So, it’s official – Microsoft has bought GitHub for a whopping $7.5B – enough to make Dr Evil’s pinky head mouth-ward.
I find this, in modern parlance, “problematic”. Microsoft have historically been a terrible terrible entity, which spent the best part of a decade directly attacking Linux/FLOSS at every opportunity. Recently, people seem to think MS have been more friendly to the open-source world – from their kernel patches for better HyperV support, to the inclusion of the “Windows Subsytem for Linux” in Win10. Without doubt though, all of their “friendly” moves have served Microsoft over the community.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and with GitHub having a surprisingly central role in the FLOSS world, their acquisition by MS can only be deemed a bad thing. On the plus side, this is making many devs think about moving away from GitHub.
I have now moved all my code over to notabug.org, and would advise any other GitHub users to do something similar. The main repos I can suggest are:-
- notabug.org
- GitLab
- Sourceforge (I know, but they have changed ownership since the installer debacle)
Microsoft will ruin what GitHub was. Even in recent memory they ruin whatever they buy – look at what LinkedIn or Skype became to see what I mean.
Get out while you can, coders!