July 24th, 2006
New Google service for developers
In a post that was designed to get us all talking, Greg Stein builds suspense on the opening day of OSCON — the Open Source Convention. His article, "A New Google Service" on the Google Code Blog says that he and his team have been working on a new service for the open source community, but refuses to give us the juicy details.
At first I was thinking it might be be something to do with GWT or Eclipse, but his hints suggest it’s a "service" — narrowing down what he might be talking about. I would not refer to Eclipse or GWT as a "service", so I’m going to dismiss that as a possibility.
What could the open source community benefit from then? Well, I am speculating here, but wouldn’t it be great if Google provided a service like Source Forge with the search capability of Krugle , excellent revision control using SVN and continuous integration with Cruise Control?
Greg Stein has a history filled with open source involvement — currently he is Chairman of the Apache Software Foundation and is an engineering manager at Google. He has worked on projects like Subversion (SVN), and WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) in the past — can you fill in the blanks here?
They could be setting up a public code repository for developers. Now that would have people talking! One thing Google really needs now is a community of developers — and a great place to find one would be OSCON. If the word "Google" ever becomes synonymous with "code" in the eyes of the open source community, that would be very interesting — especially since a large portion of open source developers aren’t exactly pro-Microsoft.
Garett Rogers 
is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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