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Google Unveils Hosting for Open Source Community

Google has launched a hosting service for the Open Source Community, which the company said is an effort to encourage the community. The company said hosting with the service will provide users with a project workspace, version control, issue tracking capabilities, and a mailing list provided by the Google Groups service.

Google said the new project is not to take in SourceForge.net from VA Software that hosts more than 100,000 open-source projects. "We really like SourceForge, and we don't want to hurt SourceForge" or take away projects," said, Greg Stein, an open source engineer with Google. Stein admitted that Google's hosting offering will not have some features present in SourceForge.net and other code repositories that open source projects and enterprise customers might want.

The hosting site Feature mechanisms to store software, discuss it with mailing lists and track bugs. The initial public release will not be feature-complete, but users will be able to sign up right away without an invitation, unlike some of Google's other new service launches.

"We'd like to see projects standardize on the most popular, time-tested ones. The selected licenses offer diversity to meet most developer needs," Google said.

Stein says that Google's hosting has a "brand new look" at issue tracking that may be of interest to open source projects, and says "nobody else out there is doing anything close to it."


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