In today's open source roundup: Say goodbye to Google Code. Plus: Is Google+ already dead? And Chakra GNU/Linux 2015.03 has been released Google prepares to end Google Code Google Code is going the way of the dodo bird. Google is getting ready to shut it down for good and the site will be completely gone by January 25, 2016. Sean Michael Kerner reports for Internet News: The writing has been on the wall for nearly two years about Google Code’s fate, so the move shouldn’t be much of a surprise. In May 2013, Google shut down Google Code Download services. At the time, I thought that it made no sense, after all what good is a code repository when developers can’t use the service to enable binary downloads? It wasn’t Google shooting itself in the foot that is the prime cause of Google Code’s demise, but rather the extreme success of Github. Nearly every major interesting open-source project that I’m aware of is now using Github. The end of Google Code is coming in a timed approach. As of March 12 all new project creation has been disable. On August 24 the site goes read-only and the site will effectively disappear on January 25, 2016. More at Internet News You can read the official announcement on the Google Open Source Blog: When we started the Google Code project hosting service in 2006, the world of project hosting was limited. We were worried about reliability and stagnation, so we took action by giving the open source community another option to choose from. Since then, we’ve seen a wide variety of better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket bloom. Many projects moved away from Google Code to those other systems. To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub. As developers migrated away from Google Code, a growing share of the remaining projects were spam or abuse. Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management. After profiling non-abusive activity on Google Code, it has become clear to us that the service simply isn’t needed anymore. More at Google Open Source Blog The news about Google Code shutting down caught the attention of Technology redditors who shed few tears about its demise: Bluelightzero: “Good. Their site was awful anyway.” Jdr_: “This was bound to happen sooner or later. Google Code was becoming very outdated, and most projects seem to be on GitHub now. Hopefully nothing of value is lost after 2016.” NoIDontWorkHere: “Everybody left to GitHub as Google did what they usually do to their products: Neglect their project, never update it, and ignore it. The only reason people stay with other Google products as it either 1) Rules the market (Search), 2) No good alternative, or 3) Those who drink Google’s kool-aid.” ClassyJacket: “Exactly. I don’t even trust anything Google releases now that requires any sort of investment at all because they’ll just shut it down in a year. They took Latitude from me. They took Wave. They sold Sketchup. They cancelled Glass. Google+ looks to be on its last legs.” TheDuke45: “Another failed google project. More at Reddit Is Google+ already dead? Speaking of Google, there’s been some news this month that concerns the fate of Google+. Media reports have speculated that Google+ as we’ve known it will cease to exist as Photos and Streams are spun out into their own services. Rich McCormick reports for The Verge: Google is splitting Google+ apart, breaking the social network’s photo element away from what it’s now calling “Streams.” Bradley Horowitz, a longtime Google VP of product, announced that he had become the new lead for both new products, Google Photos and Streams, in a post on Google+ today. Horowitz steps into the role vacated by David Besbris, who took over the top job at Google+ less than a year ago. Horowitz says that he’s now running Google’s Photos and Streams products — two new names for existing elements of Google+ that conspicuously don’t reference the social network. The name changes could possibly suggest that Google is planning to kill or significantly alter the brand, but the company has yet to make an announcement to confirm or deny this. More at The Verge Seth Fiegerman speculates on why Google decided to split Google+ into Streams and Photos: …by splitting up Google+ into parts, Google may be able to get out from under the weakened Google+ brand and encourage employees and users to think about updates through a different framework. It can continue to innovate on its photo editing and sharing features, which have earned praise in recent months from the tech press, and develop communication tools under the promising Hangouts brand. As for the stream product — the central feed that is most synonymous with social networks — some insiders we’ve spoke with in recent weeks speculated that Google could make it more focused on topics and communities. Or even make it more like Pinterest. Or the company could quietly let it rot. And if, one day, it should choose to get rid of it outright, Google won’t have to say it’s killing Google+. It’s just sunsetting Google Streams. More at Mashable I shared my own thoughts about what I consider to be the impending demise of Google+ in a blog post: I can’t say I’m sorry to see Google+ going away. Like many other bloggers I used it to promote my posts, mainly for whatever SEO benefits it offered. And I found it to be a useful tool when looking for sources for posts, reviews, and news roundups. While Google+ was always a bit of a wasteland in terms of users, I could always count on finding interesting articles being posted by other sites. I never really spent much time actually on Google+ for my own personal use. I tend to prefer reading books to wading through lots of social chatter. I guess I’m old school that way, I hearken back to a time before the Internet so I have found social media networks to be filled with far too much inane noise to bother wasting a lot of my time on them. More at Jim Lynch Chakra GNU/Linux 2015.03 released Chakra is a Linux distribution that provides an optimized KDE dekstop. Chakra uses a half-rolling release model that updates applications more frequently while updating the core system less often. You can read the full announcement release on the Chakra site: The Chakra team is happy to announce the third release of the Chakra Euler series. This is a maintenance release to fix some installation issues and provide all the updated packages that landed in the stable repositories since the previous release. The main new feature is that our ISO now supports booting and installing on UEFI systems! Please follow the instructions carefully on how to achieve this. We are aware that everybody is looking ahead into Plasma5 and we are working on the transition, but we believe it is too early for this to be shipped by default and decided to wait for a little bit longer until Plasma 5 has furthered matured and more KDE Applications have switched to Frameworks 5. This ISO ships with the following notable packages and updates: KDE Software: Chakra provides the Applications 14.12.2, except for the applications that have been ported to frameworks 5, which will remain on their 4.14.3 versions. kde-workspace 4.11.16 and kdelibs 4.14.5 Frameworks 5.7 Calligra 2.9.0 Core Packages: kernel 3.18.3 xorg-server 1.16.4 systemd 218 qt5 group 5.4.1 More at Chakra The Chakra download page has the latest release, which weighs in at 1.8 GB. If you run into any problems be sure to drop by the Chakra forum or check out the Chakra wiki. Did you miss a roundup? Check the Eye On Open home page to get caught up with the latest news about open source and Linux. Software DevelopmentOpen Source