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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.
Azure Github by Windows featuring Sharepoint and Skype communications.
community
kmjunti/
noun
1. a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
"Montreal's Italian community"
2. the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.
"the sense of community that organized religion can provide"
I would say GitHub users share a condition of having certain attitudes or interests in common, namely, GitHub. But I get the feeling you would not know what it would be like to have something in common with someone.
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I see everyone saying that Microsoft is just going to destroy Github, but I think they've got different plans. Skype was acquired to give them better video conferencing in O365/Teams and IP for video chat for Windows Phone, etc. Nokia was acquired because they wanted to buy their way into the iPhone/Android app store supported phone model. In neither of these cases were there any plans to keep the companies as-is. I think their overall plan is to make it even easier than it is now to consume Azure services while not touching the underlying culture around Github.
The reason for this is clear in the posts here...no one from the "open source community" trusts Microsoft. This is why they've went out of their way to let people run Linux and non-Microsoft products in Azure as first-class citizens. It's no longer about selling software; they want people to consume services monthly. They don't care what you run as long as you're paying them every month for a VM or PaaS instance to run it on, and that's a huge shift. They know that if they're not selling software licenses anymore, they need to move their focus away from enterprises and towards developers...because developers are the ones writing the new-style apps that will generate them cloud revenue.
I also think another reason they're doing this is because they're trying to establish "hipster developer cred." All the cool kids use Github. All the cool kids use open source. Therefore, if they want cool kids to pay them every month to host their code and build pipelines in VSTS, Github is the onramp. Enterprise developers with their stuffy closed source control solutions will still be supported, but they want to be seen as open to change. I've talked to a lot of people who work at Microsoft, and the change over the last 4 years has been pretty sweeping. Developers used to have private office space and they're slowly being moved into cafeteria-table workspaces to promote a DevOps culture. And they fired the QA testers and are forcing developers to do their own testing now, which is a huge change. It's all about pumping out new services in Azure and Office 365 at a breakneck pace instead of three-year OS release cycles.
So first off, I am not a developer and have never needed or used any source control system. So no stake in this argument. To the people threatening to leave GitHub...I'm sure MS could care less since you never paid a cent to keep your precious GitHub running. In fact, it is losing money hand-over-fist and not likely to around much longer, anyway. They won't miss you. Now I can sort of understand why MS might want to buy an up-and-running source control shop, but it's hard to understand why they significantly overpaid for it. There's probably a common relationship going on between the current paying GitHub customer base and MS's own base. That could be worth a lot for both parties. Then this would seem to be more of a full-service offering to enterprise. It makes no difference that MS already has it's own service. It's just a choice for your customers like different grades of gasoline (car analogy here). I'm sure the other major cloud players will be either buying up the other small guys or rolling their own soon, so you'll have a really nice choice of which devil will own your soul ... if that's your attitude.
you let a small group of people have this much money they can buy out pretty much any competitor. Money is power. Wealth inequality means power inequality. A certain amount is fine, but I don't think anyone would argue that it's gone too far in one direction when a company can blow $7.5 billion on a code repository.
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I suspect part of what Microsoft is doing here is seeing who downloads what, in what order, after what stimulus, from what referencing page, etc.
Using this allows them to figure out what FOSS software to steal/rebrand, and what communities can be disrupted by messing with what FOSS product.
If this is the case, a starting point as a defense would be to set up a bounce site which pulls github for you, so no referrer/cookies passed. Such a site could, over time, replace github, but replacing github would take work and money, whereas partially insulating us from microsoft tracking would be trivial.
Embrace,
Extend,
Extinguish
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Rember this from just a couple of years ago? https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
You don't 'steal' open source code. You just lock it down to inconvenience the developers. Get ready to fire up VisualStudio and SourceSafe as the only working interfaces to GitHub content. It's not about stealing the code. Microsoft could always grab their own copies of anything they wanted. And it's not about funding the site. They could have kicked in cash as a major user/contributor of the site without taking an ownership/control position. This is about dragging everyone else down to their level.
Bucket of crabs.
Have gnu, will travel.