Dive Brief:

• Microsoft announced last week it is shutting down CodePlex, its service for hosting repositories of open source software. The company launched CodePlex in 2006.

• Microsoft has already disabled the ability to create new CodePlex projects. The services will be completely shut down December 15th, 2017. Google shut down its own service, Google Code, in 2016.

• The move is because of an industrywide adoption of GitHub as a code sharing platform. "GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there," Microsoft corporate vice president Brian Harry wrote in a company blog.

Dive Insight:

Microsoft's move indicates just how dominant GitHub has become. GitHub says 20 million developers and 1.3 million teams use the service, with 1,500 teams joining every day. Ironically, though it had its own CodePlex, Microsoft itself was the biggest contributor to open source projects on GitHub over the last year, GitHub reported last fall.

GitHub has been praised for being more flexible than other open source repositories, and offers the ability to work with many different systems. The platform was also born in the open source world, while Microsoft has traditionally been a proprietary software company that only opened up to open source recently. In fact, several years ago former CEO Steve Ballmer compared Linux to "communism" and a "cancer."

GitHub is even working to better accommodate business customers that use its service. Last month, the company announced a new hosted version of its code sharing platform for businesses.