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Microsoft Is Shutting Down CodePlex: Admitting That GitHub Wins The Game Of Open-Source

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CodePlex is an open-source project hosting website owned by Microsoft. It allows people to share the development of open-source software, and commit to projects as well as ideas. After almost 11 years up and running, Microsoft decided to shut it down.

While CodePlex has a variety of projects, including SQL Server, projects that center on .NET, ASP.NET and Microsoft's collaboration server, WPF, Windows Forms-related projects, SharePoint and others. But it has somehow failed to compete with a startup that is younger but apparently more popular: GitHub.

Microsoft tells CodePlex developers to move on to GitHub instead of sharing their projects on its platform.

On March 31st, 2017, Microsoft announced that it has disabled the ability for users to create new CodePlex projects. In October, it's planning to set CodePlex to read-only, and starts discontinuing CodePlex completely in December 15, 2017.

In a post by Brian Harry, Microsoft's VP for Cloud Developer Services:

"Almost 11 years after we created CodePlex, it's time to say goodbye. We launched CodePlex in 2006 because we, like others in the industry, saw a need for a great place to share 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."
CodePlex shutting down annoucement

When CodePlex was launched by Microsoft back in 2006, it was initially based on Microsoft's Team Foundation Server source control. But later, Microsoft added options to use Subversion, Mercurial, and Git.

At the time of the launch, the number of platforms to host projects weren't many. SourceForge was one of the biggest, but it was heavy on advertising and light on feature developments. CodePlex was meant to be an alternative to SouceForge with a more attractive interface but less cluttered.

In short, CodePlex was Microsoft's biggest steps towards the world of open-source software.

GitHub was founded in 2008, and it quickly gained traction as the choice to host most open-source projects available. As GitHub became more and more popular, Microsoft that was still maintaining CodePlex, had even started to use GitHub to host its own projects, such as .NET and its Chakra JavaScript engine.

At the same time, user activity on CodePlex declined. As of Microsoft announcement to terminate Codeplex, less than 350 projects in CodePlex were seeing code commits over the last 30 days.

As it decided to shut down CodePlex, Microsoft said that GitHub is the preferred new home for CodePlex projects. Simply put, GitHub wins the game of open-source, and Microsoft admits it.

Users and developers have a straightforward import process that enables them to copy existing CodePlex-hosted source and documentation to GitHub. Microsoft is also building a tool to help the migration process. Projects can also be migrated to services such as Bitbucket.