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> code.google going away, without the excuse that google itself was going away, after I had started to rely on it and link to it in docs and scripts all over the place

It didn't go away, though. It got archived and that archive is still up and running today. Those links you put all over the place should still be working.

> If google had said "The purpose of this service is an academic goal of Googles, not to serve users needs. This service will be shut off as soon as Googles academic purpose is met." I would not have used it.

That's not an accurate representation of what DannyBee said. Moreover, what DannyBee did say is in line with what Google itself said was its goal when the service launched: https://support.google.com/code/answer/56511

"One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting."

> Effectively, Google harnessed users for it's own purposes without their consent by means of deception.

This does not appear to be a good faith argument.

None of what DannyBee said in their comment aligns with that interpretation. Neither does that interpretation line up with Google's publicly stated goals when they launched Google Code.

There is a difference between

> Actually, Google Code was never trying to win.

> It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty monoculture ... . Google was 100% consistent on this ...

And

> One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting.

These are not the same. One of these makes it out to be the singular goal. The other does not.

Yes, there is a difference, but one thing you should do when you see this difference and think it is critical consider whether you are parsing words way too strongly in a colloquial discussion on hacker news.

I'm trying to participate in a discussion. Not write comms that go to hundreds of millions of people. That is why the rules of hn are very clear on assuming the best, not the worst.

"It didn't go away, though. It got archived and that archive is still up and running today. Those links you put all over the place should still be working."

I think this is misrepresenting what the commenter stated. He appears to have stated the project hosting service "went away". This fits with the context of the OP which is comparing project hosting services, e.g., Google Code, Sourceforge, Github.

If the context was software archives, e.g., software mirrors, instead of project hosting, then we could indeed claim "Google Code" still exists. However, the context is project hosting. And no one can upload new projects or revisions to Google Code anymore. Google Code project hosting did in fact "go away":

https://codesite-archive.appspot.com/archive/about

The old https://code.google.com/p/projectname URLs need to be redirected to https://code.google.com/p/archive/projectname

Google then redirects these /archive URLs to storage.googleapis.com

Too much indirection

https://code.google.com/p/projectname becomes

https://storage.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/google-...

Downloads

https://storage.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/google-...

He made that claim but then conflated it by talking about "those links being gone" which isn't true.

I'm going to defend Google on this. They don't need to maintain products forever but this case is a good way to shut down a service. Allow access to existing projects but make clear that active projects need to go somewhere else. The commenter can be upset that they can't use Google Code as a product but they shouldn't misrepresent the situation by saying the code is inaccessible. I checked a university project I created 15 years ago and it's still there. The commenter is objectively incorrect.

> Too much indirection

I don't think this is a valid criticism. The web is designed explicitly to do this. You can still access the code, that's good enough.

No, it's not good enough. The service went away.

You're free to expect for-profit businesses to fully support a free product forever. Just as they're free to decide they don't want to do that.

Thats funny, no business ever does anything for free.

People/businesses who do stuff for free, ask for donations.

Sometimes businesses do things that they believe to be in their own self-interest, but is not.

Sometimes businesses do things to create good will (which has tangible value).

Sometimes businesses do things which destroy good will and create animosity (which has a tangible cost).

Google seems to have managed to have accumulated significant animosity by shutting down services that could instead have been left to die a slow death on a long tail. I still remember a time when I could plausibly believe that "Google Is Not Evil". Shutting down those services prematurely when people still depend on them is evil. That's the cost.

And, by the way, sometimes people do things for no other reason than because it is virtuous to do so. I suppose Plato does make the argument that you should do virtuous things so that you can hang out with other virtuous people, and not have to put up with *ssholes. Darwin would probably argue that people do virtuous things for free in order to increase the survival rates of their progeny. But those are both deep and nuanced arguments that are best left to incurable pessimists.

The web, i.e., HTTP and HTML, is designed so that Javascript is not necessary to redirect URLs or publish direct download URLs. But here a $2 trillion online advertising company tries to coerce the computer user into enabling Javascript for basic redirection.

> It didn't go away, though. It got archived ...

"It got archived" means it went away for actual use. i.e. in not-just-read-only fashion

But that's ok! It's easy to switch to a new code host. It's hard to change all the links on the internet if your link rots.

Putting a service like code.google into read-only mode is pretty much the ideal outcome for a discontinued service.

Google should be praised for how they behaved here.

Coding is a solitary activity? Switching everyone to a new environment is hard.

Also, "Google sunset their project really well" is damning with faint praise.

>Switching everyone to a new environment is hard.

Sure, but this is the danger you get when you rely on an outside vendor's service for anything. If you don't want to deal with this danger, then you should never, ever use an external vendor's service for anything; you should only use your own self-hosted solutions.

Of course, Google does have a worse track record than some when it comes to their services being EOLed if they aren't search, Maps, etc., but still, this can happen with anything: it can be shut down, or bought out by a competitor, etc.

>Also, "Google sunset their project really well" is damning with faint praise.

I don't think so in this case. I'd say Google has done a poor job of sunsetting other projects of theirs, but if this one actually keeps all the links alive albeit in read-only mode, that's really a lot better than most other EOLed or shut-down (like due to bankruptcy) services (from Google or anyone else), where it just disappears one day.

> Of course, Google does have a worse track record

Yes, that's the point of the above comments. The repeated lesson is that there's always a risk of shutdown, but don't trust google in particular to keep services running.

This is a repeatable pattern:

  1. A well-known major company sees that people are relying on something broken and it's hindering progress.
  2. The company decides to compete with that thing, but it's not part of their mission, so they make it free.
  3. Because the new thing is free, and run by a major company, lots of people come to depend on it, even though it's intentionally not the best.
  4. Another company builds more competition and works to actually be the best.
  5. The major company sees that their original objective of replacing the bad version is fulfilled, so they sunset the thing.
  6. People who came to depend on the thing feel betrayed.

This is why we should all be cautious about any non-core free service from major companies.

Is GitHub a core service of Microsoft?

Github is free for a large class of users, but it's also an enterprise product that feeds off the funnel created by the free userbase. Almost every developer knows github by now, knows how to use it and integrating your own source control management with the place where all of your open source dependencies live is a significant lock-in effect. And while I don't know the numbers for Github, I'd expect that GH itself is profitable or at least could be profitable.

Very close actually. Their strategy has always been to build essential developer tools. Developers, developers, developers.

So I think it is core to the way Microsoft expands and holds market share. And that market has changed to not only want windows only tools, so they change with it. Microsoft culture has always been kind of pragmatic. They were a walled garden for developers when they could get away with it (and still are for some), but now they have opened up a bit out of need.

Microsoft has over six thousand repos on Github including flagships like Typescript and VSCode. For all intents and purposes, it is a core service.

Microsoft is a different beast because so much of their revenue is B2B. Continuity of operations is kind of their whole deal. Google Workspace is the equivalent Google product and they're much less likely to dump a service, unlike the rest of Google.

And, how will the existence of source control management in both GitHub and Azure DevOps be reconciled?

They're sharing a lot of the resources as pragmatically as possible it seems. GH Actions and DevOps workflows are really similar, and afaik run on the same clusters of hardware.

There's also some pretty decent integration features for DevOps projects with source control in GitHub for that matter iirc. Not to mention the potential upsell to/from GH Enterprise and/or Azure DevOps.

I can imagine at some point, GH Enterprise and Azure DevOps may become more similar and share more infrastructure over time.

I hate to break it to you be GitHub is going to shut down too. Everything does.

People are just now catching on that Google services always fold and leave you hanging. Your comment is insightful. You're ahead of the curve predicting that eventually non-Google services will screw you too.

Whats the solution? Is the future self hosted? Making it accessible for non-technical people?

> Google harnessed users for it's own purposes without their consent by means of deception

Every profitable company on earth, ever.