Google Inc. has announced that it is shutting down Google Code, its open source code project hosting service effective January 25th, 2016.

In a post to the Google Open Source Blog Chris DiBona, Google’s Director of Open Source explained that the move to close the service comes due to the fact that GitHub is more popular, and Google Code usage has dived relative to that.

“Many projects moved away from Google Code to…other systems. To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub” Di Bona said.

“As developers migrated away from Google Code, a growing share of the remaining projects were spam or abuse. 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.”

The migration for the closure of the site has started with new project creation being disabled. On August 24, 2015 Google Code will go read-only, preventing any further work on code uploaded to the site, followed by its final closure January 25, 2016.

For the few still using Google Code, Google has provided a Google Code to GitHub exporter tool, which provides an automated way to migrate a project’s source, issues, and wikis to a new GitHub repo.

End of an era

Google Code came about at a time that services like Github were nascent, and there was a need for a well supported, centralized code repository. In it’s glory days it was a popular, and easy to use resource, but its simplicity finally was its undoing; where as GitHub continued to innovate, the Google Code of 2015 isn’t that dissimilar to the Google Code of 2006.

It could be argued that a lack of attention from Google was its final undoing, but it was never a core Google product to begin with, more one of those “Google projects” that came out of an era where Google still claimed to do no evil, and wanted to be a friend to all and sundry.

Its passing, sadly, will be hardly noticed, but for those who once used the service, it (not unlike Friendfeed) will be fondly remembered.

Disclosure: the author of this post once hosted an open source Adobe Air Plurk client on the site.

photo credit: System Code via photopin (license)