Microsoft Closes Its $7.5 Billion Purchase of GitHub (techcrunch.com)

Microsoft has official closed its acquisition of GitHub, the Git-based code sharing and collaboration service with 31 million developers. "The Redmond, WA-based software behemoth first said it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock in June of this year, and after the acquisition closed it would continue to run it as an independent platform and business," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The acquisition is yet another sign of how Microsoft has been doubling down on courting developers and presenting itself as a neutral partner to help them with their projects. That is because, despite its own very profitable proprietary software business, Microsoft also has a number of other businesses -- for example, Azure, which competes with AWS and Google Cloud -- that rely heavily on it being unbiased towards one platform or another. And GitHub, Microsoft hopes, will be another signal to the community of that position. In that regard, it will be an interesting credibility test for the companies. Nat Friedman, previously the CEO of Xamarin, will be the CEO of GitHub on Monday. He says the site will be run as an independent platform and business.

"We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud," he writes, noting that there will be more tools to come. "We will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love," he added.

Comments

"tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the FUCK is he talking about? Microsoft has been hellbent on making GARBAGE the last 15+ years...

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft make some of the best development tools available nowadays. Visual Studio, SQL server/management studio etc. They have some annoying quirks granted, but they're better than alternatives.

Android Studio is very much on par with visual studio to be fair, but that's probably because it's basically resharper.

xcode is dire, as is the whole iOS development process thanks to the awful provisioning profile and app review process. Its storyboard designer is nice though.

Re:"tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[AHuxley]

The tasteful part is a new code of conduct. The code has to be ethical and all comments approved.
All code use and has comments will have to reflect well on the M$ brand and its party political policy direction.

Re:"tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You will learn to love the taste, just give it time. They all learn eventually.

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even so, snappy is a bit of a stretch. Visual studio frequently pauses randomly for seconds, sometimes minutes. Really sloppy design to have the input thread able to be blocked like this, completely stalling whatever you were doing.

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[jd]

For database, I've been using dbForge and Dezign for Databases. Vastly superior to Microsoft's offering and it's not limited to one database. True, you pay for the privilege. Also true, they are not open source. So? I'd rather have something that does the job than something that has a particular badge. I'm willing to pay for a working product.

I've not tried OmniDB yet,but it looks interesting. That is open source - BSD, which is perfectly good as a license. It looks much better than Microsoft's SQL Server editor (which I've known to randomly destroy table content on a schema edit).

Visual Studio is a pain. The tool tips make it hard to read the text. It can't handle renaming a file to change the case. Its error highlighter is defective, randomly reporting spurious errors that vanish if you reboot VS. The build can sometimes show as complete when it has failed. A RAD tool like that should never report flags are incompatible because there's no value in a RAD over text editing a compile recipe if you can set impossible combinations - those should be sanity checked at input. You know, the way we were all taught to validate inputs when first taught programming.

VS' debugger has nothing on DDD.

https://softwarerecs.stackexch...

VS, on being presented with a wstring, shows a pointer. Getting it to show the string itself is horrible and getting it to handle such strings on re-entering the function is all but impossible as it relies on static evaluation of where things are. Sadly, DDD doesn't support Microsoft C/C++, or I'd use it exclusively.

Open source RAD? Meh. For Windows, Notepad++ with syntax highlighting is faster, easier and more robust. Eclipse is too heavy and I find its package manager gets confused easily. Otherwise, it would be a good project.

Re:"tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[Anonymous Coward]

They will soon polish out the unnecessary colors from github UI, add more whitespace between buttons and also implemen some magical hidden buttons which can be found only by moving mouse over them. And UI layout will get randomized on every "upgrade" to keep website exciting and engaging.

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[mikael]

Microsoft Visual Studio is probably the best there is - at least it doesn't show up variables as [unknown] because the compiler and debugger developers couldn't agree on a data format to indicate where variables optimized into registers were stored.

Visual Studio seems to be extending functionality into the Internet so it retrieves news articles related to C++ and coding. Perhaps they will extend it into searching for useful Github repositories and libraries.

Re:"tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it were Samsung/Android, the clock time would be changed to a 2x2 box of text, everything would have a countdown timer, menu items would randomly rearrrange themselves whenever they were updated, trying to uninstall an application would be like whack-a-mole as the menu disappears before you can click on it.

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[grinchier]

Resharper came from Intellij Idea which made Android Studio

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[MemeRot]

If you want a text editor, I'd recommend you check out Visual Studio Code. It's great. It is nothing like VS in any way, other than the name. I use it for everything but c# nowadays. It's quite popular with open source developers

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[MemeRot]

They also make Rider, a very compelling Visual Studio alternative. But my office gets volume pricing on msdn, so we stick with that

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[chrish]

I'm still confused as to why anyone would use Visual Studio Code or Atom (both massive Electron apps) when SublimeText is available?

It's like Atom (a LOT like Atom, I think they're cloning it), but using much less disk and RAM, and with more polish. My instance is currently using a bit over 4MB of RAM (on Win10, no files open).

Fresh install of Atom, no files loaded... 285MB of RAM.

On-disk install size for Sublime is 26MB. Atom is 668MB. FOR A TEXT EDITOR.

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[tepples]

I'm still confused as to why anyone would use Visual Studio Code or Atom (both massive Electron apps) when SublimeText is available?

To save $80 per seat per major version, especially if the U.S. Dollar is expensive where you live.

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[Pieroxy]

Android Studio is very much on par with visual studio to be fair, but that's probably because it's basically resharper.

Android Studio is IntelliJ IDEA, not resharper, although both are provided by JetBrains.

Re: "tasteful, snappy, polished tools"?

[chrish]

Seems fair.

We let people use whatever they prefer for their dev environment; I'd rather spend that $80 and use the CPU/RAM for compiling and debugging.

We're actually spread between a bunch of editors... Atom, VisualStudio Code, Sublime Text, Eclipse, vim, etc.

7.5 billion fucks given

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow linus caused this value with git

Re: 7.5 billion fucks given

[Anonymous Coward]

Over a weekend addressing one of his amazing rants, snowballs into something that his leading competitor buys so they can profile all of the uploaded code for nefarious reasons

Re: 7.5 billion fucks given

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the ones that caused the snowball are the ones getting paid

Re: 7.5 billion fucks given

[Anonymous Coward]

Even worse Linus turns into a snowflake....

Re: 7.5 billion fucks given

[Anonymous Coward]

What is worth the 7.5 billion, clearly not the web interface nor the domain name. Is it advertisement opportunity, access to the email addresses to file lawsuits on patent infringement or the ability to morph the terms for their favor?

Re: 7.5 billion fucks given

[jd]

It'll be the license, modified so that you give permission for Microsoft to use anything you've put on GitHub in a closed source product, regardless of any license you use, and to make Microsoft co-owners.

Re: 7.5 billion fucks given

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that worth 7.5 billion, they can do that by hiding any traces of it

Re: 7.5 billion fucks given

[tepples]

Has any evidence of this planned TOS change been made public?

"neutral partner" my arse

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd first have to break up the whole incestuous mess.

Re:"neutral partner" my arse

[Kaenneth]

You mean GNU?

Re:"neutral partner" my arse

[Anonymous Coward]

Does "closes" means that Microsoft is going to leave the open source projects alone now?

Re:"neutral partner" my arse

[_Sharp'r_]

Maybe now Microsoft will start using decent version control and branching for developing their Windows product...

Re: "neutral partner" my arse

[jd]

Why stop using SourceSafe now?

Besides, can they? SourceSafe suffers random database corruption. They might not be able to move off it.

Anyway, a more advanced source control system could include RCS and SCCS. The extra features of RCS might confuse Microsoft developers at first, but they'd manage. They'd never cope with Git, totally alien to their mindset.

Re: "neutral partner" my arse

[Dutch Gun]

SourceSafe suffers random database corruption. They might not be able to move off it.

MS never used SourceSafe internally. They used an internal licensed fork of Perforce.

They'd never cope with Git, totally alien to their mindset.

They've been using git to manage Windows for over a year now, as well as many other projects, and they've contributed back some of the work they did to support extremely large repositories (~300GB). git support is even directly integrated into Visual Studio now.

Microsoft Electron

[tepples]

GitHub made an application framework called Electron that is essentially a copy of Chrome hardcoded to view one website. Applications built with Electron, such as Slack, Discord, and modern Skype, tend to be RAM hogs, well into the triple digit MB per application. On laptops with 4 GB or less RAM, the swap pressure caused by running more than one Electron application at once makes Emacs look like "Eight Megs And Constantly Smooth".

So I guess with the purchase of GitHub made official, we can officially refer to this as "Microsoft Electron".

Re:Microsoft Electron

[thePsychologist]

Electron may be a resource hog, but with it Microsoft produced Visual Studio Code. It's free, available on Linux, and the first text editor that I have actually been able to use aside from Vim. Aside from Vim keybindings, it's just pure fun to use, and wouldn't exist on Linux without Electron.

Re:Microsoft Electron

[Anonymous Coward]

that just means you have to buy a new PC with Microsoft Windows

Re:Microsoft Electron

[schweini]

But why did they use Electron, instead of simply making it a bring-your-own-browser javascript app? (genously curious)

Re:Microsoft Electron

[tepples]

I think at the time, bring-your-own-browser lacked strong support for several things: 1. offline use, 2. allowing the user to drag an entire directory into a web application for things like multiple-file search and replace, 3. launching local build tools natively, and 4. running a secure web server locally without having to buy a domain name and keep it renewed.

Time to move on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry Microsoft. You pissed all over the PC industry, acted malicious, subverted standards, wrote the least secure major OS on the market, tried to make the web be "Microsoft-Only", and have generally been a bad actor for decades. You set personal computing back a decade and half if not more.

Guess what? Git is DECENTRALIZED. That means you don't get to have lock-in just because you bought github.

Bye bye!

Re: Time to move on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you have missed the past few years of news.

Re: Time to move on.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're whining about shit that happened decades ago

Then sub spyware built into the OS, app store lock-in, etc.

Re: Time to move on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Decades ago? The Win10 spying shit is still ongoing. Have you used that dumpster fire of an OS? The regression since Win7 is like some kind of sick joke.

Re: Time to move on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to move on from Github not time to move on from microsoft. He cant move on from microsoft when hes already done that a decade ago, Please go back to school. Your reading comprehension sucks.

Re: Time to move on.

[jd]

Microsoft today IS your father's Microsoft. They've changed only their slogans. They're still working to subvert and destroy open source.

Re: Time to move on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. microsoft saying they love Open Source and Linux is the embrace part in EEE.

Now ...

[PPH]

... you can unplug it.

Time will tell.

[nimbius]

The fact that Nat Friedman is heading this up is cause for me to lower my machete and molotov. Nat is a smart guy, and if given the opportunity hes shown he knows how to deliver what the community wants.

the canary for Microsofts acquisition however is, also, Nat. Once he resigns its an impossible act to follow for Microsofts dyed-in-the-wool chain of command. Theyll need to continue the momentum, redouble their commitment to the community and maintain good communication. Gitlab and Sourceforge are too readily available, too easy to use, and have all the same features as github. Microsoft is literally banking on their ability to curate a very perceptive userbase...something they have failed to do time and time again

Re:Time will tell.

[Anonymous Coward]

but what the community wants and what microsoft will demand out of their 7.5 billion dollar investment are NOT the same.

this will go down as one of microsoft's biggest blunders. github will (continue to) bleed paying customers until it's a shell of its former self. microsoft's been down this road before. anyone remember codeplex? didn't think so. github will soon follow suit.

Re:Time will tell.

[TFlan91]

I don't think so.

Even if this investment never reaches black, M$ will view it as a win.

This is about vertical integration, pure and simple.

Control not only the productions systems (read Azure), but also the development systems (read GitHub). CI/CD is starting to become a must-have feature among GitHub, GitLab, and others, which only further reinforces reliance on a particular system/structure

Build those walls, ensure you support the entire workflow process from start to finish, then close the gates.

Re:Time will tell.

[TheRealQuestor]

So not only are you a armchair analyst, you can also foresee the future. Man that must be a terrible burden to carry.

Re:Time will tell.

[Anonymous Coward]

but what the community wants and what microsoft will demand out of their 7.5 billion dollar investment are NOT the same.

Did Torvalds's every make any money from Git?

I assume not.

Re: Time will tell.

[jd]

Check for a suspiciously humming blue box with a telephone cabinet on the front.

Or accept that most people know not to trust Microsoft. Either works.

Although if anyone here has seen such a box, please let me know. I promise, I am not The Master. Look into my eyes. I am not The Master.

Re: Time will tell.

[jd]

Not as easy to answer as you might think.

He never directly made money off Linux, but did land at least one (possibly several) multi-million dollar per year jobs on the strength of Linux. The Transmeta shares I'll assume have historic value to a museum but not to Linus.

So he's a multi millionaire from Linux without making money from it.

It's less clear what the situation is with git. He may well have earned millions off speaking tours of businesses on the subject of proper attribution and decentralised archiving in content management, for all any of us would know.

Mind you, with so many kids to put through American schools (expensive) and American college (expensive), with their health system (expensive), he will need to. It's estimated that, in America, it costs about a million to go from pregnancy to graduating university. More, if you want quality.

Re:Time will tell.

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe, "if"

good on the GitHub folks, i hope its money spread evenly around (probably isnt).

If i were a MS shareholder, more-so than via index --- i'd call him inept. his MS company has stagnated all the while MS has alienated the non-business as well as the business users.

They should have started down the path of buying something that actually makes good money. S@P has a ton of technology companies doing just so, and valued stupidly low. instead they are taking the FANG approach in that they should buy something at a price as ludicrously over values as their own stock.

Gitlab

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello Gitlab

Re:Gitlab

[Anonymous Coward]

Gitlab saw its all time high on project movement count the day Microsoft bought Github.

"Presenting itself" VS *actually being*.

[Anonymous Coward]

The xenomorph can wear as much human skin as he likes... he's still a xenomorph

This kind of behavior reminds me of that Dexter episode, where his therapist/mother explained how psychopaths answer questions differently.
In essence, while a normal person would feel sorry that he harmed you, a psychopath would feel sorry that he got caught.
Case in point: Exxon's boss when talking about ruining half the east coast of the US.

Sorry Microsoft. Corporate culture persists for centuries. Just like the violent ex-husband who used to steal your money, and begs to be taken back, you haven't changed either.

Embrace, check

[Anonymous Coward]

Extend, check ...

Re:Embrace, check

[AHuxley]

A new code of conduct will do the rest.
No comments in any code that are not M$ approved.

Farewell GitHub

[Anonymous Coward]

Farewell Github.

Like all the other things Microsoft has destroyed, you will live in our hearts.

Meet new boss.

[AHuxley]

In Soviet Russia government extracts all intellectual property from you.

In Capitalist West M$ becomes partner to intellectual property created by you.

Re: Meet new boss.

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a country named Soviet Russia does not exist any more, idiot.

Electron is a nice OS, but does it run Electron?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone tried running JSLinux (Or JSWindows) under Electron, and start Electron in there? For MAXIMUM WHATWG!
Cause if it is implied, that running an OS (the HTML5 platform) on top of an OS, ... Then "It's VMs all the way up!" surely is the ideal dream state that the WhatWG targets. Until every last cycle and bit is used up.

Microsoft are evil

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not use their software or platforms.

I'm now on gitlab.

Re: Microsoft are evil

[Anonymous Coward]

gitolite... the github for the command prompt... and redmine is all you need.

So, gitlab then?

[Trogre]

Let's just assume that Microsoft will follow their overwhelming modus operandi and screw this up.

See you all over at gitlab?

MS and skype went bad. And now?

[OFnow]

I hope MS does right by linux users, but...I'm sceptical given
the skype experience.

Unless...

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes me laugh âoeWe will always support developers in their choice of any languageâ

Did he say that with a straight face? Whereâ(TM)s the Asterix ? How about all the tech they pump and dump? How about vb6? Screw MS donâ(TM)t trust anything they do.

will continue to build

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he meant "buy"

Developers vs Users

[gringer]

I'd rather Microsoft supported software users rather than software developers.

Re:Developers vs Users

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Microsoft, software uses you.

Re:Branding

[Anonymous Coward]

Officer, my speed should not be scrutinized because another guy was speeding faster than me. Fuck off microsoft shill.

Re: Branding

[jd]

I've taken another look.

Same attitudes, same abuse towards rivals, same embrace extend extinguish policy, same buying out success stories to illegally leverage a monopoly in other markets, same buggy products.

Gates wasn't the one who ordered the ISO group bribed to certify their Office data format as a standard. Bribery is wrong, even when done by slightly less rich people.

Gates didn't violate antitrust law by bundling Edge with Windows 10.

Gates didn't buy out Mojang or dismantle the community there.

Go pee on a floor, Nat.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope he has been housetrained by now.

Those of you not happy with this situation

[themusicgod1]

Note: there are attempts at forks, though they do not have very much to them (yet).

Re:Branding

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when everyone is speeding and going the actual speed limit becomes dangerous.

NSA/Microsoft Github

[themusicgod1]

I moved all my repositories off of github, and deleted my github account. Then I went on a downloading spree and grabbed as much repositories as I could on the day the deal was announced. Since then I've been slowly uploading to notabug doublechecking that I have everything - the goal will be to have an OS that has 0 github maintained code in it, and *definitely* no github code without a license in it. I have a thread on NSA/Facebook if anyone would like to help coordinate this effort.

I will never use github again, and code which treats github code as upstream will be migrated away from github to a non-microsoft platform first. Microsoft can suck sand if they think after a decade of war that I will ever touch any of their products again. If they think they can take over and extinguish the free software movement, they are wrong.

Current task: getting a new gogs instance up since i hit my repository limit on notabug

Re:NSA/Microsoft Github

[Anonymous Coward]

I share my extreme dislike of Microsoft, due to many reasons, not the least of which being their collaboration with the US NSA. However - how is that significant w.r.t. the use of GitHub, at least for FOSS projects? The NSA could have already accessed all of your data on GitHub before. So is it because of the symbolic significance of Microsoft ownership, or are there concrete reasons?

Re:NSA/Microsoft Github

[themusicgod1]

I have made a point to calling all prism partners by NSA/$x to show they are part of a broader system of global oppression.

Extinguish does not work with Open Source Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it. Microsoft wastes $7.5 Billion that it would have otherwise used to shake down Linux vendors. Everyone with a project on Github forks to another site, and M$ ends up holding an empty bag.

Do not take my word for it. Oracle had the same experience in the acquisition of SUN Microsystems. OpenOffice forked to LibreOffice and the original is now dead. Solaris and Open Solaris are dead projects. MySql is being replaced with MariaDB and PostGRE SQL, and Java is both facing competition from Iced Tea and dying a slow death. Google still has not written the check to Oracle, so Larry can stop counting his chickens before they hatch.

Screw Oracle, screw Microsoft. Extinguish does not work on Open Source Software, but the attempt provides one hell of a revenue stream to Open Source advocates. Keep the money flowing.

"fun to use" what the fuck does that mean??

[Anonymous Coward]

"fun to use" what the fuck does that mean??

For a goddamned IDE?

woof dot com

[Anonymous Coward]

how have we not developed an open source source control library yet

RIP, Github.

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

Just a matter of time before this is shuttered. "What, the FL/OSS people use it? We must buy it and shut it down, or turn it to shit so they won't use it." This has been M$'s MO for a while. The good news is there are alternatives, and hopefully people removed anything important before they got their grimy little hands on it.

The End is Near

[Anonymous Coward]

Donald Trump is US President.

Microsoft owns Github.

All hope is lost.

U.S. v. Microsoft

[tepples]

Gates didn't violate antitrust law by bundling Edge with Windows 10.

The only difference between that and the behavior that prompted U.S. v. Microsoft and BrowserChoice.eu is that Internet Explorer wasn't called Edge yet.

Re:No, GitHub does not have 37M developers

[tepples]

Now, if people would only publish a repo once the program was actually working and useful...

I'll assume "actually working and useful" means roughly the same as "minimum viable product". Is that what you meant? If so, I have trouble believing that you meant "don't back up the repository at all until the MVP is complete". Did you instead mean "pay Microsoft $84 per year to keep your backup private until the MVP is complete"?