Google Code was created mainly to combat the monoculture of Sourceforge, which was slowly growing crappier.
Google wanted to create a place open source people actually wanted to be, and had reliable hosting, instead of a place people had to sadly live with that was pretty unreliable (no offense meant to my friends at sourceforge).
Doing so jump started some competition in this space.
While github is slowly becoming a monoculture again, it doesn't appear to slowly be growing crappier or less reliable.
I'm sure in 5-10 years something like Google Code will be necessary again.
(Google code was the first engineering project I worked on at Google, for a few years starting in 2006).
Hi Dan! Remember when I DDOSed Google Code on Super Tuesday 2008, when I thought it would be a good idea to host my election map result tiles there, and then I forgot to turn off the cachebuster in my tile URLs? Good times... :-)
If they wanted to they could turn Google Code into a real competitor for Github with full GAE and Compute integration. That would make it an amazing platform.
Seriously though, yes, that would be really cool, but probably not something you could directly transform google code into.
Google Code is a pretty legacy codebase in a lot of ways.
It would likely require making a new platform to do such a thing.
Google wanted to create a place open source people actually wanted to be, and had reliable hosting, instead of a place people had to sadly live with that was pretty unreliable (no offense meant to my friends at sourceforge).
Doing so jump started some competition in this space.
While github is slowly becoming a monoculture again, it doesn't appear to slowly be growing crappier or less reliable.
I'm sure in 5-10 years something like Google Code will be necessary again.
(Google code was the first engineering project I worked on at Google, for a few years starting in 2006).