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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.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable?
I keep seeing the same behavior that happened during the first dotcom boom - companies valued at stupid multiples of "earnings", including what are technically negative earnings, being valued far in excess of their worth. A company is only worth its future profits discounted at the rate of the next best investment of that money, minus its initial and ongoing investments. The longer it takes to return a profit, the exponentially more difficult it is to recover the initial investment. Only a fundamental change or an external factor like currency inflation can distort that picture into a supposedly rosy one.
Perhaps GitHub can have some of its cost structures reduced by riding on Microsoft's coattails. Perhaps there's some breakthrough that Microsoft can see with them, although I don't think there's a tremendous synergy there. The basic model has been there before (SourceForge), and it could technically be duplicated again by someone else. Many developers/repos will simply bail due to Microsoft's history of changing business terms. Heck, they rolled "Teams" out which is supposed to compete with Slack.
More power to the current owners of GitHub if they get bought out, as it's a great tool. I just think P.T. Barnum really was right, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop in this latest boom.
And were suddenly erased.
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
Let me put an image in your mind:
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
Microsoft believes in, "It it ain't broke, how are we supposed to make money on support contracts?"
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. 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.
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
> Have they never heard "If it aint broke, don't fix it"?
You obviously don't remember Hotmail; before gates and company sank their fangs into it, that is.
Imagine all the people...
Thanks 93. I appreciate it. Sometimes I feel like someone saw it fit to burn down a museum and all the contents inside, and I stepped in to put out the fire, yet I still get some really vile hatred. In case anyone is wondering, here's what we've done since we acquired SourceForge in 2016 https://sourceforge.net/blog/i...
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 might not ruin this, but on their history, I'll actively have one foot out the door, rather than passively.
I was somewhat active on LinkedIn — until Microsoft bought it.
I was somewhat active on Goodreads — until Amazon bought it.
Because with these large corporations, you just never know what of retroactive TOS root canal is coming down the turnpike, on any given day.
Once these corporations get to a certain size, it almost takes radioactive blow-back from the community to deflect their course in any meaningful way. And I don't enjoy the galloping pony-swap for the duration as this plays out.
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.
Completely different owners did that. We got rid of all that nonsense.
You know what they'll put in the usage terms with regard to what you are allowed to do with your project?
You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
Completely different owners did that. We got rid of all that nonsense in 2016
Completely different owners did that. We got rid of all that nonsense back in 2016
That's just a mirror, the official repo is at kernel.org, while the real master is on Linus' disk. Anyone, Microsoft included, is allowed to mirror it all they want.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
What's wrong with you?
Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in.
Hey cool. The Digg of source code repositories still thinks it’s relevant.
They aren't relevant yet. This is the second chance. One of GitLab, Sourceforge, BitBucket or a completely new entrant is going to end up the winner. The question is, which one? Let's start the bidding war.
I believe the opening bid is GitLab with, "you can get a reasonable open source version of the bits of our web site you care about but without the statistics and other commercial features". Who's going to raise us a statistics module?
"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.
casings works at github. The mandatory company hormone treatment makes him bitchy.
Well shit. That's gonna seriously impact all my MIT licensed code on GitHub...
If Microsoft does acquire Github, does that mean that they will instantly have access to all the private repos from Google, Apple, IBM, etc?
This makes me wonder what will happen to Atom, the text editor which is developed by GitHub and shares similar features to Microsoft's VS Code.
My company has never bundled malware with any projects. In fact we eliminated that practice immediately after acquiring SourceForge and now scan every single project on the site for malware.
Thank you my friend. Such is the world.
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.
It is easy to replicate git repositories. So easy it is a piece a cake compared to moving a cvs or another centrally managed repository. In git, every repository is equal whether it is local, on github, sourceforge etc.
Just replicate the repositories to your environment, then, just push it to a new remote. The new remote will have everything. I regularly do this to pull from our GitLab environment and push specific public changes to GitHub or other specific changes to companies git repositories. You can pretty much control whatever you wish to propagate.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Still over a million daily users, so we're gonna do right by them
Microsoft already something a bit like Github called VSTS and so far haven't claimed any right to any code on there.
We actually don't bundle spyware with our installers. In fact that's the first practice we eliminated when we acquired SourceForge in 2016, along with instituting malware scans for every project, https downloads and project web hosting, a redesigned experience, and much more. https://arstechnica.com/inform...
You posted this twice so I'll respond twice: We actually don't bundle spyware with our installers. In fact that's the first practice we eliminated when we acquired SourceForge in 2016, along with instituting malware scans for every project, https downloads and project web hosting, a redesigned experience, and much more. https://arstechnica.com/inform...
Well, then I apologize. Sourceforge was the source of the only malware infection any computer I've ever owned has had, so I was a bit put off by it and stopped using the site altogether. Even the old 90's warez sites were never that bad.
Thanks for the feedback. I will explore it. By the way if you log in you'll never see ads.
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."
They messed up on Minecraft, too, completely dividing the community by making incompatible versions. Not cool.
"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?
They messed up on Minecraft, too, completely dividing the community by making incompatible versions. Not cool.
Other than keeping their installed user base firmly addled with Stockholm Syndrome, I can't come up with too many of their success stories.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Lol
It's admirable how you've responded to so many comments about the misdeeds of Sourceforge's previous owners.
But, like a guy named Hitler running for chancellor of Germany, you might want to consider changing the name. Now seems like an opportune time.
Some percentage of Github users are definitely going to leave, because they will never trust Microsoft. I'm certainly curious as to how big of a percentage A certain percentage of those will never trust Sourceforge, no matter how much you assure them that things are different now.
This place is also loaded with people who feel that they must hate the thing that is currently cool to hate. Hipsterizing your every thought is an effective way to avoid actually thinking. Of course MS is not anywhere close to pure, but not pure evil either. They will tend to act in what they perceive their best interests to be. The key is to guess how they will perceive them. Satya seems to have a reasonably evolved view on such things, so I don't expect any truly stupid shit to happen. Of course, that's not always the case with any company, small or large.
This is Slashdot too. My name suggests anti MS hatred which was certainly true back in 2000. Many of us fled from Windows and discovered Linux and Slashdot took the mantra of the unofficial community site. So yes this is why you see such things.
I understand this makes people uncomfortable who are old enough to remember what MS did with COM/VB/Java/and Visual Studio 6.0 and below with VC++. MS is changing now as they are fighting tooth and nail to keep Visual Studio alive today with the onslaught of Xcode, Atom.IO, Android SDK, Python, and Jetbrain tools to win developer marketshare with the young millennials.
My hunch is this is the purpose to integrate it more nicely into visual studio and make the github website like Office 365 online is compared to the desktop version. But VS code is available for Linux and Mac and there is a Mac version of Visual Studio.So we will wait and see.
http://saveie6.com/
Well having some kind of good git-repo mirroring would be a great start.
New things are always on the horizon
Their own open source hosting site at Codeplex didn't pull in the numbers so they shuttered it.
Now they've decided they need something in that area they just go out and try to buy the market...
Git has a steep learning curve but it's pretty great when you actually embrace the philosophy of it. I don't have a link to it handy but Linus did a brief at a Google conference of some kind one time that goes into the philosophy really well, that's what made git click for me and I haven't gone back to subversion since (though unfortunately still have to use VSO for work.) The biggest issue with git is that it's so fundamentally different in principle and in practice from other version control systems that you really just have to give up the concepts that you are familiar with in others to use it successfully. The one thing it really lacks is great submodule support, because doing things like updating all the submodules referenced by the project requires a line of pseudocode/script, and there's no way to make a pointer to the head version of a submodule like you would naturally get from a massive source tree in subversion.
You're arguing some weird semantics. SourceForge is the brand, but my company is an investment vehicle that purchased the ASSET sourceforge.net from the previous company. Do some basic research on corporate structures if you need more help.