CodePlex SNAFU

time to read 2 min | 231 words

I found this mostly by accident, but it looks like a few weeks ago CodePlex has lost the source code for some of the projects hosted on the site. I would like to address the part about "free means no guarantees" that came up in the post:

CodePlex is a free service.  They've provided complete source code hosting along with one heck of a website and never asked for a cent in return.  So, I really can't hold it against them.

I would.

Regardless of the legalese involved. I have certain expectations from such a service. And having reliable backups is one of those. I don't care if it is free, SourceForge had ensured that there wouldn't be much point in charging for source control for open source projects, so I am not surprised that it is offered as a free service.

CodePlex's stated goals are to host and support open source projects, I assume that it is also meant to show off Microsoft's technologies. That is nice, except that the fact that a project is OSS doesn't mean that its source is not mission critical data that really should be safe.