Google Deepens Commitment to Open Source

The Mountain View Company has taken a step further in its efforts to support open source programming development and has presented on Thursday a Website designed to host software projects. At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Google's engineering manager Greg Stein made this announcement to the open source community stressing that the initiative doesn't mean take a swing at VA Software's SourceForge.net that runs a similar service hosting currently over 100.000 open source projects.

"One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open-source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting," Google said. "We'd like to see projects standardize on the most popular, time-tested ones. The selected licenses offer diversity to meet most developer needs," Google said.

The Mountain View Company has enabled the hosting service through Google Code that also provides support for APIs and developer tools through which Google services can be added to applications. Google has specified that however, accounts will be limited to projects driven by the Apache license, Artistic License, GNU General Public License (GPL), Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Mozilla License, BSD license, and MIT licenses.