Microsoft Is Shutting Down CodePlex (venturebeat.com) 45
Microsoft corporate vice president Brian Harry announced in a blog post today that they are shutting down CodePlex, its service for hosting repositories of open source software. "As of this post, we've disabled the ability to create new CodePlex projects," Harry wrote. "In October, we'll set CodePlex to read-only, before shutting it down completely on December 15th, 2017." VentureBeat reports: While people will be able to download an archive of their data, Microsoft is teaming up with GitHub, which provides similar functionality for hosting code that people can collaborate on, to give users "a streamlined import experience" to migrate code and related content there. "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," Harry wrote. Microsoft has been leaning in more and more to GitHub in the past few years. It moved the CNTK deep learning toolkit from CodePlex to GitHub last year. Today Microsoft's GitHub organization has more than 16,000 open source contributors, Harry wrote. And last year GitHub itself made a big deal about Microsoft's adoption of GitHub. At the same time, CodePlex has rotted. In the past month people have made commits to fewer than 350 projects, Harry wrote. GitHub is based on the Git open source version control software, which keeps track of changes by multiple people. People can move code to alternative systems like Atlassian's Bitbucket and Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services, Harry wrote. The startup GitLab also offers hosting for open and closed source projects.
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, I've never heard of this "Git Hub". Perhaps I'll check it out!
Re: (Score:2)
As Mark Twain allegedly said: put all your eggs in the same basket and watch that basket.
Re: (Score:1)
I like this better: "Put all your eggs in the same basket and watch that basket FALLS".
Not so good news (Score:1)
I was going to say "about time!", but then I realized how good it was to keep Microsoft code constrained to a single site without polluting the rest of the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
True. They even leapfrogged download.com in terms of spyware.
Re:Sourceforge... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sourceforge... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot owns SourceForge now. Since we took over in 2016 we've been improving. https://arstechnica.com/inform... [arstechnica.com] No more bundled adware, all projects are scanned for malware, https downloads & hosting, & more. Big redesign coming soon too
Can't help but notice this reply was posted at exactly 2017-04-01 0:00.
Re: (Score:2)
As a past long-time SourceForge user, I'm afraid I see no reason to come back and plenty of reasons to not do so.
There is, though, a feature SourceForge used to have that I dearly miss: the Compile Farm. At least two of TUI programs I maintain notoriously fail to build on some obscure platform, usually OS X; getting a report after a release and having to beg such a random user for help is not fun. No other platform requires a large monetary investment (you can run MiddayCockroachBSD and Green Pickelhaube
Re: (Score:2)
qemu-user is nice when it works, yeah. Too bad, it notoriously interferes with debugging, has broken threading, and badly lags wrt compatibility with current kernels. For example, currently powerpc and powerpcspe guests on amd64 fail at network access (it used to work quite recently). qemu-system has none of such problems.
Also, qemu-user won't let me catch that Green Pickelhaube's kernels are now built with a seappgrarmor patch that disallows unprivileged user programs to add 2 to an even number. And ob
Why shut it down? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
it's called 'not making money' or in amazon-speak, 'CRAP' (can't realize a profit). google does it all the time with their 'free' services, why should microsoft be any different?
besides, microsoft really does NOT want people writing software for windows for distribution outside of the "store", where they can track installs, users, and collect their cut of any money that comes in.
Github monoculture (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems we are moving toward a Github monoculture. That will turn it into a high value target for attackers.
The ironic point is that git nice point is to be distributed, and despite this, we move to a single central hub.
Re: (Score:2)
Even with git, you still need a centralized repository for management and integration. The "distributed" part simply means you don't have to connect to a central server to get your own work done, since everyone has a full copy of the repository locally, and can *work* on it locally. If Github shut down tomorrow and stayed down for a time, it wouldn't impact my ability to work on any GitHub-based code already on my machine - only management of it (pull requests, bug reports, etc).
Re: (Score:2)
What other free web-based UIs exist for this purpose? Ironically, Microsoft provides one too, but I assume it isn't based on codeplex.
So Ironic (Score:2)
What about VSTS? (Score:2)
I don't get it. Microsoft is moving their stuff from CodePlex to github. But Microsoft offers VSTS [microsoft.com], which is their own service that competes with github. They both provide git + a web UI for bug tracking, releasing, pull requests, etc. Why would they move to github instead of to VSTS? And why would they make a migration tool that migrates to github instead of VSTS? This is like Microsoft deciding to cancel Windows Vista, and making a migration tool that migrates to Linux instead of to Windows 10. Did
Monocultures are bad (Score:2)
I didn't have any special reason to love CodePlex, but I'm still sorry to see it and so many other such services go.
As nice as Github's features are, electing a single organization (inevitably with its own political agenda) as the planet's one source for development repos is a tremendously bad idea. Way too much concentration of power for abuse and way too low an organizational bus factor in case something goes wrong.
I've been pleased with the changes made here at Slashdot and at SourceForge since Dice sold