Google should provide an option to allow projects hosted at Google Code to display and profit from Google Ads. Project owners who would opt into the ads would benefit from the revenue they collect. Google would benefit as well by collecting their share of the advertising revenue. Users might benefit because they can perhaps find other advertised services similar to the project they might be currently looking at.

Recently I’ve decide to open source some more code and templates that I’ve written. I could either share that code from my own website, or I could share it on Google Code, being able to make use of some of the other features they have there. The biggest advantage to providing the code from my website is that I’m able to collect on any advertising revenue, which in the past has been around a dollar or two per thousand views. If Google could provide me a way to generate similar revenue by hosting my code on their site, not only would I consider hosting my code their, but I would find more incentive to write open source code projects.

The only major problem with this might be abuse. If I wanted to make a few extra bucks, what is stopping me from “forking” someone elses project just to host their code under a slightly different name on Google code and profit from the visitors I would have stolen from the more legitimate site.

Related posts:

1. Harvest the code
2. Google Web Toolkit for Mac didn’t work for me
3. Octave from the web