A couple of days ago it was officially announced that Microsoft will be acquiring GitHub. You can read their announcements here (https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/) and here (https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/).
We’ll be paying close attention to this move, of course. We’re not too worried, or predicting anything particularly evil will necessarily come from this, but we will be watchful and ensure that our own values and mission are kept intact throughout this move.
This post is to hear the Community’s concerns and ideas regarding this event. We would like to hear what you believe should be the points of focus, or eventual actions to take.
Some initial reflections of our own:
-
We will examine the pathways for migration to other similar platforms (Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc), just for precaution. As a product owner we should always be considerate of the dreaded ‘single point of faliure’. Moving the code is easy, but moving a Community is a big thing, not to be attempted lightly. We’re happy with GitHub, and we won’t move unless we feel we really need to.
-
We recognize that Microsoft has been making huge leaps in terms of their open-source commitment, not just in words, but in their actions. To list a few, they are GitHub’s largest contributor, they open sourced PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, and Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine. They partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 (as an app, not in a VM!), and acquired Xamarin to aid mobile app development, open-sourcing Xamarin’s SDKs and developer tools. So we can see that they are actively trying to shed their image of the previously known “anti-open source company” and embracing open source.
-
We have reason to believe they’re making this expense to win the hearts of developers, not to alienate them. We believe they will try not to annoy people like us, or lose projects like ours. But they will also want some return on investment, and only the future will tell in what direction they mean to take GitHub.
What’s your view on this?