
Shutting down CodePlex - Permit
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-down-codeplex/
======
mindcrime
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
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
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.

------
kevan
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.

------
lwlml
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
> 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
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
"...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
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
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

------
ocdtrekkie
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
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
Anyone will be able to download a project's archive from the CodePlex Archive
site once it launches.

~~~
EvanAnderson
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
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.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Thanks very much for the answers. I really appreciate it!

------
andrewmcwatters
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.

~~~
alexmullans
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."

~~~
vidarh
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.

------
YCode
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.

~~~
alexmullans
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)

------
bsimpson
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.

~~~
simooooo
What's that got to do with codeplex?

~~~
aembleton
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..."

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

------
hueving
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.

------
newsat13
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?

~~~
bhuga
GitHub doesn't charge for anything that's open source. Who the owner is or if
they happen to be a customer doesn't factor into it.

~~~
Touche
Don't you have to pay for an Organization though, regardless of what types of
repos it has?

~~~
smudgymcscmudge
Nope. You can create orgs here:
[https://github.com/organizations/new](https://github.com/organizations/new)

------
laughinghan
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
The lightweight archive won't support VCS pulls, just HTML and an archive of
the repository, from how I read it.

~~~
alexmullans
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.

------
giancarlostoro
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.

------
kemonocode
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
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
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.

------
fithisux
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.

------
booleandilemma
Will CodePlex's sourcecode be hosted on GitHub?

------
lawl
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
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
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
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)

