With Developers Flocking To GitHub, Google Code Closes Its Doors After 9-Year Run

This is sure to sound like music to GitHub's owners: Google Code is done. On Thursday, the company turned off the ability to create new projects, and come August, all projects will be switched to read-only mode. As of next January, the service will officially be closed, although project owners will have all of 2016 to fetch their repository in the form of a tarball.

Google Code launched in 2006 with good intentions; it was supposed to give developers a good replacement for self-installed code management, but furthered its use with extra features. GitHub, meanwhile, offered much of the same, but quickly became a go-to place for new development projects. Even Google itself moved or started a number of projects at GitHub, so ultimately, this move isn't much of a surprise at all.

Example hosted Google Code project

Google's Director of Open Source Chris DiBona says via the announcement blog post: "...we’ve seen a wide variety of better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket bloom. Many projects moved away from Google Code to those other systems. To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub."

If you happen to host a project on Google Code, instructions for migration are given at the link below. Fortunately, none of the methods seem to be terribly complicated, and shouldn't require that much manual interaction. Google notes that it will continue to host Git repositories for Chrome and Android, so it's not giving up on Git entirely - it's just not prepared to move its biggest projects elsewhere. I can't say I blame it.