The short answer is that Google claim there has been abuse of the downloads facility. Below is a copy of the statement on the posting announcing this:
"Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Each project comes with its own member controls, Subversion/Mercurial/Git repository, issue tracker, wiki pages, and downloads service.
Downloads were implemented by Project Hosting on Google Code to enable open source projects to make their files available for public download. Unfortunately, downloads have become a source of abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently. Due to this increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure, we are deprecating downloads.
Starting today, existing projects that do not have any downloads and all new projects will not have the ability to create downloads. Existing projects with downloads will see no visible changes until January 14, 2014 and will no longer have the ability to create new downloads starting on January 15, 2014. All existing downloads in these projects will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future.
If your project is using downloads to host and distribute files and has a need to periodically create new downloads, we recommend you move your downloads to an alternate service like Google Drive before January 15, 2014. If you choose to move your files to Google Drive, check out our help article."
I know nothing more than the above. Michael Whapples On 02/10/2013 01:18, John J. Boyer wrote:
Michael, I don't understand why Google would stop permitting projects to post new downloads. It makes their project pages almost useless. Maybe I'm missing something, butg could you explain. Thanks, John On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 10:31:52PM +0100, Michael Whapples wrote:Hello, In uploading the LibLouisUTDML 2.5.0 release, I noticed on the page for creating the new download there was a mention that Google Code will not be offering the ability to create new downloads after 15 January 2014. So my question is, how do we plan to provide liblouis and liblouisutdml release downloads after that point? Do we want to provide these through another website/FTP server or shall we look at other project hosting services like SourceForge, BitBucket or GitHub? I guess the other question might be, do people find release downloads useful? This could include binary builds as well as source tarballs, or would just having release tags in the repository be sufficient? Michael Whapples For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
