Google Announces Open Source Repository

NewsForge (also owned by OSTG) has word of Google's newest product: an open-source project repository. Robin Miller sat down for a talk with Greg Stein and Chris DiBona, who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them. From the article: "Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects. DiBona says that it's a 'direct result of Greg concentrating on what open source projects need. Most bugtrackers are informed by what corporations' and large projects need, whereas Google's offering is just about what open source developers need. Stein says that Google's hosting has a 'brand new look' at issue tracking that may be of interest to open source projects, and says 'nobody else out there is doing anything close to it.'"

SourceForge is easy to beat

Whether or not they claim to be competing with SourceForge is really beside the point. SourceForge puts all its effort into providing service for its Enterprise customers. Or at least that's my interpretation of why their free services have been plagued with extensive downtime and poor administration. When I did the first release of a personal project last year I didn't even bother to put it on SourceForge. If they can't provide reasonable uptime and notification of changes (such as the infamous CVS root change) then it's worse than nothing.

If Google provides decent uptime--which seems likely given their infrastructure--then they'll already have SourceForge beat on the most important metric. If the service actually innovates and provides some unique value, well that's just a bonus.

SourceForge, we hardly knew ye

...who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them.

I guess they mean that in the sense that the Pittsburgh Steelers aren't intended to compete with an intramural squad playing in a park. Shall we start the SourceForge countdown clock?

More words missing from the original post

"very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them" ****Missing from the original post**** ", but is intended to replace them." Why compete when you can crush?

What the catch?

Can we use this Open Source Repository without something in the source code calling home like some of Google's APIs are in habit of doing?

What a pity

I was really hoping for something more exciting from google, when they announced that they'd be producing something for the open source community. Sourceforge has the occasional problem (CVS stats has been broken for how long now?), but basically it a fantastic site for open source, and easily provides all the services that any OSS project of any size needs in order to function and flourish.

I know google has done amazing things with stuff like webmail (gmail DESTROYS any previous webmail I have used in terms of features/functionality/speed/storage space, so much so that I haven't tried another since and doubt I ever will - if google decided to charge $10 a month for the gmail service I'd pay it in a heartbeat - it's that good :)). However, I just cannot see that they can bring any miraculous innovation to the table as far as hosting/supporting OSS projects goes - between forums, IRC and email, collaboration over OSS projects is already working perfectly and as I see it, that is all that google could help with - they can't really step in and do the actual development work required to create every Open source project out there.

Still, I'm sure it will be all AJAXy and perdy, maybe faster than sf.net and maybe I'll even choose them over sf.net the next time I can be bothered starting an OSS project.