The dominance of GitHub in the project hosting and code sharing space has claimed another victim, with Microsoft announcing plans to shut down its CodePlex site following a period of decreasing use.
According to the plan posted by Microsoft vice president for Cloud Developer Services Brian Harry, the creation of new CodePlex projects has already ended, with the site to become read-only during October, followed by its shut down on December 15.
“We’ll take a final, complete backup of the site before shutting down and decommissioning the existing CodePlex site and servers,” Harry said.
“At that time, 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.”
Harry said, at this time, there are no time limits for how long the archive site stays up.
Citing its own chart-topping contributions, Microsoft said it was clear developers have moved over to GitHub, with less than 350 CodePlex projects experiencing a commit in the past 30 days, and Redmond having to deal with spammers taking advantage of the CodePlex domain.
Microsoft will soon release a tool to help developers move CodePlex projects to GitHub, if they haven’t done so already.
Google’s similar project hosting site, Google Code, shut down in January last year with users encouraged to move their code across to GitHub.
Last month, GitHub launched a new business plan which is similar to its Enterprise offering, but uses github.com to host code instead of private servers.
The company also said recently it had experienced a 50 percent year-on-year revenue increase in Australia and New Zealand.
