14 DAY TRIAL // After killing its so.cl social network, Microsoft is shutting down another service that you probably didn’t even know existed. Open-source project hosting website CodePlex is going dark in December this year, and Microsoft is telling users to move to GitHub instead.
In a recent post, Brian Harry, Microsoft's vice president of cloud developer services, explains that GitHub has become “the de facto place for open source sharing,” with the company itself using it for its own open-source projects.
As a result, keeping CodePlex alive makes no sense, especially because there are now only 350 active projects updated in the last 30 days on the service.
Starting April 1, CodePlex no longer allows the creation of new projects, and Microsoft says that in October the service will become read-only, which means that no updates can be made. On December 15, CodePlex is scheduled to be completely retired, with users to be allowed to download archive files with their projects.
Microsoft also using GitHub
A dedicated app that will make it possible to migrate to GitHub will also be released, and Microsoft says that it also prepares redirects for existing projects to lead visitors to the new homepage.
“Over the past few years, we've watched many CodePlex projects migrate. During the same period, we've had to address several issues, including a spam epidemic over several months in 2015, as spammers sought to take advantage of the CodePlex.com domain to boost their illicit activities,” Brian Harry explained.
Microsoft itself is betting big on GitHub and the company is also using it, with no less than 16,000 open-source contributors currently registered for its projects.
“We migrated too. As many of you know, Microsoft has invested in Visual Studio Team Services as our ‘One Engineering System’ for proprietary projects, and we’ve exposed many of our key open source projects on GitHub,” Brian Harry concluded.
If you want to read more information about the migration to GitHub, you can check out Microsoft’s guide here.