As discussed here earlier this week, Google has announced a site where programmers can host their software projects.

The site: code.google.com/hosting is intended to further the open-source programming movement.

News.com reports: “Google’s hosting service, which accumulated dozens of new projects on its opening day, features mechanisms to store software, discuss it with mailing lists and track bugs. Google permits projects under a variety of open-source licenses–but not the full range.”

A Google spokesperson said: “We’d like to see projects standardize on the most popular, time-tested ones. The selected licenses offer diversity to meet most developer needs.”

Google’s service uses hosting software called Subversion. That start-up, which still oversees Subversion development and sells hosts distributed programming projects for its clients, welcomed Google’s move.

“I think it’s a great thing,” said CollabNet co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Brian Behlendorf, who added that Google still contributes to the Subversion project. “It’s not too often that Google can deploy something they didn’t entirely write.”

For those who track newly registered domains from Google, here’s an interesting snippet. In the past few weeks the company has registered a number of domains with even more now under the control of Google Inc. Lots of interesting names including several legal/law firm sounding names.

Read the list here.

Greg Stein writes enigmatically about “A New Google Service” on his blog, Google Code Updates:

I’ve been working with a great team for a while now to produce a new Google Service for the Open Source community — in fact, we’re putting the final touches on it as I write this blog post. Come to my OSCON talk on Thursday the 27th, at 1:45pm, to learn more!

The reliable Garett Rogers speculates: “They could be setting up a public code repository for developers. Now that would have people talking! One thing Google really needs now is a community of developers — and a great place to find one would be OSCON. If the word ‘Google’ ever becomes synonymous with ‘code’ in the eyes of the open source community, that would be very interesting — especially since a large portion of open source developers aren’t exactly pro-Microsoft.”

We shall see.

Google has denied that it is positioning itself as an ISP (internet service provider), despite considerable speculation.

A Google spokesman who declined to be identified said: “Google has no current plans to be an internet service provider outside of our pilot Wi-Fi projects in Mountain View and San Francisco. Our IPv6 allocation simply reflects planning for the day in the future when the services we currently provide via IPv4 will need to be accessible via IPv6.”

Wired.com comments: “Several sources have reported over the last year that Google has been quietly acquiring inactive or ‘unlit’ optical cable — otherwise known as dark fiber — a key ingredient used to build data networks.”

Alex Lightman, CEO of Innofone said: “This is why Google bought mobile dark fiber. It’s to go out and go: ‘All these bozos in America aren’t rolling out IPv6, so we’ll do it if they aren’t going to.’ ”