I actually consider this a Bad Thing. Monosystems are not a desirable thing, and nobody (except GitHub) wants a world where all open source projects are hosted on GitHub. Now, Git itself being a DVCS mitigates the downsides of this a little bit, but still... I think it's better to live in a world where you can use GitHub, Bitbucket, CodePlex, GitLab, SourceForge, etc., instead of narrowing things down to pretty much just GitHub.
Nothing against GH per-se... we're paying customers and fairly happy with their service. But I still don't want to see their competition going away.
I don't disagree with you at all. The competition between GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket spurs creativity and is a good thing.
However, let's not fool ourselves: services like Codeplex, Google Code, or Sourceforge, that are not updated or providing new value, are going to be left behind and abandoned. In other words, their continued service wasn't providing any value, to their users or "competitors", because they weren't evolving.
I would rather people put their open source project on a code hosting service that is someone's priority, not just one that exists and is useless.
This is key, I think. Codeplex feels like abandonware to me. All the important Microsoft projects have migrated to GitHub, where all the active development is happening. Perhaps this also screws over some people who wish to stay on Codeplex, but I can imagine it was just a cost to Microsoft. No use in having something which only costs you money lingering around.
To expand on your point, this CodePlex post mentions there were 350 projects with commits in the last 30 days. I'd venture to guess that number was much larger for GitHub. The people have voted on which service provides the most value.
Might actually look into doing a quick script and checking this out.. It'd be interesting to look at. Plus I may only be able to scrape public projects, where private repositories may account for some large amount of the real number since those are typically paid for (except for Student accounts, afaik).
For those that don't follow Git hosting, it may not be obvious, but GitHub's mind share, is truly massive. If you want to compete head to head with GitHub, you'll basically, have to wait for them to REALLY screw up. If you want any sort of chance, you'll have to approach things, from a totally different angle.
Make code reviews your number one priority. Be the place that people want to put their code in, because they can review code, significantly easier on your site, as opposed to GitHub's. Make management your number one priority. Be the place that can provide managers with code metrics and analytics, that GitHub can't. And so on.
To take mind share away from GitHub, you'll have to treat Git hosting, as a secondary thing. You can't be a derivative of GitHub and expect to compete, and succeed. Like Snapchat, Instagram (before acquisition) and others, you can only compete with Facebook, from a completely different angle.
If you can provide a novel solution, that cannot be easily duplicated by GitHub and others, getting users to store code with you, will be significantly easier. With GitLab, Gitea, Gogs, etc., Git hosting has turned into a commodity product, which means you'll need to focus on providing value based on the code stored and not the management of the code.
Make management your number one priority. Be the place that can provide managers with code metrics and analytics, that GitHub can't.
That seems to be Microsoft's approach with Visual Studio Team Services. Whereas Github seems to be focused on code, VSTS is more focused on integrating every step of software development, with version control, work item tracking, continuous integration, etc, all living in one integrated package. Now, this means that the version control aspect of it isn't as good as that of Github's. But, the issue tracking is far superior, and you don't really need to invest in learning separate software (like Travis or Jenkins, or what-have-you) in order to get continuous integration working.
Make code reviews your number one priority. Be the place that people want to put their code in, because they can review code, significantly easier on your site, as opposed to GitHub's.
This isn't really a high bar. Doing more than one iteration of code review with GitHub's tooling is a complete mess. In addition to that, both PR comments and Commit comments exist which can be extremely confusing if you do make one when you meant to make the other.
There is already other tooling which leverage GitHub's APIs to provide a nicer interface for code review.
Y. Has anyone actually tried running a complex enterprise pipeline via github. What you will find is the almost exclusively everyone ties github to a "project platform" like JIRA, Assembla, Pivotal, etc. Github is a repo hosting tool with just enough to support collaboration. Shipping, testing prod code 100% in github is very rare. I do think the comments and PR similarity is a challenge yeah - where to comment?
That's nonsense. I would never assume "Last January" means 2016. I've never met anyone who talks the way this arbitrary "rule" implies, either. Human language is not computer language; trying to force standardization of relative terms is rarely useful. We interpret by context.
No, he's correct. To a native English speaker, "since January" would mean "in the last 4 months", whereas "since last January" would mean "in the last 16 months" (assuming it's April now).
There's no ambiguity there. It's just how the language works.
It's currently Saturday, if someone says "last Sunday", I assume they mean the previous Sunday that recently passed. If someone says "last Friday", I assume they mean the one a week and a day ago. This seems like a common interpretation in the UK.
They could mean the same thing depending on the speaker.
"I saw that film last January."
"I saw that film in January."
As the other commenters have mentioned, "last January" may mean January 2016 for them, whereas for others it's 2017. The second example should be a definite 2017, except you always have your occasional smart alec [0].
I would disagree with jasonkester--there is ambiguity here.
Not necessarily. Suppose Tim and Bob are having a conversation.
Tim: "It's a little known fact that Woodrow Wilson signed the Treaty of Versailles while ice skating on the royal pond."
Bob: "That's clearly nonsense. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in June."
It would be very different to say, "the Treaty of Versailles was signed last June." That would imply it was signed in June 2016, rather than June 1919.
If anything, "last" meaning "most recent" would be the most logical. However, "last January" meaning January of last year is a convention. Not everyone follows or knows it, but it does exist. Same for days of the week.
Your indirectly talking about the year. "January" is for the current year and "last January" would be last year.
I would interpret "this past" as most recent thing from the current. So "this past January" would, to me, sound like the most recent January (Jan 2017)
Agreed. CodePlex and to a lesser extent Google Code both felt less like competing products and more like MS and Google just wanted to have a code hosting presence to advertise that they "do" open source.
Neither offered much that couldn't be provided with barebones cheap hosting and a Gitlab install, and my impression as an outsider was thatneither really improved over time.
TBH, GitHub and BitBucket may not offer too much over GitLab any more either, but they are at least improving their products all the time and there's a sort of trendy network effect in using them that didn't exist for CodePlex or Google Code.
I'd point out Google Code predated Github and for a while was the cool kid in town. They were late in supporting Git and slow to improve the feature set. Another lead Google threw away.
Github is barely at $200M in revenue and requires a lot of moving pieces to make that happen - something that just doesnt make sense for the scale of Google. It's not really a great business opportunity.
However, Google Cloud Platform does have private repositories that can also be used in their CI/CD solution.
SourceForge are still going, they were bought up (along with Slashdot) by BizX last year. SF President, Logan Abbot, does a fair bit of outreach on Reddit.[1]
They do seem to actually care about the two properties.
Supposedly there's a big redesign of SF in the pipeline, and more importantly, the first thing they did when they took over was cancel that malware hijack monetization bullshit which the previous owners had embarked upon. They scan for malware now too apparently, added 2FA and are offering HTTPS downloads. Regaining trust is an uphill battle, but they're giving it a damn good go.
Searching HN to see if he'd done similar to his AMA-type thing on /r/sysadmin[2], it's sad to see their blogposts have been posted and got no love. I didn't even know SF had a blog, and it seems to have some cool content.
(He didn't do an AMA-style post here, probably wise, but the Reddit post was submitted here and he showed up in the comments [3]).
SFs malware installers should have served as a warning to all developers.
Unfortunately, there seems to be the same thing happening with GitHub - at least from a layperson's perspective. (same thing meaning that github has extraordinary mindshare in the open source community)
Personally, I'm usually surprised when I encounter an opensource project that is not hosted on github. There are plenty of other options, but github has entirely too much mindshare to be safe. The people currently managing it have proven trustworthy, and git's architecture makes it easier to migrate should that change in the future. But even if it's easy there is a cost in lost supporting data.
Developers need to support other tools so that the big dogs have a reason to play nice through takeovers or changing business climates.
I hope that Gitlab continues to grow. And I'd love to see at least one other VCS grow their footprint. Competition is good. Git and github are not without problems, even if they are the preferred option at the moment. The more competition there is, the more pressure they have to improve.
<ironic I have a strong opinion considering I spent exactly $0 on version control in the last 6 months>
No we do not. When my company acquired SourceForge in 2016 the first thing we did was eliminate bundled adware installers. We now scan all projects for malware as well, have https downloads, and more. Big redesign coming soon too. Ars: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...
I know the 'you screw me up once, I'll never trust you again' principle is very human, built into our genes probably, but just like in real life people can change. So suppose SF did change for the good (I didn't check yet, but it seems so according to other commenters) then maybe it's time for bit of open-mindness and some forgiveness?
Nope. That ship sailed so long ago, the only brand SF has now is "old busted OSS that nobody has bothered to migrate to something decent". There's nothing left to save.
The first three seem to be mostly about Roger Abbott. An interesting read.
>Regulators said the company was the brainchild of Roger B. Abbott, 39, who served three years in state prison after a 1982 conviction for cocaine trafficking in Orange County. Court records show he drove a red Porsche at the time with license plates that read "CRACK."
Not sure I would hold that against him, a drug trafficking conviction from the eighties.
In 2002,the date on the first article, Logan would have been what, 13 or 14 years old? As for Wirefly, weren't they teetering on the edge of being bought by Wallmart or something?
I'll reserve judgment, but be cautiously optimistic.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I think there's a healthy competition going on, for now. I just setup automatic replication of all of our repositories from Github to Gitlab (gitlab makes this super easy, I did dozens of repos in one leisurely evening while watching TV...probably could have scripted it, but learning the API would have likely taken longer), for the potential risk that Github may one day pull a SourceForge (though, SF.net turned evil for a while because they couldn't figure out how to ring the cash register without being evil...I think Github is already making money without being evil).
I only ever looked briefly at CodePlex (I'm not involved in any MS developer communities, so it wasn't really my scene), but it didn't seem competitive with Github in terms of how much you can do with very low friction. Likewise, I don't miss Google Code. It just wasn't good enough for me to want to use it...even Googlers didn't want to use it, and used Github more often.
And, there's some high quality open source options, as well, for self-hosted. I've tinkered with Gogs, and it's really very solid (if light on features compared to Github or Gitlab). And, of course, Gitlab has a very competent OSS offering.
Things seem pretty good right now. Not a lot of risk of ending up locked into one vendor that goes rogue. I mean, I worry about some projects really going all-in on github, like their dependencies and such are based on github URLS (that seems crazy on numerous fronts!). But, there are escape routes to many good competitors in the space.
This.Competition is good. The less competition, the less insentive Github will have to improve their product.
But Microsoft didn't put a lot of effort into making CodePlex user friendly either (just like google code back then). What makes Github great is that it is fairly easy to get started with, fairly easy to use and to navigate.
I don't think it's a bad thing. As you say, there are alternatives to Github: Gitlab and Bitbucket being the most well known. If Gitlab and/or Bitbucket were to shut down I would consider it a bad thing because it would give Github a monopoly. Codeplex shutting down doesn't, because it was not particularly used (350 active project on the last month as they say).
This is a great example of how to perform a successful wind-down. The win for monoculture isn't great for us, but at least they're shutting down gracefully.
I'm not one to usually defend Microsoft, but this is a sad day. This increases the world's reliance on fewer and fewer developer-collaboration systems like Github. But, if you're set on hosting your own, it isn't so bad these days. Gogs, Gitea, GitLab and Fossil will continue to push on.
If you're going to rely on these external third-parties, please do consider self-hosting your own mirrors of your repositories.
Thankfully, git makes this kind of thing astoundingly easy compared to the bad-ole-days of RCS and CVS. There's no excuse not to maintain your own local backups.
> But, if you're set on hosting your own, it isn't so bad these days.
+1. Exactly what I wanted to say. Back in sourceforge days setting up your own internet server to run the central repo was a big hurdle. Solving that and mailing list and the bug tracker was a nice relief. These days you can set up your own server in very short time for minuscule amount of money.
Increasingly companies are shedding on-prem infrastructure. One startup I was at har everyone work exclusively on laptops (though with docking stations and monitors) and had a policy where everyone had to take their computers home every night - nothing to steal. Everything was Cloud-hosted on AWS, Atlassian, GitHub and Dropbox. To my surprise it worked quite well - the only issue was working with large files because we had no NAS/file-server and only ~10mbps upstream.
Not having to pay for any on-site sysadmin definetly saved the company money - even more-so when you consider there was no physical servers to break either.
> everyone had to take their computers home every night - nothing to steal. Everything was Cloud
That is scary if you believe that.. That nothing can be stolen because it is in "the cloud"... I am sure there are a few Celebs that will tell you in graphic detail how wrong you are.
>Not having to pay for any on-site sysadmin definetly saved the company money
Likely compromising Security, backups, and a few other things as you depend on "the cloud" to provide these things
I bet you claim that will nto happen to you because you only use "the largest providers" like AWS or Dropbox....
Far to often I see companies moving their entire operations to "the cloud" with no planning for Off-Boarding, Data Backups, or anything, they just assume "its the cloud so everything is perfect, cheap, secure and we need no neckbeard admins"
That is a scary scary trend. SaaS can be a good tool, when used right. It can also be the end of the organization when done wrong...
The point of "the cloud" isn't just global accessibility, but also massive redundancy - Azure Storage and S3 both replicate data globally in case of data-center meteor impacts and well-designed web-services are stateless and run in a a load-balanced, fault-tolerant manner.
Arguably a much better proposition than a dusty old Dell server locked in a closer.
And when S3 was glitchy recently [those] depending solely upon it suffered. Arguably less than they may have otherwise. But with one's own hardware one has more control.
I'll chime in with similar sentiments. I could criticise Microsoft 'til the cows come home (and have), but the competition in this space would be a positive.
My biggest concern, as with the Google Code shutdown, is wondering how much obscure code is going to end up lost to time.
For .NET projects, open source code is growing, but still pretty rare. A lot of times when looking for stuff I end up on CodePlex. So the biggest question for me is going to be: How many old abandoned projects actually do get migrated.
Can I just ask that it is complete including things like issue trackers etc. I've not been to codeplex much recently but I went to get hold of an older AvalonDock version documentation.
There have been a couple of repos on codeplex where I've visited not for the code but for the issues (bug fixes I've remembered seeing in the past) as I've got the same problem (stackoverflow pointed me to codeplex).
Sorry for the delay - this response got caught up in the rate limiter.
Yes, the archive functionality is available to everyone, and will export the source code, documentation, license, issues, and downloads.
For source code history, it depends on the source code type. For Git and Mercurial projects, we'll include the .git/.hg folder so you have the full history; for TFS, it'll be just the snapshot as of read-only.
One important thing many people hardly mention during events in history like this is that often software is lost in the sands of time, never to be recovered.
Some software out there is actually "finished" and undisturbed by surrounding ecosystems for the most part. When the author or maintainers are no longer around and a host collapses around a project, sometimes you just can't find the source anymore.
It's out there, for sure, but most likely in cold storage, collecting dust in some old hobbyist's closet.
Keeping the source available for projects, even those don't migrate to GitHub or elsewhere, is important to us.
We've updated the blog post with some additional details on the long-term archive plans: After December 15th, 2017, "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. Where possible, we’ll put in place redirects so that existing URLs work, or at least redirect you to the project’s new homepage on the archive. And, the archive will respect your “I’ve moved” setting, if you used it, to direct users to the current home of your project.
There isn’t currently any plan to have an end date for the archive."
Thank you for handling this properly. We've had too many instances of sites shutting down without thinking about archival, so it's great seeing it done with some thought.
1 - CodePlex was a more elegant repo for a more civilized age and hasn't really kept pace with the features people want.
2 - Microsoft doesn't really benefit from keeping it open anymore and MS is realizing they can reap many of the benefits of collaboration without all the overhead by just using Github.
Github has the marketshare, but there are other options. Gitlab for example seems to be moving in the right direction and I'm excited to see what they do in the next two years or so.
You're correct - our investment has shifted to Visual Studio Team Services (https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/git/). We use GitHub extensively for our open-source work, and VSTS for private/internal projects.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the PM team for VSTS & CodePlex)
I don't see how you come up with this stuff. Codeplex was simply uglier than Github, that's it. Both graphical design wise and interaction design wise.
Microsoft has definitely stepped up its open source efforts in recent years and should be lauded for that: projects like TypeScript are good for the community.
Still, their brag about being the most popular org made me wonder how the chips would shake out if you could truly count all the software published by one company. Google, for instance, tends to have separate orgs for its major open source projects: Polymer, Angular, Material, AMP, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Firebase, and Chrome are all examples of major Google open source projects that each have (at least) one of their own orgs.
GitHub's org/repo URL scheme doesn't scale well to companies with many unrelated initiatives, so measuring "most contributors by GitHub org" isn't a useful metric.
It upsets me that people who care about the open source movement so fervently support closed source tooling like Github and EC2 in the name of convenience.
Does GitHub charge companies when keeping only opensource code? Like the big companies like Google, Microsoft have lots of code there - who is paying for it? Or this is just free marketing for GH?
If we were only doing pure open source, public repos, there would be no cost to us ($0).
The truth is that we actually do pay, as we have private repositories. We ask that people prepare their initial open source releases during a 30-day window - making sure they have a decent README file, the right LICENSE, Code of Conduct, etc.
Full disclosure, I work at Microsoft within our Open Source Programs Office and I own our billing relationship with GitHub for the large organizations including Microsoft, Azure, etc. We pay via a yearly invoice for a set level of services today but we're always looking for better ways to collaborate with GitHub!
GitHub Enterprise is an on-premise product and separate from the "dot-com" (GitHub.com) product offering. Inside Microsoft we have great engineering systems that today are powered by Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), so for most teams we try and use that for all private engineering work.
For our externally-facing open source projects, we are using the GitHub.com public product like any other GitHub user - we realize that GitHub is where open source lives these days!
That said, we have some unique challenges, as we have nearly 10,000 members in some of our organizations.
Full disclosure, I work within the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office and am responsible for our GitHub.com billing arrangements at this time.
These companies run their own internal git systems (Gerrit & Team Foundation Server). They put their OS stuff on GitHub, which only charge for private repos.
What does "shutting it down completely" mean if all published projects are still available read-only? If I'm understanding correctly, all published projects were already read-only by then, so what changes when they shut it down "completely"? Is it just a behind-the-scenes switchover to the "lightweight archive"?
That's correct. The archive site will be a new, read-only architecture that serves static content. We'll be decommissioning the current TFS, Git, and Mercurial servers after 12/15/17.
I always enjoyed CodePlex but they limited it just to open source projects no availability to host private projects or anything as far as I know. They could of become a backbone for NuGET packages or something and put the .NET ecosystem on there. As others have said, it's a shame to see everything shift to GitHub.
I can't see Github going the way of SourceForge. SF was exclusively a download portal for FOSS, it needed ads (and, eventually, malware) to survive because it had no other revenue stream. Github, on the other hand, really only hosts FOSS to further cement its position as the standard in git hosting. Their bread and butter is large organizations who are paying per seat to keep their code hosted there.
There was an effort at VA Linux to convert SourceForge into an enterprise project. That failed. I believe that's when SF was spun off (along with Slashdot) as an independent. Or was it that SF became what was pretty much all that was left of VA after the hardware business left?
I'm a bit fuzzy on the history, and wasn't there at the time, though I do know people who were.
Point being that SourceForge was not intended to be exclusively FOSS.
SourceForge really only became a problem very late in the game when they had mostly been abandoned for new development and started trying to monetize the (often semi-abandoned) projects still hosted there.
Their behavior was bad, but honestly I think a little too much was made of it. People got all wound up over the ethics issues (leeching off of other people's open source work to sell creepy adware), but the actual work itself remained accessible and supported.
Honestly even in its fading days, if you wanted a free host for a CVS archive and mailing list, SourceForge remained a good choice. It was providing more value than it derived even then.
If that's what happens to github, I think we can deal. Someone would just start a giant project to pull and mirror all the junk locked inside github (git makes that process distributed, you don't have to actually crawl their site and can use external archives) and we'd just start the cycle all over again.
My problem with google code and codeplex is that they should have autoexported to github. Some projects may have value even if their creator could have died.
It's funny how in their breakdown of "organisations with the most open source contributors" they split up google and angular. Now I'm sure there's some overlap between these two groups, but that's still a pretty obvious this metric was chosen to make sure microsoft comes out on top.
I mean [GitHub] organisations with the most open source contributors seems like a pretty meaningless metric anyways for judging anything.
That doesn't change anything. The metric is useless in the context presented by Microsoft. It was picked because MS ranked on top on this one. That's what I already implied in the original post.
How you structure your team(s) on GitHub has nothing to do with your "commitment to opensource" or whatever your marketing phrase is.
Nothing against GH per-se... we're paying customers and fairly happy with their service. But I still don't want to see their competition going away.