The Mountain View, Calif. firm said yesterday that the project hosting site, available in beta now at http://code.google.com/hosting, also offers its trademarked minimalist user interface, as well as a powerful back-end database to speed up access and lower downtime.

"We wanted to bring a Googley-style layout," said Greg Stein, a technical lead at Google. "Most open-source developers don't need the workflow features that are available [in other sites] today."

During the announcement, made at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Or., Stein downplayed competition with existing sites for open-source developers, especially SourceForge.Net.

"SourceForge and Tigris are doing a really good job," he said. "We don't need to take all of the projects."

Fremont, Calif.-based SourceForge has long been the standard for open-source developers, with more than 166,000 projects.