A Change to Google Code Download Service
google-opensource.blogspot.com
google-opensource.blogspot.com
There are tonnes of code hosting sites going back as far as SourceForge and none of them ever came up with something like this.
There's something extremely weird about Google making this kind of developer hostile move. Why would I use Google Code now when there are any number of alternatives that have no problem with hosting downloads? It's like they are trying to drive us away. I hope it doesn't hint at Google Code being on the "sunsetting" list in the future.
I wonder if it gives them some kind of safe harbour from the copyright industry. Perhaps a Google Code download is a "download from Google" vs a Google Drive download being a "download from that user".
FWIW, when I search, I see quite a lot of abuse reports for malware; this may have little to nothing to do with the copyright industry (against whom they already have a safe harbor for user-submitted content due to the DMCA.)
If a user downloads malware from Google Code, it seems like there's at least some tiny chance they might try to sue Google for it. If they download it from a personal Google Drive account, it will be a lot harder to convince a court that Google had a responsibility for the content.
Obviously, they can, or they wouldn't be able to tell that there is an increasing frequency of abuse.
That still requires them to be able to tell the difference between abusive and non-abusive files, which ability was what was questioned in the post upthread.
Obviously, this wouldn't be an issue if they could in an efficient (and particularly, automated) manner identify all abusive files before they were exposed to the public.
Other services like Github could do the multiple repository thing too. In fact they already all do - having one main repository and a second for the wiki. Github said there is no way they would add this functionality when I asked.
Losing Downloads from Google Code is a big pain. That they never made a paid for private version is also annoying.
To give you some perspective: I have a popular open source project hosted on Google Code. I host my binary downloads via S3 and since it's popular, it costs me $200+ a month in bandwidth.
If I used Google Code for hosting those binaries, Google would have to pay for that and why should they?
And that's a grey area example i.e. I would be using the service as it was intended to be used.
I'm pretty sure plenty of smart alecks simply abuse the service by putting and random stuff there to avoid paying for bandwidth.
This is a tragedy of commons: Google offered a free service, people started abusing it via excessive usage and Google chose to no longer offer that free service (as opposed to e.g. spend their resource on never-ending battle of policing abusers).
That is very much their right.
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4
It's $60 for 10 TB/mo.
Actually, [github phased out their uploads/downloads features starting last December](https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads) too. They didn't mean "abuse" as part of the reasons it was going away, but I wonder if it played a role.
Edit: Yes, I know that many free options exist and I plan on switching to one of them soon. I just wish that I didn't have to use another service for a common task associated with software development.
Disclosure: I work for SourceForge
Edit: I found some of the old text, it's apparently dual-nature. You can make backups that you/friends download for free. You can also have files for sale that people pay to download. No way to have permanent public hosting.
abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently
The abuse reports I find from doing a search seem mostly to be that and malware, yeah.
> when they can actually do so via other more effective means?
I don't think Google really cares if people currently abusing Google Code's download hosting could do the same thing easier elsewhere or not, they care that they are doing on Google Code, and consequently are consuming Google staff resources (and, hence, $$) addressing the resulting abuse reports.
Older browsers in particular just love to treat everything under the same second level domain as coming from the "same origin". Browsers even have a hardcoded list of country codes and exceptions to prevent "example.co.uk" from setting cookies for all of "*.co.uk".
It's a total security mess and ICANN is not helping the situation by selling new gTLDs.
Hint: Take a look at the Subject Alt Names on some of the Google SSL certs sometime.
Anyone giving away free file hosting eventually runs into this problem.
Google just happens to also have drive to fall back on.
Drive's intended use case and sharing model may support dealing with abuse reports more efficient (for instance, it might make it practical to shift a reported file to non-publicly-shared after receiving an abuse report but before confirming that it contains malware.)
A) How Google is shutting down / degrading yet another service.
B) Crazy things Schmidt says.
C) Google Glass
Could be doing better on the PR front Google.
Seems like it's a pain point for code hosting services.
This may or may not be true, but it is exactly how late USSR and contemporary Russian bureaucrats reason every of their restrictive and reactionary measures.
I mean, what won't you do for the children? For keeping our community safe? What, you don't want this measure? It seems you aren't a team player then.
I would say that whether or not it is in fact true (and the question you don't address even indirectly of whether, if the stated problem is true, the response is proportional) is more important than whether or not bad actors have used somewhat analogous claims when they were false as pretext for restrictive measures.
Every legitimate justification for action has been used, at one point or another, by some bad actor to justify some bad act.
Google's taking away a minor feature of a completely free "product", and your response is to compare them to bureaucrats in the USSR?
Feel free to use something else.
I sit with a bag of popcorn watching them ruining their image.
Download links belong on the project web page.
Google Code has a number of features -- not just downloads, but also wiki, etc. -- that, while not intended to replace a user-centric site separate from the developer site Google Code is intended to provide, in practice facilitate projects using it that way.
While it has a set of features which may have made it usable for this use, I don't think Google Code was ever really intended to provide user facing web sites for open source projects, it was designed to provide developer facing project sites.
Hangouts does not use XMPP, but it's a feature that they didn't implement. It's not something that they disabled.
From a systems perspective, they have basically prevented anyone new from getting on Google Talk. I am expecting an EOL announcement at some point, as they are otherwise making it hard to get into.
See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... and http://talk.google.com
They're just boring and insincere.