Google To Launch Ad-Free Open Source Project Site

Google is adding open source project hosting to its menu of services, said Greg Stein, a Google engineer and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation. Stein was scheduled to announce the launch in a talk Thursday at O'Reilly Media's Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. The new service, to be located at code.google.com, competes with VA Software Corporation's SourceForge.net. Unlike SourceForge.net, which carries both text and banner ads on project web pages, Google's service will be ad-free.

The heart of an open source project hosting service is the version control system, which keeps track of changes to software and allows developers to fix conflicting changes or roll back to previous versions. Google will be using Subversion, an open source version control system to which several Google developers contribute, Stein said. The Subversion repository will store projects' code and other data in Google's own BigTable database, which according to a post by Chris Wetherell on the Google Reader blog, is also the data store behind Google Reader. BigTable, like much other Google software, is designed to run on thousands of inexpensive computers for load balancing and reliability.

Google has simplified the bug reporting interface to make it easier for "Joe Random User" to report a problem with software, Stein said. "All he fills in is a summary and a description," he said. Existing open source bug tracking systems show users often-confusing forms with fields for information that a user probably wouldn't know.

Google has taken the unusual step of cooperating with SourceForge.net to pre-reserve project names registered there, said Chris DiBona, the company's open source program manager. "We won't get projects trying to impersonate others," DiBona said. Google won't register a project name that's also on SourceForge without the SourceForge account holder's permission, he said. A GMail account will be required in order to create a project, Stein said.

Each project will receive 100MB of space for code in Subversion, and 50MB for the bug tracker, and Google plans to increase the quota on request for any projects that show a need for it, Stein said. Future plans will concentrate on improving the integration between bug tracking and source code management, Stein said. For example, when a developer changes code in Subversion and posts a commit message with the change, the message will be able to modify the status of a related bug.

"This is how we're going to be publishing our open source code. We're going to move all of those projects into our own project hosting," Stein said.