The Google Code Project Hosting site was revealed by Google engineer and Apache Software Foundation chairman Greg Stein at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland Oregon, and is designed to provide a collaborative development environment for open source projects.
As you would expect given that the service is hosted by Mountain View, California-based Google, it also boasts a simple search-focused user interface that makes it easy for potential developers or users to find existing open source projects.
The service is based on the Subversion version control system, which Stein managed in his previously role at Subversion sponsor CollabNet Inc. While the service might be seen as a competitor to SourceForge, which is currently home to 125,872 open source projects, Google maintained it is complementary, and there is no option to import existing projects from other repositories.
