One could argue that this move was in an effort to assuage some criticism (but so what, I say, if that was the motivation) that Google “doesn’t give back” to the open source crowd, yesterday Google decided to open code.google.com (thanks Scoble). The announcement via Google Blog:

We’re very happy to be launching code.google.com today. To begin, we’re releasing some developer-oriented libraries and tools. A number of engineers have used their 20% time to ready these tools for release, and will also help build the communities we hope will form around them.

Chris DiBona is the Open Source Program Manager and they seem quite open, pardon the pun, to contributions:

If you have an application that you’d like to see featured, please feel free to email code@google.com

They are featuring two RSS feeds

• Google Code updates (Atom ) - good use of the blog format for displaying updates to code.google.com
• Featured Project Link (Atom ) - Currently featuring Mark Pilgrim’s PyGoogle, a Python wrapper for the Google API. Just email code@google.com to suggest your project to be featured. Exposure opportunity there.

This new area of Google is being released with three projects that could appeal to C/C++ developers and one project for Python devs. I did some poking around and didn’t see anything geared towards PHP yet, but they have a total of nine different APIs (ok, 8, if you don’t count the BBS for hacking the Keyhole KML file).

Put me in the group that’s glad to see Google introduce this area. This has the potential to be a really interactive and useful way for developers to plug-in to Google’s wide, growing assortment of projects. Promising release.

• Google offers specialized source code search
• Google Talk API sweetens the pot
• 10 useful .NET tools
• AOL *opens AIM to developers
• Scoble invites developers to excite him
• Tickspot project budgeting lackluster compared to PDA options