Msft paying $7.5 billion.... Overpaid overpaid overpaid That's what happens during these crazy bull markets, companies will overpay for anything and everything!!
I think y'all are thinking too conventional. I do not claim to have an answer as to what MS will do with github, but I do know MSFT's rise to DOMINANCE was created through the development community and the many free (and paid) development tools and protocols MS made available. Maybe this acquisition isn't about profits. Maybe it's a road to dominance into whatever MS sees as being next.
Front Page of BB. Right now I'm in the "Terrified" camp. I am having flashbacks to when Oracle bought mySql. Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Triggers Coders’ Trust Issues https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ft-s-github-deal-triggers-coders-trust-issues
I don't think that will ever happen. If $MSFT ever did that, after the first time, everyone would simply delete their software off the site and find another site. $MSFT knows that many fewer people would use GitHub. $MSFT knows they would be destroying their own website. Programmers, scientists, developers and instructors would simply build up another website. Ever since the rise of free Python and R, $MSFT's position in the programming world has been weakened. I think that's why they offer some Visual Studio packages for free. $MSFT isn't giving Visual Studio away for free because of the kindness of their hearts. $MSFT only began giving Visual Studio away in late 2014, their Community Edition. Before that, Visual Studio was prohibitively expensive. Beginner programmers couldn't even afford it. The irony is, most people don't even care. Python has experienced explosive growth.
...and this is what frightens me. Are they trying to destroy this site, or perhaps, curb the enthusiasm of the open source community? Anecdote: my father worked in the steel industry after WWII. At the time, the railroads business was brisk. The automakers saw them as competition. A decision was made: THE UNITED STATES WILL RUN ON GASOLINE. But how to get rid of the railroads? There were plans to build out a rich network of rail lines across the US. What did the auto industry do? They bought the railroads... and let them rust. Is Github the next victim? 7.5B is nothing to MS if it mitigates disruption risk from the open-source community.
Railroads are expensive to lay out. Repositories are cheap to clone and host elsewhere. There are plenty of git based repository hosting available to move the open source community should GitHub become clunky. If none is suitable, you can be sure a new one will be created. The open source community was alive well before git and GitHub, I wouldn't worry about them. If they paid 7.5B to kill open source, they failed miserably. Take for example Hudson. It used to be an open source project maintained by Sun. Then Oracle bought Sun and the open source community didn't like it, so they forked and created Jenkins. A few years later, Hudson is almost dead and Jenkins is thriving.