31 ms·

Shutting down CodePlex

327 points by Permit 10y ago

lwlml 10y ago
I'm not one to usually defend Microsoft, but this is a sad day. This increases the world's reliance on fewer and fewer developer-collaboration systems like Github. But, if you're set on hosting your own, it isn't so bad these days. Gogs, Gitea, GitLab and Fossil will continue to push on. If you're going to rely on these external third-parties, please do consider self-hosting your own mirrors of your repositories. Thankfully, git makes this kind of thing astoundingly easy compared to the bad-ole-days of RCS and CVS. There's no excuse not to maintain your own local backups.
- babuskov 10y ago
  > But, if you're set on hosting your own, it isn't so bad these days. +1. Exactly what I wanted to say. Back in sourceforge days setting up your own internet server to run the central repo was a big hurdle. Solving that and mailing list and the bug tracker was a nice relief. These days you can set up your own server in very short time for minuscule amount of money.
  - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    Increasingly companies are shedding on-prem infrastructure. One startup I was at har everyone work exclusively on laptops (though with docking stations and monitors) and had a policy where everyone had to take their computers home every night - nothing to steal. Everything was Cloud-hosted on AWS, Atlassian, GitHub and Dropbox. To my surprise it worked quite well - the only issue was working with large files because we had no NAS/file-server and only ~10mbps upstream. Not having to pay for any on-site sysadmin definetly saved the company money - even more-so when you consider there was no physical servers to break either.
    - paulryanrogers 10y ago
      "...consider there was no physical servers to break either." Consider that the cloud they did rely upon was comprised of other people's computers.
      - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
        The point of "the cloud" isn't just global accessibility, but also massive redundancy - Azure Storage and S3 both replicate data globally in case of data-center meteor impacts and well-designed web-services are stateless and run in a a load-balanced, fault-tolerant manner. Arguably a much better proposition than a dusty old Dell server locked in a closer.
        paulryanrogers 10y ago
        And when S3 was glitchy recently [those] depending solely upon it suffered. Arguably less than they may have otherwise. But with one's own hardware one has more control. EDIT: fixed swipe typo
    - syshum 10y ago
      > everyone had to take their computers home every night - nothing to steal. Everything was Cloud That is scary if you believe that.. That nothing can be stolen because it is in "the cloud"... I am sure there are a few Celebs that will tell you in graphic detail how wrong you are. >Not having to pay for any on-site sysadmin definetly saved the company money Likely compromising Security, backups, and a few other things as you depend on "the cloud" to provide these things I am sure the customers at CodeSpaces ( http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-infrastructure/code-spaces-lesson-cloud-backup/314805651 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-infrastructure/code-sp... ) thought their data was secure in the "cloud" as well I bet you claim that will nto happen to you because you only use "the largest providers" like AWS or Dropbox.... Far to often I see companies moving their entire operations to "the cloud" with no planning for Off-Boarding, Data Backups, or anything, they just assume "its the cloud so everything is perfect, cheap, secure and we need no neckbeard admins" That is a scary scary trend. SaaS can be a good tool, when used right. It can also be the end of the organization when done wrong...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I'll chime in with similar sentiments. I could criticise Microsoft 'til the cows come home (and have), but the competition in this space would be a positive.
mindcrime 10y ago
I actually consider this a Bad Thing. Monosystems are not a desirable thing, and nobody (except GitHub) wants a world where all open source projects are hosted on GitHub. Now, Git itself being a DVCS mitigates the downsides of this a little bit, but still... I think it's better to live in a world where you can use GitHub, Bitbucket, CodePlex, GitLab, SourceForge, etc., instead of narrowing things down to pretty much just GitHub. Nothing against GH per-se... we're paying customers and fairly happy with their service. But I still don't want to see their competition going away.
- gjtorikian 10y ago
  I don't disagree with you at all. The competition between GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket spurs creativity and is a good thing. However, let's not fool ourselves: services like Codeplex, Google Code, or Sourceforge, that are not updated or providing new value, are going to be left behind and abandoned. In other words, their continued service wasn't providing any value, to their users or "competitors", because they weren't evolving. I would rather people put their open source project on a code hosting service that is someone's priority, not just one that exists and is useless.
  - edgyswingset 10y ago
    This is key, I think. Codeplex feels like abandonware to me. All the important Microsoft projects have migrated to GitHub, where all the active development is happening. Perhaps this also screws over some people who wish to stay on Codeplex, but I can imagine it was just a cost to Microsoft. No use in having something which only costs you money lingering around.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - jlarocco 10y ago
    Agreed. CodePlex and to a lesser extent Google Code both felt less like competing products and more like MS and Google just wanted to have a code hosting presence to advertise that they "do" open source. Neither offered much that couldn't be provided with barebones cheap hosting and a Gitlab install, and my impression as an outsider was thatneither really improved over time. TBH, GitHub and BitBucket may not offer too much over GitLab any more either, but they are at least improving their products all the time and there's a sort of trendy network effect in using them that didn't exist for CodePlex or Google Code.
newsat13 10y ago
Does GitHub charge companies when keeping only opensource code? Like the big companies like Google, Microsoft have lots of code there - who is paying for it? Or this is just free marketing for GH?
- chrisper 10y ago
  For Microsoft, they are all under the same Microsoft account. So I guess these big boys have special contracts.
  - nathantotten 10y ago
    MS has many different orgs. Example: https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure
    - skynode 10y ago
      Another example: https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet
    - chrisper 10y ago
      Interesting. Though I'm sure it's still tied to the same customer account, no?
  - jeffwilcox 10y ago
    If we were only doing pure open source, public repos, there would be no cost to us ($0). The truth is that we actually do pay, as we have private repositories. We ask that people prepare their initial open source releases during a 30-day window - making sure they have a decent README file, the right LICENSE, Code of Conduct, etc. Full disclosure, I work at Microsoft within our Open Source Programs Office and I own our billing relationship with GitHub for the large organizations including Microsoft, Azure, etc. We pay via a yearly invoice for a set level of services today but we're always looking for better ways to collaborate with GitHub!
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  I imagine most of these companies are using GitHub Enterprise, which costs plenty of money.
YCode 10y ago
I think it comes down to two things: 1 - CodePlex was a more elegant repo for a more civilized age and hasn't really kept pace with the features people want. 2 - Microsoft doesn't really benefit from keeping it open anymore and MS is realizing they can reap many of the benefits of collaboration without all the overhead by just using Github. Github has the marketshare, but there are other options. Gitlab for example seems to be moving in the right direction and I'm excited to see what they do in the next two years or so.
- hubert123 10y ago
  I don't see how you come up with this stuff. Codeplex was simply uglier than Github, that's it. Both graphical design wise and interaction design wise.
- alexmullans 10y ago
  You're correct - our investment has shifted to Visual Studio Team Services (https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/git/ https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/git/). We use GitHub extensively for our open-source work, and VSTS for private/internal projects. (Disclaimer: I'm on the PM team for VSTS & CodePlex)
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
My biggest concern, as with the Google Code shutdown, is wondering how much obscure code is going to end up lost to time. For .NET projects, open source code is growing, but still pretty rare. A lot of times when looking for stuff I end up on CodePlex. So the biggest question for me is going to be: How many old abandoned projects actually do get migrated.
- EvanAnderson 10y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking, too. I'm not seeing if non-project owners will be able to download archives of projects. It would be nice if anyone could download a project's archive. I'm also going to invoke the names "Archive Team" and "Jason Scott" here to see if either one magically appears here.
  - alexmullans 10y ago
    Anyone will be able to download a project's archive from the CodePlex Archive site once it launches.
    - EvanAnderson 10y ago
      Thanks for jumping in here, Alex. If you have a moment to indulge a couple more questions I'd appreciate it. Will that archive have the same "fidelity" as the project-owner's archive? Will either archive include the complete commit history for the source code, or is it just a snapshot of the code as of the site going read-only?
      - alexmullans 10y ago
        Sorry for the delay - this response got caught up in the rate limiter. Yes, the archive functionality is available to everyone, and will export the source code, documentation, license, issues, and downloads. For source code history, it depends on the source code type. For Git and Mercurial projects, we'll include the .git/.hg folder so you have the full history; for TFS, it'll be just the snapshot as of read-only.
Semaphor 10y ago
It's great that they'll keep an archive. I sometimes find random stuff for rare asp.net cases on codeplex
andrewmcwatters 10y ago
One important thing many people hardly mention during events in history like this is that often software is lost in the sands of time, never to be recovered. Some software out there is actually "finished" and undisturbed by surrounding ecosystems for the most part. When the author or maintainers are no longer around and a host collapses around a project, sometimes you just can't find the source anymore. It's out there, for sure, but most likely in cold storage, collecting dust in some old hobbyist's closet.
- simplehuman 10y ago
  In some circles, "finished" code is removed promptly as "bitrot" :) But seriously, that's a true story!
- alexmullans 10y ago
  Keeping the source available for projects, even those don't migrate to GitHub or elsewhere, is important to us. We've updated the blog post with some additional details on the long-term archive plans: After December 15th, 2017, "CodePlex.com will start serving a read-only lightweight archive that will allow you to browse through all published projects – their source code, downloads, documentation, license, and issues – as they looked when CodePlex went read-only. You’ll also be able to download an archive file with your project contents, all in common, transferrable formats like Markdown and JSON. Where possible, we’ll put in place redirects so that existing URLs work, or at least redirect you to the project’s new homepage on the archive. And, the archive will respect your “I’ve moved” setting, if you used it, to direct users to the current home of your project. There isn’t currently any plan to have an end date for the archive."
  - frik 10y ago
    So everyone will be able to browse and download unmaintained open source code, correct? That would be good.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Thank you for handling this properly. We've had too many instances of sites shutting down without thinking about archival, so it's great seeing it done with some thought.
kevan 10y ago
This is a great example of how to perform a successful wind-down. The win for monoculture isn't great for us, but at least they're shutting down gracefully.
booleandilemma 10y ago
Will CodePlex's sourcecode be hosted on GitHub?
lawl 10y ago
It's funny how in their breakdown of "organisations with the most open source contributors" they split up google and angular. Now I'm sure there's some overlap between these two groups, but that's still a pretty obvious this metric was chosen to make sure microsoft comes out on top. I mean [GitHub] organisations with the most open source contributors seems like a pretty meaningless metric anyways for judging anything.
- alexmullans 10y ago
  That chart comes from the GitHub Octoverse site (https://octoverse.github.com/ https://octoverse.github.com/), and reflects GitHub Organizations (e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/ https://github.com/microsoft/). The Angular and Google entries each represent their own Organization (https://github.com/angular https://github.com/angular and https://github.com/google https://github.com/google).
  - lawl 10y ago
    That doesn't change anything. The metric is useless in the context presented by Microsoft. It was picked because MS ranked on top on this one. That's what I already implied in the original post. How you structure your team(s) on GitHub has nothing to do with your "commitment to opensource" or whatever your marketing phrase is.
    - Flenser 10y ago
      Microsoft has several other github organisations, so they weren't representing the total "company" contributors for themselves either. e.g.: They have separate github organisations for: https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/PowerShell https://github.com/PowerShell https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet (and many more smaller orgs as well, as I'm sure google do too)
- nathantotten 10y ago
  Microsoft has tons of other orgs besides /Microsoft. For example https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure
kemonocode 10y ago
One day too early for Aprils Fools, ain't it? I'm not really one to kiss up Microsoft most of the time, but the fact GitHub is becoming the new SourceForge is not too keen.
- xanderstrike 10y ago
  I can't see Github going the way of SourceForge. SF was exclusively a download portal for FOSS, it needed ads (and, eventually, malware) to survive because it had no other revenue stream. Github, on the other hand, really only hosts FOSS to further cement its position as the standard in git hosting. Their bread and butter is large organizations who are paying per seat to keep their code hosted there.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    There was an effort at VA Linux to convert SourceForge into an enterprise project. That failed. I believe that's when SF was spun off (along with Slashdot) as an independent. Or was it that SF became what was pretty much all that was left of VA after the hardware business left? I'm a bit fuzzy on the history, and wasn't there at the time, though I do know people who were. Point being that SourceForge was not intended to be exclusively FOSS.
- ajross 10y ago
  SourceForge really only became a problem very late in the game when they had mostly been abandoned for new development and started trying to monetize the (often semi-abandoned) projects still hosted there. Their behavior was bad, but honestly I think a little too much was made of it. People got all wound up over the ethics issues (leeching off of other people's open source work to sell creepy adware), but the actual work itself remained accessible and supported. Honestly even in its fading days, if you wanted a free host for a CVS archive and mailing list, SourceForge remained a good choice. It was providing more value than it derived even then. If that's what happens to github, I think we can deal. Someone would just start a giant project to pull and mirror all the junk locked inside github (git makes that process distributed, you don't have to actually crawl their site and can use external archives) and we'd just start the cycle all over again.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
I always enjoyed CodePlex but they limited it just to open source projects no availability to host private projects or anything as far as I know. They could of become a backbone for NuGET packages or something and put the .NET ecosystem on there. As others have said, it's a shame to see everything shift to GitHub.
bsimpson 10y ago
Microsoft has definitely stepped up its open source efforts in recent years and should be lauded for that: projects like TypeScript are good for the community. Still, their brag about being the most popular org made me wonder how the chips would shake out if you could truly count all the software published by one company. Google, for instance, tends to have separate orgs for its major open source projects: Polymer, Angular, Material, AMP, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Firebase, and Chrome are all examples of major Google open source projects that each have (at least) one of their own orgs. GitHub's org/repo URL scheme doesn't scale well to companies with many unrelated initiatives, so measuring "most contributors by GitHub org" isn't a useful metric.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- simooooo 10y ago
  What's that got to do with codeplex?
  - aembleton 10y ago
    In the article they made this claim: "In fact, our GitHub organization now has more than 16,000 open source contributors – more than any other organization..."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fithisux 10y ago
My problem with google code and codeplex is that they should have autoexported to github. Some projects may have value even if their creator could have died.
fithisux 10y ago
My problem with google code and codeplex is that they should have autoexported to github. Some projects may have value even if their creator could have died.
laughinghan 10y ago
What does "shutting it down completely" mean if all published projects are still available read-only? If I'm understanding correctly, all published projects were already read-only by then, so what changes when they shut it down "completely"? Is it just a behind-the-scenes switchover to the "lightweight archive"?
- krallja 10y ago
  The lightweight archive won't support VCS pulls, just HTML and an archive of the repository, from how I read it.
  - alexmullans 10y ago
    That's correct. The archive site will be a new, read-only architecture that serves static content. We'll be decommissioning the current TFS, Git, and Mercurial servers after 12/15/17.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hueving 10y ago
It upsets me that people who care about the open source movement so fervently support closed source tooling like Github and EC2 in the name of convenience.

327 points by Permit 10y ago

lwlml 10y ago

I'm not one to usually defend Microsoft, but this is a sad day. This increases the world's reliance on fewer and fewer developer-collaboration systems like Github. But, if you're set on hosting your own, it isn't so bad these days. Gogs, Gitea, GitLab and Fossil will continue to push on. If you're going to rely on these external third-parties, please do consider self-hosting your own mirrors of your repositories. Thankfully, git makes this kind of thing astoundingly easy compared to the bad-ole-days of RCS and CVS. There's no excuse not to maintain your own local backups.

babuskov 10y ago
> But, if you're set on hosting your own, it isn't so bad these days. +1. Exactly what I wanted to say. Back in sourceforge days setting up your own internet server to run the central repo was a big hurdle. Solving that and mailing list and the bug tracker was a nice relief. These days you can set up your own server in very short time for minuscule amount of money.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  Increasingly companies are shedding on-prem infrastructure. One startup I was at har everyone work exclusively on laptops (though with docking stations and monitors) and had a policy where everyone had to take their computers home every night - nothing to steal. Everything was Cloud-hosted on AWS, Atlassian, GitHub and Dropbox. To my surprise it worked quite well - the only issue was working with large files because we had no NAS/file-server and only ~10mbps upstream. Not having to pay for any on-site sysadmin definetly saved the company money - even more-so when you consider there was no physical servers to break either.
  - paulryanrogers 10y ago
    "...consider there was no physical servers to break either." Consider that the cloud they did rely upon was comprised of other people's computers.
    - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
      The point of "the cloud" isn't just global accessibility, but also massive redundancy - Azure Storage and S3 both replicate data globally in case of data-center meteor impacts and well-designed web-services are stateless and run in a a load-balanced, fault-tolerant manner. Arguably a much better proposition than a dusty old Dell server locked in a closer.
      - paulryanrogers 10y ago
        And when S3 was glitchy recently [those] depending solely upon it suffered. Arguably less than they may have otherwise. But with one's own hardware one has more control. EDIT: fixed swipe typo
  - syshum 10y ago
    > everyone had to take their computers home every night - nothing to steal. Everything was Cloud That is scary if you believe that.. That nothing can be stolen because it is in "the cloud"... I am sure there are a few Celebs that will tell you in graphic detail how wrong you are. >Not having to pay for any on-site sysadmin definetly saved the company money Likely compromising Security, backups, and a few other things as you depend on "the cloud" to provide these things I am sure the customers at CodeSpaces ( http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-infrastructure/code-spaces-lesson-cloud-backup/314805651 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-infrastructure/code-sp... ) thought their data was secure in the "cloud" as well I bet you claim that will nto happen to you because you only use "the largest providers" like AWS or Dropbox.... Far to often I see companies moving their entire operations to "the cloud" with no planning for Off-Boarding, Data Backups, or anything, they just assume "its the cloud so everything is perfect, cheap, secure and we need no neckbeard admins" That is a scary scary trend. SaaS can be a good tool, when used right. It can also be the end of the organization when done wrong...
dredmorbius 10y ago
I'll chime in with similar sentiments. I could criticise Microsoft 'til the cows come home (and have), but the competition in this space would be a positive.

mindcrime 10y ago

I actually consider this a Bad Thing. Monosystems are not a desirable thing, and nobody (except GitHub) wants a world where all open source projects are hosted on GitHub. Now, Git itself being a DVCS mitigates the downsides of this a little bit, but still... I think it's better to live in a world where you can use GitHub, Bitbucket, CodePlex, GitLab, SourceForge, etc., instead of narrowing things down to pretty much just GitHub. Nothing against GH per-se... we're paying customers and fairly happy with their service. But I still don't want to see their competition going away.

gjtorikian 10y ago
I don't disagree with you at all. The competition between GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket spurs creativity and is a good thing. However, let's not fool ourselves: services like Codeplex, Google Code, or Sourceforge, that are not updated or providing new value, are going to be left behind and abandoned. In other words, their continued service wasn't providing any value, to their users or "competitors", because they weren't evolving. I would rather people put their open source project on a code hosting service that is someone's priority, not just one that exists and is useless.
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  This is key, I think. Codeplex feels like abandonware to me. All the important Microsoft projects have migrated to GitHub, where all the active development is happening. Perhaps this also screws over some people who wish to stay on Codeplex, but I can imagine it was just a cost to Microsoft. No use in having something which only costs you money lingering around.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jlarocco 10y ago
  Agreed. CodePlex and to a lesser extent Google Code both felt less like competing products and more like MS and Google just wanted to have a code hosting presence to advertise that they "do" open source. Neither offered much that couldn't be provided with barebones cheap hosting and a Gitlab install, and my impression as an outsider was thatneither really improved over time. TBH, GitHub and BitBucket may not offer too much over GitLab any more either, but they are at least improving their products all the time and there's a sort of trendy network effect in using them that didn't exist for CodePlex or Google Code.

newsat13 10y ago

Does GitHub charge companies when keeping only opensource code? Like the big companies like Google, Microsoft have lots of code there - who is paying for it? Or this is just free marketing for GH?

chrisper 10y ago
For Microsoft, they are all under the same Microsoft account. So I guess these big boys have special contracts.
- nathantotten 10y ago
  MS has many different orgs. Example: https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure
  - skynode 10y ago
    Another example: https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet
  - chrisper 10y ago
    Interesting. Though I'm sure it's still tied to the same customer account, no?
- jeffwilcox 10y ago
  If we were only doing pure open source, public repos, there would be no cost to us ($0). The truth is that we actually do pay, as we have private repositories. We ask that people prepare their initial open source releases during a 30-day window - making sure they have a decent README file, the right LICENSE, Code of Conduct, etc. Full disclosure, I work at Microsoft within our Open Source Programs Office and I own our billing relationship with GitHub for the large organizations including Microsoft, Azure, etc. We pay via a yearly invoice for a set level of services today but we're always looking for better ways to collaborate with GitHub!
edgyswingset 10y ago
I imagine most of these companies are using GitHub Enterprise, which costs plenty of money.

YCode 10y ago

I think it comes down to two things: 1 - CodePlex was a more elegant repo for a more civilized age and hasn't really kept pace with the features people want. 2 - Microsoft doesn't really benefit from keeping it open anymore and MS is realizing they can reap many of the benefits of collaboration without all the overhead by just using Github. Github has the marketshare, but there are other options. Gitlab for example seems to be moving in the right direction and I'm excited to see what they do in the next two years or so.

hubert123 10y ago
I don't see how you come up with this stuff. Codeplex was simply uglier than Github, that's it. Both graphical design wise and interaction design wise.
alexmullans 10y ago
You're correct - our investment has shifted to Visual Studio Team Services (https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/git/ https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/git/). We use GitHub extensively for our open-source work, and VSTS for private/internal projects. (Disclaimer: I'm on the PM team for VSTS & CodePlex)

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

My biggest concern, as with the Google Code shutdown, is wondering how much obscure code is going to end up lost to time. For .NET projects, open source code is growing, but still pretty rare. A lot of times when looking for stuff I end up on CodePlex. So the biggest question for me is going to be: How many old abandoned projects actually do get migrated.

EvanAnderson 10y ago
Exactly what I was thinking, too. I'm not seeing if non-project owners will be able to download archives of projects. It would be nice if anyone could download a project's archive. I'm also going to invoke the names "Archive Team" and "Jason Scott" here to see if either one magically appears here.
- alexmullans 10y ago
  Anyone will be able to download a project's archive from the CodePlex Archive site once it launches.
  - EvanAnderson 10y ago
    Thanks for jumping in here, Alex. If you have a moment to indulge a couple more questions I'd appreciate it. Will that archive have the same "fidelity" as the project-owner's archive? Will either archive include the complete commit history for the source code, or is it just a snapshot of the code as of the site going read-only?
    - alexmullans 10y ago
      Sorry for the delay - this response got caught up in the rate limiter. Yes, the archive functionality is available to everyone, and will export the source code, documentation, license, issues, and downloads. For source code history, it depends on the source code type. For Git and Mercurial projects, we'll include the .git/.hg folder so you have the full history; for TFS, it'll be just the snapshot as of read-only.

Semaphor 10y ago

It's great that they'll keep an archive. I sometimes find random stuff for rare asp.net cases on codeplex

andrewmcwatters 10y ago

One important thing many people hardly mention during events in history like this is that often software is lost in the sands of time, never to be recovered. Some software out there is actually "finished" and undisturbed by surrounding ecosystems for the most part. When the author or maintainers are no longer around and a host collapses around a project, sometimes you just can't find the source anymore. It's out there, for sure, but most likely in cold storage, collecting dust in some old hobbyist's closet.

simplehuman 10y ago
In some circles, "finished" code is removed promptly as "bitrot" :) But seriously, that's a true story!
alexmullans 10y ago
Keeping the source available for projects, even those don't migrate to GitHub or elsewhere, is important to us. We've updated the blog post with some additional details on the long-term archive plans: After December 15th, 2017, "CodePlex.com will start serving a read-only lightweight archive that will allow you to browse through all published projects – their source code, downloads, documentation, license, and issues – as they looked when CodePlex went read-only. You’ll also be able to download an archive file with your project contents, all in common, transferrable formats like Markdown and JSON. Where possible, we’ll put in place redirects so that existing URLs work, or at least redirect you to the project’s new homepage on the archive. And, the archive will respect your “I’ve moved” setting, if you used it, to direct users to the current home of your project. There isn’t currently any plan to have an end date for the archive."
- frik 10y ago
  So everyone will be able to browse and download unmaintained open source code, correct? That would be good.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Thank you for handling this properly. We've had too many instances of sites shutting down without thinking about archival, so it's great seeing it done with some thought.

kevan 10y ago

This is a great example of how to perform a successful wind-down. The win for monoculture isn't great for us, but at least they're shutting down gracefully.

booleandilemma 10y ago

Will CodePlex's sourcecode be hosted on GitHub?

lawl 10y ago

It's funny how in their breakdown of "organisations with the most open source contributors" they split up google and angular. Now I'm sure there's some overlap between these two groups, but that's still a pretty obvious this metric was chosen to make sure microsoft comes out on top. I mean [GitHub] organisations with the most open source contributors seems like a pretty meaningless metric anyways for judging anything.

alexmullans 10y ago
That chart comes from the GitHub Octoverse site (https://octoverse.github.com/ https://octoverse.github.com/), and reflects GitHub Organizations (e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/ https://github.com/microsoft/). The Angular and Google entries each represent their own Organization (https://github.com/angular https://github.com/angular and https://github.com/google https://github.com/google).
- lawl 10y ago
  That doesn't change anything. The metric is useless in the context presented by Microsoft. It was picked because MS ranked on top on this one. That's what I already implied in the original post. How you structure your team(s) on GitHub has nothing to do with your "commitment to opensource" or whatever your marketing phrase is.
  - Flenser 10y ago
    Microsoft has several other github organisations, so they weren't representing the total "company" contributors for themselves either. e.g.: They have separate github organisations for: https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/PowerShell https://github.com/PowerShell https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet (and many more smaller orgs as well, as I'm sure google do too)
nathantotten 10y ago
Microsoft has tons of other orgs besides /Microsoft. For example https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure

kemonocode 10y ago

One day too early for Aprils Fools, ain't it? I'm not really one to kiss up Microsoft most of the time, but the fact GitHub is becoming the new SourceForge is not too keen.

xanderstrike 10y ago
I can't see Github going the way of SourceForge. SF was exclusively a download portal for FOSS, it needed ads (and, eventually, malware) to survive because it had no other revenue stream. Github, on the other hand, really only hosts FOSS to further cement its position as the standard in git hosting. Their bread and butter is large organizations who are paying per seat to keep their code hosted there.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There was an effort at VA Linux to convert SourceForge into an enterprise project. That failed. I believe that's when SF was spun off (along with Slashdot) as an independent. Or was it that SF became what was pretty much all that was left of VA after the hardware business left? I'm a bit fuzzy on the history, and wasn't there at the time, though I do know people who were. Point being that SourceForge was not intended to be exclusively FOSS.
ajross 10y ago
SourceForge really only became a problem very late in the game when they had mostly been abandoned for new development and started trying to monetize the (often semi-abandoned) projects still hosted there. Their behavior was bad, but honestly I think a little too much was made of it. People got all wound up over the ethics issues (leeching off of other people's open source work to sell creepy adware), but the actual work itself remained accessible and supported. Honestly even in its fading days, if you wanted a free host for a CVS archive and mailing list, SourceForge remained a good choice. It was providing more value than it derived even then. If that's what happens to github, I think we can deal. Someone would just start a giant project to pull and mirror all the junk locked inside github (git makes that process distributed, you don't have to actually crawl their site and can use external archives) and we'd just start the cycle all over again.

giancarlostoro 10y ago

I always enjoyed CodePlex but they limited it just to open source projects no availability to host private projects or anything as far as I know. They could of become a backbone for NuGET packages or something and put the .NET ecosystem on there. As others have said, it's a shame to see everything shift to GitHub.

bsimpson 10y ago

Microsoft has definitely stepped up its open source efforts in recent years and should be lauded for that: projects like TypeScript are good for the community. Still, their brag about being the most popular org made me wonder how the chips would shake out if you could truly count all the software published by one company. Google, for instance, tends to have separate orgs for its major open source projects: Polymer, Angular, Material, AMP, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Firebase, and Chrome are all examples of major Google open source projects that each have (at least) one of their own orgs. GitHub's org/repo URL scheme doesn't scale well to companies with many unrelated initiatives, so measuring "most contributors by GitHub org" isn't a useful metric.

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simooooo 10y ago
What's that got to do with codeplex?
- aembleton 10y ago
  In the article they made this claim: "In fact, our GitHub organization now has more than 16,000 open source contributors – more than any other organization..."

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fithisux 10y ago

My problem with google code and codeplex is that they should have autoexported to github. Some projects may have value even if their creator could have died.

fithisux 10y ago

My problem with google code and codeplex is that they should have autoexported to github. Some projects may have value even if their creator could have died.

laughinghan 10y ago

What does "shutting it down completely" mean if all published projects are still available read-only? If I'm understanding correctly, all published projects were already read-only by then, so what changes when they shut it down "completely"? Is it just a behind-the-scenes switchover to the "lightweight archive"?

krallja 10y ago
The lightweight archive won't support VCS pulls, just HTML and an archive of the repository, from how I read it.
- alexmullans 10y ago
  That's correct. The archive site will be a new, read-only architecture that serves static content. We'll be decommissioning the current TFS, Git, and Mercurial servers after 12/15/17.

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hueving 10y ago

It upsets me that people who care about the open source movement so fervently support closed source tooling like Github and EC2 in the name of convenience.