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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.
Microsoft believes in, "It it ain't broke, how are we supposed to make money on support contracts?"
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
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.
I hear Bit Bucket is good too.
Both offer unlimited private repos.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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?
"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.
If Microsoft does acquire Github, does that mean that they will instantly have access to all the private repos from Google, Apple, IBM, etc?
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.
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.
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...
Thanks for the feedback. I will explore it. By the way if you log in you'll never see ads.
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.