A Hive of Code and Open Source: Google Chrome

After using Chrome for a month (well I'm on month two pretty much at this point), I've explored a lot of what Chrome has to offer. It's a slick browser, speedy, and it's got some great features.

But really, the point of this project is about open source, and today I'm going to explore Google Code, where many of the open source developers hang out. My goal is to simply give a few feeble insights into the matter, as after reviewing code.google.com for a while, there is really too much inside this massive site than I can take in.

Code.Google.com
code.google.com, or Google Code, is Google's open source "playground". Within the site you will find all the Google APIs, technical documents, news, video, forums, but most importantly, Google Code acts as the place developers can create new code, work on projects together, and receive free versioning control.

Google Code is a place that fosters the development of open source projects, and not just widgets for Google Chrome. The Google Code site lets users develop for any of Google's apps, from Google Maps to Google Book Search. This means developers have a place to host and control their software as the group works together.

Recently, Google Code has added the ability to work on Android Apps as well.

The Open Source mission statement reads:

Recognizing the vital role that open source software plays at Google, we of the Open Source Programs Office are tasked with maintaining a healthy relationship with the open source software development community. We do this by releasing Google-created code, providing vital infrastructure and by creating new open source software developers through programs like the Google Summer of Code.

Project Hosting
These projects are hosted through Google Project Hosting. Project hosting gives developers (and this is a quote from the main Project Hosting page):

• Instant project creation on any topic
• Subversion and Mercurial code hosting with 2 gigabyte of storage space and download hosting support with 2 gigabytes of storage space
• Integrated source code browsing and code review tools to make it easy to view code, review contributions, and maintain a high quality code base
• An issue tracker and project wiki that are simple, yet flexible and powerful, and can adapt to any development process
• Starring and update streams that make it easy to keep track of projects and developers that you care about

Limitations
Before I let you go to far in thinking you can host just any old code project on Google Code Project Hosting, we should look at the vision statement. Their philosophy stems from keeping out a majority of the useless Open Source Licenses and only supporting features that over 80 percent of the community can use.

I hope you enjoyed this little look into Google Code. It's fun to dive in and look at where many of the developers who create exstentions for Google Chrome, create, store, and work together on projects.