Microsoft bought GitHub. Now what?

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Last Monday, a weekend of rumors proved to be true. Microsoft announced plans to buy code-hosting site GitHub for $7.5 billion. Microsoft’s past, particularly before Satya Nadella took the corner office a few years ago, was full of hostility to open source. “Embrace, extend, extinguish” was the operative phrase. It should come as no surprise, then, that many projects responded by abandoning the platform.

But beyond the kneejerk reaction, there are two questions to consider. First: can open source projects trust Microsoft? Secondly, should open source (and free software in particular) projects rely on corporate hosting.

Microsoft as a friend

Let’s start with the first question. With such a long history of active assault on open source, can Microsoft be trusted? Understanding that some people will never be convinced, I say “yes”. Both from the outside and from my time as a Microsoft employee, it’s clear that the company has changed under Nadella. Microsoft recognizes that open source projects are not only complementary, but strategically important.

This is driven by a change in the environment that Microsoft operates in. The operating system is less important than ever. Desktop-based office suites are giving way to web-based tools for many users. Licensed revenue may be the past and much of the present, but it’s not the future. Subscription revenue, be it from services like Office 365 or Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, is the future. And for many of these, adoption and consumption will be driven by open source projects and the developers (developers! developers! developers! developers!) that use them.

Microsoft’s change of heart is undoubtedly driven by business needs, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation, expressed his excitement, implying it was a victory for open source. Tidelift ran the numbers to look at Microsoft’s contributions to non-Microsoft projects. Their conclusion?

…today the company is demonstrating some impressive traction when it comes to open source community contributions. If we are to judge the company on its recent actions, the data shows what Satya Nadella said in his announcement about Microsoft being “all in on open source” is more than just words.

And in any acquisition, you should always ask “if not them, then who?” CNBC reported that GitHub was also in talks with Google. While Google may have a better reputation among the developer community, I’m not sure they’d be better for GitHub. After all, Google had Google Code, which it shut down in 2016. Would a second attempt in this space fare any better? Google Code had a two year head start on GitHub, but it languished.

As for other major tech companies, this tweet sums it up pretty well:

https://twitter.com/KrisSiegel/status/1003796510281121793?s=19

Can you trust anyone to host?

My friend Lyz Joseph made an excellent point on Facebook the day the acquisition was announced:

Unpopular opinion: If you’re an open source project using GitHub, you already sold out. You traded freedom for convenience, regardless of what company is in control.

People often forget that GitHub itself is not open source. Some projects have avoided hosting on GitHub for that very reason. Even though the code repo itself is easily mirrored or migrated, that’s not the real value in GitHub. The “social coding” aspects — the issues, fork tracking, wikis, ease of pull requests, etc — are what make GitHub valuable. Chris Siebenmann called it “sticky in a soft way.”

GitLab, at least, offers a “community edition” that projects can self-host. In a fantasy world, each project would run their own infrastructure, perhaps with federated authentication for ease of use when you’re a participant in many projects. But that’s not the reality we live in. Hosting servers costs money and time. Small projects in particular lack both of those. Third-party infrastructure will always be attractive for this reason. And as good as competition is, having a dominant social coding site is helpful to users in the same way that a dominant social network is simpler: network effects are powerful.

So now what?

The deal isn’t expected to close for a while, and Microsoft plans to seek regulatory approval, which will not speed the process. Nothing will change immediately. In the medium term, I don’t expect much to change either. Microsoft has made it clear that it plans to run GitHub as a fairly autonomous business (the way it does with LinkedIn). GitHub gets the stability that comes from the support of one of the world’s largest companies. Microsoft gets a chance to improve its reputation and an opportunity to make it easier for developers to use Azure services.

Full disclosure: I am a recent employee of Microsoft and a shareholder. I was not involved in the acquisition and had no inside knowledge pertinent to the acquisition or future plans for GitHub.

3 thoughts on “Microsoft bought GitHub. Now what?”

  1. Pingback: Recommended Read: Microsoft bought GitHub. Now what? – Blog Fiasco | thechrisshort

  2. While not part of the MS acquisition some folks left GitHub because the culture there was…bad.

    I do think MS is a much better netizen not that Balmer and Gates are no longer anywhere near the levers of power. However, they have a multitude of sins that makes some of us wary.

    I also agree they are the least bad option of the number of companies that could have acquired them.

  3. All of the people I’ve met from GitHub have seemed like fine humans, but there’s no denying they’ve had some cultural problems. Hopefully Microsoft helps fix that (or at least doesn’t amplify it the way I’d expect some other companies to).

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