Google pre-empts OSCON headlines

It's like a yacht in the midst of rowboats, swamping everything around it, sometimes by accident. Another analogy might be a whale among minnows.

So it may be quite accidental that Google has pre-empted the big headlines at OSCON in Portland this week with a single blog entry.

The text reads:

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!

That's it. Except the author, engineering manager Greg Stein, is also head of the Apache Software Foundation. And he heads the Subversion project, an open source version controller that beats CVS two ways from Sunday. And he used to be with CollabNet.

Thus, the speculation centers on a Google repository for open source code, sort of a Sourceforge killer. And is anyone going to be talking about anything else before Thursday? Probably not.