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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.

31 of 493 comments (clear)

  1. Rebranding by Fls'Zen · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next, they will rebrand it "CodePlex".

    1. Re:Rebranding by Luthair · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Azure Github by Windows featuring Sharepoint and Skype communications.

    2. Re:Rebranding by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Git#

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    3. Re:Rebranding by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 5, Funny

      #GitOutOfHere

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    4. Re:Rebranding by DaFallus · · Score: 3, Funny

      GitRekt
      GitFucked

      --
      No one cares what your captcha was

      Houston TX, USA
  2. Sad day by hlavac · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I feel like when Oracle bought Sun.. something is over

  3. The cry of a million voices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I sensed a great disturbance in the FOSS, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

  4. "community" by ooloorie · · Score: 3, Informative

    A portion of the developer community has opposed the move, with some already leaving the platform for alternative service.

    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.

  5. Re:nooo by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  6. Re:Skype style UI coming to GitHub ? by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  7. Licenses by richie2000 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Apparently, Microsoft thought the cost of licenses for all the code on GitHub was included in the price.

    --
    Money for nothing, pix for free
  8. friendly reminder: abandon ship. by nimbius · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:friendly reminder: abandon ship. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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)
  9. Re:So I guess changes are coming? by jonnythan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:Skype style UI coming to GitHub ? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Funny

    >> 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?

  11. Not suprised, just wondering what's next. by Mysticalfruit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  12. They need it to drive cloud adoption by ErichTheRed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:They need it to drive cloud adoption by wonkavader · · Score: 3, Informative

      Dude, let's go back to that first paragraph. Skype is now dying. I am forced to use it at work and it is genuinely worse than the MicroSoft product it replaced. Nokia is TOAST.

      Microsoft may be planning many things with who knows what good intentions. They'll still gonna destroy github.

    2. Re:They need it to drive cloud adoption by Zmobie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  13. Maybe this is public information anyway but... by wonkavader · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:Sourceforge time to make up for the past by war4peace · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)
  15. Re:So I guess changes are coming? by timholman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    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.

  16. github's owners were going to cash out eventually by Anon+E.+Muss · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  17. Re:Sad day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    Rember this from just a couple of years ago? https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

  18. Re: Sourceforge time to make up for the past by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."
  19. Re:Maybe this is FUD anyway but... by PPH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  20. Re:Skype style UI coming to GitHub ? by webnut77 · · Score: 3

    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.

  21. Re:So I guess changes are coming? by jeff4747 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  22. Never change, Slashdot. by The+Welcome+Rain · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  23. Re:Distributed nature of GIT by renegadesx · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!
  24. Re: nooo by DamnOregonian · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.