Google announced today that it would henceforth stop accepting new projects for Google Code, as a prelude to shutting down the project hosting platform completely as of January of 2016.
An official blog post cited declining usage and the general superiority of alternative hosting platforms, like GitHub and Bitbucket, as the primary reasons for the shutdown.
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"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," wrote Google open-source director Chris DiBona. "After profiling non-abusive activity on Google Code, it has become clear to us that the service simply isn't needed anymore."
Even Google doesn't use Google Code, which originally launched in 2006, much any more -- DiBona also noted that the company had moved close to a thousand of its own open-source projects to GitHub. Google will share its own tools for migration with those who will be moving their projects off to GitHub or elsewhere, and both GitHub and Bitbucket have indicated that they can also help Google Code projects migrate.
Google Code will be locked into read-only mode as of August 24, and the service will shut down completely on January 25, 2016. Downloadable files of source code and documentation will remain available for the rest of 2016, however, and the company said that it will continue to provide hosting for its best-known open-source projects, Android and Chrome.
The decision to turn the lights out at Google Code is no surprise, according to Bill Ledingham, CTO of Black Duck Software, an open-source consultant.
"I think this will largely be a non event in the open source community as many projects have already migrated away from Google Code to GitHub," he told Network World. "This trend has been underway for the past few years and Google's announcement is largely just a recognition of this reality."