Not sure where you're seeing failure? I remember that Google code was very popular back then alongside MS's Codeplex (for .NET stuff at least), both being better than sourceforge, but neither really attempting to be businesses and just providing free code hosting. They both shut down around the same time with migration tools for GitHub, and as we all know, MS eventually went on to buy GitHub outright.
For me, GitHub had only entered my sphere of knowledge when the Google code phase out started. It was pretty painful because I was already struggling to teach myself to code and git seemed incomprehensible compared to svn. Sourceforge was up there with cnet as being a somewhat sketchy site which could occasionally have something genuinely interesting to download, but usually did not. So I can kind of believe that GC/Codeplex weren't necessarily aiming to be profitable products. Selling access as an enterprise product was a common model even back then, and it would've been an obvious route if they were actually aiming for profit.
Curious whether you read the (pretty short?) post you replied to...
That post said that their goal was to make sure SourceForge, which was truly awful and also the only game in town back then, did not become (or remain) dominant.
Pretty hard to argue they failed at that goal when SourceForge is so not-dominant today that some people here didn't even recognize its acronym!
It was also written in our OKRS, etc at the time. I probably have plenty of internal evidence.
In the end, we would have been happy if SF had become a great and reliable place as well. You are assuming the goal was to destroy it. But in practice, we expected them to compete for real and become better as a result.
I can't speak to modern Google, but old Google definitely did things to ecosystem-shape. It wasn't "sane" in the sense that, yes, it does buck simple calculations of profit-maximization; being able to avoid those simple calculations is the reason the founders structured the IPO to maintain executive control, so they could make wild bets that broke with business tradition.
If the goal is to stop a competitor from slow or stop a competitor from gaining market share, and you slow or stop them from gaining marketshare, how is that failing?
So a third competitor appearing and taking the marketshare from both of them doesn't count? Such a great logic to get promotions. Of course it would come from google.
You are again thinking in terms of winning, and in literally the first sentence i wrote that we were not trying to win anything.
The goal was to get SF to not be a shitty monoculture.
Ideally by SF being forced to compete with us, and making their product less shitty. It does not require destroying or harming SF to achieve this goal.
They chose, ironically, not to compete, and were destroyed as a result of their own choice.
It also happened that third parties came along and helped make it both not shitty, and not a monoculture.
Goal achieved. Why does marketshare have to enter into any of it?
Nobody was trying to destroy anything.
The person who started the project (dibona) came from VA linux and slashdot, and was very good friends with the people who ran both (still is!).
He also started summer of code and lots of other things.
If you send troops to block the enemy from advancing, if those troops block the enemy from advancing, they've succeeded. Even if those troops didn't "win the war". Even if they all died in combat. The mission was a success.
If you want to say this is revisionist history from a googler... sure - make that case. But simply deploying a service to try to 1) prevent a competitor from gaining marketshare and/or 2) get the competitor to suck less... it's a valid move.
Personally, I don't think google code alone made much of an impact on SF directly, but google code and ms codeplex together probably did get people to start considering using something beyond SF.
Because the truth matters? it is quite annoying to see people trying to bend reality to make themselves or their projects more important than they really were. Google code sucked, like many google projects.
Github wasn't successful because Google Code made people "start considering using something beyond SF". Github succeeded because git is great and social network features allowed it to reach a much bigger audience.
Google code did not at all suck, compared to the alternatives - essentially just SourceForge! - at the time it launched.
A lot of what the OP wrote rings true to me, Github obviously hit on a better model, but they clearly had different goals.
I'm sympathetic to people who came into this landscape after Github was already around feeling like google code was a lame also-ran, but as someone who thought "why is everything hosted through this shitty SourceForge website" when I first started using open source, it was a huge improvement.
DannyBee didn’t claim that they “brought SourceForge down” or even attempted to. They said Google Code was intended to prevent a monoculture, i.e. SourceForge being the only popular option.
Again, I'm sorry, but you really need to work on your reading comprehension! My post in no way claims that "Google Cloud Code is what brought SourceForge down".
It just says that the original post says their goal was for SourceForge to not be the shitty but dominant monoculture that it was when they started, and that fast forwarding to today, it clearly is not.
It may well be the case that they had absolutely nothing to do with that! But the goal, as stated, was achieved either way.
> And why is it a believable goal that as long as you bring down a competitor, it's OK if you fail? No one (sane) has such a goal.
I just can't fathom why you think this. Can you explain it more? You have stated it a few times, but not yet explained it.
in hindsight, the success of GitHub could be seen as a missed opportunity for Google with Google Code but at the time SourceForge was a website with some advertising, the commercial opportunity was minuscule compared to what GitHub is today. I'm sure you can go back to Hacker News from 2007/2008 and find discussions that confirm what the parent said.
