Google announced the closure of the free hosting service for free software projects Google Code. Since yesterday, March 12, 2015, the possibility of creating new projects on the website was eliminated, from August 24, 2015 it will be impossible to make changes to existing projects while with a read-only access to the pages, on January 25, 2016 the service will be shut down for good.
Google Code was opened in 2006, when the choices of hosting services for open source projects were limited. Google gave the open source community a service with various tools for developers. Over the years, the choices have become wider and especially similar services such as GitHub and Bitbucket have grown considerably.
The result was a gradual migration of projects from Google Code to other services. Lately, the work of the site administrators consisted mostly in handling abuses because an increasing share of the remaining projects was spam or other kinds of abuse.
Even Google decided to move nearly a thousand of its open source projects from Google Code to GitHub. It was a pretty clear signal that even in Google they believed that GitHub would offer a better service to free software developers. At that point, it just remained to be seen what the company wanted to do with Google Code and now came the official answer.
Google prepared a roadmap for the next ten months to allow those who still have projects hosted on Google Code to move to other services. They also made available various tools to accomplish this migration: the official announcement contains links to a tool for exporting projects from Google Code to GitHub and to a page where you can find tools for migrating to GitHub and Bitbucket. It’s also reminded that SourceForge, another famous hosting site for open source projects, offers a service of importing projects from Google Code.
In short, anyone who wants to move a project from Google Code to another of the leading hosting services for open source projects can do so without problems in the coming months. Google acknowledged the fact that its service is surpassed and the project managers prefer other ones.
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