Stein is scheduled to give a talk titled “A Google Service for the Open Source Community” at the conference.
According to NewsForge.com reporter Joe Brockmeier, who interviewed Stein, the new service will be similar to SourceForge.net and other community hosting projects, although Google does not see it as a competitor.
According to Stein, Google is aiming to see what it can do with its infrastructure to provide an alternative for open source projects.
The Google service will have a “brand new look,” Stein said, adding that the company was able to “cut out a lot of heavy structure.”
“Rather than doing queries through that heavy structure, we can just full text search across it all,” Stein said. “It provides a really powerful mechanism for issue tracking, but keeps it really simple."
Stein also said that the Google service will feature a “massively scalable Subversion repository.”
While the initial release will not include all planned features — for example the service is still missing a file download feature — Google does plan to make it available to all users without an invitation.
Stein describes the service as ideal for smaller open source projects, adding that Google understands the importance of being able to move data.
"We don't have those [migration features] in there now, but that's something we intend to do soon after launch."