A Change to Google Code Download Service

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-change-to-google-code-download-service.html

by edwintorok • 13 years ago

91 77 13 years ago

google-opensource.blogspot.com

I love how they always talk about "abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently" and the "desire to keep our community safe and secure". Whether it is about downloads or about disabling XMPP federation.

This may or may not be true, but it is exactly how late USSR and contemporary Russian bureaucrats reason every of their restrictive and reactionary measures.

I mean, what won't you do for the children? For keeping our community safe? What, you don't want this measure? It seems you aren't a team player then.

dragonwriter8• 13 years ago

> This may or may not be true, but it is exactly how late USSR and contemporary Russian bureaucrats reason every of their restrictive and reactionary measures

I would say that whether or not it is in fact true (and the question you don't address even indirectly of whether, if the stated problem is true, the response is proportional) is more important than whether or not bad actors have used somewhat analogous claims when they were false as pretext for restrictive measures.

Every legitimate justification for action has been used, at one point or another, by some bad actor to justify some bad act.

jlarocco2• 13 years ago

Wow. Your sense of entitlement is astounding.

Google's taking away a minor feature of a completely free "product", and your response is to compare them to bureaucrats in the USSR?

Feel free to use something else.

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

I don't use many Google product but yeah, I do feel entitled to mock them for Politburo-style decision process and rhetoric.

I sit with a bag of popcorn watching them ruining their image.

motters2• 13 years ago

Downloads are hardly a minor feature. Having a downloadable package makes it significantly easier for users to try open source software. The average user is very unlikely to want to compile from source.

BarkMore2• 13 years ago

Google Talk supports XMPP federation and has done so since January 2006. To deal with an onslaught of spam, Google disabled incoming subscription requests for a short time. During this time, all other XMPP federation features continued to work.

Hangouts does not use XMPP, but it's a feature that they didn't implement. It's not something that they disabled.

mey• 13 years ago

While Google has not announced an actual EOL of Google Talk, you can no longer download the desktop client and the Android application tries to directly upgrade to Google Hangout.

From a systems perspective, they have basically prevented anyone new from getting on Google Talk. I am expecting an EOL announcement at some point, as they are otherwise making it hard to get into.

See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... and http://talk.google.com

mietek• 13 years ago

Did you really just compare Google to a totalitarian regime responsible for millions of deaths?

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

Neither late Soviet nor contemporary Russia are responsible for millions of deaths. Any meaningful number of deaths anyway.

They're just boring and insincere.

davidrudder• 13 years ago

"Due to this increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure, we are deprecating downloads." What misuse? Did I miss something? Lots of pedo-porn or something? Or was it simply people using Google code to transfer pirated files?

marshray3• 13 years ago

Any time you serve raw user-supplied files from * .[your site].com you take on some risk.

Older browsers in particular just love to treat everything under the same second level domain as coming from the "same origin". Browsers even have a hardcoded list of country codes and exceptions to prevent "example.co.uk" from setting cookies for all of "*.co.uk".

It's a total security mess and ICANN is not helping the situation by selling new gTLDs.

a3_nm• 13 years ago

Err... Google can just use a custom domain (e.g. "googleusercontent.com" that they already use) to serve user-supplied files rather than stopping the service altogether, so I guess this is not the issue here.

denzil_correa• 13 years ago

    abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently

You mean to say people using Google Code to share porn, copyright material etc. when they can actually do so via other more effective means?

dragonwriter8• 13 years ago

> You mean to say people using Google Code to share porn,

The abuse reports I find from doing a search seem mostly to be that and malware, yeah.

> when they can actually do so via other more effective means?

I don't think Google really cares if people currently abusing Google Code's download hosting could do the same thing easier elsewhere or not, they care that they are doing on Google Code, and consequently are consuming Google staff resources (and, hence, $$) addressing the resulting abuse reports.

zmmmmm4• 13 years ago

That's crazy. Google can't tell the difference between legit downloads and "abusive" material? Google Code projects are already tied to a Google user account, what difference does it make if that user puts their abusive material on Google Drive instead of the downloads section of Google Code?

There are tonnes of code hosting sites going back as far as SourceForge and none of them ever came up with something like this.

There's something extremely weird about Google making this kind of developer hostile move. Why would I use Google Code now when there are any number of alternatives that have no problem with hosting downloads? It's like they are trying to drive us away. I hope it doesn't hint at Google Code being on the "sunsetting" list in the future.

notimetorelax• 13 years ago

It doesn't look like they were improving it either. I guess with Google it means only one thing...

asb• 13 years ago

GitHub also made this move a while back (so it's not completely unprecedented), though I agree it's massively inconvenient.

zmmmmm4• 13 years ago

Thanks .... I must have missed that github did this too (been a while since I tried to post a download there, but I have a number of active Google Code projects).

I wonder if it gives them some kind of safe harbour from the copyright industry. Perhaps a Google Code download is a "download from Google" vs a Google Drive download being a "download from that user".

fishywang• 13 years ago

Actually after GitHub's move, I see many GitHub projects just provided their download link at Google Code. Basically they created a Google Code project just for the download section, even not bother to push the code there.

X-Istence• 13 years ago

Github also no longer has this feature ...

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

Google is tidying up. Why have two storage facilities on an island when Google Drive is as good as it is universal.

dragonwriter8• 13 years ago

> Google can't tell the difference between legit downloads and "abusive" material?

Obviously, they can, or they wouldn't be able to tell that there is an increasing frequency of abuse.

teraflop• 13 years ago

They could estimate the frequency of abuse just by taking a random sample of files and manually evaluating them. That's not inconsistent with it being hard to find all of the abusive files.

mbell• 13 years ago

Frankly, I hope they do drive developers away from google code. Every time I run into a project using google code to host they start off in the red in my assessment. Google code is a mess, it's always been a mess, I avoid it as much as I can.

DannyBee• 13 years ago

Always been a mess? You must have never used sourceforge. There were times before github, and Google Code was great for what it was.

rogerbinns• 13 years ago

I use Google Code because it has a functioning issue tracker (try setting a priority at GitHub and sorting by it), and because you can have multiple repositories per project. The latter is very helpful as it lets you have one issue tracker, wiki, downloads etc for the project but still have things organised better behind the scenes.

Other services like Github could do the multiple repository thing too. In fact they already all do - having one main repository and a second for the wiki. Github said there is no way they would add this functionality when I asked.

Losing Downloads from Google Code is a big pain. That they never made a paid for private version is also annoying.

kkowalczyk• 13 years ago

The difference is: you pay for Google Drive (including bandwidth).

To give you some perspective: I have a popular open source project hosted on Google Code. I host my binary downloads via S3 and since it's popular, it costs me $200+ a month in bandwidth.

If I used Google Code for hosting those binaries, Google would have to pay for that and why should they?

And that's a grey area example i.e. I would be using the service as it was intended to be used.

I'm pretty sure plenty of smart alecks simply abuse the service by putting and random stuff there to avoid paying for bandwidth.

This is a tragedy of commons: Google offered a free service, people started abusing it via excessive usage and Google chose to no longer offer that free service (as opposed to e.g. spend their resource on never-ending battle of policing abusers).

That is very much their right.

Jabbles2• 13 years ago

People download 2TB of binaries from you a month? What do you work on?

StavrosK• 13 years ago

Why not get a Hetzner box or something?

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

It's $60 for 10 TB/mo.

zmmmmm4• 13 years ago

If it was purely a cost of bandwidth issue they could easily limit the size of downloads. Most projects on Google Code only need to offer downloads of a few MB in size to fulfil the basic need. It's really hard to imagine that being a significant cost to Google, and the convenience of having downloads integrated into the service is huge.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

> There are tonnes of code hosting sites going back as far as SourceForge and none of them ever came up with something like this.

Actually, [github phased out their uploads/downloads features starting last December](https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads) too. They didn't mean "abuse" as part of the reasons it was going away, but I wonder if it played a role.

Wilya• 13 years ago

What were the size limits for hosted downloads (they say some limits exist, but no numbers in the FAQ) ? I could understand if they provided too much space for free that they would want to deprecated that in favor of Google drive.

conroy• 13 years ago

As a developer of open-source, downloadable software (a video game), the removal of download sections from source hosting websites (GitHub, Google Code) is really frustrating. Instead, I either have to commit my binaries to a repository, or host them myself of S3.

Edit: Yes, I know that many free options exist and I plan on switching to one of them soon. I just wish that I didn't have to use another service for a common task associated with software development.

trentmb• 13 years ago

... or use bittorent...

vy8vWJlco• 13 years ago

For that matter, with BTSync I can share my project's git repository with a read-only "secret" (identifier, like a magnet link) and cut out google code/github, etc, all together (now, if only there were a foss version).

brondsem• 13 years ago

SourceForge still supports downloads and provides pretty good stats around them too. You can put your OSS file releases on SourceForge and keep other project stuff (code, tickets, etc) elsewhere if you want. Under Admin, Tools, you can pick and choose which SourceForge tools to use or not, and even add external links to project resources on other sites

Disclosure: I work for SourceForge

Kerrick2• 13 years ago

Or dream host's Files Forever. You pay once to put them up, and then they can be downloaded for free by anyone.

andfarm• 13 years ago

Also gone for unrelated reasons, sorry: https://files.dreamhost.com/

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

I thought that was a service for selling files. How does the pricing work out if they can be free?

Edit: I found some of the old text, it's apparently dual-nature. You can make backups that you/friends download for free. You can also have files for sale that people pay to download. No way to have permanent public hosting.

motters2• 13 years ago

This makes little sense, and seems like Google moving to distance itself from the open source community. Without downloads it's extremely unlikely that the average user will be able to try running an open source application. Especially for the larger and more popular projects with multiple dependencies the prospect of compiling from source can be quite daunting especially for anyone who is not a software developer.

rasterizer• 13 years ago

Before someone veers into a misguded USSR analogy (too late: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5753890) note that Github also disabled downloads months ago: https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads

Seems like it's a pain point for code hosting services.

piokuc3• 13 years ago

Bitbucket doesn't have this problem.

c0nfused• 13 years ago

Bitbucket will have this problem.

Anyone giving away free file hosting eventually runs into this problem.

Google just happens to also have drive to fall back on.

piokuc3• 13 years ago

We'll see if Bitbucket takes these kind of drastic measures. Anyway, I don't understand one thing: why is it safer to let developers host the download files on their drive? What's the difference, really? Nobody could upload the files anonymously, could they? Perhaps it's just a way to 'encourage' people to use the drive?

mh-• 13 years ago

I think the problem comes with a significant userbase

piokuc3• 13 years ago

I don't really know the numbers of projects hosted on bitbucket and Google Code but it's true that it's often the case that the underdog (say Bitbucket in this case) offers the best value. Apart from the downloads they also offer free private repos.

wfunction• 13 years ago

Is it just me who smells BS? Why hasn't this happened to SourceForge?

zwily• 13 years ago

Maybe SourceForge makes enough off the bajillion ads they host on download pages to make it worth it?

dsl• 13 years ago

SourceForge doesn't host any of the downloads. They depend on donated mirrors.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Mirrors

marshray3• 13 years ago

Because something else happened to SourceForge instead.

Siecje• 13 years ago

I don't care where you have to host the files. It should be easy for a user to download your code, plain and simple.

tiziano88• 13 years ago

This is not about the code, just binaries or other kinds of download

rpicard• 13 years ago

I don't really have much of an opinion on the news itself, but I'm curious how they decided on January 14th / 15th as the cut-off date. It seems sort of arbitrary.

rurban2• 13 years ago

I especially chose code.google.com over github. After the SourceForge troubles I thought, this is a big company, which will not go away soon. I can trust them hosting my repos there. In comparison to github. But unfortunately github turned out to improve their stack constantly in contrast to googlecode, and now it seems they are also turning down downloads, though that would be a feature that is much cheaper for them to support than for github. It's minimum support cost, their bandwidth is free and almost unlimited. bad bad bad. I start to regret my decision. Though really, binary downloads for open source projects make not much sense nowadays. Compile from source or leave it to a distro.

raylu2• 13 years ago

Binary downloads are often important for Windows projects, though.

rurban2• 13 years ago

So, if windows users cannot deal with open source they should get it from closed source. The binary distros do exist. mingw or cygwin even have graphical UIs. Not a googlecode problem. I hate to provide binary dll's for lazy windows users. windows compilers are free nowadays.

rurounijones• 13 years ago

Maybe confirmation bias but it seems every article I see about Google these days is either:

A) How Google is shutting down / degrading yet another service.

B) Crazy things Schmidt says.

C) Google Glass

Could be doing better on the PR front Google.

rgo• 13 years ago

I wonder where they're going to take the Go downloads page to:

https://code.google.com/p/go/downloads/list

A Change to Google Code Download Service

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