Google Code disables direct file downloads

Google has announced that it will in future not allow direct file downloads from its Google Code hosting service. The company says that "increasing misuse" of the service has forced it to take the step in the interest of keeping the platform's community "safe and secure".

The measure will go into effect immediately for new projects and for existing projects that have not used the downloads facility. Projects that have downloads will need to move them to another hosting service by 14 January 2014; the company recommends its Google Drive service as an alternative. All existing downloads on the service will continue to be available "for the foreseeable future" and source code hosted on Google Code will continue to be available through Git, Mercurial and Subversion checkouts.

More information for users wishing host direct file downloads in conjunction with hosting source code at Google Code is available in the Downloads FAQ at the Google Code wiki. FLOSSmole's 2012 data on projects hosted at Google Code puts the number of projects on the service at approximately 300,000. FLOSSmole is a project that collects data related to free software and open source projects on various hosting platforms.

(fab)