Skip to main content

Google Launches Open Source Code Hosting Service

I made my first contribution to the Open Source community back in 1989 when I contributed CVS to the Free Software Foundation. That was before we started calling it "Open Source". CVS is the backbone of Sourceforge.net and has been home to over 100,000 Open Source projects, has more than 1 million registered Open Source developers, and serves up more than 19 million unique visitors each month. CVS has stopped being maintained and Subversion takes its place - the natural evolution of Open Source projects continues. SourceForge has owned the mind-share for Open Source developers for many years, but the service has not given the developers everything they need for full software lifecycle management.

At OSCON, Google announced that they have put together a service, similar to SourceForge.net, that can be used for hosting Open Source projects. Enter Google Code. It has built-in support for Subversion access (controlled through a special password that appears to be linked to your Google account, so they can track what you're downloading) and issue/defect tracking. It's pretty darn basic now, and a new Open Source project would definitely be better served by using an existing service (like SourceForge.net or Trac). Hopefully, Google will continue to enhance this and build out a whole set of hosted capabilities, like:

  • Project Management

  • Requirements Gathering

  • Release Management

  • Packaging & Distribution Tools

  • Integration with Eclipse

  • Automated Test Harness


A hosted service with full software lifecycle management will do very well and win the mind-share of the 18 million Open Source developers out there.

Ars Technica has done a nice review. Slashdot and TechCrunch are talking about it. Mad Penguin covers more of the technical details. I'm all for activities that ease and support the development of the Open Source community. My thanks to Google for giving back to the community.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bill Coleman Joins 3tera Advisory Board

I think this move surprised a number of people, since Bill recently wrapped up Cassatt Corproation, getting the technology and people  acquired by Computer Associates . However, I was not surprised at all. The announcement, via  3tera Welcomes Bill Coleman : You may or may not have seen the recent press realease.  Bill Coleman, IT/Silicon Valley luminary, Founder and CEO of BEA Systems, has joined 3Tera’s Advisory Board. Yes, this alone is a great testimonial to what we have accomplished in our field.  Getting dignitaries such as Bill does not come easy.  But here’s the best part - this has a lot more than just marquee value and I doubt that Bill would have joined us if that was the case.  Bill, especially since his most recent stint as Founder and CEO of Cassatt Systems, is an extremely knowledgeable visionary in the area of utility and Cloud Computing; and, data center automation. So, Bill will be extremely valuable, reviewing and tweaking both our business plans and techno
Post a Comment
Read more

Kernel-based Virtual Machine hits Linux

Many congratulations to my good friend Moshe Bar and his team over at (stealth-mode startup) Qumranet . Techworld reports that the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project has been accepted into the 2.6.20 version of the Linux kernel distribution. KVM is an Open Source kernel driver that basically allows a Linux kernel to host virtual machines, as plain old Linux processes, that can run Linux or Windows (or other x86-based operating systems). It runs only on hardware that support Intel's VT instruction set (which is fine) and will soon support the AMD-V instruction set as well. This is cool for a number of reasons. It's Open Source, released under the GPL. It basically turns the Linux that we all know and love into a "hypervisor". Linux-as-hypervisor makes sense because Linux already knows how to manage devices, memory, processes, multi-cores, etc. VMware ESX is, essentially, a "hypervisor" - a small kernel, built on Linux as it turns out, that
2 comments
Read more

Big In Japan Open Sources Their Ruby On Rails Tools

The kind folks over at Big In Japan have graciously decided to Open Source the code they used to build their demo web sites . It's all Ruby on Rails code, and it's being released with a GPL license. The code trees being made available include: elfURL ~ URL Shortner FeedVault ~ OPML file storage FrankenFeed ~ RSS feed merger InstantFeed ~ RSS feeds via email QwikPing ~ Ping Server SocialMail ~ RSS via email Very cool. I just love the Open Source community . I have actually been writing some code of late, and it's great to have some reference code to check out. Not sure if I'm going to go with Ruby on Rails yet, however. And, for the record. I have no idea if this is big in Japan. Tags: Open Source , GPL , Ruby On Rails , Big In Japan , Brian Berliner , brianberliner
Post a Comment
Read more