When the co-founders started-up Google, their main source of funding was their credit cards. Any way they could find to leverage resources was critical. One approach was to use open source software. Basically, this is software that is freely available – so long as all additions to the software is also made free.

In light of this, it makes sense that Google is launching a portal for open source, called Project Hosting.

The leading portal is SourceForge.net, which has built an extensive community over the years. Google said it is not competing against it.

I think, Google does have an interesting view of what "competition" really is. Google is leveraging its powerful search technology. In the programming world – in which projects have endless amounts of lines of code – strong search is a must-have.