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Microsoft Acquires GitHub For $7.5B (microsoft.com)
As rumored, Microsoft said Monday that it has acquired code repository website GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B in Microsoft stock. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will assume the role of GitHub CEO. GitHub's current CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, to work on strategic software initiatives. From the blog post: "Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. "We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world's most pressing challenges." Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. Subject to customary closing conditions and completion of regulatory review, the acquisition is expected to close by the end of the calendar year. GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects -- and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device. The two companies, together, will "empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft's developer tools and services to new audiences," Microsoft said. A portion of the developer community has opposed the move, with some already leaving the platform for alternative services.
Update: In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Nadella said today the company is "all in with open source," and requested people to judge the company's commitment to the open source community with its actions in the recent past, today, and in the coming future. GitHub will remain open and independent, Mr. Nadella said.
Update: In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Nadella said today the company is "all in with open source," and requested people to judge the company's commitment to the open source community with its actions in the recent past, today, and in the coming future. GitHub will remain open and independent, Mr. Nadella said.
I feel like when Oracle bought Sun.. something is over
Who is going to trust their code to people that are known to 'borrow' others ideas?
noooooooooooo
I'm sure this wise phrase of yours has been uttered by many in the tech community around the world over the last 24 hours. Microsoft has a way of killing things off; and GitHub was always great, in part, because it WAS independent.
I use MS stuff all day long... I program in a MS language... I'm not happy about them owning GitHub.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If they don't own it, GitHub can make changes that Microsoft doesn't like. That's the long and short of it.
Microsoft can easily afford this, and they see its continued existence and use as important. They're protecting an asset by assuming control of it.
The value is that they can control the development ecosystem.
With Github you can do a full life cycle development all on Microsoft back yard. Where they can see you, guide you, encourage you to not go too far off course.
For most development, this is actually probably a good thing, as most stuff that we make, isn't breaking the mold being something super advanced and despite what developers think of themselves they are average, not superior. Having MS Framework as a guiding hand, that will prevent too many rouge applications out there.
That said, when ever you force people to play by the rules, chances for true innovation is loss. We all hit places where the Framework just isn't flexible enough in a particular area, so we need to go outside the box. So too much guidance from MS means we cannot create something new, because Microsoft didn't think of it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's been clear for a long time that GitHub didn't have a sustainable business model. The question now is how does this change GitHub? Suddenly being owned by MS isn't going to fix their "giving away services for free" business model and MS isn't exactly known for it's altruism.
I imagine that in the near future, you're going to see functionality stripped from the free GitHub and moved into tiered services that cost money.
This might include stuff ilke Paywalling the collaborative features and tiering out the fancier parts... Tier 1 only has groups, Tier 2 has groups and Kanban boards, etc. Putting strict limits on this size of free repos, etc.
Let's not forget exactly how long it took before Skype stopped having a linux client.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
MS has always had some of the best developers tools out there, so this makes sense because they couldn't grow something like this organically and it fits their role. If they tinker with it and break functionality or breach user trust, then it they'll just kill it. However, I'll be optimistic given their support of Linux, Kubernetes, Python and R.
What we have here is a problem of centralization. Switching to other centralized solutions isn't what we need. Decentralized solutions need to be invented.
git already has many of the necessary capabilities but things like search across repos is harder. Still much of what Github offers can be done with client software too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
1) E. for Embrace
2) E. for Extend
3) E. For Extinguish
4) P. for Profit
aaaaaaa
And within 6 months, some middle-level Microsoft manager looking for a promotion will decide to "enhance" GitHub as a means of increasing visibility within the corporate structure, but to the complete detriment of everyone using it, including Microsoft's own internal dev teams.
You only have to look at Microsoft's past behavior in order to accurately predict the future with the GitHub acquisition.
GitHub is dead. Leave now.
Yea I am going to have to agree with jaseuk here. Skype is not dying. The consumer market/perception is not really important to their strategy on a lot of products. Little guys pay with little checks and that is why the consumer market is absolutely brutal. For every Snapchat or WhatsApp (to borrow the examples) there is a littered landscape of dead applications or attempted copycats (*cough*Instagram*cough*). Meanwhile, MS realized a long time ago that businesses will pay big bucks for productivity software, and you don't even have to sign up that many before the product is in the black.
Then, because of the difficulty in shifting an entire company off of a particular technology it usually takes a monumental fuck-up or need before they get off of it (not to mention a real competitor). Some employees might hate it, but enough like it or the execs like it and it doesn't matter. Lync was perfectly fine in a lot of ways, and Skype for Business is basically re-branded Lync with some upgraded libraries from the acquisition. Originally, MS abused a lot of first-to-market features and tech (or at least they were the best of the first crop) and made TONS of money from it. Now? They can BUY the first to market/dominate market group if they don't capture it and as long as there is a clear path to business level monetization, it is worth it. Didn't work out with the phone division because they made a really bad strategic error and bought the company that was already on decline in that area. The one thing I am not sold on their strategy at the moment is the amount of money Nadella is paying for some of this stuff. I agree with other poster's that they are overpaying for GitHub, but that doesn't really feed into my post's main point.
Skype is plenty big in the business world. Especially with them bundling it into their O365 subscriptions and everyone looking at it as mild added value at the very least. Hell, even companies that use WebEx still have Skype often times. So the idea that Skype is dying is pretty poorly informed. MS business strategy is not to capture the consumer market so much, that is just a nice side-effect to them (hence the amount of stuff they are giving out free now to non-enterprise customers). Their strategy is to make money from businesses and be sure to keep enough of the consumer market engaged with their entire portfolio to make it more profitable for businesses to sign up with MS in general. Skype just so happens to be something they don't really care about in the consumer space it appears.
Microsoft has been a huge contributor to git in the last couple years. Maybe it's time you update your antiquated preconceived ideas.
Look, see! The leopard has removed his spots!
Microsoft invests in git. Slashdots look for the hidden catch. Failing to find one, they invent some. This might be seen as helping Microsoft in their evil designs, except that all of the ideas are so dumb that they couldn't be regarded as useful even by the inventors of the Zune.
Microsoft gives git the capability to deal with huge codebases, which had been a noted weakness of that system. Slashdots whine that the initialism of the name they gave it conflicts with some obscure GNOME project. According to them, this was some 4-D chess move to injure the GNOME project, which self-administers footbullets using automatic weapons.
Microsoft throws money at Github so it can remain viable. Slashdots fulminate about the implications. Banner ads? In your repo? It's more likely than you think.
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom