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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?"

5 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Zombie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, no, it wont be that bad, it will just auto update all repos, insert ad's into every code and break on every 2nd tuesday in a month...

  2. Bad idea by c++horde · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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.

    2. Re:Bad idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      GitHub to SourceForge import tool: https://sourceforge.net/p/forg...

  3. Nokia, Skype, Hotmail, and LinkedIn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    QuarterDeck, OS/2, Xenix.

    But Google kills off just as much. Remember the much-loved Google-Reader? Wave? Google-Talk?

    I was a paying skype customer before MSFT.
    I was a paying Nokia Maemo customer, before MSFT.
    I was an early adopter for LinkedIn.

    Cancelled my accounts in each, when Microsoft broke each of them.