Mad Penguin interviewed Google’s Chris DiBona and Greg Stein at OSCON 2006 last week regarding their new Google Code offering.
Interview with Google’s Chris DiBona and Greg Stein
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Sorry, a little OOT
At the bottom of the page, there is a “Powered by FreeBSD” logo. Wow, that penguin must be mad
.
From the interview, I don’t have a clue about question “is it under GPL?”. How the repository license will affect code that hosted in it?
From the interview, I don’t have a clue about question “is it under GPL?”. How the repository license will affect code that hosted in it?
It’s not about the repository license; under the terms of service, Google will only host projects that are licensed under one of seven standard OSS licenses and will not permit hosting of dual-licensed projects, so it won’t be as varied as something like sf.net, but will be more focused.
Google Code isn’t all that great right now, but I expect that it will be much better within the next 6-12 months. I really liked this interview, the Google guys have a good sense of humor, and they are really in touch with the community. I get the sense that Google will be quite open to the suggestions of the open source community, and I certainly get the sense that the community will be sending thousands of emails their way.
I have two suggestions:
1) A feature-rich hyperlinked source browser similar to OpenSolaris’ OpenGrok browser
2) Source tagging and annotation built into the issue tracker, so that an issue can be assigned an entry point into the code (where the problem most likely resides) and the code can be annotated (in-line) with issue-specific comments.
These would increase productivity enormously. For example, many newbie developers often don’t know where to start contributing. Filter for simple fixes, click on “view source” or whatever, and see if you understand the problem. It takes the guess work out.