This seems, to me, to illustrate perfectly how Microsoft still doesn't understand open source as an idea nor as a culture. The whole movement exists as a reacti

This seems, to me, to illustrate perfectly how Microsoft still doesn't understand open source as an idea nor as a culture. The whole movement exists as a reaction against central, corporate control. Large companies think that, by acquiring important hosted open source infrastructure, they'll somehow acquire the users or act as gatekeepers. But open source tooling is so decentralized these days that is not easy to be a captive user. The cost of switching is so low -- plenty of other comparable services supply collaborative utilities for git -- that, for most projects, a weekend spent altering URLs and configs should suffice. If such a deal goes through, Microsoft will spend millions on the acquisition and, simultaneously, alternative providers who appear more independent (Gitlab, BitBucket, etc) will see a surge in new accounts. And I, for one, think it'd be a good thing for open source. Every time an OSS sugar daddy turns on its users -- SourceForge, BitKeeper, Oracle, SCO, etc -- the community has grown more robust, more decentralized, and more resilient.