Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github? <comment><USER4> I spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear.

With all that said, things have changed a lot over at GitHub over the past 2-3 years, so I can't say I'm all that surprised that this was the outcome. Restructures, scandals, and some crazy comments over the few years has led me to believe that GitHub probably isn't the same company that the development community embraced. For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft mess with GitHub then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years, it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service (i.e. GitLab).

<comment><USER5> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft's ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.

<comment><USER7> Can't speak for everyone but that won't happen personally until they start respecting privacy.

<comment><USER8> The Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem does not have a problem with how Google respects privacy.

<comment><USER9> Stop bashing Google without any proofs. They do respect privacy and don't share data you elect not to. In fact, their take out tool was released in 2009 or something, way before GRPR made others do it too.

<comment><USER10> It's insidious how Google has redefined "privacy" from "what's yours is yours" to "what's yours is ours, as long as we don't share it."

Microsoft is moving fast along the same path.

<comment><USER11> [Replying to sibling comment]

> MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the > world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.

They're trying pretty damn hard with Windows 10, which by default collects pretty much every keystroke you make. That data in turn gets shared and sold to advertisers - see MS's own privacy page: [https://privacy.microsoft.com/en- us/privacystatement](https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.

<comment><USER13> Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity.

The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.

<comment><USER14> I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.

The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.

That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.

<comment><USER15> I saw someone post on Twitter saying they were tired of being their own sysadmin.

It's true - I could set up my own mail server, my own Git hosting etc etc, but why would I? I'd rather just pay Fastmail for email and GitHub for some private repos.

<comment><USER16> I'm my own sysadmin (for personal email, small HTTP server, an OpenVPN and a few other minor services for personal use) and while it did take me a non- negligible amount of time to get things running smoothly it now only requires a few minutes of attention every other week to apply security updates and make sure my backups are running smoothly. In exchange for that I have total control over my data and basically unlimited customization potential. I'm definitely not planning on stopping that.

I do use Github regularly however, but it's because of the "social network" aspect. If you want to interact with many open source projects it has to be on github nowadays. The network effect is strong.

<comment><USER17> I want to make that switch, but am rather intimidated by my inexperience in that domain. Are there any guides or tutorials you've used that you'd recommend?

<comment><USER16> Not a single tutorial comes to mind but you generally find a wealth of resources and tutorials online about setting up anything you might need.

Always start by setting up a strict firewall and then whitelist cautiously anything you need as you set up the rest. Don't bother with SELinux. Be very careful with your Postfix (or if you're masochistic, sendmail) config as it's rather (needlessly IMHO) intricate and it's easy to end up with a configuration that appears to work but is extremely broken. In particular if you end up configuring an open relay by mistake spammers are going to have a lot of fun with your server but you'll end up blacklisted everywhere.

My "stack" is nginx for web, postfix + dovecot + spamassassin for email (+ roundcube when I wanted a webmail). Postfix was by far the trickiest to configure, although if you find a good tutorial online and can spare a couple of hours to understand how it all works it's not too bad.

<comment><USER18> I have similar setup but use Exim instead of Postfix. And I am still glad I host my own services. Yes, it took time but it will work as I want it forever. Only lazy people prefer ready-made cloud services - yes, it's convenient - <USER2> it's more costly, you lose control over your data and they are constantly redesigning and reinventing something. You never know when they sell the business or increase prices, ban or limit you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a completely smart purchase on Microsoft's part. I can't imagine more synergy between two companies:

\- Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players (Google has been a great contender for this position since 2010).

\- Microsoft has moved most of their open source projects to Github.

\- Microsoft is a major contributor to Git, including massive infrastructure projects to make it possible to host the NT kernel on Git.

\- Microsoft has tried to do open source git hosting in the past (Codeplex?) but it never succeeded. Also: Microsoft partnered with Github when they shut down to migrate Codeplex projects to Github.

\- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.

\- Github are the champions behind the electron project, with a lot of institutional knowledge about that technology + native web apps/PWAs in general. Microsoft is making a huge push toward writing UWP apps as PWAs.

Time will tell how they handle this merger. They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin, Mojang come to mind) and others horribly (Skype, Yammer, Nokia).

<comment><USER20> This "synergy" seems to be pretty one-sided. Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users? That's kind of the problem with this acquisition, which is why few Github users are excited for it.

It also doesn't feel like Microsoft understands developers or even end users consistently. VSCode is a nice editor, but not the only one. The MSDN docs and site is awful. Azure is okay, but Windows 10 is somehow more annoying than macOS.

Meanwhile Github is in a tricky position, because for most people there's nothing but "community" keeping them on it. Github has some decent features, but nothing so great it would stop me from using their competitors. And they don't even have a CEO to provide the vision. The only thing in their favour is inertia.

<comment><USER21> GitHub subscriptions included in msdn?

<comment><USER22> I was thinking part of Office 365 - collaborative dev tools are the missing piece for most businesses.

There wouldn't be a major need for Jira, GitLab, etc for the most part.

<comment><USER23> I don't know why this is downvoted.

I've worked at two major companies which both used MS Office/Skype for everything and a selfhosted gitlab for code repo.

If the MS package provided git, I'm sure we would be using that instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github.

Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.

<comment><USER25> I could see developers ditching GitHub with the acquisition for a perceived conflict of interest. It's really easy to change your remote.

I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.

<comment><USER26> Changing the remote doesn't migrate anything in the issue tracker, merge requests, webhooks, pages or wiki

<comment><USER27> Migrating from GitHub to GitLab

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI)

this adresses some of the issues.

<comment><USER28> It doesn't solve the number one issue: External references to your project will all still point to github.com since that's where the project homepage (aka README.md) is.

<comment><USER29> If GitHub does get sold to MS and I end up moving to GitLab, I'll probably push one last commit to the GitHub repo adding a header saying the project has moved, with a link to the GitLab repo. It's not perfect, but it wouldn't be too bad.

<comment><USER28> Until MSFT/GitHub does what Sourceforge.net did - taking over project sites from projects which moved away and adding malware (adware/spyware) into those ;)

(I believe with all critique on Microsoft they aren't as bad, but want to exemplarize the risk)

<comment><USER30> It might just be cleaner to close the github repo and when other projects find a 404 where it used to be, they'll have to use super detective skills (i.e. Google it) to find the project's new home. And if they can't find it that way, then nothing of value was lost. (Yes, yes, I know it's more nuanced than that, but if you wanted permanence, you'd be hosting on your own domain, right?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.

<comment><USER32> > I hope they don't discontinue Atom

Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...

<comment><USER33> I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)

<comment><USER34> No, it's not a fork. They both run on Electron, so they share a common runtime environment, but they share no editor code.

<comment><USER35> Wasn't Electron created for Atom? If so, VSCode is at least using a part of Atom.

<comment><USER36> I mean, by that argument Windows uses Unix because C was written for Unix.

<comment><USER28> At least historically Windows used different parts of UNIX. i.e. they used BSD's TCP/IP stack for quite some time. Also used "UNIX services for Windows" and recently added the Windows subsystem for Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why?

Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software.

Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle that:

> _Open Source software needs Open Source tools_

<comment><USER38> Although this doesn't directly have anything to do with open-source; look at what happened to Skype, LinkedIn, and other companies they acquired.

<comment><USER39> Did i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn't changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.

<comment><USER40> Skype UI was changed dramatically for virtually no obvious reason and resulted in the usage of skype to be way more annoying for basically no good reason. They then rebranded Lync to be called Skype for Business which is a giant mess because like so many microsoft enterprise products it uses some strange scheme to connect to either a web-based server or to an enterprise server that invariably is not setup correctly and never works reliably. So they basically bought skype which everybody loved and turned it into something that a huge amount of people don't like now due to UI changes and created a second version of Skype that basically barely works and many people are forced to use at work..

<comment><USER41> We are forced to use Skype for Business at my job, and let me tell you, I have never seen a POS like that. Calls drop out for no reason, UI is unintuitive with all kinds of weird dropdowns and buttons, slow to start and just a pain to use in general. I wish we could use Slack calls instead...

<comment><USER42> I'm counting down the days until Teams has fully integrated all of the Skype for Business features so that they can finally shut the POS down. It is, indeed, the absolute worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ?

If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet.

As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.

<comment><USER44> It is shockingly bad. The fact that you can't code search in a fork blows my mind. How have they not fixed this basic, important feature after so many years? What could possibly make it more difficult than a few person-months of effort?

<comment><USER45> Um, have you actually tried doing anything about this? [https://help.github.com/articles/searching-in- forks/](https://help.github.com/articles/searching-in-forks/)

<comment><USER44> > _You will not be able to search the code in a fork that has less stars than > its parent._

... but since it's allowed if the fork has more stars, I guess they're just trying to save compute cost. Seems like a bad place to scrimp to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Can anything exist anymore without

A) Getting acquired by a multinational

B) Becoming one

Sure, MS visual code is open but as a few players get more and more power we all become subject to their whims and not them to ours.

MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment, or will it's data be useful to MS for those ads?

What sort of integrations can we expect to see with other MS products that encourage a more closed ecosystem?

This may all seem alarmist but with so many companies having so much power this sort of behavior get through unchecked.

The only recourse people suggest is "well then don't use it" but what options do employees have when higher ups mandate technologies? What about most users who just go with the wind and just let these snowballing large companies skate by? It all makes me very sad...

<comment><USER47> Probably a direct consequence of VC funding.

<comment><USER46> Definitely, investors don't give you money just for kicks, they want a payday. It shapes the community... people who take that money get a head start, crowd out competition. Everyone needs to grow huge, get bought, or die.

What could change this? People refusing money? Some encouragement to stay mid sized? Wonder if that will ever happen...

<comment><USER48> doesn't matter what you do. there will always be a competitor that takes the money and kills you. If not, the big companies themselves will fund their own projects with 100x your budget

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I'm hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft.

I think it's worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I've had paid private account since forever).

GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the 'let's move to GItLab or other' people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.

TANSTAAFL

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574) [3] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab- com](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com)

<comment><USER50> GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO [https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals](https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals) as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.

<comment><USER49> Out of topic, but how often do you have the ear of CEO: sytse, one specific wish for Gitlab that I have: please enable 'one-click' automatic LetsEncryptNow certificate creation for GitLab Pages with custom domain names (just like GitHub is doing it today) instead of me having to go out of my way to go get a X.509 from a CA for my TLS/SSL enabled site[1].

[1] [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_starte...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_started_part_three.html#ssl- tls-certificates)

EDIT: typos

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Heck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.

<comment><USER52> If you ever get something for free, remember something somewhere is subsidizing it. Whether that's the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced, VC funding (which will eventually run out), or your data is sold.

<comment><USER53> > your data is sold

It's now easier to see some of this, with the GDPR rules.

The Gitlab cookie page lists 80 "marketing" cookies which may be set: [https://about.gitlab.com/privacy/cookies/](https://about.gitlab.com/privacy/cookies/)

<comment><USER54> Wow. On the one hand I'm impressed with the openness (almost - what does purpose='unclassified' mean?), as well as the option to elect which cookie category I agree to. On the other hand... my, that's a lot of tracking!

<comment><USER53> Something similar (sometimes exactly this interface) is shown on about every third newly visited website I look at from the EU, since 25 May.

If you don't see this, it could be informative to use a British or Irish VPN (to keep an English language default) for a day or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.

At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.

Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.

<comment><USER56> what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.

as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.

<comment><USER57> > what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.

I think that's his point. He's saying that LinkedIn has the opportunity to do lots of interesting things, and appears to be squandering it.

<comment><USER58> LinkedIn is excellent as it is; its a utility to keep your CV updated and connect with professionals. We don't want FB-like functionality here, thank god.

<comment><USER59> LinkedIn is a massive pile of dark patterns and spam. What universe are you living in that that's "excellent" or even acceptable?

<comment><USER60> Well, it is excellent platform for self-declared thought leaders offering groundbreaking insights about business/culture and innovation.

<comment><USER59> It's a shit platform for that. Users who are attempting to read these "groundbreaking insights" are subjected to a deluge of tracking code and other malicious behavior. There are plenty of excellent platform for people to share ideas, LinkedIn is absolutely not one of them.

<comment><USER61> I think parent was joke.

<comment><USER59> I can't even tell anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I recently built a GitHub Markeplace [0] app Pull Reminders [1] and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.

GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:

> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single > application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle > is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.

It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.

[0] [https://github.com/marketplace](https://github.com/marketplace) [1] [https://github.com/marketplace/pull- reminders/](https://github.com/marketplace/pull-reminders/)

<comment><USER63> GitLab has always demanded too much faith from its users.

First with CI, it was the all-or-nothing approach where you couldn't use GitLab CI with any other provider. Lately they have tried to fix this but it was a half-hearted development after a lot of complaints.

Lately with their DevOps approach, it's exactly how you've said.

I don't have trust in GitLab leadership and their product feels way too bloated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is a sad day for Open Source and software in general. What makes Github great is that its a neutral place where anyone can host their code. Now that its owned by a Big Corporation, the values that Github has built will be abandoned in favor of making money for the corporation.

R.I.P. Github. Your move, Gitlab.

</comment><comment><USER65> Ouch.

So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the _suspicion_ of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.

To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."

Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!

</comment><comment><USER66> This seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub's biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub).

You see, whether or not it's justified, some projects invariably _will leave GitHub_ simply _because it's Microsoft_. And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where most projects exist. And really, GitHub isn't perfect: projects overlook a lot of minor imperfections in GitHub's actual product _because_ there are so many projects on GitHub and the usefulness of the networking outweighs the warts here and there.

<comment><USER67> Why would investors care? It's a payday for them.

Current investors are going to be bought out in cash or MSFT stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Personally, I can't wait for GitHub360 Professional for Sharepoint 360.

<comment><USER69> "Hi, I'm Gitty! I see you are having difficulty submitting your large file. Would you like some help with that?" [YES] [NO]

<comment><USER70> Clippy was last activated by default back in 2001 (!). When are we going to let go of this old joke?

<comment><USER71> Never.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> There will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.

<comment><USER73> BizSpark is discontinued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> "Please sign in with your Microsoft account".

"Requires Windows 10".

"Best viewed with Microsoft Edge".

"This project violates our terms of service by competing with a Microsoft product."

OK, where do we move everything?

</comment><comment><USER75> This is pretty conflicting. Github is nice on its own, but business wise they haven't been profitable, so sooner or later some change had to happen. In my experience, Github is great for public code storage and small private projects (easy to manage developers that already have github accounts), but it does become pretty expensive and I don't necessarily think the ROI is worth it compared to a self-hosted solution. For opensource and personal portfolios, the "network effect" or first mover advantage sort of set the stage for github's popularity over gitlab, but for a paid enterprise solution I think gitlab does a better job and offers more value per dollar. Partially what sucks is having to have separate github/gitlab accounts/repositories since that's now 2 things to manage. I've tried codecommit and bitbucket as well, but those were kinda meh (in my opinion).

Typically when "the Microsoft touch" is added it's for the worse, so the expectations bar is pretty low. But who knows. I can definitely see them leveraging github to further go after AWS by giving Azure a leg up over codecommit. VSCode has also been pretty good, if they add in the "social integrations" of github to VSCode that also competes against Cloud9 on AWS. Right now AWS is solidly winning the cloud race, but if this puts price/service competitive pressure on amazon I won't complain.

I also wonder what will happen with all the code and personal data from github. I really don't want to have to make a microsoft account to access github. As long as the switching costs from github to a viable alternative (right now gitlab) remain low, I would not have a problem with jumping ship.

</comment><comment><USER76> Why I'll never trust Microsoft ever again.

"firstname.lastname@example.com"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY)

<comment><USER77> Don't forget about: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

<comment><USER78> I don't think anyone on HN has forgotten considering it's repeated ad nauseum on every single Microsoft story on here.

<comment><USER77> Well, because the strategy was really nasty stuff and acquiring github might fit into this kind of pattern.

<comment><USER79> Except all the key players of this strategy are gone and Microsoft has embraced (full stop) open source as much as any major corporation in recent years.

But don't let actual evidence stop your pitchforks.

<comment><USER77> I see that Microsoft is not a corporation that is evil by design and that they are doing exciting stuff as well -- I don't hate them.

However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?

So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> This may just be paranoia but if I were competing with Microsoft on something that I'd have private code for hosted on GitHub, I'd be pretty worried right now.

<comment><USER81> That's not paranoia. That is completely reasonable considering Microsoft's history.

<comment><USER82> Microsoft have a history of corporate espionage against their customers?

<comment><USER81> Just for example, among the EU's criticisms of Microsoft were some of the documented (as in civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars documented) abuses of some of its notable customers like IBM and Intel.[0]

"Oh, but that was way back in the 80s and 90s, and different people run the company now. They're more mature and responsible these days." This is the only argument I've been offered when pointing out Microsoft's very shady history. It doesn't suffice.

[0] [http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...](http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf)

<comment><USER82> > among the EU's criticisms of Microsoft were some of the documented abuses of > some of its notable customers like IBM and Intel

Scanning that, I don't see any mention that this was in any way due to corporate espionage, or weaponizing the customer relationship -- could you point me directly to that part?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty frontend.

MS buys GitHub for $5B.

Funny old world.

<comment><USER84> Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof

There's a reason MS bought GitHub and not GitLab

<comment><USER83> _Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created /glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof_

Linus invented git because Linux needed a new code repo thingie. He was only focused on one project - Linux. He released git as GPL. GitHub n Co are value add sites with fees for services and are more than welcome to use GPL software for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> The way GitHub is developed (remote) and culture, this is pretty much death of GitHub and if most developers leave it will become a mess quite quickly.

GitLab just got big boost.

<comment><USER86> That's extremely doubtful. First, having to login to different Gitlab instances is terrible UX. Second, you cannot easily reference another instance's issues. Hosted Gitlab is also unreliable and slow and comes with no publicly mentioned SLO of any kind.

I'd be surprised to see any big projects going away from GitHub in the coming years, unless Microsoft actually manages to tarnish the GitHub brand in a meaningful way.

The typical tinfoil head probably never trusted GitHub anyways, whether they're owned by Microsoft or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Just when it looked like GitHub was "sustainable" through revenue ... greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") and they sell out to the _worst_ software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! :-( Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub _community_ to secure their own _independent_ future? I would buy a few (thousand) shares ... Who _else_ would buy stock/shares if they remained independent?

<comment><USER88> > Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their > own independent future?

No. Unless they want to go for an IPO, they are only allowed to sell to accredited investors ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor)).

> greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble")

That's their _job_. They put hundreds of millions of dollars into GitHub 3 (Series B) or 6 (Series A) years ago, and _their_ sustainable business relies on selling those investments for a profit.

<comment><USER87> @asernik I was referring to the idea of them doing a "Direct Public Listing" ("DPO") as opposed to an IPO (similar to what Spotify recently did...) [http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/spotify- ipo/](http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/spotify-ipo/) [https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-difference-between- ip...](https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-difference-between-ipo-and- direct-listing/)

> " _a DPO is attractive to small companies and companies with an established > and loyal client base. A DPO is also known as direct placement._ "

GitHub _has_ the " _established and loyal client base_ " with many millions in recurring revenue.

GitHub's principal VCs, Sequoia and A16z can both afford to _wait_ for a return. _everyone_ could sell in the "DPO" so VCs could liquidate if they needed cash ... [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> If this goes through Microsoft basically gets access to all the private proprietary code of so many companies. I would have never expected Github founders to even entertain the notion. I guess times change.

<comment><USER90> Microsoft has access to the _running systems_ of so many companies.

<comment> noah-kun Notably Google banned Windows years ago and every startup I know is 99.9% Mac.

<comment><USER90> I was actually thinking about Azure, but good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> From at least two angles this is great news for Gitlab.

But it feels a bit like the Atlassian / Trello arrangement, which has had little impact on users.

From recent behaviour I'd expect Microsoft to have a very light touch here.

<comment><USER92> I'm not familiar with recent behaviour anything in particular? (My memory goes to Skype...)

<comment><USER93> Minecraft, LinkedIn as examples. While LinkedIn has not gone super well, it has been left to make the decisions that it made on it's own.

Minecraft has also gone untouched - it's still hosted on AWS in fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Hey, GitLab, if you want to push a big migration from GitHub, inundate the GitHub design team with requests for a ribbon UI on github.com and to move the subscription system to Office 365.

</comment><comment><USER95> I am very interested in what will happen with these accounts (t name a few) the next few weeks / months:

[https://github.com/torvalds/linux](https://github.com/torvalds/linux) [https://github.com/mozilla](https://github.com/mozilla) [https://github.com/google](https://github.com/google)

<comment><USER15> What do you think will happen?

What advantage would any change bring for Microsoft?

(/torvalds/linux is not the upstream, btw)

<comment><USER95> I am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way.

Another issue: Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository. Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I still will be moving away _right now_.

<comment><USER15> A bit like if you're a bookshop running your online site on AWS.

The downside risk for Amazon messing with anything is greater than any benefit they could gain.

I mean, Microsoft has a kernel module upstreamed. It's not 1990 anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I guess it's time to move to Gitlab.

<comment><USER97> MS has had an 180 degree turn in policy since Balmer left.

Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.

<comment><USER98> Looking at Windows 10, with stuff like telemetry that's impossible to disable completely and hidden behind every dark pattern imaginable, or ads in Start menu?

Microsoft of today is more Microsoft than ever.

<comment><USER99> Eh. _Windows_ today might be more Microsoft than ever, but the rest of the org is spending lots of effort creating cross platform developer tools that's preparing Microsoft to remain relevant in a world that doesn't involve Windows PCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Not surprising. Microsoft has made a big deal of partnering with GitHub, showing off how well their Azure-based CI/CD products and services integrate with code hosted at GitHub. Not to mention that .NET Core and many companion libraries are hosted at GitHub, not on VSTS.

</comment><comment><USER101> I am really sick of monopoly and centralization of internet. For last few years many of important projects changed hosting to GitHub... Now this? We have alternatives, and good ones (one may argue much better than GitHub), but where is all of this going?

And Microsoft going around devouring _open-source_ community. To some extent we are the responsible ones. But on the other hand I am getting really tired of this. Then people ask me why I use Emacs... it's free and immortal as of now...

</comment><comment><USER102> I hope this encourages people to fight vendor lock-in a bit and move to self- hosted git portals. With SaaS there is always the danger of acquisitions and degradation of service. The solution is open software, self hosted and portable. Git itself is absurdly easy to self host, but self-hosted alternatives to github deserve more attention, both in terms of use and development effort.

See here for some alternatives: [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted#project-manag...](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted#project-management)

(Funny that this list is hosted on github.)

</comment><comment><USER103> I worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.

<comment><USER104> Why not self-hosting?

<comment><USER105> 1\. Electricity cost 2\. Need for constant electricity 3\. Internet cost 4\. Need for constant Internet access 5\. Cost of hardware 6\. Heat generated by the running hardware 7\. Noise generated by the running hardware 8\. Space occupied by the hardware 9\. Need to update and maintain hardware/software 10\. Worse discoverability for your repos 11\. ISP asking questions 12\. Government asking questions 13\. Police asking questions

Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.

<comment><USER106> Most of these aren't an issue if you're self-hosting in the cloud though. You can cheap VPS for a couple of $ a month.

<comment><USER107> Have you tried running GitLab on a $3 VPS?

<comment><USER108> Gitlab, no. Gogs [1] or Gitea [2], no problem. I run Gitea on an Intel SS4200 (2.4 GHz Pentium E2200, 2 GB, 8 TB JBOD), it hardly causes a blip on this rather anaemic system. The process generally takes up around 35 MB (RSS), it talks to a PostgreSQL database server on the same box. You would not want to run a service the size of Github on this but for a personal repository it is more than enough. If your projects get so popular that they outgrow the hardware or VPS just move to a higher tier.

[1] [https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

[2] [https://gitea.io/](https://gitea.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Microsoft was the second most frequent contributor on Github (to Google)[1].

[1] [https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to- gith...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to- github-2017-be98ab854e87)

<comment><USER4> Absolutely, and this has been the case for many years. Microsoft has contributed to open source heavily for a long time, but it won't stop a lot of people that have been burned in the past from not trusting Microsoft.

<comment><USER110> It's worth noting that the same goes for Apple. They have tons of closed source stuff, but they also make huge contributions to the open source world. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have LLVM or Clang as they exist today. WebKit is another big one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Tbh, I like this move. I hope they will merge Atom with VS Code and shutdown VSTS in favor for GitHub.

<comment><USER112> I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot of individual developers are biting at that price.

<comment><USER113> I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.

<comment><USER112> It's a convenience thing for me. As a hobbyist solo dev it'd be nice to have a place to work on code across different devices in private and then open it up when I feel the code is mature enough and the time is right to put it out there under an open source license.

Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> Microsoft being an owner here doesn't bother me that much.

The Azure integrations are inevitable. I guess we'll see if Microsoft has learned that strong-armed vendor lock-in makes people not like them. At this point, I am more glad they were acquired by Microsoft than Amazon. Still - there is still so much Microsoft ill-will, that this will take away the aura of 'software purity' from the GitHub.

Microsoft, please be a kind steward... I don't want to waste time migrating.

</comment><comment><USER115> Putting aside my general dislike for Microsoft for a moment, I still believe this is bad for the tech industry.

It was great having a neutral player running the site, I don't think anyone should own them. GitHub would be best as a nonprofit, though unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen.

Imagine if CNN for example bought Twitter, would other news companies use Twitter still? Probably not.

Will Google, Amazon etc. move their code elsewhere? Maybe. But we will no longer have a centralised git repo, whether that's a good or bad thing.

GitLab have already said they're having 10x the amount of normal traffic migrating GitHub repos to them.

Will employers now ask to see your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket profiles?

<comment><USER48> yeah but frankly 10x of a small number is still a small number. we still have to see what the real numbers are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> I consider this a huge waste of money on Microsoft's part.

Why did they create and then shutter codeplex in the first place? Why can't we have multiple competing platforms (Google Code, Github, Codeplex, Sourceforge, bitbucket, etc.)?

If I were Microsoft I'd rather invest a smaller amount of money (it surely is much cheaper than acquiring Github!) into making Codeplex the best platform.

And then I'd just do a traditional way of forcing people a bit: Why did Microsoft put their software on Github, a competitor? Why not force people a little bit into your ecosystem? Why give up the fight for winner takes it all every single time??? If I were Microsoft I were a bit more proud to use Codeplex, Windows phones, Windows instead of Mac, etc...

Why shutter MSN messenger for Skype? Why making apps for iphone first before Windows phone? Why does Microsoft not simply fund their projects (Windows Mobile had a head start and was abandoned, tablet PCs were already there with XP) and try to compete and create an ecosystem full of solutions working together?

Of course it's kind of nice to see Microsoft embracing github and being more open etc. But where's the fight? Why give up all the time?

Why letting codeplex die when all we need is a bit competititon.

<comment><USER77> You need to reach a critical mass of users. In contrast to Github, neither Codeplex nor Windows phone did that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> If you're thinking of moving off GitHub, one thing that I have heard about that might help you is you can ask GitHub to mirror repos, the way [https://github.com/moodle/moodle](https://github.com/moodle/moodle) looks -- note it says:

        moodle/moodle
        mirrored from git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git

That way any URLs to your GitHub repo should carry on working. People can even clone and pull this repo. That may ease migration, especially if some tools assume code is on GitHub and don't allow you to specify the full URL to the repo.

<comment><USER81> This will certainly be one of the first features to be deprecated once the deal goes through. _Quietly_ deprecated, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reasons, now no tech company who hosts its codebase on GitHub would want to continue doing that if its MSFT-owned. It's already happening: [https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632](https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632)

<comment><USER119> > Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reason

My former employer, a major e-commerce player in Europe and a direct competitor of Amazon, had basically their entire infrastucture on AWS. You might want to reconsider your definition of "no".

<comment><USER120> Just because someone did it, it doesn't mean it's wise and advisable. Just saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> I don't understand how GitHub has been unable to become profitable. Anyone know more and want to share some details?

<comment><USER122> My guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.

<comment><USER123> The costs of the fancy office and the workforce should be quite high as well.

The cash flow is probably good but even with a million customers at $5 a month, that's not enough to sustain a large company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> Hop, that's one thing less to do tomorrow! ... of course it was just a matter of time before it happened, github have stood on the other side of the mirror for a long time now, they just happend to have kept that not-for- profit/garage-built-startup image for some time, kinda like twitter. Or reddit and even y combinator. And yet people comment stuff like _" let's switch to {gitlab,bitbucket,gogs}"_. We need to understand that making a self-hostable floss clone of a service that has been designed for a monopoly captive market is not gonna change anything durably. Build something based on small friend- to-friend networks. Something that doesn't need to be big to suceed. That will slowly change the way people think about collaborative tools and get people out of the "giant ad-based ex-startup owned; `free' (as in beer) to use; hosted service" mental model. _Please stop building services and start sharing collaborative tools with your peers._

</comment><comment><USER125> I recently built a GitHub Markeplace app ([https://pullreminders.com](https://pullreminders.com)) and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.

GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:

> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single > application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle > is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.

It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.

P.S. Here's the GitHub Marketplace: [https://github.com/marketplace](https://github.com/marketplace)

</comment><comment><USER126> I bet GitLab is getting infrastructure ready in anticipation of the exodus.

<comment><USER127> The exodus began a number of days ago when this was just a rumor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.

But that Microsoft has changed, I see the most what people are complaining about is telemetry that is send, for following up on their biggest product. But all companies do this ( eg. [https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not- just-you-clicking-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not-just-you- clicking-on-links-in-ios-9-3-can-crash-your-iphone/) ), also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this.

Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too, because I think they have more to lose if they fail with GitHub then when they succeed (with more integration for visualstudio.com probably)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of > how Microsoft was in the 90's.

And because of how Microsoft was in the 2000s, and the 2010s. Ballmer was after the 90s. Did they ever stop suing Android manufacturers for using FAT, or open up exFAT after managing to get it as part of the SDXC standard?

> also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this

...Yeah, Ubuntu did that. Not Debian. Not Fedora. Not Arch. Not Gentoo. Even RHEL barely phones home enough to check its license and get updates. And in Ubuntu, the single Linux distro to have done this, you could toggle it off in 5 minutes and it would actually respect your choice, rather than "accidentally" resetting to the most invasive set of options every other update after you spend hours hunting the latest set of registry hacks that make it better.

> Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too

I agree that they want to show that they've changed. I even agree that the current ecosystem is forcing them to change some. I also expect them to pull something the moment they think they can get away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> I wonder what the reaction would have been with Apple being the acquirer. Microsoft still receives lots of hate, sometimes justified, but often just baseless. On the other hand, whenever Apple fucks devs (or users) over, they're just "protecting users" or "making business decisions". I feel there's a strong bias in the dev community.

<comment><USER130> I bet the reaction would have been largely the same; a megacorp monopoly is a megacorp monopoly.

That being said, Apple did make a few nice moves lately -- e.g., open-sourcing FoundationDB (when was the last time Microsoft opened up anything it acquired?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> I doubt that Google or Amazon will use GitHub to opensource anything two years from now.

<comment><USER132> I was just thinking the same thing.

If github ends up running completely on Azure infrastructure; how likely will microsoft's competitor's be to host large projects there.

that said, I'm not sure the impact will be too negative if google or _______'s open source being on some other git-based system if it includes decent github / gitlab like collab tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> ...And in the comments, a thousand developers suddenly realize GitHub is a plain old business rather than some kind of core infrastructure service altruistically provided by Free Software Elves and their Infinite Bandwidth Rainbow.

</comment><comment><USER134> My dissenting opinion is that this is good. I am not a Windows user and only peripherally use their services however ironically I believe Microsoft is now the challenger if monopolies:

\- Bing is one of the only english search engines with a big userbase; provides a google alternative. I like ddg but it isnt mainstream yet.

\- Provides alternative to gmail and enterprise services

\- a big 3 cloud provider, competes with AWS and GC. Likely why this github acq makes sense

\- runs linkedin to keep fb in competition

There are a lot of examples where they drop the ball, but they are surprisingly the challenger in a lot of new markets providing an alt to the leader/incumbent

</comment><comment><USER135> Get ready to merge your Github account with your Office 365 and Skype accounts

<comment><USER136> doesn't seem like something that will happen, just look at LinkedIn, they don't even have MS Account logins

</comment></comment><comment><USER137> Maybe this is an unpopular question.

People unwilling to pay for a service they think is important for their work, yet lose their shit when the the said service does what is best for them. That is, to be sustainable.

AFAIK, GH charges for private repos and yet they are not-profitable. Gitlab offers free private repos, how will the story end differently?

EDIT: Typo

</comment><comment><USER138> Oh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube).

Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.

<comment><USER139> I was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)

<comment><USER138> Videos get demonetised for questionable or non reasons

Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time).

Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything.

Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today).

Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site.

Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant.

Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them.

YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections.

And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.

<comment><USER139> Most of these features (and problems) appeared after YT was acquired, but demonetization and account problems (including wholesale blocking) seem specific to Google, so I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER140> According to [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million- run...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run-rate- from-business-products.html), GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.

I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.

I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.

</comment><comment><USER141> I talked to a VP from MSFT last year. He asked how MSFT could do a better job appealing to the open source community and start up community. I said just keep doing what you are doing. It is going to take time for those of us that were around during the Balmer days to be willing to believe that MSTF has turned a corner. I think that they are on the right path, but I certainly don't judge anyone who is skeptical about the future of github. I've been on gitlab since 2011 so it don't make much difference to me.

</comment><comment><USER142> This is seriously depressing. GitHub had such massive network effects that you'd think if anyone could stay independent it would be them.

</comment><comment><USER143> Perhaps an unpopular opinion around here but I see nothing but positives in this announcement.

This move towards a "good" Microsoft has been going on for a decade, ASP.NET MVC was released as Open Source in 2009. Seeing where they're going with .NET core, VSCode and TypeScript makes me pretty confident they will be good stewards of the site.

Microsoft had their own open source hosting solution Codeplex but closed it and migrated all their stuff to GitHub so they could be where the community was. That was a bold move and I think demonstrates how they see the community now. This isn't the Microsoft of the 90's.

GitHub is great but it's not profitable and I'm sure there are lots of improvements they could make with a bit of a cash injection.

On the flip side if Microsoft stuff it up or there is an exodus from Microsoft because people hate Microsoft, that's not such a bad thing either.

There are great alternatives out there, it's not the same landscape as when GitHub launched, everyone's learnt from GitHub, GitHub's biggest feature is the network effect. Everyone has an account and it's super low friction to contribute there. If we can break that a bit and everyone has an account at 2 or 3 places I think we might see some great innovation as competitors try to differentiate themselves.

Finally on that point. Bitbucket is awesome, you can build apps that are integrated directly into the UI [https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/](https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/)

<comment> noah-kun In case you haven't seen it already: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

TL;DR, Microsoft's known strategy is to feign goodness, then use the goodwill to kill competition, especially in the open standards/open source area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> Every business that built their service around the GitHub ecosystem will get massively screwed. They should immediately start to integrate as many GitHub competitors as possible or Microsoft will just eat them within the next months. GitHub always wanted to concentrate on the code hosting, not the CI/CD, code quality, code analysis, etc parts but Microsoft will soon start to extend GitHub to support Azure's services directly.

</comment><comment><USER145> GitHub was never conceived as a charity. But this didn't stop people to put half of the world's open source code centrally on this one platform. Now they are crying/worried because this platform is being sold. Can't really understand your point, guys. That is the way it often goes with commercial enterprises. It's quite an irony that free/open source makes this platform so financially interesting to buy.

<comment><USER146> I use it for work like everybody else here, but being so comfortable and happy with it, I paid $7/month for a few private repos which maybe used $.02/month in their resources. Just a shame companies and the developers paying for it wasn't enough

</comment></comment><comment><USER147> At least it's not Oracle

<comment><USER148> I searched through the comments to see if anyone else had the same thought I did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER149> Gitlab is a good solution for most folks. They have a for profit business powered by open source software.

<comment><USER150> GH also had a for-profit business. Apparently the profits weren't enough, but they were profitable and bootstrapped in their early days

<comment><USER151> It says in the article:

GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and _has yet to make a profit_ from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work.

<comment><USER152> And why exactly do you think that GitLab is any more profitable than Github?

<comment><USER151> I never said it was. I am just pointing out that the article says Github hasn't even turned a profit yet while the OP said they were profitable.

<comment><USER152> Fair enough. The parent said "early days", though. It's fairly common for reporters to get this stuff wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER153> Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it? So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.

<comment><USER154> Linux doesn't use GitHub for anything other than a mirror, and Linus famously hates GitHub.

(More reading: [https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds- github/](https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/))

<comment><USER153> Point taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA:

"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."

But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER155> From a recent github blog post: "Millions of developers trust us with their data—and protecting their privacy is a top priority for us."

Now these millions of developers will face a dilemma.

</comment><comment><USER156> Some years ago I wrote "The Github Threat" [https://carlchenet.com/the-github- threat/](https://carlchenet.com/the-github-threat/) and I'll be delighted to update the conclusion with this quite predictable and logical outcome.

</comment><comment><USER157> Personally, I think this is great news given the investment Microsoft has made in hosting their open source projects on GitHub. I'm heavily invested in the Microsoft stack so I'm kind of excited to see where they take this.

Also, I'm excited because I'm in the middle of launching a product that aims to build people in to Git experts, or at the bare minimum build up your comfort level with Git to make you productive.

I'd love for you to check it out. This open source version is kind of the basis for my upcoming commercial project.

[https://github.com/ryanrodemoyer/git- evangelism](https://github.com/ryanrodemoyer/git-evangelism).

Also, let's connect if you're in the Denver area. You can find my email through my GitHub account or comment on my message.

</comment><comment><USER105> Speaking of fickle developers, I'm already planning my exit.

Any mention of Microsoft is enough to turn me off, I have seen enough - I have had enough.

<comment><USER158> And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google.

[https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/microsoft- fort...](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/microsoft-fortifies- commitment-to-open-source-becomes-linux-foundation-platinum-member/)

[https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/)

<comment><USER159> I am forced to use Windows for gaming, and let me tell you what Microsoft has done to me lately.

\- Forced updates are a travesty. I should be able to delay or ignore updates indefinitely as I own my computer.

\- I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program, despite having no need of one. I can only temporarily pause Windows Defender's real-time checks before they'll helpfully turn it back on for me. This results in a loss of gaming performance.

\- Turning off their spying telemetry is essentially impossible and will helpfully turn itself back on.

\- They hold some good games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows (Halo Master Chief Collection) since they don't take gaming seriously on PC.

\- Every once in a while, they become dedicated to PC gaming again which simply means they will use their power to force something awful onto the community, like the Windows Xbox Game Bar, Games for Windows Live, etc. in their quest to make my gaming PC into an Xbox.

\- UWP is trash and greatly restricts what the user can do with their game, such as mods or fan patches to fix bugs developers ignore.

\- The Windows Store is horrible in and of itself and is full of even more low quality software. Instead of releasing their games on Steam, Origin, GOG, or even UPlay, they force them into this dumpster fire.

\- They install Candy Crush and other drivel by default on a fresh copy of Windows, and sometimes it magically reappears.

Just because Microsoft has put on the "I'm changed!" act recently by releasing some FOSS and donating some money does not mean they have actually stopped being a negative influence.

<comment><USER158> > Forces updates are a travesty.

You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to block your machine's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do this.

> They hold some games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows...

Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don't follow.

> UWP is trash...

This is true. UWP tries to be many things, like a single container for desktop, tablet, and (Windows) mobile apps. In the end it mostly fails.

> I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program.

Uh, dude: I run Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines and none of them FORCE me to use antivirus. They nag about it for a while but those alerts and nags can be disabled.

<comment><USER160> > _You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to > block your machine 's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do > this._

That's not disabling Windows Update, that's hacking name resolution to prevent the connection itself. That's like saying you can disable Windows Update by not connecting to the internet.

And I'm not even confident that the host file solution will last forever, in future you might have to do it from the router level instead.

> _Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don 't > follow._

If you play PC games you are effectively forced to use the Windows ecosystem. Several of my favorite games are available on macOS/Linux, but it's like watching movies. You might watch Blazing Saddles and Evil Dead 2 on a regular basis, but you're also going to want some variety in there as well.

What the GP is saying though is that Microsoft is holding game franchises as XBox exclusives to try to slow their marketshare bleed. They are taking franchises that were formerly present (if delayed) on Windows such as Halo and using them to sell XBoxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER161> Ask yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github? I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github!

Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, it might be too late for github now, but I will myself conduct a review of the free services that I use regularly and reconsider pitching in, since I value independent businesses.

EDIT: looks like my experience may be atypical, that's good! Just for anecdata, would you include where you live as part of your replies? In my case it's central europe.

<comment><USER73> > I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after > spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool.

You're looking at the wrong people. It's companies who are paying for GitHub.

<comment><USER161> And yet the article mentions losses, companies might not be enough

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER162> I may be in the minority. I've had a change of heart over the last 5 years or so towards Microsoft. They've changed a lot of the practices that used to make me not like them. They've embraced open source a lot more than in the past and have clamped down a lot on the anti competitive practices they used for decades. I also have a good friend that works there and I've seen how the sausage is made from the inside a bit. They treat their employees really well and from what I've experienced they're a good company to work for.

I don't have a hard opinion on this acquisition for the OSS community, but it will be good for the employees and I'm hopeful that not much will change with Github as a service and somethings may even get better. Time will tell of course.

</comment><comment><USER163> GitLab's prayers have been answered. Hopefully they can make GitLab easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER164> Can you imagine how this story would have gone over on Slashdot in 1998? Microsoft was the Borg, Linux was the nerd's favorite OS and Google was a benevolent and powerful new search engine. How the tables have turned...

</comment><comment><USER165> Great news ! Maybe now people will understand why github was the wrong was to do things.

Using a designed to be decentralized development tool and flocking all in one place, centralizing free software development on proprietary centralized platform is the epitome of not doing things the way they should.

Hopefully people will catch the difference between opensource which microsoft is surfing on in a PR effort to regain prestige and free software which is a nemesis of microsoft.

Now let's see projects scramble to find another centralized place to migrate to in order to keep doing things wrong, and see which ones do not care enough to even do this.

<comment><USER166> But what would be the alternative then? I mean, GH serves as the de facto opensource social network, it allows private and public collaboration and integrates with many tools creating a web of transparency and free flow of knowledge.

How do we make a similar or comparable service that is decentralized yet transparent and instantly accesible to millions of people across the globe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER167> So it's time to move on, is gitlab up for the job? or bitbucket? or everyone should run a gitea/gogs container on their $5 vps?

While I use vscode sometimes for web hacking, I use geany/vim for anything else, other than that, I have nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever, and yes, I run linux as my desktop for the last 15+ years.

Money talks, Microsoft is embracing OSS because it's defeated by OSS, it never liked OSS, and it does all these moves just because it has no better options.

And, who knows,it might be the modern Trojan to ruin us all when time comes, I have no doubts on this when I recall how hostile MS has been to OSS.

</comment><comment><USER168> The final step will be acquiring StackOverflow. After that, nearly every developer will find their next job via Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER169> I don't mind this, as long as the side of Microsoft which has been on GitHub so far as the side of Microsoft who ends up dealing with GitHub in the future.

But this will definitely end the concept of GitHub as a single-source place to find code. Microsoft's competitors will likely move their code, at the least, and of course, the crowd who will never trust Microsoft will leave as well, regardless of how well they manage it.

All-in-all, I don't think that's a bad thing for anyone: Software shouldn't all come from one site, and the industry was becoming far too centralized around GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER139> Github to Gitlab migration:

[https://gitlab.com/import/github/new](https://gitlab.com/import/github/new)

EDIT: the old links were useless:

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html)

I'm stuck here:

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/github.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/github.html)

what is the gitlab Authorization callback URL?

</comment><comment><USER170> We've been lamenting the github-centralization of open-source for years now, this might be the wake-up call people have been waiting for. Rightly so. Gitlab ops people might be in for a treat tonight.

</comment><comment><USER171> Any plans to make backups/archives before Microsoft takes over? There is an enormous volume of useful open source code from individual authors on Github. A pleasing respite from the world of team-developed commercial software. It is difficult to imagine Github could remain the number distribution channel for individual authors of non-commercial code when it is run under the auspices of a large, proprietary enterprise and consumer software company.

Since its inception, I have been using simple tcp/http clients and text-only browsers to download and browse source code from stable Github urls, as I did throughout the 90's with Freshmeat, Sourceforge, etc. To its credit, Github has always been very accessible.

What are the chances this kind of accessibilty will continue to be possible if Github is being administered by Microsoft. Direct downloads of small, source code files, many with no licensing restrictions, no sign-ups, no web browser required, no hassle... Microsoft has never managed anything like that. Microsoft has always done the opposite. Indirect downloads of large collections of binaries, often coupled with installers, licensing restrictions, usually requiring some sign-up or click-through agreement, and today, possibly with telemetry.

I hope I am wrong to be concerned about this takeover. Will Github continue to be the respository service of choice amongst authors of free source code? Perhaps some will pull out and move their code elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER172> IMO, Microsoft will most likely take a hands-off approach. They would not want some people's frights to be realized, and they would appreciate developers being okay with their acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER173> I was really hoping GitHub would focus on a IPO vs. acquisition. I honestly think we would be saying the same things about Google/Apple if they had decided to swoop in and make a deal here (so none of what I say is directed specifically at Microsoft).

I think the general consensus is that we want a new, independent org, that genuinely cares about OSS but has the mind to create/maintain a sustainable business model and ensure the long-term success of an OSS platforms is extremely important (and now we'll look to Gitlab and others for that).

Microsoft will, no doubt, have their fingers all over this platform in short order. It's what they're paying for; and it's an extremely smart move (EXTREMELY). Some of GitHubs product offerings have competitors within the Microsoft ecosystem already, which may spell bad times for those long-term. Atom directly competes with VSCode and it simply doesn't make sense to continue development of two, independent, IDEs. Electron utilizes Chromium under the hood, and I'd be hard pressed to thunk Microsoft wouldn't want to try and inject Edge/Chakra into that platform somehow.

It makes good business sense to consolidate efforts once a company is acquired. I give it, at most, 12-18 months before you start seeing major changes to both of those platforms that reflect Microsofts own interests.

</comment><comment><USER174> To everyone switching to GitLab or considering it: Theres a feature on GitLab where you can import all your GitHub repos in on go. Or you can do it one by one if you want.

</comment><comment><USER175> Based on the way Microsoft has been "punishing" their on-prem customers since they started pushing O365 this has me a bit concerned about the fate of GitHub Enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER176> I can't believe Microsoft isn't aware an exodus (at some level) will occur and Github will no longer be what it is if they buy it.

But apparently they don't care. Demonstrating they have not changed as so many claim but are still the same old M$.

I'll be closing my account as soon as this is official. As for clients who decide to stay, sorry, I won't be able to help them as I won't have a Github account. But I will walk them through moving if they like.

</comment><comment><USER177> It looks like you're trying to issue a Pull Request! Would you like to use Visual Studio Azure Github for Windows 2000, Enterprise Edition with Skype & Linkedin Integration?

[https://www.redbubble.com/people/suranyami/works/32080448-it...](https://www.redbubble.com/people/suranyami/works/32080448-it- looks-like-youre-trying-to-issue-a-pull-request?asc=u&ref=recent-owner)

</comment><comment><USER178> _As [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community._

If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.

</comment><comment><USER179> Smart and inevitable, to secure dominance in the talent vertical. I remember walking into an org where none of the engineers or UX folks had Linkedin accounts. They didn't need it to land in a healthy workplace w/ a decent salary. They were active on GitHub instead, had Angellist profiles. One of them mentioned LI's InMail tool drove him away. Another said he can network just fine with Meetup and twitter.

Edited those typos.

</comment><comment><USER180> Deleting my accounts tonight. I just can't stomach a future Microsoft Github Azure™ 365 Enterprise Edition with LinkedIn™ integration. Fucking gross.

</comment><comment><USER181> Microsoft paying $2B for a company based on Linus Torvalds' work, unreal.

<comment><USER182> It's probably not for the platform, but for the user base and the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER183> I'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI)

</comment><comment><USER184> As for me, I also dislike Github being owned by Microsoft. Big conflict of interest. Microsoft core business is closed-source software.

But, it's not wrong to give Microsoft a chance to cultivate Github. Yes, Microsoft have a long track record of being disproportion with open source products. This is also true with other companies.

Good thing to point out is, there are alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER185> "The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work."

Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?

</comment><comment><USER186> Extinguish.

I mean, if I had wanted to troll. Still..almost everything about MS's choices in Win10 (aside from Linux Subsystem) bother me.

</comment><comment><USER187> Microsoft's own hosted platform Visual Studio Team Services is nuetral. It supports hosted and on prem build and deployment agents for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are easy to use plug ins for building and deploying on both Azure and AWS. You can use Github now for hosted git repositories in VSTS and still use Microsoft's other build and release tools.

Thier Wiki is Markdown based and they have a very visible link that lets you pull down your entire Wiki using git clone.

They also have free private repos, 40 hours of hosted builds, up to five users for free, project management features that are at least as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) as the other project management tools - <USER3> free for up to five users. You can also host your own private Nuget, NPM, and Maven feeds for free.

For non open source projects, you can't beat the value. Additional users over 5 are $5 a month.

<comment><USER188> I think you ascribe different meaning to "neutral" than most others here

<comment><USER187> I ascribe "neutral" to technology. VSTS supports every major platform/OS and the tools are on par for all of them.

<comment><USER189> Unfortunately, the company that owns it profits from Windows sales and doesn't profit from any other OS.

<comment> UK-Al05 They profit from Linux. They host it on azure and have their own distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER190> What is Github's reason for this? I'm looking for some salient reason why they'd sell their company. Is it investor pressure or founder apathy, or ...? It seems to me like creating and running a product as admired as Github is a bigger prize than just cash in the game of life?

"Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though, it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame."

~ Adam Smith

</comment><comment><USER191> If somebody of the size of GitHub can't manage to stay a standalone company it's a pretty sad state of affairs. We really need more players in this industry. It's becoming more and more a monoculture (not sure what the term is for a few players that together pretty much have monopoly. Oligopoly?)

</comment><comment><USER192> I'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft to begin with, but I definitely see a reason to be wary about this. I don't really want any Microsoft integration into GitHub, and really the best case would be for them to not change much with the site at all, although I don't see this being the case.

</comment><comment><USER193> My fear in this is that MS may require MS passport or whatever it is called ID system to log in to GitHub, with their really unreasonable 16 character max password length restrictions.In general MS websites are poor in usability, and littered with marketing copy, difficult to find useful information.

</comment><comment> jas- Does this remind anyone else of the back to the future movie where Biff is the free worlds leader and just a pompous asshat with the power to keep being a pompous asshat?

Having watched Microsoft over the years steal ideas from smaller companies (not purchase them then bastardize and part them out mind you), but actually steal their ideas and make them standard in their operating system.

Some examples are CDR/CDRW now standard after small companies in the late 90's developing the standard.

The bastardized implementation of Active Directory after Novell's Netware platform and the later implementations of OpenLDAP and the standards that were spurned.

What about the MIT Kerberos authentication mechanisms after Microsofts MsCHAPv2, MsCHAP & NTLM roll your own crypto schemes were found easily crackable and exploitable?

I can go on but actually have to do some work today...

</comment><comment><USER194> I read about this as a hypothetical a few days, but it really moved to done deal quicker than I expected.

I started to look for alternatives to host private repos and found that Amazon CodeCommit has a plan that's even much better than the GitHub plans. Does anybody have experience on how well this works?

<comment><USER195> I've got a couple of code commit repos for various purposes, and it's high friction. Uploading a large repo with a plain git push will likely fail. The user management is way more complicated and enterprisey than github. It does work, but it feels awkward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER196> I can imagine the people at GitLab being very excited about this! Perhaps sytse would like to comment?

</comment><comment><USER197> I think instead of moving everything to one new (central hosted) silo like GitLab.com, we should move to self hosted git instances, with some GitHub like web interface to do remote comments/pull requests (e.g. gitea/gogs with some simple modifications).

</comment><comment><USER198> Moving all my projects to gitlab. For those wondering why gitlab is different see this comment from another HN thread

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yogthos](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yogthos)

</comment><comment><USER199> There probably won't be (m)any noticeable changes for the open source and devs running personal private repos and possibly the same for GitHub team plans. However, I'd bet Microsoft will plan on a sunset timetable for TFS and push their licensing and sales machine toward GitHub for Enterprise. I'm glad my group isn't on GitHub for Enterprise because after seeing this news I'd be looking to migrate away ASAP. I can envision the the potential for their draconian licensing lock-in and TOS language spawning a nightmare for teams that are running GH Enterprise. These GH enterprise installations will likely be required to purchase MSDN licenses.

<comment><USER200> Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? I use both and there is barely _any_ overlap in features. GitHub is only code storage + a rudimentary issue manager. There is very little release management, test management, CI/CD etc.

If anything I'd expect them to integrate better and of course integrate more with Azure (e.g one-click setup of build/test on azure from any Github project)

<comment><USER199> > Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)?

Admittedly I've been away from TFS for a number of years, however, it seems that GitHub Enterprise is a natural fit product wise for revenue stream via licensing thru MSDN to get organizations onboard with GitHub that weren't before. If they were to sunset TFS and provide a migration path, it would end up giving them significant licensing dollars.

The more important point I was trying to make is that orgs that are now on GitHub Enterprise would need to subscribe to MSDN enterprise licenses for a bunch of things that aren't relevant and get locked into TOS that they hadn't been previously.

Regardless of sunsetting TFS/VSTS, I think that Github Enterprise will be only available through a MSDN enterprise/premium license or whatever that is now in 2018.

<comment><USER200> Superficially it seems there is some overlap, but github's issue tracking for example is very simple (assuming enterprise is the same, I haven't seen it).

VSTS supports the JIRA level of features like complex workflows, hierarchical issues, scrum/kanban boards (including hierarchical sub teams with differing sprint dates), burndowns and hundreds of other charts.

I would love to see all that ported to github, but it just wouldn't be GitHub any more then.

To me they seem like VS and VS code. One is a big fat enterprisey thing and one is lighter. The enterprise version of GitHub doesn't seem so focused on enterprise processes as VSTS is, but rather on enterprise infrastructure things (auth stuff, cloud integration stuff...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER201> This is the "extend" phase, in case anyone is keeping track. The embrace was "MS loves Linux!", switching Windows to use git, and putting tons of near random libraries and projects on github publically (vscode, chakracore, etc).

I just love how anyone that cards had been actively avoiding walled garden proprietary services like this and were using gitlab, phabticator, etc for years saying this or anything similar (could have just been github starting to sell user data themselves) but only when big evil MS comes along to put the reality in peoples faces that you don't bet your software infrastructure on some proprietary non interoperable web service.

</comment><comment><USER202> Gitlab must be really happy. I know my team will move out of Github if Microsoft buys it.

</comment><comment><USER203> For people looking for alternatives, I've started to write code forge tools in Salut à Toi (on top of XMPP).

It's decentralized, already working (tickets and merge requests), based on standards, and written in a popular language (python), help would be more than welcome!

It is also agnostic of the tools, I'm using it with Mercurial, but Git implementation will of course follow.

You'll find details and a demo at [https://www.goffi.org/b/9555cc02-6a87-4b6b-af85-20f1c0736722...](https://www.goffi.org/b/9555cc02-6a87-4b6b-af85-20f1c0736722/xmpp- based-tickets-merge-requests-with)

</comment><comment><USER113> I'm kind of happy with this happening as it seems to me that this can cause the VCS hosting arena to diversify a little bit. The "monopoly" of github always worried me as a huge freaky single point of failure.

</comment><comment><USER204> Now we need a GitLab alternative, just in case MS decides GitHub isn't enough.

</comment><comment><USER205> So it looks like Github is going to be the next sourceforge! Onward to gitlab!

</comment><comment><USER206> Well, let's say I wouldn't switch away from github at once (I have a paid account with private repos and all), but consider the Skype precedent: from a mostly working native application, now it's an Electron abomination that takes 100% CPU and is a lot harder to use than the previous versions. But it has social networking!

It's very likely they will "improve" github in the same way. I don't think they dare to make the site explicitly not work on anything but IE, but I expect subtle incompatibilities to pile up over time...

</comment><comment><USER207> Lets just hope Microsoft has learnt how they tend to kill good products by merging them into their ecosystem and won't do that.

If Microsoft honestly wants to improve GitHub, they should ask the community first.

</comment><comment><USER172> IMO, I think Microsoft will take a hands off approach, they don't want some of people's fears to be realized, and they really would want a friendly attitude towards their acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER208> The negativity in here is crazy. It's not even official yet everyone already seems to know that Microsoft will destroy Github. Microsoft tried really hard to improve their relationship with developers in the last couple of years and they surely don't want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again. I can understand the scepticism and that people dislike the fact that Github is not independant anymore, but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.

<comment><USER59> Are they still trying to extort "licensing fees" from Android device manufacturers? Have they apologized for ever doing that and promised never to do that again? Until that, I won't even consider it. Fuck Microsoft. They're horrible and their recent attempt to go back to the "embrace" part of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deserves absolutely zero good will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER209> GitHub is the website 90% of the packages I use are hosted on. All our company code and hundreds of hours are invested into whats hosted on it. I would hate to see this change...

</comment><comment><USER210> This might be a stupid question, I did Cmd+F to search if it had already been asked and answered and it hasn't, so it might actually be stupid.

I'm guessing it's very illegal (IANAL) and that it's not the intention of Microsoft (IANACEO), but what are the ramifications relating to IP (GitHub's customer's IP, rather than the GitHub's IP) - has Microsoft essentially bought access to a massive stash of IP/trade secrets in the form of private repositories?

<comment><USER211> I'm wondering this too - private repos might be a goldmine of intellectual property, which businesses assumed would stay "private", i.e., not in the hands of companies like Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER212> [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DezCaWaUYAAa5ih.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DezCaWaUYAAa5ih.jpg:large)

</comment><comment><USER213> What's a tool for moving _every_ GitHub repo to GitLab?

</comment><comment><USER214> Not judging if this is a good or bad thing but in general it's annoying to be dependent on a single company. While git is decentralized, github's social platform features are centralized and lock users to github. I would love to see more solutions that allows users to migrate freely between platforms without losing their social contacts. See [https://fejoa.org](https://fejoa.org) for more information.

</comment><comment><USER215> Centralized and proprietary unfortunately are two key attributes to Github. That fits the old school MS bill. But it also fits the new "we have changed hype".

It's most unfortunate, because git made decentralized revision control popular.

My future Tooling bets are on sustainable open source.

Good for MS, though. It's a smart move for them. And Github has been struggling for years, anyway. Scandals, new structure, more hierarchy. It's probably easier to pick up now than three years ago.

</comment><comment><USER216> I'm hopeful. I like typescript and Visual Code. I like their linux subsystem on windows granted that I don't use it since I'm not a windows user.

</comment><comment><USER217> Guys. Enough with the FUD please. I myself don't even believe I'm saying this but clearly Satya Nadella != Steve Ballmer. Dude has seen the light and is trying to put the company on the right path.

Every time they do something good all the tinfoil hats come out. Give them a chance. They've turned over a new leaf. And until and unless we see otherwise we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt.

This is not our childhood Microsoft.

<comment><USER218> Ballmer didn't turn Windows into spysare the way Nadella has. Windows 10 is basically a rootkit that phones home about your every activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER219> So much parroting going on in here.

Microsoft has been doing amazing things recently for devs. Wait to see what their plans actually are before you start to freak out.

<comment><USER220> What Microsoft acquisition has been a "success"? Because there are quite a lot that got worse under MS. They have a long track record and it'l take years before they can begin to counter all the stuff they've done.

Would have rather seen an investment or partnership in github than a purchase. Recognizing the desire for github to stay neutral but supporting it to continue would have been a much better received move and done far more to build up reputation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER221> > GitHub preferred selling the company [in this case to a public company > --jrochkind] to going public

Anyone have any comments on what might drive this preference?

</comment><comment><USER222> Microsoft ruined Skype, why wouldn't I think a company whose main source of income is from closed-source software wouldn't ruin GitHub?

</comment><comment><USER223> It was good while it lasted.

We will have to start migrating our software there into a more neutral platform.

I don't like the consolidation in Software in which there are only 5-6 huge players. It means politics and private interest of the conglomerate take precedence over everything else, like competence, and freedom.

Those oligopolies can just send their lawyers against competition or just buy them to stop the threat.

</comment><comment><USER224> So, where should I switch to now? I dumped LinkedIn and Skype since MS acquired it, next is GitHub. Hosting own GitLab? Something else?

</comment><comment><USER225> I'll probably quit github once they add their horrible login system. Have you experienced the login on azure portal or skype ?

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how Microsoft can manage to commercialize all the projects on GitHub. Maybe by providing an universal installer that works through the Windows Store. Maybe by adding a few mandatory patches to each project that improve compatibility. Maybe by making a much improved version of Git with a proper GUI interface. The possibilities are endless!

</comment><comment><USER226> Perhaps there is a market for a really simple Git based issue tracker, which doesn't require Ruby. This acquisition feels like Freshmeat / SourceForge v2; the hardcore OSS enthusiasts will begin their exodus. Is there an argument for actually building simple issues management into Git itself with a simple API for pull requests?

</comment><comment><USER227> Will it go the way of Nokia, LinkedIn, Skype or the way of ... err... did they have any really successful acquisitions ever?

</comment><comment><USER228> I hope they keep GitHub Pages, even if it's not free anymore. It's so convenient to host small static sites there.

<comment><USER229> Netlify does this for free along with a path to hosting larger sites as well. I found them via HN and have seen them recommended here many times.

<comment><USER220> Netlify is great! I also found them via HN at some point and use them for a couple customer projects. Totally moving my personal stuff to them too now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER230> Now is the time to move to Fossil [https://fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki](https://fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

Issue tracking & wiki built in.

You can use its git integration to ensure recruiters/employers can find you.

</comment><comment><USER231> Funnily enough a friend of mine and I migrated some of our projects over to GitLab right before this original story broke. It's really unfortunate though that this will probably go through since GitHub was/is really the staple site for social programming and project management, something that GitLab is certainly lacking.

</comment><comment><USER232> Microsoft ruined Hotmail, JellyFish, Skype, LinkedIn, Yammer ... and now they want to ruin GitHub? :/ Noooooo

</comment><comment><USER233> Some HN reaction reminds me of...

"Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class." [A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark, 022]

Big five representatives of the vectorialist class are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple.

<comment><USER234> Not very much on topic, but is the book worth reading? I started a couple of times but always kinda tuned out at some point.

<comment><USER233> It is not an easy, pleasurable read, maybe too intellectual. But it is worth for the truth and insight it provides.

<comment><USER234> Thanks for the input! Will give it another try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER235> If it's true, I'm cancelling my paid account immediately. A monopolist tried and found guilty of monopolization shouldn't own the company where many of their future competitors have their private repositories, it's frankly rather disturbing they think it's a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER236> I hope this deal results in Visual Studio Team Services somehow getting support for public projects. It is _amazing_ for private ones.

Also, paid tiers of GitHub moving to (or on top of) VSTS would not be a bad thing IMHO.

I hope both GH and VSTS benefit from this and I'm inclined to think they will.

</comment><comment><USER237> Long live [https://notabug.org](https://notabug.org)

</comment><comment><USER238> If this is true, it is really sad news. Remembering what Microsoft did with Skype, turning it from one of the most usable communication platforms to a pile of unusable crap, I can't help but wonder if it's time to prepare a migration strategy right now.

</comment><comment><USER239> I guess now this makes sense:

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting- down-codeplex/)

</comment><comment><USER240> Relevant [https://help.github.com/articles/about-archiving-content- and...](https://help.github.com/articles/about-archiving-content-and-data-on- github/#third-party-archival-projects)

</comment><comment><USER241>
       Microsoft [...] is now one if the biggest contributors to GitHub

Citation needed ?

<comment><USER242> [https://octoverse.github.com/2016/](https://octoverse.github.com/2016/) under Organizations with the most open source contributors

</comment></comment><comment><USER243> What specific user-affecting changes would the new overlords make that suck for developers? I don't doubt that there are good answers to this. They could treat it like a cash cow and just start charging more for less, but I mean functional changes.

</comment><comment><USER244> This doesn't bother me at all. I'd be far more worried if Oracle acquired GitHub.

</comment><comment> ryan-allen Of all the big players who could have acquired GitHub, I'm most glad that it's MSFT. Their open source initiatives of late have been fantastic, and they really get developers. Visual Studio is a 10/10 IDE. Congrats GH and co :)

</comment><comment><USER245> Gitlab is seeing 10x the normal daily amount of repositories

[https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200?s=19](https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200?s=19)

</comment><comment><USER246> If anyone could stay independent, it should have been them. If it weren't Microsoft but someone else, it would be almost the same to me. There are so much things they could do to improve the experience and make it more profitable.

</comment><comment><USER247> Prediction: 5 years from now github will be a memory for anyone but the Enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER248> Color me naive but it can't be that bad, maybe they will surprise the FOSS community by opensourcing the NT kernel. Satya has said it is a possibility. And he is probably the only CEO who has been friendly toward FOSS.

</comment><comment><USER249> Microsoft 2016' new year resolution [X] Join bigest open source community and get right to vote #linuxfoundation

[X] Acquire the largest open source community #github

[X] Do not share even bit of valuable open source (*do not count azure toolkits)

.. completed in 2018

</comment><comment><USER250> I'm sure they paid a good chunk of change but this looks like more of a soft landing than an acqusition. Even the language: "Microsoft agreed to acquire" dampens the enthusiasm. I wonder how this worked out for investors.

</comment><comment><USER251> [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned- down-3...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned- down-300k.html)

</comment><comment><USER252> Done or not, at least Github's wikipedia entry has already been updated [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub)

</comment><comment><USER253> [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html)

</comment><comment><USER254> I wonder what this will mean for VSTS? That has it's own public/private git repositories. Though they're more 'enterprise integrated ci/cd' than github's 'portfolio'

</comment><comment><USER211> This the end of an era. GitLab, BitBucket, self-hosted options, here we come!

</comment><comment><USER255> Step 1: Embrace.

<comment><USER256> I think they're on step 2 now.

They already embraced it by adding 1k repos. They're now going to extend it.

We'll soon have an msgit, which is git with extensions that only github will support.

<comment><USER257> You mean like the current extensions in the .github folder (pull request template, etc)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER258> If is true, this is one of the saddest news I've heard in the last 5 years. Please Github don't allow this. Look of what crap Skype became to be... look at what crap LinkedIn became to be...

Time to move to gitlab.

</comment><comment><USER67> I wonder what Linus thinks about this. He has a mirror of the Linux kernel on GitHub: [https://github.com/torvalds](https://github.com/torvalds)

<comment> UK-Al05 Probably doesn't give a crap. Microsoft have their Linux disto for embedded stuff already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER259> Maybe this means Netlify will speed up adding GitLab support to their CMS.

</comment><comment><USER260> I really like Microsoft, but this is a TERRIBLE idea for GitHub. Some rich bastard needs buy GitHub and then make it community owned. Why is GitHub a for-profit? It should be considered a utility.

</comment><comment><USER261> Previous discussion re:acquisition talks: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208293)

</comment><comment><USER262> GitHub became too expensive. I'm curious to see the new pricing model.

<comment><USER263> Look at Amazon Prime. For ONLY $99 free video, deals, free shipping, and many more.

This purchase is about increasing 365 value. They'll make the pro version free with office 356 subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER264> I am so happy to see this moving forward. Microsoft will provide the proper management to drive innovation again in GH. Start by creating a replacement for the astronomically priced Travis

</comment><comment><USER265> Why Github can't host the Linux kernel community

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872)

</comment><comment><USER266> This is great for Gitlab. I'm going to try to use more and more.

</comment><comment><USER267> Used to seeing these kind of reactions on HN. Saw this during FB React licensing issue. Angry Engineers moving to Vue or whatever was non-react, only to move back to usual in few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER268> I surely become tired of becoming the product for someone else's overly inflated bottom line after having an option to feel it is "safe" to be a part of a community...

</comment><comment><USER269> Microsoft got me using IDE's it was a nice cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good .... likely they will turn it into shit like everything else.

</comment><comment><USER270> I wonder if instead Apple had acquired GH and today morning introduce laptops with 32 GB RAM, discreet GPU and fully tinkerable laptops for geeks to recapture losing mindshare.

Well I can wish!

</comment><comment><USER271> Microsoft had codeplex which was older than github. They are probably going to spend 4 or 5 billion buying Github. They most likely write down the value a few years later.

</comment><comment><USER272> So a lot of people mention GitLab as an alternative. Would anyone with experience with that platform care to chime in and list some pros & cons compared to Github?

<comment><USER273> I like that is also has CI/CD and other features, and that you can host it yourself (also for free). I do keep hearing about database issues on their hosted version though.

In general: haven't had problems with it, am cheaper than hosted GitHub, cheaper and works better than (self-)hosted Atlassian software.

That is for a developer duo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER274> GitLab appears to be the default choice for migration for many people... I wonder though if this might prompt some folks to go old-skool and move back to SourceForge?

</comment><comment><USER275> Microsoft is also heavily "embracing" Python. CPython is on GitHub, the infra is partly controlled by MSFT employees and the CI moves to MSFT as well.

Caveat emptor.

</comment><comment><USER276> Could have been great to see the GAFAM agree to finance GitHub to remain an independant platform.

Now, I can't imagine the GAFA let their open source projects on GitHub...

</comment><comment><USER277> GitHub UI is terrible in recent years. The launch of discovery was a mistake; now they finally made the newsfeed "simpler" and cleaner, thank god.

</comment><comment><USER278> Are there any projects in the "blockchain" / "decentralize everything" industry that's tackling the source control problem?

</comment><comment><USER279> I'm hoping this puts the times of people with political agendas stearing the GitHub message well behind us. They weren't _really_ neutral anymore when the CEO stepped asside and they got the business guy to take over...

I suspect MS is aware of the delicate situation in regards to alienation the user base. If this goes through I expect them to address this directly and with perhaps some creativity.

As a bonus Microsoft did some great work scaling git for the Windows codebase. That and other great engineering efforts making there way into GitHub could be great for the community.

<comment><USER280> I also think that Microsoft is very aware of this situation. They should already work on the communication part of this. And if true that maybe Nat Friedman will take over, they will handle it the right way. He has shipped his Mono team and the later Xamarin stack through four companies with success and stability for the product and the team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER281> Good. I don't understand the hundreds of comments invested in a company that provides one of the most fungible services around, with the weakest features and no profitability. The only other option for them was dying a slow death on the public markets if they did an IPO.

There are dozens of git hosting companies, including GitLab, BitBucket, Microsoft's own VSTS, repos by all the major clouds, and many others. Microsoft has every incentive to not screw this up but even if they did, so what? Nothing happens. Switch to something else and you're all set.

</comment><comment><USER282> 90% of this comment section could have been copied from a Slashdot post in 1999. Ironic, all the FUD being thrown here.

Really showing HN's selective myopia.

</comment><comment><USER283> This is a little unfortunate but I think theres a possibility this could turn out to be a positive thing for both MS and GH. I hope so at least.

</comment><comment><USER284> Soonds like a good time for gitlab to go fundraising!

</comment><comment><USER285> I'm a CTO in the genomics sector. I'll hastily be looking for an alternative. I've long ago abandoned the Microsoft morass.

</comment><comment><USER286> Google open source ERP and realize what a gold mine github data will be to an enterprise play like Microsoft.

As acquisitions go, it's pretty brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER287> Part of me likes the possibly new native Windows-Git integration projects to come for developers.

Part of me wishes some companies were non-profit entities.

</comment><comment><USER288> good. github sucks and i don't want to be forced to use it just because everyone uses it. if microsoft buys it it will slowly die.

</comment><comment><USER289> Good. Can we make a distributed GitHub now please?

</comment><comment><USER290> Anyone know the easiest way to migrate to GitLab?

<comment><USER262> Click on "import from GitHub" when you create a new repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER291> A lot of GitHub employees are remote. All of the big tech companies are allergic to remote teams. I wonder if that will change now?

<comment><USER48> I wonder as well. If linkedin is any indication, Microsoft hasn't affected their engineering culture really at all yet. In fact linkedin still routinely poaches Microsoft engineers and used slack and google drive and bluejeans instead of skype. If anything linkedin has gone on a massive hiring spree on Microsoft's dime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER292> 9 hours ago: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

6 hours ago: GitLab sees huge spike in project imports

I think that says all there is to be said.

</comment><comment><USER256> I'm not one to praise Microsoft without reason - I've worked the last 2 decades with their tech.

However, I don't see this as a negative thing. Provided they don't trash it like most of their acquisitions - and bear in mind they sort of depend on github themselves.

I feel this will prevent github from going like sourceforge now that someone with deep pockets can support it.

They have a lot of PR to lose if they screw this one up. Generally, migration is a only few git commands away.

</comment><comment><USER293> I'm probably being silly, but it is ironic to me that Microsoft will own the service that hosts the Linux codebase.

<comment><USER294> That's just a mirror. [https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git) is where it's at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER295> sourceforge, github...these platforms have their moments but are almost always superseded by something else that is more of the moment and useful.I can't see this msft move, which has been in the works for what feels like years, will help github to stay in the position it's been in for the last 3 years or so...

</comment><comment> UK-Al05 I wouldn't be surprised that the first thing they do is open source it. Removing the advantage of its competitors.

</comment><comment><USER296> was this when they decided, nah fk it let s just aquire the thing [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the- large...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-largest-git- repo-on-the-planet/)

</comment><comment><USER297> Well, they must be over the moon at GitLab!

</comment><comment><USER298> I hope that we will never read "X Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Stack Exchange" With X being a GAFAM.

</comment><comment><USER299> I wonder if Stallman will be right, again, and whether we will see the rise of the Fossil SCM? (Or a similar clone)

</comment><comment><USER300> Unhappy about this. If TFS and Github are ever glued together, you'll see the end of github as a platform.

</comment><comment><USER301> They can finally join github and LinkedIn

</comment><comment><USER302> [https://sivers.org/horses](https://sivers.org/horses)

</comment><comment><USER283> Just in case people are looking for one more alternative, it looks like no one has mentioned codegiant.io yet.

</comment><comment><USER303> We'll be migrating everything off GitHub this week.

This is good, because I've been wanting to dive into GitLab for a while.

</comment><comment><USER304> Git is great, but it has a few social features missing

Centralised git is great, but becomes a target

Is this the perfect blockchain pairing?

</comment><comment><USER305> Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......

That means I could finally get to cancel my multiple subscription and setup gitlab.

</comment><comment><USER306> I love this! Maybe the absolute fetishism over the overrated GitHub and Git will finally cease.

<comment><USER307> Why lump git into this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER308> It is a matter of concern for private repositories (of Microsoft's competitors) in GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER309> Was GitHub under monetary duress? I thought their private Git hosting business was doing well.

</comment><comment><USER310> I expect partial geoblocking and more censorship.

The chinese government tried to force Github to censor shadowsocks and the NY times repository. But back then it would have to block the whole site with other resourceful content.

My guess is that when Github is with Microsoft, the communist party in China has far more leverage as Microsoft has to follow Chinese laws, e.g., for selling Windows (even a special government-version), and bc China is an important market. I hope I'm wrong.

</comment><comment><USER139> If this is true, I delete my account immediately.

The last thing I want is my code to fall into the hands of MS.

<comment> cup-of-tea If you've used GPL then you have nothing to worry about.

<comment><USER139> 80% of github projects here are hidden, inhouse _trustworthy_ secret private projects! This is such horrible news!

<comment><USER311> Microsoft built its business by selling software products. If they had meddled with Fortune 500 companies running their business-critical information on top of Windows, Microsoft wouldn't be here now. There are situations to be wary of MS, but I don't think this is one.

<comment><USER139> In Europe there are real worries about state-driven industrial espionage.

We shouldn't be worried that our developers coding habits will get connected with linked-in and fed into the surveillance state (which MS is big part of)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER312> Github harassment in 2014, Microsoft potentially (at time of writing) buying Github.

Mountains, molehills.

</comment><comment><USER313> Why microsoft and google ruin the things developer loves? First Kaggle and than Github.

<comment><USER314> what happened to Kaggle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is this a done deal, or could GitHub (maybe after seeing the backlash) still back out?

</comment><comment><USER315> At least it wasn't Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER316> You want to buy gitignore.io? I'll sell it for a fair and reasonable price :).

</comment><comment><USER146> I'm losing faith that people are in tech for anything more than the payday.

</comment><comment><USER317> RIP Github.

</comment><comment><USER318> I can't wait to see Skype, OneDrive and Office integration in GitHub......

</comment><comment><USER319> Seems like a big boost to their recent ML offering that suggests source code.

</comment><comment><USER320> Will it mean that we will see Atom and VS code merging in the near future?

</comment><comment><USER321> Finally, we will be able to use the same login for both Skype and GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER322> We've all seen how it ended with Skype... Terrible news indeed.

</comment><comment><USER323> "Nothing speaks louder than money; except more money."

</comment><comment><USER324> I can already see gitlab and bitbucket jumping up in popularity.

</comment><comment><USER325> Horrible and sad news.

</comment><comment><USER326> Just posted the petition on Hacker News:

> Github petition: please remain independent

[https://github.com/independent- github/petition](https://github.com/independent-github/petition)

<comment><USER327> Petitions don't pay bills; GitHub is bleeding money. The solution is not signatures, but for developers to start paying for all the free hosting GitHub has given them. The open-source community itself is strapped for cash, so this is an excellent time for all the _users_ of that open-source software (especially companies) to start chipping in for hosting and development costs. However, the cynical side of me says that ain't going to happen. :/

<comment><USER326> That was my original idea but if the deal is already closed it is too late. I've been paying for years even though I never needed it only to support Github's amazing work. And now this :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER328> What are the goals Microsoft wants to achieve with this?

</comment><comment><USER329> 790b9db572a6a819f11ad0e0cac7d261 --- will update later.

<comment><USER330> What's this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER331> Why isn't all this code on 'the chain'?

</comment><comment><USER332> Alot of MSFT codebase was moved to Git in 2016 and this just makes sense. Wow.

Wonder how hiring/firing is going to be now at Git. They are pro-remote, while most MSFT positions are going no longer remote.

<comment><USER333> Git != Github

</comment></comment><comment><USER334> I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

<comment><USER139> I feel the same. It's not the end of free software, but the end of free software as we knew it (or something, still trying to rationalize).

Someone explain the extreme feeling of uneasiness penetrating our brains.

<comment><USER334>
        Someone explain the extreme feeling
        of uneasiness penetrating our brains.

There is not a single Microsoft product/tool/service I like. Including the ones they aquired. So I expect them to turn GitHub into something I don't like too.

<comment><USER335> Not even VSCode ?

<comment><USER334> No, because as the VSCode license puts it "The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER336> and .. we will start seeing Linkedin ads on Github.

</comment><comment><USER337> Right click and publish to Azure. For the win!!

</comment><comment><USER12> GitLab > Import all repositories from GitHub

</comment><comment><USER338> Better than getting bought by Dice at least.

</comment><comment><USER339> I'm really looking forward to IPFS ...

</comment><comment><USER340> Future often rhymes with the past (Skype).

</comment><comment><USER341> Good for Github. Bad for Github users.

</comment><comment><USER342> Can't help but notice the announcement aligns with Apple's WWDC this week. Wonder it'll take a bite out of Apple's PR.

<comment><USER73> Might be the other way around: Apple's event overshadows this one, and Microsoft quietly acquires GitHub with many being none the wiser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER343> welp, bye github, it's been fun.

</comment><comment><USER344> Hello gitlab.

</comment><comment><USER345> Alternatives and no not bitbucket

<comment><USER346> Gitlab.com is what I was already slowing moving to, because their code is open source. This will just hasten that migration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER347> Have YET to turn a profit?! Wow.

</comment><comment><USER348> Well. There's always bitbucket.

</comment><comment><USER349> Time to migrate to SourceForge.

</comment><comment><USER350> What a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do things?

<comment><USER351> It's a real problem.

And yet, pure open-source / community initiatives don't seem to have the strong centralized control that appears to be needed to make good, user- focused software. Alterantives?

(I wonder if projects that reach a certain size shouldn't basically be nationalized. Private enterprise is great at innovating, not so good at maintaining w/o slipping into bullshit exploitation / ruining what was good in the first place. Obviously you'd have to be careful to do this in a way that still left enough of a payoff to not discourage new private enterprises.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER352> GitLab++

</comment><comment><USER353> Time to move to Gitlab...

</comment><comment><USER354> /me moves to GitLab

</comment><comment><USER355> End of an era for sure.

</comment><comment><USER356> guess it's time to move away from github.

</comment><comment><USER357> O-boy! I hope they'll make GitHub as awesome as Skype.

</comment><comment><USER358> A monopolist wants to buy a monopolist. Linuxers disagree.

</comment><comment><USER359> Pack it in boys

</comment><comment><USER360> "Open season on open source"

</comment><comment><USER361> Dammit!!!

</comment><comment><USER362> Oh, fork

</comment><comment><USER363> So long, and thanks for the fish!

</comment><comment><USER364> The irony. 404 comments.

</comment><comment><USER365> RIP GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER366> Oh crap.

</comment><comment><USER285> Disaster.

</comment><comment><USER367> RIP

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea All good things must come to an end. We had free software before Github and we will have free software after Github.

</comment><comment><USER368> I was using gitlab anyway. But it's significant that Microsoft is taking another step towards destroying open source and the community around it (while making it look like they are embracing it, of course).

</comment><comment><USER369> If it's true, it's the moment that GitLab will see a major boost and replace GitHub within 2-4 of years

</comment><comment><USER370> Horrible news. Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.

Wonder where the big tech companies will move their projects to? GitLab?

We finally has a single, neutral site for code and which everyone uses and MS messes it up.

I do hope once and for all we can put to rest this idea MS has changed. Clearly these actions show they have not change.

</comment><comment><USER371> Wait a minute. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so it has prime access to recruitment. It now also owns GitHub, where it can run anything they want to find the best programmers. I don't know what Microsoft plans to do, but those are good wats to find all kinds of talent.

</comment><comment><USER372> I wonder now that Microsoft controls LinkedIn and Github what kind of synergies can form between the two to better serve recruiters looking for software developers.

</comment><comment><USER373> It just seems odd that a company that threatens to sue companies for using Linux, unless they pay their patent licensing extortion royalties, may control GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER374> This is amazing. I hope they build in support for Azure and let us have free private repos.

Congratulations to Microsoft!

<comment><USER370> This is terrible news. Big guys will have to move code elsewhere. We finally has a single and neutral site and MS destroys it.

Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER375> Good! Getting rid of Atom for Visual Studio Code should make things a lot better (and allow them to free up some staff). And if they eliminate they head of "community" that makes public repository owners have to tiptoe around any sensitive snowflake's sensibilities, that will fix most of the remaining problems.

</comment><comment><USER376> I wonder what will happen to Atom, considering that Microsoft makes VS Code..?

</comment><comment><USER377> Seems like something that would have been more fitting for Google...

</comment><comment><USER378> Why would they when they have VSTS already?

</comment><comment><USER379> Never used github. Always used bitbucket.

</comment><comment><USER380> I am a [full-time open source developer]([https://github.com/ahmadawais](https://github.com/ahmadawais)) working as a core developer of WordPress contributed to every single major version for the last couple of years.

I am also well versed in JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem and have a deep interest in DevOps, Cloud, and the new serverless tech. I care very deeply about Developer Experience and most of my open source work is related to dev- tooling.

Now that you know this about me, it's easier for you understand why I am writing this post, and maybe why I think my opinion matters. Below is a copy- paste from the Twitter thread that I created on this topic:

1⃣ @Microsoft is about to acquire @GitHub. A lot of folks are skeptical. But I have a different view. Many of you know I am building a course on VSCode.pro for that, I've seen firsthand, how 🆚@Code repo is one of the best #OpenSource repos out there

2⃣— Once I created a GitHub issue at 🆚@Code repo for markdown and I was impressed by how vscodebot auto-assigned @MattBierner (who works on Markdown of VSCode) to the issue and then @tonybrix from MarkedJS helped me out. It was best GitHub automation WITH results ever!

3⃣— Don't "@" me coz I know about @Microsoft's history with #OpenSource. I am a full-time open sourcerer and I can't sit here quiet instead of supporting what looks like the new @Microsoft — @SatyaNadella's moving the company from @Windows dependant to in-house @Linux dev

4⃣— Every other day I find/meet people working at @Microsoft using Linux/Mac based devices — even bought by the company for them. Guess what? 1,000 MSFT Employees pushing open source code on GitHub. This is a BIG 🆕 change. Taking it lightly in 2018 would be tomfoolery.

5⃣— I've been most inspired by teams behind 🆚@Code (@auchenberg ) and @Azure — I think that @JeffSand has built an incredible team of @AzureAdvocates folks like @ashleymcnamara @sarah_edo @jawache @burkeholland @simona_cotin @_clarkio @John_Papa @holtbt @film_girl @TommyLee

6⃣—I'm a big fan of "Dev Experience" (DX) that's why I pay $200 for a font I use in 🆚Code & have built s of #OpenSource dev-tooling github.com/ahmadawais—Teams at @Azure are doing a lot to make DX better for the cloud → @AzureFunctions + @Code integration is impressive!

7⃣— GitHub's been struggling to find a new CEO for a year. What if? It's my primary code hosting company. It's helped me go full-time open source with the support from awesome dev community/companies. Safe to say that @GitHub has made #OpenSource better

8⃣— @Microsoft has done a lot for #OpenSource in the last 4 years with @SatyaNadella.

🆚 @Code's love. @Linux Subsystem on @Windows. Draft.sh for @kubernetesio didn't have a Windows version and still offers @MacHomebrew as the go-to way of installing it!

9⃣—@GitHub is not exactly a cash-cow. @Microsoft has put money where their mouth is — out of 1.5 Million organizations on GitHub MSFT has most GitHub contributors to its repos, it's the biggest company with over 1000 employees contributing code to GitHub →proof of good faith!

— I think @Microsoft is changing for good. The intent here's to connect with developers and not offend them by disrupting a good company. MSFT won't change a lot but this acquisition might make GitHub a lot better. Also, MSFT will jump into ROR. It's high time for #OpenSource.

What are your thoughts on this whole thing?! Peace!

</comment><comment><USER381> Oh well. Github was great while it lasted. What's next?

</comment><comment><USER382> People moving to a alternative just because they can't handle change is hilarious. Good riddance!

</comment><comment><USER139> Can the old CEO be sued for 'breach of trust'? At least they must have to give prior notice before any of our sensitive data (trusted to github) falls into the hands of MS (untrustworthy)?

</comment><comment><USER383> Guys and girls, I really don't get this. It's 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content?

Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.)

Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon's store, Google's search engine, Apple's app store, Facebook's social network ... don't you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers?

Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we're upset. Oh no, what's the new owner going to do?

With a network that no one controls, we wouldn't worry about that.

We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It's a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to "the cloud" ie some servers owned by someone else.

Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.

<comment><USER189> We don't use Github to host Git repos alone. We use it as a tool for collaboration - to track bugs, host some documentation, do code reviews, track workflow and so on. And, most of all, we use it for discoverability. It's easy to find things on Github.

> Why did we stop at DNS?

A lot of companies host their domain servers on AWS because Route 53 makes it convenient.

A real successor to Github would allow all the extras around Git, but in a federated way. We'd deploy a server for our projects, different addresses for our repos and all members of this federation would agree on an API and share data with each other.

It's doable, but, unless it's easier than other options, it won't fly.

<comment><USER383> Back in 2011 I saw this problem — that social networking (profiles, ratings, collaboration of all kinds) is all based on centralized platforms.

Even github as you said provides all the social layer on top of git and you jusy have to trust them.

There was no good software to take care of that stuff. So we built it. It's exactly the federated API layer you're talking about!

Here it is:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER384> Reading through replies to this and especially about "the death of free software" makes me ask, "Was software ever free?"

From my perspective, any software that has made it to production use ended up supported by some large for-profit corporation.

Java<-Oracle Linux<-multiple distro's with paid-for enterprise support

And IBM and other companies hiring developers to work on "free software".

Without the support of corporations, most software just dies.

So Github is losing money and can't figure out a model to become profitable. They could start charging for all repositories. They could go public, but then they're beholden to some small set of investment groups.

Microsoft, under Nadella, has been about as pro-open source as you can get.

The only change I expect from Microsoft re: Github is that they will very likely bake DevOps into their tools (Code/Visual Studio) and their cloud (Azure) so that developers can be more productive.

The illusion of free software has always been just that. An illusion.

<comment><USER102> This isn't even about free software... github is closed. It's SaaS. It just became a defacto standard interface, a sort of facebook for git. git is free and will stay that way.</comment></comment>