Adiós a Google Code

Uno más, y van...Google anuncia el fin del servicio de Google Code. Acabo de enterarme a través del boletín de SourceForge, que remite a su recomendación acerca de cómo migrar los proyectos remanentes a SourceForge. En resumen, a partir del 12 de marzo, Google Code congeló la aceptación de nuevos proyectos, renunciando a su servicio debido a su pérdida de importancia frente a otras opciones más aceptadas y controladas. Google lo explica claramente:

When we started the Google Code project hosting service in 2006, the world of project hosting was limited. We were worried about reliability and stagnation, so we took action by giving the open source community another option to choose from. Since then, we’ve seen a wide variety of better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket bloom. Many projects moved away from Google Code to those 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.
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.

Las tres fechas claves del proceso de cierre son:

• March 12, 2015 - New project creation disabled.
• August 24, 2015 - The site goes read-only. You can still checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis.
• January 25, 2016 - The project hosting service is closed. You will be able to download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis. These tarballs will be available throughout the rest of 2016.

¿Economía de recursos o compromiso limitado con sus desarrollos? Entre los comentarios y quejas por su cierre, quizá comparta el de Pavel Roskin, reaccionando a quienes hablan de cementerio de iniciativas: The comment about Google Cemetery makes me sick. Snide remarks don't belong here. Google Code has been a great contribution to the Free Software. Google should be thanked for that.