Changes to Microsoft Learn’s public documentation repositories

This is a rather unfortunate & silly decision & whilst I really wanna leverage certain words here that are in the English Language, I will refrain from doing so to keep somewhat professional, what I say elsewhere well that's a different matter.

One of the best things that Microsoft did was open sourcing their documentation, even for closed source products like the on-premises versions of M365 Servers & fully integrating the process for making edits to individual documents available in the pages themselves. The removal of that feature was a mistake, the removal of these repositories for currently supported closed source products is also a mistake, like it has been for deleting repositories for all those out of support/deprecated products that are still deployed out there in the world.

From a historian's point of view I cannot understand why this change is happening, the only place that to me makes sense is that there is a need to free up some of the compute resources that are currently allocated for these repositories and reshuffle things after recent layoffs.

Doing this feels akin to .NET yelling out to the community "Hey we going back closed source now sorry & all the documentation is also going behind closed doors too & will need a product license to access"

That is not a suggestion either. But you get why this feels kinda like a sneaky stab in the back when we've been unfortunately stunned when someone threw a stun grenade our way.

The options for feedback just unfortunately don't meet the need for the end to end of what is a `living breathing document` which the GitHub backed repos does best. 

I mean you even still today have a Learn Pathway for becoming a Learn Documentation Contributor - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/become-learn-contributor/?source=recommendations

Honestly, as one of the many former MVP's for 7 years & a currently serving Microsoft Global Community Initiative Regional Lead (MGCI RL) I am very disappointed in seeing the demise of all of Microsoft's documentation being open source editable, with full end to end traceability as to when and why edits are being made.

I already know from the chatter on Twitter/X about this, which is how I learned about it that this decision, is not being met with "warm fuzzy feelings" in the slightest.

I hope that perhaps there will be either a rethink, or a more detailed reasoning as to why this decision was made as this post, as to be brutally honest whilst still being professionally kind, we need actual details being provided as this post lacks the detail and just adds unnecessary scare by being so light on the details.

At a minimum, we should have had some detail that covers
- How many repositories are potentially affected with a list of them & importantly who's the owner of that repo/group of repos.

• I'd recommend a public tracking system that is built and viewable on GitHub because well it would just make sense

- Additional data around the operating costs for individual repos 

• Human and compute cost
• I'd quite like this to be information that is available via repositories themselves as that information is already available somewhere even if in multiple disparate systems and hidden by "Promotional Credits" costs for any of the agent costs etc

There are estimate tools out there but we should really be able to see what the rough monthly cost of a repo is. Which I know isn't just for these repos but that info, would help people actually understand decisions like this instead of it just being a "hidden management only thing" and better brings things into the open.

But ya, I'm not a fan of this direction, at all.