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Not Invented Here (NIH) - Microsoft buys GitHub
In the Gates/Balmer era, Microsoft epitomize NIH. What interest could they possibly have in buying GitHub?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/t...omputing.html? |
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Times change. Microsoft isn't the company that it was even 10 years ago. Not saying that Microsoft needs to be your best friend but the acquisition makes a lot of sense to me having seen Microsoft hanging around *BSD conferences and the like the last few years.
As to what interest they could have, two things come immediately to mind: exposure and profit. Microsoft will likely end up making some nice developer tools for GitHub, at least some of which will probably be open source. And let's not forget a lot of big companies pay a lot of money to host private repositories on GitHub--now under Microsoft's ownership the "risk" of using GitHub for those companies may decrease. I imagine GitHub will likely grow as a result of the acquisition. |
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I still do think there is conflict of interest between Microsoft and open-source, although it is smaller than ever. Why they acquired GitHub? Microsoft has quite good and popular programming language: C#. They have compiler and rest of toolchain for that language. They have .net framework and .net core frameworks for building desktop and web apps. They have popular and good IDE: Visual Studio. It completes their modern development ecosystem. Quote:
From other, more pessimistic, point of view they have increased influence on FOSS ecosystem through being a member of Linux Foundation and buying GitHub. Just these two things give them a lot of power. I hope they will not use that to sabotage FOSS, but who knows? Good thing is that GitHub has competitors such as Bitbucket and GitLab. I personaly have account on Bitbucket and recently a few big name open-source projects such as Gimp migrated to GitLab.
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GitLab's import statistics:
https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer
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If you're of the perspective that FOSS is your gift to the world, and that the goal is to produce quality code that others can freely use in their own projects so that the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented (badly) over and over again, then Microsoft's entry into FOSS is probably a net positive. LibreSSL and OpenSSH having made their way into Microsoft products are great examples of this. This would be a good thing under this perspective (and I do think it is a good thing). There are of course flaws in this perspective; one could say we're in the extend phase of the embrace-extend-extinguish cycle, but I don't think in the current corporate climate of FOSS a single company, even if it is Microsoft, can effectively make a run at extinguish. It would take at least one partner, perhaps Google, to begin sounding the alarm bells. If your perspective is that FOSS is a tool like any other tool, then Microsoft being a player doesn't really matter. It's just a tool; use the best tool for the job. If anything, we could say Microsoft has grown to understand that a little bit better today. |
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