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

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?"

Comments

Zombie

[gigne]

A few years ago I would have said it is the end of GitHub. Now it is most likely to be turned into a zombie

Re:Glad I switched to Bitbucket so MS gets no cash

[Mattcelt]

This has not been my experience in any way, shape, form, or manner.

Linkedin has become absolutely insufferable since Microsoft acquired them.

Microsoft kills products over time

[mejustme]

What an incredibly effective way to piss off a large set of developers! The early adopters of git obviously were non-microsoft devs. Just discussing this now will be seen as a very serious threat to most of that population subset. Just look at any other product MS has purchased over the years to see what happened to the linux (or non-MS) version 1-2 years after the purchase.

E.g., anyone had any trouble using Skype in Linux over the last year, versus 3-5 years ago?

How long would it take before access to github is integrated into VisualStudio, and how long after that will the command-line version of git start failing to pull/push/etc to github? "Pull must be performed from within VisualStudio Team Explorer. Command-line version of git is no longer supported. Please upgrade to VisualStudio 2020."

Re:Microsoft kills products over time

[Required Snark]

"why would they do that?"

Because they are Microsoft and they live and die by NIH. That is why they have strangled so may other projects they acquired. They are even better at destroying other peoples work then Oracle, and that is world class competition.

In Microsoft Land the sequence is acquisition => integration => brain death. For example if they buy GitHub then they will "integrate" it with Linkedin, and it will be like using Facebook as a development platform. Good luck with that.

Re:Microsoft kills products over time

[Xtifr]

Git itself is still GPL'd. They can't distribute modified (or unmodified) versions without also providing the source code. Which means that any changes they make to provide a "special" version can easily be taken up by the folks who make the command-line version.

And even if they could, the result, if they tried such a thing, would be to fragment the community. Which is Github's main asset. Git, if you recall, is a distributed system. There's no need for a central point. A site like Github is merely a convenience for users. The only real benefit of Github is its community. If they damage that, they damage Github, but don't harm Git, because Git users aren't locked into Github.

Lots of big projects (including lots of big enterprise-y projects that MS customers care about) are already hosted on other sites, especially Gitlab. Plenty of big projects (including lots of big enterprise-y projects that MS customers care about) are cross-platform, and would quickly move to something else (e.g. Gitlab) if Github tried to turn MS-only. There simply isn't enough leverage there for MS to do anything nefarious at this stage.

Granted, I'd be watching like a hawk for their next move if they bought Github. But this move by itself doesn't really seem to give them any real opportunities, beyond the obvious of making money off of all the commercial projects hosted on Github.

(And frankly, if they do buy Github, I predict a lot of projects move to Gitlab or some other site anyway, as a just-in-case measure. Probably not enough to damage Github, but enough to help drive the point home: we're not locked in, guys.)

Goodbye

[Misagon]

I have already said goodbye to Skype and Linked-In after they had been taken over.
If this happens, I would say goodbye to Github too for sure.

The users of Github are not sheep. They are not like Microsoft's typical users that would accept lock-in and clunky interfaces because they don't know any better.

Re: It will become as crappy as Skype and LinkedIn

[viperidaenz]

LinkedIn was shit before Microsoft bought it.

Re:Glad I switched to Bitbucket so MS gets no cash

[novakyu]

"Has become"? When was LinkedIn not insufferable, with their constant reminder of contact requests that I was ignoring in the first place (and didn't want to log into their website to officially ignore)?