Microsoft has just acquired GitHub for $7.5bn. Good or bad?
Injected VC capital was $350m, so ROI for the VCs = 21.4x = very happy VCs.
Microsoft has done excellent work on OSS software in recent years, including on the Linux kernel, PHP, and many others. Just like Oracle continues to put very good effort into MySQL after the Sun Microsystems acquisition many years ago.
But Microsoft is not an Open Source software company. The open source development model is not something they have built into their business “DNA” – processes (actually many companies that only do OSS haven’t got that either). So why GitHub? Combine it with LinkedIn (acquired by Microsoft earlier), and you have developers’ resumes. That’s valuable. It’s a strategically smart move, for Microsoft.
Will GitHub users benefit, and if so, how?
Well, I expect there’ll be more hoovering of “useful” (meta)data by a corporation, which some LinkedIn users will find handy, but I think it’s mainly beneficial to Microsoft rather than users, and this type of gathering and combining data is fundamentally incompatible with basic privacy. It will bite, at some point down the line. It always does.
Fundamentally, GitHub and its use is self-contradictory. Git explicitly enables distributed source code control and truly distributed development, whereas GitHub is very much centralised. Don’t just walk away to something else now, that won’t address the actual problem. Solving it properly will include having bug tracking as part of a repository, and by design not relying on a single central location, or company. The developer community (and companies) must resolve this external dependency.