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Microsoft Is Talking About Acquiring GitHub, Says Report (zdnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the symbiotic-relationships dept.

The Welcome Rain shares a report from ZDNet: Microsoft officials have been talking to GitHub about possibly acquiring the company, according to a June 1 report in Business Insider. BI claims that the two have discussed the possibility of an acquisition on an on-and-off-again basis over the years "but in the last few weeks talks have grown more serious." BI is citing unnamed "people close to the companies" as its sources. "This isn't as surprising as it would have been ten or more years ago," writes The Welcome Rain. "Microsoft is investing a lot in git, including GVFS, a Git Virtual File System to help Git work with very large codebases. What might this mean for the future of Github?"

4 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. It means Github is dead. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    I, for one, welcome our Embrace, Extend, Extinguish overloards.

    (he says while migrating to a superior free git repo host that already permits closed source projects, docker, and continuous integration.)

  2. Re:Zombie by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

    We use their paid version at work. It's okay... But lacks some basic features, like a way to organize your 300+ repos in some sensible way.

    Honestly if Microsoft spur some development of the site it would be welcome. The industry seems to have stagnated a bit - all the rivals like GitLab and Bitbucket are pretty much clones of GitHub and while they have some interesting features there isn't really anything radically different.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re:Bad idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a former Microsoft developer, I can tell you, this is a really bad idea. Microsoft internally has one of the best revision control systems I've ever used (Source Depot), so we know they won't use it, but they will control how source code is managed and he who controls the keys to the repository also controls the builds.

    I vote really, really bad idea. Start moving your projects back to SourceForge.

    The Windows code base is already hosted on Git. It was migrated from Source Depot to Git and in the process GVFS was created to allow Git to scale. This is no secret, it's been reported in the news for over a year.

  4. Re:Bad idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Source Depot is no more - Windows is now built using Git

    https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/61pnmv/source_depot_is_no_more_windows_is_now_built/