Ask HN: What do you think of Microsoft shutting down Codeplex?
"There have been a lot of comments here and I haven’t replied to many of them (though I’ve been reading them and had Alex monitoring and trying to help/clarify). I wanted to comment on this one though. The issue has nothing to do with the cost of hosting the Codeplex site. That’s negligible and we’d pay that in perpetuity. The issue is supporting the site. As we all know, things decay. Without active care and feeding, over time, things stop working or become unsatisfying. Over time, engineers who worked on Codeplex moved on to work on other things (most, not even in my team any more) so we’ve lost a lot of the expertise. We’ve shifted our investment towards Team Services and “private” code/development hosting. Codeplex has been coasting for a while now and over the past 6 months, we’ve been watching an increasing trend in performance issues, outages, spam/attacks, etc. We’ve realized that the quality of the service we can provide is gradually declining and we are faced with a decision – either up the investment meaningfully or plan for shutting it down. Because continuing to offer a solution with declining quality isn’t an option. We chose the latter path. Clearly not everyone agrees and I respect that but it’s the path that we’ve chosen. We’d like to do what we can to minimize the negatives from that decision but it’s unlikely we’d reverse it."
What do you think about this decision?
In the comments other people mentioned how this, together with XNA and ASP.NET dismissions, is telling something about current Microsoft solidity as a platform in which developers should invest in.
What's your take?
[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-down-codeplex/
1 comment
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 11.3 ms ] threadI think it's a hard decision to make, but they've made the right choices in how they're doing it. An archive in perpetuity allows the content (the important bits IMO) to be preserved. Code-hosting-platform-ecosystem is another argument I've heard for preserving it, but a legacy platform with (from the public numbers I've seen) comparatively negligible usage and very little forward investment doesn't to me seem like it's doing much to contribute to competitiveness in the ecosystem anyway.
Re: Long term validity of products, all I can say unbiasedly is that codeplex is over a decade old. That, next to the usage trend, competitors, and the ramp-down plan, paint a picture that wouldn't make me worried about product existence. (And I say this as someone who was very sad about the XNA decision, I thought it was a swell little engine, and was parent to some games I love playing even today)