Microsoft cannot compete with GitHub. The company announced it will be closing the doors on CodePlex, its open-source project hosting site. CodePlex was designed to give developers a place to share, collaborate, and download open-source software.
“Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of amazing options come and go but at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there,” Brian Harry, vice president for cloud developer services, wrote in a post.
Microsoft has also been migrating its own projects over to GitHub over the last couple of years. Some of the company’s key open-source projects such as Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, the Cognitive Toolkit and .NET live on GitHub. “In fact, our GitHub organization now has more than 16,000 open source contributors – more than any other organization – and we’re proud to partner closely with GitHub to promote open source,” Harry wrote.
As of today, developers will no longer be able to create new projects on CodePlex. In October, Microsoft will set CodePlex to read-only, and then officially shut it down on December 15, 2017. The read-only version will allow users to browse through published projects and download to an archive file. Before the site and its servers are completely turned off, Microsoft will take a complete backup of CodePlex’s data.
In order to migrate data out of CodePlex, Microsoft has partnered with GitHub to provide a simple-to-use import experience. In addition, the company is working on a migration tool for issues, and a new option to add an “I’ve moved” banner to projects that will direct to the projects’ new home.
“Microsoft announced the shutdown plans for CodePlex. We’re working with the CodePlex team to streamline the experience of importing projects to GitHub for CodePlex users. As always, we will continue to support SVN clients for those who’d prefer to stick with SVN over Git,” the GitHub team wrote in a post. “We welcome CodePlex projects to their new GitHub home!”
