This Google product was so full of hackers and trolls that Google shut it down

Matt Weinberger

Mar 13, 2015, 01:52 IST

Google is shutting down Google Code, an online space for coders to store and share their projects with each other and the larger web, the company announced today.

The reason for the shutdown, Google says, is that it was often used to post malware, spam, and other bad stuff - and it wasn't worth Google's time to pay for its upkeep anymore, especially as most coders have moved to competing service GitHub.

"As developers migrated away from Google Code, a growing share of the remaining projects were spam or abuse. Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management," wrote Google Director Chris DiBona in a blog entry on the shutdown.

As of today, you can't make a new code project on Google Code. The shutdown will be gradual, but by January of 2016, all you'll be able to do is download an archive of your projects. Google is offering tools to migrate Google Code to Github, and similar service SourceForge has its own.

Google Code may have been especially attractive to no-goodniks given that people trust anything downloaded from the Google.com domain without knowing or caring that it's from a third-party developer, security firm Zscaler pointed out in 2013. People would download a game or app and unknowingly hand the keys to the kingdom to a bad actor.

A cursory glance at Twitter shows very little remorse for the death of Google Code, which opened in 2006.

ZING! OH: "man i'm really sad that google code is shutting down. That was my #1 resource for deciding to ignore a project"
- Irakli Nadareishvili (@inadarei) March 12, 2015