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Comment by gtaylor | Hacker News Reader

> How is this even a failure? Google Code was the best at what it did for several years.

Google Code had a few good years, and I am grateful that it happened. However, it did fail to win the software forge battle as the space heated up. It failed to evolve enough to keep up. It failed to keep the mindshare it built in those two initial years as Github and others blew past it over the next six.

So call it for what it is: A project that had two good years out of eight. Like many failures, there were successful moments and positive impacts on the greater community. But closing down due to losing constitutes failure.

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It actually can be considered a success in the style of the original intent of Chrome, Fiber, the Nexus line, and who knows, maybe the upcoming MVNO: to spur innovation and increased investment in a stagnating product area.

When Google Code came out Source Forge was horrible, and Github didn't exist. Google Code helped both open source software and the market for code hosting. Now there's a dominant, but so far so great, offering with Github, and several very good competitors.

Google Code wouldn't have even launched today, it's both necessary to projects and to Google.

Yeah, it's tempting to take a small bit of credit for the existence of the new generation of project hosting services. Google Code showed that there was room for new players, so it did open the door, but you have to give credit to GitHub for the concept of social coding. I never understood it and it goes against my personal OSS DNA, so I would never have made that leap.

Another way to (very charitably) count Google Code's success is to look at the role it played in Google. One of the largest users of Google Code has always been Google itself. In 2005, Google had released like 8 project tarballs on SF, kind of tentatively. Having Google Code as a home field endorsement allowed that to grow into the thousands. Now, OSS releases seem pretty routine for Google and feel more integrated with the community than ever.

> However, it did fail to win the software forge battle as the space heated up.

This is just the wrong metaphor entirely. It's not a battle because battles, and even wars, have ends.

But you're implying that somehow today is special and marks the end of the battle and therefore GitHub "won" because it's the most popular right now. But will it be in twenty years? If not, will you have to go back and edit your comment?

There's no winning and losing here. It's just an endless continuum of time where popularity waxes and wanes, where things end and new things begin. Google Code had a good run. So did SourceForge before it, and CVS and FTP sites before that. Something will come along to replace GitHub eventually.

The computer world is new enough that we haven't gotten used to the idea of software technology having a finite lifespan, but it absolutely does. That's OK. The goal of every product on Earth doesn't have to be to live forever.

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