Google Code to Shut Down in January; New Project Creation Disabled

Google on Thursday announced that it is shutting down its Google Code service on January 25, 2016. The Mountain View firm blamed the growing share of spamming or abusive projects on the service as developers migrated away from the Google Code to other popular project hosting services such as GitHub and others.

The company detailing the reasons said on its Google Open Source Blog, "Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management. After profiling non-abusive activity on Google Code, it has become clear to us that the service simply isn't needed anymore."

Google confirmed that it has disabled new project creation on Google Code starting Thursday while the service will be shut down about 10 months from now in January.

The company is also providing link to migration tools designed to help coders move their projects off Google Code. "We will also make ourselves available over the next three months to those projects that need help migrating from Google Code to other hosts," it adds.

Google has also detailed its timeline for the Google Code service: by August 24 2015, the site will be read-only (users however will be able to checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis); by January 25 2016, the project hosting service will be closed. The company added that coders will be able download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis. "These tarballs will be available throughout the rest of 2016."

Additionally, the company revealed that it will continue to provide Git and Gerrit hosting for projects such as Android and Chrome. In the meanwhile, Google will also maintain mirrors of projects like Eclipse, kernel.org and others.

Google's Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source, went on to suggest developers to use GitHub and Bitbucket for project hosting. "To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub," DiBona said.

For the uninitiated, project hosting on Google Code provided a free collaborative development environment for open source projects.

"GitHub and Bitbucket are both looking forward to working with developers moving off of Google Code. They've been great to work with leading up to this announcement, so we'd like to thank those sites for their continued support of the community. There are some great options for people today that didn't exist in 2006, and we look forward to helping you find the one that works for your project," added DiBona.