Announcing apache-extras.org

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has had a profound influence on everything I’ve worked on over the last decade, and a new partnership with them is a great opportunity for saying “thanks” and giving back. Today we’re announcing the launch of apache-extras.org. Much like our launch of eclipselabs.org earlier this year, we’re creating a separate instance of Project Hosting specifically for ASF-related projects to congregate around.

Back in 2000, when the Subversion project was in its nascent stages, we first few committers were all made members of the APR (Apache Portable Runtime) project; Subversion and Apache HTTPD shared this common portability layer. Over the following years, I was pulled ever closer to the workings of the ASF — attending Apachecon conventions and meeting members from other ASF projects. And because the Subversion project started out with a significant number of developers from the Apache community, its own processes came to mimic the same classic consensus-driven culture that the ASF champions.

Years after that, Google Code’s Project Hosting service was also started by ASF members working at Google. So it’s not surprise that those of us who still work on the product share the ASF’s core philosophy: that open source projects aren’t just buckets of code, but are all about people. A codebase without a living, breathing community is a dead project.

So what can we do, as a company, to support open source communities? Providing hosting infrastructure certainly helps, but we can even go a step further. Successful open source software projects are rarely islands of development; larger projects tend to develop ecosystems of related but “unofficial” projects around them. It’s sometimes hard to identify these sub-communities, and so we can help by bolstering their presence: give them a clearer sense of identity and location by inviting them to live under a common banner.

This is why we’re excited to launch apache-extras.org today. By working under a common logo and domain name, we hope these projects can gain more visibility and grow into their own thriving community.

And to the ASF: a great big “thanks” for doing what you do.

[If you already have a project on Google Code and would like to migrate it to the apache-extras instance, you can fill out this request form.]

A fresh look for Google Project Hosting

Simplicity is key to longevity. Since we launched in 2006, even as we’ve added new features, we’ve had very little desire to change our user interface. It’s simple, it’s clean, it’s quick — and as engineers, we like it.

However, the look of other Google products has evolved significantly in the last four years. Rounded corners, for example, are not used as aggressively as they used to be. Therefore, we’ve pushed out a small set of changes that update the style of our pages.

Take a look at the project creation page, project pages, and user profile page and give us your feedback. We look forward to hearing what you think.

By Ali Pasha, Google Project Hosting

A name check, no more

When we first launched Google Project Hosting back in 2006, we wanted to do what we could to encourage best practices around open source development. This was expressed in a variety of ways, one of which was tied into SourceForge’s namespace.

Here’s how it used to work: people would create a project on Google Project Hosting, and if that project’s name was already in use at SourceForge, we would email that project’s administrator and ask them if it was cool to use the name again. Most of the time, the person creating the project on Google Project Hosting was the same person on SourceForge, looking to reserve the name on both.

Sometimes though, the project on SourceForge was inactive or had never been active, so we would manually approve the name on Google Project Hosting. In the last few years, it’s almost always been the latter case where people want to use a name that has never been active, so we’ve stepped in to allocate that name to the new project leader.

Since this is, by a long shot, how most of these name arbitration requests have turned out, in the spirit of efficiency we’ve decided to shut down the SourceForge name check on November 22nd.

Happy hacking this Thanksgiving* and we hope you enjoy Google Project Hosting!

By Chris DiBona for the Google Project Hosting Team