News by CGIDir

Google Unveils Open Source Code Repository

CGIDir
Friday, July 28, 2006; 01:54 AM

Google launched a hosting service for open source projects, available at code.google.com/hosting . The company's latest public project, dubbed "Google Project Hosting," allows software developers to safely keep their code on Google servers, while keeping track of changes, reporting issues and collaborating with other coders.

The free service is similar to a number of other community hosting projects, of which SourceForge.org is the most prominent. Google tracks project names on SourceForge and does not allow duplicates. "Project Hosting" is, of course, beta, and is still lacking some of the SourceForge's advanced functionalities. The hosting service is based on the Subversion revision control application.

Source code of Google projects will be accessible via the new service. Currently the website lists 18 distinct categories, or labels, including Python, Java, C++, XML, and Google.

"Project Hosting" is part of the Google Code initiative -- a website for external developers interested in Google-related development. Google Code offers access to open source code and various Google APIs.

Google's latest service for programmers was announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference during a talk by Greg Stein, an open source engineer with Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.