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/