Over 10,000 Projects for Microsoft's Open Source Repository

There's nothing like the volume of projects and the sheer traffic statistics to prove that Microsoft's repository for open-source projects is a success. Over the past weekend CodePlex managed to pass the 10,000 mark when it comes down to the total number of projects hosted by the Redmond company. But at the same time it's not all about the volume of software solutions and source code added to the repository, but also about the audience that builds the CodePlex community. According to statistics from the software giant, CodePlex enjoys over 159,000 registered users.

“The number of projects hosted on CodePlex, Microsoft's Open Source project hosting site, breached the 10,000 mark on Saturday, July 4, 2009, which represents 160-million lines of code hosted across 10 Team Foundation Servers,” revealed Microsoft Open Source Community Manager Peter Galli. “Congratulations go to SharpFitter, a Visual Studio 2008 C# add-in that dynamically loads plug-ins, for being the 10,000th project, and to the entire CodePlex team for this great achievement.”

Sara Ford, the program manager for CodePlex, applauded the milestone for the repository, but ultimately pointed out to the community around the portal for driving success. “When people ask me why CodePlex has such great traffic growth, I say it is because of the quality of our projects,” Ford opined. And indeed it isn't just the numbers of projects that are surging, but also that of the users accessing Codeplex.

"We hope to see this incredible rate of growth continue to bring more open source development to the Windows platform," Ford added. In June 2009 almost three million people visited CodePlex, resulting in approximately 10 million page views.

“This milestone comes shortly after CodePlex celebrated its third anniversary on June 27, and follows the recent agreement under which CodePlex projects are automatically fed into Black Duck's open source KnowledgeBase repository, and searchable through Koders.com, a search engine for open source and other downloadable code,” Galli said. “The most popular license used by the projects hosted on CodePlex is the Microsoft Public License, followed by the GPL v2 and with the MIT license rounding out the top three.”