Submitted by Microsoft has recently held talks to buy GitHub, reviving on-and-off conversations the two have had for years, according to people close to the companies.
The talks have come as GitHub, a popular platform for software developers, has struggled to hire a new CEO.
Even as a non-developer, I ‘use’ GitHub almost daily to check out new projects or download some piece of software. This would be a pretty major acquisition.
Simply tragic.. Nothing good will come of this.
Don’t react on emotions but…
The question is why.
What is the purpose of this move ?
It’s a bold speculation of my part, but i guess this could be related to MS consistent failure to deliver a decent VCS solution for his customers (in particular individual developers) since as far as it existed.
This used to be a major sore spot for managers pushing for a “all MS” solution for his IT teams, and a bit of a oddity with all MS IDE solutions for a very large chunk of 90’s until mid 2000’s. They did have this great IDE solution, Visual Studio, but it used to lack any kind of meaningful VCS despite its sophistication. Their customers could use Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, but it was plain crap: frail architecture that made it brittle, prone to corruption, unreliable.
They recognized this, and did their second attempt at a VCS at 2005, the Team Foundation Server. And failed again. Albeit it is arguably a better solution than VSS, designed to bring all new amenities that one could expect from a modern integrated project management solution on top of a VCS, like a web application with requirement management, bug tracking, release manager, storyboards, integration with sharepoint… etc, his actual “version control system” (TFVC) born outdated: people already began using distributed VCS (remember, Git, Mercurial and Bazaar are all also released in 2005) while TFS relied on a centralized server architecture not much unlike Subversion or CVS.
It also had some additional problems: his command line client is crank to the point of uselessness making a IDE a must (and the only IDE with decent support for it is VS), it’s feature creepiness made it unpractical for small teams and individual developers and also a bit too costly for people looking only for a VCS solution.
Eventually MS conceded that TFVC is just outmoded,, and slapped a Git back-end on TFS 2013, turning it into just a gloried Git project management suite.
MS did attempted to create a critical mass for his TFS/TFVC solution before yielding to Git using CodePlex, their take on opensource community fostering in 2006. But it failed, by 2012 it adopted Git but was already too much behind GitHub to gain any significant traction, and it went belly up in late 2017.
By assimilating Github, not only MS could integrate it with Visual Studio (and other MS tools) to a degree previously impossible, but will also gain almost overnight a say in the development of Git tool itself as the owner of the largest source forge community in world.
Edited 2018-06-04 00:19 UTC
I do not trust the direction Microsoft is taking and with all the privacy problems I see in consumer products (windows 10) and cloud as in Azure, I will see this as a sign that I should move everything I have from Github to gitlab or something else. They are trying to dominate the professional market again. I think this, and Linkedin and maybe in the future Stackoverflow would just give them full control on mining the crap out of the network of professionals everywhere. For literally every job out there they can have all the info needed. It did not work out well so far when they had all the control and this new Microsoft seems more ignorant (political) about it.
This will be the end of a currently incredible platform. Just look at Skype.
we can all go (back) to sourceforge
There is no way back.
So far so good! Microsoft themselves use GitHub (did y’all know their JavaScript engine is open source and hosted there, among many other projects?)
If you were worried about for-profit companies controlling your source code hosting, then nothing’s different today from yesterday — you should be looking at self-hosting or using a cooperative hosting platform you trust and support.
If you weren’t worried, I wouldn’t expect much to change. Just one corporation buying another to use and support its products. (I’m mildly curious if Atom and VS Code will continue to stand off against each other though.
It’s been very clear that people who don’t like this move don’t like it because it’s Microsoft, not just any for-profit company. The only other companies that would be worse would be IBM and Oracle – IBM because they don’t have plans after acquisition, and Oracle because they are well known arseholes.
I’m willing to see how this plays out, since Microsoft has been more good than not lately. My only gripe in all this is why can’t companies let go of their acquisitions if it doesn’t work out – why do they have to destroy it?
Why upset about Microsoft, specifically, then?
Are you new to the world of computing?
From that answer, I assume you’re upset about the 1990s (which I remember very well, thanks). I’m a little more interested in the present and future.
If you can read properly, you’d know from previous comments that a) I was referring to other people and why they have a problem and b) I am willing to see how this plays out. So maybe you should realize that you can’t extrapolate from just one “answer”.
If you remember the 90s very well, then why were you playing dumb? You know full well the people who have a problem with it are thinking of Microsoft’s entire history. If you have no problem with it, fine, but don’t pretend not to know why other people may be against it.
Microsoft is not just a random for-profit company, is the main competitor for a lot of projects hosted on GitHub
What’s the implication, that Microsoft will shut down the source code hosting for someone’s IDE or operating system because they also make an IDE and an operating system?
Personally I am not a paying customer of GitHub, but definitely would not want to pay if it was owned by my competitor.
Why not? Companies that compete in one area do business with each other in other areas all the time.
Rest assured there’s a strategy at work here. This is a business decision, plain and simple. They see a way of getting something back from this, the question is what.
Lest anyone think this is about being part of a community, I’m struck by the GVFS issue between Gnome VFS and Microsoft’s github file system, and their complete lack of courtesy towards other established projects. Microsoft is still Microsoft, doing things the way they want irregardless of other established projects/people/players.
I don’t wish to speculate on what Microsoft will do if they acquire github, there’s plenty of speculation pieces already written about it.
The simple question is, if they acquire it, will apathy continue to reign supreme and as long as Microsoft doesn’t change things too much will people stick with it? Or, will people abandon ship and go to other git hosting services? I’ll be watching to find out, because I’m really curious if people really care? Or if it’s just a vocal minority pointing out history, threats, and other real issues.
Face it. We get the services we deserve, in the broadest sense. People know Google and Facebook slurp down vast quantities of personal information. We know they can slice and dice and bake that data and come up with some amazing conclusions about us. Look at Target years ago, using their small snapshot of data, to figure out that people were pregnant, sometimes before they had told anyone, just by their searches and purchases at the Target stores. Imagine how much more Facebook can do.
Yet – are people abandoning Google or Facebook? A few principled people are, but the vast majority are still there.
I anticipate the same thing happening with github if MS acquires it. A few principled people will leave. For a while. But the vast majority will probably just follow along.
Edited 2018-06-04 03:39 UTC
Ehh…
Just announced!
https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-fo…