At OSCON, the O’Reilly open source conference, Google announced an open source project hosting site called: Google Code Project Hosting. Greg Stein, an open source engineer with Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, says in an interview with NewsForge that it’s not supposed to rival SourceForge.net, but I guess that SF will of course suffer from Google’s new service.

Google’s new system is built on a modified Subversion repository that stores it’s data in Big Table, a scalable, storage technology used in Google. Subversion is a very flexible and proven technology these days.

At a first glance, the smooth AJAX interface is not very present as with GMail and Google’s Calendar, but as allways the interface is very straightforward. For now it doesn’t provide as much information as you would expect, but as Stein says: “it’s not yet feature complete”. They are working very hard on delivering new features.

Stein describes the project as ideal for smaller open source projects, rather than larger projects with more complex needs, such as Apache. However, they also say that larger projects are welcome of course.

Well let’s wait and see what happens with this new service. A little competition doesn’t hurt anybody!