It’s common knowledge that Google likes open source software. With the search engine’s latest move to create an open source repository, it’s getting behind the open source community in a big way. For various reasons, however, it’s getting mixed reviews.
The company unveiled the new service at the O'Reilly Open Source Developers Conference. It's called Project Hosting, and like all Google betas, it's free to use, though you do need to have a Google account. The service is supposed to give open source software developers a web-based ability to track bugs and other issues with their software, collaborate, and otherwise handle the many details involved in working on and coordinating an open source project.
The screen shot above shows the Project Hosting home page. You can see that the company is trying to keep the same clean interface for which it is famous (as you'll see in another screen shot in the next section). It has adopted the "release early, release often" motto popular within the open source community. Judging from some of the comments this particular service has received, however, it's one beta that may have been released just a little too early.
Google seems to be willing to accept the flak as the price it pays to make this work. Project Hosting was created by a regular, small team of Google developers; one wonders if this is one of the benefits of the "20% time" that Google gives its engineers. The goal of the service, according to Google Engineering Manager Greg Stein, is to make issue and bug tracking simpler. "We wanted to get it in peoples' hands and get our feedback so we can shape it as we get informed," Stein explained. "We're launching it very early because we want some feedback."
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