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Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub (bloomberg.com)
Bloomberg reports:
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Terms of the agreement weren't known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.
GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, use GitHub to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It's also a social network of sorts for developers. While GitHub's losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016 -- it had revenue of $98 million in nine months of that year.
On Friday, it was reported that Microsoft was in talks with GitHub about an acquisition. Now it seems like it's actually happening.
Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in. Here is a tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge.
Update #2: Already, we are seeing plenty of backlash over this news. One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.
Update #3: It's official. Microsoft has acquired GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B.
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Terms of the agreement weren't known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.
GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, use GitHub to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It's also a social network of sorts for developers. While GitHub's losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016 -- it had revenue of $98 million in nine months of that year.
On Friday, it was reported that Microsoft was in talks with GitHub about an acquisition. Now it seems like it's actually happening.
Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in. Here is a tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge.
Update #2: Already, we are seeing plenty of backlash over this news. One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.
Update #3: It's official. Microsoft has acquired GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B.
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Why hello, Gitlab
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Same here.
But I'm a nobody, and my OSS project are of little importance. What matters the most now is migrating this away from the Microsoft trap...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
But now that MS has acquired Github, it too shall be turned to shit just like practically every other online acquisition MS has made since... ever. Time to move to Bitbucket or Gitlab
are belong to us.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Sourceforge offers git, so it seems like a perfectly reasonable bit of self-promotion to add. And it’s not like Whipslash is removing mentions of the other possible places people might consider migrating to.
Z Shell’s home is on SourceForge. If I wanted to take the time, I could come up with other prominent SF denizens for you - but regardless it’s apparent not everyone shares your sentiments.
The current owners do seem to be trying to turn SF back into a useful home for open-source projects. It looks to me like they've removed most/all of the crappy behaviors put in place by Certain previous owners. It’s not the only game in town... but it’s a legitimate competitor again.
#DeleteChrome
That's where my code won't be.
No way.
I've been kicked in the face, in a business damaging way, by Microsoft acquisitions. In fact a couple of times.
There's no way that my intellectual property, open source or not, will be under Microsoft control.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Why does everyone expect digital/virtual goods and services to be free? And then those same people flip shit about the advertising and sales of submitted and extrapolated data about them.
Y'all got any more of that good strawman? Who is this everybody?
The resources to host this stuff, and do so reliably, quickly, and securely, is not cheap. The cost to continue improving it is not cheap. Explain to me, please, why you expect a whole lot of something for absolutely nothing.
That is all beside teh point. This is Microsoft, they manage to turn things to shit very quickly. Perhaps they will raise GitHub to the quality of their Windows 10 updates, eh? I wouldn't be surprised if the first thing they do is require a Microsoft account to access anything as well.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Microsoft will 99 out of 100 leave Github alone. Like the Minecraft or LinkedIn acquisitions, Microsoft knows if they mess the community they will not get money out of it. Admittedly LinkedIn hasn't turned out super well, but that is LinkedIn's fault and not MS.
Kinda like Skype, eh? Don't worry though - nothing has ever been Microsoft's fault.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"GitHub is an essential tool for coders"
No it's not. It's a *useful* tool for *many* coders. Many other coders use other cloud-based source code control services - or none at all.
It's important that we be precise in our language, and stop resorting to hyperbole.
If Microsoft does acquire Github, does that mean that they will instantly have access to all the private repos from Google, Apple, IBM, etc?
GitHub is highly strategic. It's value extends beyond its revenue to its brand, its momentum, and its position at the crux of the exceedingly important developer demograpchic. If they mostly sit on it, they can use it to effectively push MS's FOSS projects over competitors that marginalize MS's own proprietary products.
What comes to mind for me is Node.js. It's one of the first really popular developer platforms to come around that really made Windows a second class citizen. MS has pushed their way into the community and found solutions to those issues, but it shows how MS is vulnerable in this space.
Especially since their biggest desktop competitor (OS X) is much more compatible with their largest server competitor (Linux), and aligned with the mobile OSes which actively undermine MS's position as a dominant player. It's a perfect shit storm for MS.
Not necessarily. A lot of companies will acquire and keep running losses on those just to keep the market share, account information or some integration or whatever is actually "valuable" in the grander scheme of things. Some things just aren't expressed in money.
Microsoft has been chasing developers since Ballmer got forced out. With low cost or free development cloud infrastructure and free dev tools, hardware and software. They think the future is going to be in custom middleware in the cloud and they're betting big on it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The people I feel most sorry for are commercial customers of github paying for version control as a service.
Waking up one day to find out your competitor is not only hosting but has access to all your proprietary source code must royally suck.
Given what Microsoft has done to Visual Studio as of late (support for building apps on Linux, Android, iOS and other platforms, major efforts towards making Visual Studio compliant to the latest C++ standards, open sourcing core parts of .NET and generally being much more developer friendly) I cant see a purchase of Github being the end of the world.
To be fair, it's not a good idea to use a lot of these services because they lock you into the platform, and because Microsoft has a habit of discontinuing stuff after hyping it (Silverlight). Of course, you don't want to get locked in to AWS if you can help it, but containers can help with that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Certainly will start farming code and ideas from all those private repos. Probably quite a few MS competitors and suppliers of their competitors use Github. I've always thought Github was a secret gem for harvesting IP from.
How many people have taken drastic action based on one reporter saying they know (an unknown) someone who knows (undescribed) relevant things?