Code Hosting: SourceForge, Google Code and GitHub

11 thoughts
last posted March 13, 2015, 2:53 p.m.
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I was a big user of SourceForce around 15 years ago. In fact, I was an earlier enough user, I was offered a chance to participate in the VA Linux IPO. Boy did I miss out on that one!

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As Baron points out, SourceForge was so much better than self-hosting CVS, which is what I did in the 90s. (That or RCS!)

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The main reason I left SourceForge was I became a huge fan of SVN over CVS and SourceForge was just too late to implement SVN support.

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Google Code came at just the right time when I needed good SVN hosting.

And they had other innovations too. I really liked their tag-based approach to issues. It enabled tremendous flexibility without the configuration nightmare.

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When I started Pinax, all the component apps were on Google Code. 100% of them. They dominated the Django app space.

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But even in that first year of Pinax, it became clear the open source developers I was collaborating with preferred Git over SVN.

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After I kept hearing about GitHub, I made an off-hand remark in one of my talks that "while 100% of the apps in Pinax are on Google Code, it wouldn't surprise me if most are on GitHub within six months".

And sure enough, 100% of them moved to GitHub.

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Google Code finally introduced Mercurial support and I wonder, if they'd done it sooner, (a) would Mercurial have beaten Git? (b) would Google Code have beaten GitHub?

Or at the very least, would Google Code not be shutting down?

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I do wonder what GitHub is going to miss, like Google Code before them and SourceForge before them.

Although as I said to Jan, if I knew, I'd be doing it :-)

Hindsight is definitely 20/20.