thearchivist.funGoogle Code closes, and open-source projects move to other hosts
Google's open source blog announced on 12 March 2015 that Google Code, the project hosting service it had started in 2006, would be shut down. New project creation was disabled the same day. On 24 August 2015 the site went read-only, so source, issues and wikis could still be viewed or checked out. The service closed on 25 January 2016. Google said other hosts such as GitHub and Bitbucket had matured and many projects had moved to them, and that the remaining activity had become increasingly spam or abuse. It offered an exporter to GitHub that converted Subversion and Mercurial projects to Git, migration tools for GitHub and Bitbucket, SourceForge's importer, and downloadable archives of source, issues and wikis available throughout 2016. Google itself moved nearly a thousand of its own open source projects to GitHub, the post said.
Context and provenance
Software projects keep more than code: issues, wikis and discussion explain why decisions were made. The exporters and archives were meant to carry those along, but the post does not say how complete a migrated project was or how many projects were never migrated.
A citation to old Google Code content should say whether it comes from an export, an archive download or a web capture, because the three do not hold the same material.
To test whether a Google Code project moved intact, compare its GitHub copy with a tarball or web capture taken before January 2016, including issues and wiki pages. The blog describes the tools but not their completeness, so a clean comparison is itself a finding worth recording.
Transmission timeline
- 2006
Google Code project hosting starts.
- 2015-03-12
New project creation disabled; closing announced.
- 2015-08-24
The site becomes read-only.
- 2016-01-25
Project hosting closes.
Why it matters
A code host closed in three stages with several export routes, showing what a well-signposted shutdown looks like.
What remains uncertain
The number of projects hosted and the number migrated are not stated.
Sources and evidence
- Google Open Source Blog: Bidding farewell to Google Code
2006 start, 12 March 2015 end of creation, 24 August 2015 read-only, 25 January 2016 closing, export options, stated reasons, nearly a thousand Google projects moved.
Editorial review: 2026-10-22. New evidence may change this account.