Google Code, which provided free project hosting, code search, and issue tracking to the open-source community from 2006, was closed on the 25th of January 2016, following a decade of service that had once placed it among the foremost repositories of collaborative software development on the public internet. At its height it hosted hundreds of thousands of projects and offered developers a clean, reliable alternative to the fragmentation that then characterised open-source hosting.

Its decline was attributed by Google to a rise in spam and abuse, and to the ascendancy of GitHub, which had surpassed it in both features and community gravity. The announcement of its closure, delivered in March 2015, was received with sorrow by those who had built workflows, communities, and careers upon its foundations. Projects were offered migration paths; not all arrivals were clean. What had been carefully maintained in one place was scattered, and the commit histories of a generation of amateur and professional programmers were entrusted to ZIP files on infrastructure that carried no promise of permanence.