A new home for Google Open Source | Hacker News Reader

A new home for Google Open Source

opensource.google.com

257 pointsflyingramen63 comments

It looks like some of these projects repos link to GitHub, while others are hosted on this new platform. Is this a signal that Google is moving away from GitHub, or something else entirely?

Edit: Ah, here's the relevant blog post: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/03/a-new-home-for-goo...

No, we're deeply committed to continuing to release projects on Github.

That's great. Is this site more of a resource for Googlers, and for outsiders to understand the process? A lot of the information I'm reading seems to suggest that.

Yes to both. Googlers start as not-googlers, after all..

There's a lot of reasons to do this that go beyond recruiting not the least of which was our old site was getting super crufty..

Please make the UI default to the card layout and not the floating circles.

Looks like they've got a whole section in their docs on how they use GitHub at Google: https://opensource.google.com/docs/github/

It just looks like a one-stop shop to increase discoverability of all of google's opensource project, including the ones not hosted on github, like ganeti[1]. Which is hosted on Google's own infra[2]

[1]: https://opensource.google.com/projects/ganeti [2]: http://git.ganeti.org/?p=ganeti.git;a=summary

Except that the UI is so bad that you can only discover a few top ranked (whatever it means in this UI) projects or the project you already know it exists in there.

the circling-bubble UI is terrible. But you can use list based UI to filter the ones by tags.

I agree. The bubble UI is cutesy but otherwise completely useless. I'd say they should drop it altogether, and stick to the list UI as default.

I could be improved by just not being constantly moving so you lose track of what you've explored and what you still haven't.

Well, all of it only really helps you discover the featured ones, because the list was opt in. The total number is in the thousands.

I routinely click through the google and gcp orgs, and I hadn't seen quite a few of these, a couple of which I'd really like to use. Congrats!

Thanks. What you said definitely exemplifies the problem we were trying to solve. People often look through one or two of our GitHub organizations, but don't realize that we actually have over 100 of them. Plus many of our projects aren't actually on GitHub (or at least only mirrored to GitHub). The goal of this directory was to help discover those projects.

We recently thought about on how to do this as well and created our own Open Source page [1]. Not sure if we have done it right, but I quite like it. Happy to receive some feedback on it. It's nothing huge, nevertheless we're quite proud of what we've achieved.

[1]: https://mobilejazz.com/products/opensource

This is nice, I like what you've done with the logos

They're very cute! And the effect is elegant and nice.

There is an option make into a normal list its on the upper right hand side.

Agree. Over use of animation. All these are good examples.

If Google has 50+ projects, then it's best to just have a page with multiple rows, each row is a category, and upon click can expand down to what #3 looks like. Or perhaps just GitHub README... it's pretty nice to read.

[1]: https://netflix.github.io/ [2]: http://twitter.github.io/ [3]: http://etsy.github.io/

The problem is that we have over 2,000 projects, so simply listing them all on one page doesn't work very well. Hence why we built this directory, which allows browsing by category, by tag, by language, as well as full text search.

Okay that makes sense now. 2000 project is indeed no where easy to implement a nice interface. My two cents: perhaps display top and some random.

Thx

If only there were some way to search such a vast number of project listings. Some type of engine, perhaps.

A "search ... engine" ? Noo. That would be too far out.

Maybe, if they do not find anything, they could use lucene ;)

Fire the UX guy, the interface is terrible.

Firstly wayyy too much useless animation + distractions. This slows down every aspect of the interface making it annoying to use.

The default of showing just miniature icons of projects provides ZERO useful information. After clicking 'next' and waiting an eternity for the animation to finish, you are presented finally with some information, just a title and description.

In this mode there is no way to know when you've finished seeing all the projects in a category (no clear end).

The no ending is solved by changing the view to the grid based one. But guess what, grids fucking suck for text, they are good for images, we don't scan data grid by grid for sentences, this makes it insanely difficult to read, or skim - ie. read first four words, decide no interest in that particular project, now you have to keep moving your eyes right - which you would normally do if you're INTERESTED and since this is text, you're forced to look over more text from the project which you don't want - in a list view, your eyes go down to the next project, your brain has a clear new context.

And of course nowhere can you see latest commits, total commits, language etc. You know, stuff that matters.

If you can't handle 2,000 projects, how are you going to handle 20,000, or 200,000?

The Debian Project last I checked (a year or two back) had over 60k software packages. It's got an interface for delivering those. Actually, several interfaces, and the ones I prefer and use are commandline and filter through grep, if they don't provide their own search interfaces.

And those are platforms which are noted ... for their relative lack of software availability. (I think that criticism is ... misguided in several ways, but on a sheer quantitative basis, there are some pale merits.)

If Google cannot figure out how to manage, organise, present, and offer useful search interfaces to a measely 2,000 pieces of software, then, with all due respect, get the fuck out of the way for someone who can.

There's some really interesting tidbits in the docs section.

For example, apparently AGPL licensed projects can't be used at Google: https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/

That is not one bit surprising considering that Google does everything online.

Google no doubt has some proprietary code that they would like to keep proprietary. Also they probably have code under other licenses that they would like to remain under those particular licenses.

Errr,it's completely and totally unrelated to that. It's because we have tons of temps, vendors, and contractors, and don't want to have to owe them source code to internal systems. The other alternative (remember that google is a monorepo) would be to somehow police them differently. That is literally not worth the cost.

I don't see how having "some proprietary code that they would like to keep proprietary" is "completely and totally unrelated to" "not want[ing] to have to owe [someone/anyone] source code to internal systems"?

What's going on with the names of you all?

No idea. DannyB2 has been around about a year, and i've seen posts by them in other threads.

The others were just created, presumably to be reddit-level-hilarious

The implication of the above comment is explicitly that it's because of stuff we make available in public (IE google docs), and we actually literally do not care about that at all.

This actually explains what's new about this: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/03/a-new-home-for-goo...

Website is beautiful. But actually not useful. It's better for programmers just browsing on GitHub.

Yeah, I immediately followed a bunch of links and found GitHub at the end and thought I could just ignore the new site. Some comments here claim not all the projects are on GitHub, though, some are hosted directly by Google. So maybe there's something else you could find on this new site and not find there.

The other problem is that we have 100+ GitHub organizations, so browsing them all together is impossible.

+100

Why didn't they use their new .google TLD for this?

Seems a nice template. Can I get fork it somewhere?

The docs are an interesting peek into google's internal stuff :)

At first glance, project explorer's circular is not intuitive. My first reaction was to switch to the grid view. Perhaps, they should make the grid view as default.

Well, now PVS-Studio has more code to check and to entertain the readers with reports. :) About the analysis of various open source projects by PVS-Studio Team: https://www.viva64.com/en/inspections/

I find it hard not to be cynical when google launches new sites now, will it still be there in 3-5 years ?

List of all projects: https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured?page=6

("page=6" means no 6x clicking "Show more", then it loads the whole page - interesting)

That's actually not all of them. Just the featured ones :) That's why the url has featured in it.

the search filter seems to have some hard coded logic, preferring languages like R (4 projects [1]) over Scala (5 projects [2]). I wonder if that's based on trends or purely taste (or just cache :-)).

  [1] https://opensource.google.com/projects/search?q=%20&language=r
  [2] https://opensource.google.com/projects/search?q=%20&language=scala

Maybe it has something to do with actual amount of scala code. E.g. github reports bazel as 90%+ java.

Made with Angular, seems pretty snappy.

2 years max.

What's 2 years max? Google's contributions to open-source? They've been doing it for a decade now.

I think parent is referring to the longevity of this "new home", given Google's tendency to cancel things.

yawn

I don't think anyone in this thread has actually opened the link. This "new home" isn't some sort of platform like Google Code, it's just a website that lists all of Google's open source projects (mainly on GitHub). Everyone's talking about it like it's supposed to be some sort of GitHub competitor that can be 'abandoned'.

I don't see why you feel like this website is something that Google can't abandon. Hell: I swear I remember Google already having a page like this six or seven years ago... I'd imagine this page will slowly become less and less maintained, with both layout rot and failing to include some new projects, until it eventually gets scrapped or replaced (with a new URL, and likely no redirect).

What they are saying is that eventually this site will be removed because Google is constantly killing their own projects after a couple of years.

The last one was like 10 years, so ... probably not?

This one seems to have the purpose of showing off google open source contributions (for marketing purposes?) rather than actually hosting. So the utility is much lower and the effort to maintain it is lower. I wouldn't expect many to miss it greatly if it disappeared one day since the actual contributions are elsewhere. I'm not sure how that translates into the expected lifetime for google keeping it around.

This joke is getting old.

Google can stop killing shit any time it wants. It's got all the Spaces in the world.

Oh, wait, no, they killed that one. In about a year....

Spaces was never used by any major groups. It was an experiment and it ended. Using it to fuel the "Google shuts down everything" meme is just silly and makes the memers look silly.

Google has never shut down a major product. The closest thing they've come to is shutting down Google Reader, which was popular in the tech crowd but not mainstream in any way. That hurt. I totally agree with feeling the pain here.

They've never shut down anything of consequence besides this. Lots of little experimental things but nothing of real value.

They've also transitioned lots of things which does not count as shutting it down because you can still use the damn product. Latitude became Google+ Locations which became Maps Locations. They changed the name. Big whoop.

From an end user perspective the meme is a total joke. From a developer perspective there's a bit more truth but it's not as bad as the joke entails.

Sure they shut down some APIs but they give months or even year+ notices and pretty much universally always have an API with roughly equivalent functionality to move to. They rarely leave devs in the cold. It has happened but the vast majority of the time you just swap a few lines or a module and you are back up and running with probably better features.

Their PR has taken a hit because people don't like to do their research. They just shit on Google because it's fun.

How about Free Software?

here we go again, at some point google "deprecated" code.google.com which was great for developers in china because of the gfw. now they're going back to a google source control service, this means that i have to develop with a vpn which is a simple pain in the ass.

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