Google Code Project Hosting Is Going Away

Google Code, a project hosting service that Google started in 2006 has finally came to its end. Google Code is now closed for open projects and all the projects will become read-only in August 2015 and finally the website would be shut down early next year as they stated in their email.

google code going away


Google took this hard but important decision as there are even better project hosting services available like GitHub, SourceForge etc. And it doesn't even feel like Google worked on it to make it better, it is just simply functioning and can host projects and no extra features that other services provide and probably that's the reason they've decided to shut it down next year.

There are more than a million projects being hosted on the website by hundreds of thousands of users, now that it is going to die all the projects must be transferred to another Project hosting service. Many projects on Google Code hasn't been touched in years, and that's the case with most of the projects, as people opt-in to better alternatives and never looked back.

How Does That Affect Me

If you are a developer then you know what to do next, so I would just skip this for you.

And if you are not, then you probably might own a website, a blog or a web app. There is a chance with Blogger platform that you have had added a plugin for example a "Related Post Widget" and its source code is being hosted on Google Code, and that's where you are linking to get the source code.

There wouldn't be any difference until next year when they shut it down completely and no data will be available.

What Must I Do As A Blog Owner

If you are a kind of blogger blog owner who loves adding a lot of third-party widgets and features from "vague" sources then you probably have got a reason to worry. 

All you have to do is make a list of third-party widgets and functions you have stuffed in your blog and contact the original authors of the widget and ask them if the users are safe or not, and are they hosting and hotlinking to Google Code for the source codes. Hotlinking is the term for direct linking to files on a destination, here Google Code, which is going to be shut down next year.

What if I Fail

Oh no! Don't worry though, there wouldn't be any "zombie apocalypse", if your site's functionality relied on Google Code then only those specific things will stop working, only in rare cases it might break the whole website, only in RARE cases.

Farewell, Google Code 

So Google Code, good bye.