It's Official: Microsoft Pays Out $7.5 Billion For GitHub, Nat Friedman Becomes The CEO

[johanb]

Can you name a single Microsoft product acquisition where years later, consumers are happy with the outcome? Me neither. Microsoft has a very well earned reputation for their "embrace-extend-extinguish" strategy. History proves they aren't going to "destroy" github per se; they are "merely" going to destroy it as we know it, and 5 years from now it will be unrecognizable.

LinkedIn didn't change much.
My guess is that this will be similar, they will simply stop improving the product (but not make it worse).

[Vistaus]

Importing 900 github repo to gitlab take a while...

Be sure to host GitLab yourself though 'cause who knows if MS is also going to buy GitLab in the near future?

[Vistaus]

Can you name a single Microsoft product acquisition where years later, consumers are happy with the outcome? Me neither. Microsoft has a very well earned reputation for their "embrace-extend-extinguish" strategy. History proves they aren't going to "destroy" github per se; they are "merely" going to destroy it as we know it, and 5 years from now it will be unrecognizable.

Picture Microsoft Github 365, where you pay an annual subscription fee to use it. All the tools get ported to Windows with Linux becoming a second class citizen, with only some of the tools available. You have to use the new Microsoft Git client, the "legacy" open source git no longer works properly as MS has altered the interface and API's. The web site requires Microsoft Edge, other browsers are not compatible. It's the exact same pattern over and over and over with every product MS acquires, this is nothing new.

I'm not using LinkedIn, but from what I can see w/o an account, it still looks exactly the same. I'm not saying they're never going to destroy it, but if they are, they sure take their sweet time unlike some of the other products/projects they aquired...

[AnonymousCoward]

Once the full take over happens people using github should carefully read the terms and conditions of use, and any possible changes that occur. Microsoft might reword it in such a way that gives them legal ownership over peoples projects and code!

How would that work? I might upload a repository including code by people other than me who haven't agreed to the terms of use, and if I commit that under my name (e.g. by importing old source code, or applying a patch not via pull request) there's no easy way to see it's not my code.

I'm more concerned about them messing up the UI or trying more aggressive monetisation or something along those lines.

[ssokolow]

Once the full take over happens people using github should carefully read the terms and conditions of use, and any possible changes that occur. Microsoft might reword it in such a way that gives them legal ownership over peoples projects and code!

Doubtful. GPL-family licenses are non-revokable, specifically to counter this sort of "company becomes evil" threat. Even if you sign over your code to Microsoft, they can't revoke GPL/LGPL/AGPL on on the code prior to that, so you can just put a copy up elsewhere and continue developing under "received a license from your past self" conditions.

All it would get Microsoft is the ability to relicense the subset of commits by people who had a GitHub account, massive hatred and possibly a class action lawsuit from the user base, and you'd lose the ability to relicense your own contributions.

[andyprough]

Amazing how much money Linus's little hobby projects are worth in today's dollars. I sure hope he gets a bit of stock out of this.

[tildearrow]

I just hope they don't begin merging Microsoft accounts with GitHub ones...

Anyway i think any developer should use his own server and install git on it, making his own git server. You can buy a nice cloud server from google for example...costs you like 10 euro a month. Works very nice. On my server i have a few websites running and many git repositories. I would say: life is beautiful.

Better replace "google" with something else, since Google is actually a larger monster than Microsoft.

[waxhead]

Once the full take over happens people using github should carefully read the terms and conditions of use, and any possible changes that occur. Microsoft might reword it in such a way that gives them legal ownership over peoples projects and code!

Bingo! You nailed it! This is exactly what is going to happen. Microsoft is likely to do exactly that, and they will do it step by step so people hardly notice. It is probably going to be roughly something like this:

Step 1: (Embrace)
- Everything is free, you can host whatever you want for free and we won't touch anything or put any restrictions on you, but we may change our license in the future and we will even be so nice that we mail you in advance when we do that. And by the way , we love you and your cat, and would never hurt you and we promise to be your best friend in the whole world forever and ever because we are Microsoft and always keep our promises unless we change our mind like we often do , but we probably won't change our mind so just relax...

Step 2: (Extend)
- Everything is free, you can still host whatever you want for free and we won't touch anything or put any restriction on you except that you acknowledge that use of our infrastructure give us certain rights to move your projects to our new infrastructure which is really better for you. It also provides new features that we know you will like, and if you choose to accept this (which you eventually have to, because we don't give you any choice) you are under a very nice permissive, but not as free agreement that give us lots of rights in the future , that we right now claim that we probably will never use so you don't have to worry.

Step 3: (Extinguish)
- Oh by the way , we just moved all your stuff to our new infrastructure and that is now under restrictions that you happy accepted since everybody else did anyway. This means that we own you, your code and so forth. And incidentally since we now host your projects on Windows 10 then Win10's privacy policy applies and we can do whatever we want with you, your code, your cat and even your mother.

[onicsis]

It's not about "classical" , by now, the famous E E E - Embrace Extend and Extinguish, it's more about "enslaving" a huge number of open source project in their own personal M$ interests.

[FireBurn]

Microsoft bought it to make money from it, not to extinguish it. Expect super easy integration to Azure for CI and deployments of code. Expect businesses to have to pay for it. I doubt end users will notice any differences. Microsoft bought it because it has lots of users, they don't want to scare them away