Microsoft is shutting down CodePlex in favour of GitHub

Microsoft's more than a decade-old, project-hosting service, CodePlex has now officially lost the match against GitHub, the de facto platform for hosting open source software and projects.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that the company has decided to the pull the shutter down on CodePlex, after 11 years of its inception.

The Redmond based tech giant has already disabled the ability to create new CodePlex projects. In October, they will set CodePlex to read-only, before shutting it down completely on December 15th, 2017.

Microsoft is teaming up with GitHub, which provides similar functionality. “We’re proud to partner closely with GitHub to promote open source,” Brian Harry, the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server wrote.

Harry said, "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."

In 2006, Microsoft founded CodePlex when it recognised the free open source software, including the Linux operating system, as a significant competitive threat. However, after two years, GitHub arrived which gave users “a streamlined experience.” And, gradually, GitHub became the default choice for most open source projects.

Along with the programmers, Microsoft was also slowly moving back to GitHub. Microsoft itself migrated some of its leading open-source projects from Visual Studio Team Services to Github. In September 2016, GitHub revealed that most programmers contributing to open source software on the platform are from Microsoft, beating Facebook down.

Currently, CodePlex garners barely 350 projects per month.

Microsoft will also provide CodePlex Archive that will allow developers to download an archive file with their CodePlex source code, releases, documentation, issues, and license, all in common formats like Markdown and JSON.