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

[jpg44]

Unless it was a hostile takeover, some express concerns the Github sale was an act of desperation because a number of their customers are non paying and they cannot resort to ads without alienating their user base. A report from 2016 shows its a "unicorn" backed by VC financing and lost $66 million in 2016

[oooverclocker]

Now I am on Gitlab.

I also encourage companies like Valve to follow. You don't really like to give M$ access your private repos, do you?

[starshipeleven]

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...

I've always had a very poor view of Linkedin, maybe in the US it's not "facebook of work".

[mulenmar]

So it ends...

(Seriously, this is one of those typical MS's "me too" purchases, and they'll mess it up and tear it down like they did with everything else they got into their clutches. The list is long and sadly still growing.)

I thought we were talking about Microsoft, not EA?

[Nelson]

Unless it was a hostile takeover, some express concerns the Github sale was an act of desperation because a number of their customers are non paying and they cannot resort to ads without alienating their user base. A report from 2016 shows its a "unicorn" backed by VC financing and lost $66 million in 2016

The numbers I had heard were losses in that range on like $90m-$100m in revenue. Not even close to breaking even. Hosting all those free projects is expensive and it's really hard to monitize something that is free.

[starshipeleven]

No, not at all. Nobody in their right mind thinks Microsoft will try to steal the code by violating your licenses. What worries people is that Microsoft is going to close down access to the code behind a paywall, require proprietary software that only works on Windows and Edge to access "advanced features", etc etc. Given that a huge amount of code is located on github, the real concern is that the archive of open source software will be lost, the big value in github is that other people can find the software even if the maintainer of the software is no longer interested in the code and maintaining it, and that the code just doesnt disappear because they dont pay for some kind of "premium account".

That's a so poor idea that even MS would not do that.
At the first sign of that happening the code is just going to be cloned off the platform, and MS is going to get roasted.

A lot of the early software code for many older programs was lost because the ftp sites that hosted the code went down and the software just vanished. Despite the problems with Github, A warning against Self Hosting, its a BAD IDEA, Self hosting code/cloud/paid account is probably the worst thing anyone can do because then if they don't pay the hosting bill any more or turn on the server in their den any more, the software is lost for people who may be interested, even if only for historical preservation. You want your code hosted on a site that is maintained by a large number of people that will hopefully be around for a long time, the sale of github casts some doubt on that. But self hosting/cloud/paid account in my experience virtually gaurantees the code will vanish because nearly all self hosted repositories I have ever seen do not last more than a few years.

Anyone with concerns about this should really just have the Internet Archive run some scans on his self-hosted site every once in a while.
That's the place where most dead sites are still accessible, where you can get long dead software and so on and so forth. It's up and running since 1996.

Also donate regularly to this non-profit organization to support its operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive

https://archive.org/index.php

[sdack]

Why doesn't Microsoft just go ahead and open source Windows, if they really have changed?

They'd instantly lose one of their income sources. And the risk of people detecting new holes in it and exploiting countless Windows installations is far too risky. This has to happen much slower and careful, because basically the entire world still depends much on Windows. You cannot hit the switch this easily or you'd risk damaging countless businesses.

[andyprough]

The numbers I had heard were losses in that range on like $90m-$100m in revenue. Not even close to breaking even. Hosting all those free projects is expensive and it's really hard to monitize something that is free.

Unless you find a sucker -- errr I mean willing buyer -- to pay $7.5 billion for your money-losing venture. Capitalism at its finest.

[KellyClowers]

I'm not particularly worried about MS really messing it up/destroying it. They've been fairly decent as major corporations go lately, and I don't really see them reverting to old behavior anytime soon. I'd be more worried if Google bought it TBH.

That said, I think its more consolidation that we shouldn't really welcome in general.

On the other other hand, if this encourages more self-hosted gitlab instances and similar, that's probably better than everybody and their brother being tied to GitHub...

[KellyClowers]

I guess everyone forgot about this this and this among many other missteps by github. To hell with them, I hope this is the final nail on the coffin.

Those were all good things... And MS isn't going to purposely reverse things on that front...