choose a license. It also lets developers manage bugs and tasks and manage code with the Subversion version control system.
Subversion is a version control system that's meant to replace the popular CVS (Concurrent Versions System) in open source community development circles. For example, Subversion versions not only file contents and file existence, but also directories, copies, and renames. It also allows arbitrary metadata (aka properties) to be versioned along with any file or directory.
SourceForge and many other internal and public open-source development sites use CVS.
While publicly, Google insists that it's not competing with the SourceForges of the world, the Project Hosting FAQ tells a somewhat different story.
The reason why Google is hosting the site is "to encourage healthy, productive open source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting," according to the FAQ. And why should a developer choose Google? Because its "project-hosting service is simple, fast, reliable, and scalable, so that you can focus on your own open source development."
There are essentially no difference between these goals and those of SourceForge.
Google Project Hosting is not ready to compete on an equal basis with SourceForge yet, though. Google itself admits that "Google Code will have lots of key features at launch, but we may not have all features you want or need for your project. Rather than try to offer every possible feature, we have focused on doing the most important things really well. More features will be added over time, but only when they are ready," the FAQ states.
Eager programmers shouldn't expect some vital features anytime soon. "However, we will not offer the following any time soon: shell accounts, build farm, private projects, nested projects, or multiple alternatives for each type of hosted tool," the FAQ continues.
Ryan Paul of Ars Technica agreed in an early review that Project Hosting not ready for prime time.
"After creating a test project and experimenting with most of the features, I have concluded that the service is far from ready for production use. With the exception of the issue tracking feature which has a very nifty (albeit buggy) filtering list view widget, the interface is plagued with an uncharacteristic lack of useful ajax flourishes," wrote Paul.
That said, while "Right now, Google's new source code hosting service is an island, but properly integrated with GMail, Google Groups, Google Talk, and other relevant services (I can already imagine Google Checkout being used in an elaborate payment system for open source code bounties), the new hosting offering could become a force to be reckoned with," Paul noted.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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