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Linux Foundation Celebrates Microsoft's GitHub Acquisition (theverge.com)
The Linux Foundation has endorsed Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. In a blog post, Jim Zemlin, the executive director at the Linux Foundation, said: "This is pretty good news for the world of Open Source and we should celebrate Microsoft's smart move." The Verge reports: 10 years ago, Zemlin was calling for Microsoft to stop secretly attacking Linux by selling patents that targeted the operating system, and he also poked fun at Microsoft multiple times over the years. "I will own responsibility for some of that as I spent a good part of my career at the Linux Foundation poking fun at Microsoft (which, at times, prior management made way too easy)," explains Zemlin. "But times have changed and it's time to recognize that we have all grown up -- the industry, the open source community, even me." Nat Friedman, the future CEO of GitHub (once the deal closes), took to Reddit to answer questions on the company's plans. "We are not buying GitHub to turn it into Microsoft; we are buying GitHub because we believe in the importance of developers, and in GitHub's unique role in the developer community," explains Friedman. "Our goal is to help GitHub be better at being GitHub, and if anything, to help Microsoft be a little more like GitHub."
when an 800 pound gorilla consumes a bundle of bananas meant for the FOSS chimpanzees,
hey Linux Foundation do you like seeing a corporation that has had 20+ years of animosity towards GNU/Linux & FOSS buy a resource that makes downloading GNU/Linux & FOSS possible, how long before microsoft starts deleting all the good GNU/Linux & FOSS code and makes access by paid subscription only? then what?
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
GitHub aligns really well with Microsoft's position as a development tool company. Unless you want Embarcadero or Oracle to buy them, the best big dev tool company to buy them was Microsoft on that front.
How long until the E-mails from GitHub saying "our terms of service have changed"?
I'm betting this happens "before the end of summer".
A leopard can not change it spots. Just two months ago I was using Microsoft chat to find out about installing Windows for the first time in 15 years. I was using FF and Ubuntu, and the chat window was broken, the input line covered the bottom of the chat history. so I had to keep hitting enter, enter so that I could see the last thing typed. Always just a little broken for not MS systems. The Linux foundation function is to support big business not the small developer or hacker. When money talks. the Linux Foundation bends over and takes it.
The original Linux ideals are being lost to corporate money.
because they're not an advertising company
...Except that they are an advertising company. Unless you've been living under a rock the last decade, you must know about Bing, and of course, all the advertisements that have been built-in to Windows 10. Why are you lying?
"My opinion: Microsoft bought GitHub because it expects to make money. To begin evaluating GitHub's future, consider what Microsoft did to Skype and LinkedIn. "
I suspect you hold this opinion because you're entirely unaware of the significant cultural change Microsoft has gone in the last 5 - 10 years.
The open source community often would talk about the Bill Gates/Ballmer era tactic of embrace, extend, extinguish, and that's all well and good but neither of those people work at the company now. Ironically, as a result, there's been a developer led revolution in Microsoft whereby the company has actually been defacto taken over by developers who believe in open source. As such Microsoft has, internally, taken a step change in terms of supporting that, from implementing a full open source license management solution for ensuring it's products conform to various licenses such that it's developers can use open source, all the way through to actively supporting it to the point they've become a top 3 (top 1 by some metrics) contributor to open source.
Microsoft have in turn migrated much of their internal codebases, including Windows itself onto Git for source control. This is incredibly evident in Microsoft's toolchain itself with integration for Git and GitHub being built into Visual Studio as standard. We now have .NET core, a fully open source compatible rebuild of .NET, we have ASP.NET MVC now cleanly integrating with many open source frameworks and standards as standard, and Microsoft supports open source operating systems and tooling on it's cloud offering with equal prominence as it's own offerings.
So there's a reason for Microsoft to own GitHub that doesn't revolve around profiting from it directly - and that's because it's bet it's development infrastructure and future around it. The last thing it needed was for someone like Oracle to buy it and destroy not just GitHub, but Microsoft's entire strategy of underpinning it's own development with open source nowadays that it's been building on top of it.
Anyone that still thinks Microsoft is still an enemy of open source is stuck in the 90s, or early 00s at best. It's abundantly clear that open source has embraced and extended Microsoft, and that's a change that's been led by Microsoft's own development staff as the dated mindset of it's legacy management team has slowly left the building.
If you're still sitting in your bedroom, with no communication with professional developers, or similar I can see how this might not have reached you. But for those of us who have worked with both Microsoft's stack and open source for the last couple of decades and work at, or know people who work at Microsoft, it's pretty clear that there's substantial convergence, and that Microsoft is now as much part of the open source community as any other corporation, and that all the reasons Microsoft gave us in the 90s not to trust it, have long left the building along with the likes of Gates and Ballmer.