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.
Next, they will rebrand it "CodePlex".
I feel like when Oracle bought Sun.. something is over
I sensed a great disturbance in the FOSS, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
A bunch of people doing the same thing, or even having the same interests, is not a "community", so let's stop putting "community" after every group. What you're trying to say is simple: Some open source developers have opposed the move, with some already leaving the platform for alternative service.
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
So how long will it be before Microsoft gives the GitHub UI the Skype treatment ?
On the plus side, Microsoft raised Nokia up to be the world leader in phones...
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Apparently, Microsoft thought the cost of licenses for all the code on GitHub was included in the price.
Money for nothing, pix for free
For those looking for alternatives, https://gitlab.com/ is open source and can easily import all your projects from github.
gitea is a good light weight alternative for those seeking to take back their repos as well:
https://gitea.io/en-US/
dont wait until Microsoft turns this into Github Professional platinum edition 2019 with Minecraft 3D integration and Azure store support.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
>> Skype
Well that's a very interesting question. In fact the qwerp thing you should lak tossed fem is exactly tewrk. Wait, I think we lost Dave, and Darneesh. Let's give them a few minutes to reconnect. Hello? Can you hear me? Hey, can someone tell Joe to turn off his open mike?
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.
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.
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.
sourceforge is still a festering bloat of ads.
I guess that's why they didn't sell out to Microsoft (yet). Have you considered that?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
github as it exists now was never going to last forever. At some point the VC firms that funded github were going to cash out. They'd either take it public or arrange an acquisition. That's how this works.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
Rember this from just a couple of years ago? https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Built for managers who are afraid of losing control, not for programmers who want to get things done. (In slight defense of the managers, a lot of programmers are kids who won't get stuff done if not constantly prodded)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
So how long will it be before Microsoft gives the GitHub UI the Skype treatment ?
On the plus side, Microsoft raised Nokia up to be the world leader in phones...
Yes, you are correct. Microsoft razed Nokia.
In fact, it is losing money hand-over-fist and not likely to around much longer
Uh....$200M a year is just a little bit away from "losing money hand-over-fist".
It makes no difference that MS already has it's own service
Microsoft was already using GitHub.
I'm sure the other major cloud players will be either buying up the other small guys or rolling their own soon
Actually, the trend is for the major players like Google and MS to wind down their efforts and go with...GitHub. Wonder why MS bought them.......
Currently Amazon does have a "code repository" product, but it's primarily focused on housing your private repo. It's part of their push to have to do all your coding, building, issue tracking, testing, deploying and hosting on their servers. While you could make a public repo there, it isn't their main focus.
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
Clippy: "I can see you are writing code for AWS? Would you like to migrate to Azure?" Select Yes or Yes.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
The IDE is cluttered, gets in the way and is painful to use. It is tedious
That's like, your opinion, man. And a minority opinion, at that.
I have to hardcode options, I can't use discovery tools to see what exists or where it is. As an autoconf/cmake replacement, it sucks.
Good god. You still use autoconf?
It's slow. Given the choice of VS or Emacs, I would use Emacs every time. Much less overhead, much more real estate.
Yes, and you'll never get a real job as a programmer. I love Emacs too. I use it for all of my scripting, and even small and simple linux C projects. Emacs isn't even an IDE when compared to the IDE functionality of VS. It's a really bitchin extensible text editor with some language punctuation and highlighting features. I'm beginning to wonder if you're even serious, here.
And that's central to an IDE, your real estate. It's mostly wasted in VS, no matter what you do.
Yawn. Your real estate is what is central to your IDE? I'm starting to piece something together here. What you need is a text editor. I'm wondering if you're really qualified to be forming opinions about what makes a good IDE when you're quite clearly an amateur.
Auto builds slow the computer down and are a bad design choice.
Again, are you serious? I don't know whether to attack the literal falsity of that, or the obvious solution to it.
Probably the best IDE I have ever seen for any language on Windows was Borland Turbo Pascal 3's. The Inmos folding editor was superb, Ada's GPS and Eiffel's GUI are decent. Vi and Notepad++ are brilliant (tools should never get in the way). Really, for programming help, Norton Guides were the best I've ever seen.
TP3 and BCB were both good products. Very similar to VS, but in a lot of ways better. But still, everything that you love about them, you hate about VS. Weird.
As for the rest of that horseshit, again... with the text editors. I'm sorry VS has too much functionality for you. I'm sorry you work on simple software projects, and are confused a lot of tools in your face. That's fine. Stick to your text editors, and the professionals will continue to use professional tools.
Next up, jd tells us about using Gimp for professional post processing.
Their debugger is dreadful. If that's the best you've used, I pity you. I don't use it, even if using VS.
Again, that's like, your opinion, man. And you're again a minority. But yes, using GDB is a fucking thrill [rolls eyes]
Indeed, I think you'll find Notepad++ beats VS in popularity.
Mmmh, no. As a text editor? Sure. Probably. VS is a little heavy for simply editing files. It is, after all, a fucking IDE- something that notepad++ *is not*.
More people might own VS with Windows but that's because you can't separate it from the compiler and most competing compilers oblige you to install VS even if you never use it. That's not popularity, that's antitrust.
Poppycock. You can develop for windows without VS. Furthermore, you can separate VS from the compiler as well. Hell, you can use GCC if you want. It's just a fucking IDE. It also, unsurprisingly, ships with compilation and linking tools, derp.
I'd love to start picking apart all the ways your selected software sucks, but not a single fucking one of them were an IDE, so I'm kind of at a loss here. Since they are pretty good text editors, I can't really shit on them too badly. What I can say, is you didn't have a single good point, your opinion is not only a minority one, but also ridiculously bone headed. And finally, you need to look up the definition of antitrust.