5 ms·

You don't embrace open-source by buying a major code hosting platform.

• cupofjoakim 8y ago
  That does depend on the situation. We know that google wanted to buy Github, so a (very unlikely) motivation could be that microsoft bought github to "protect it" from google, or in case of no deal happening, financial instability. That being said, we have no way of knowing what the true motive of the move is - being sceptical/critical is indeed the correct reaction.
• ggregoire 8y ago
  MS is the biggest open source contributor on GitHub.
• mikece 8y ago
  Usually you buy something in order to make a profit from it. In the case of GitHub, Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern, that will never implode for lack of funds, as a place where open source projects can be freely hosted and open source developers can find a sense of community. This is more magnanimous than anything Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter have done -- COMBINED!
  • IncRnd 8y ago
    > Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern Is that your belief, or do you know that to be true?
    • mikece 8y ago
      GitHub has never made money. Microsoft buys GitHub and says we're going to let them operate independently as they see fit. Where do you see the profit motive?
      • IncRnd 8y ago
        > Where do you see the profit motive? I never wrote anything abut profit motives. You just made the same leap of logic again. Do you know factually that , "Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern."
        • parvenu74 8y ago
          The fact that Microsoft tried as many times as they did to push Windows Phone -- even buying Nokia to have a captive device maker -- shows how committed they can be to losing money.
        • linuxftw 8y ago
          I agree with you here. I doubt Microsoft is committed to losing money on a product. There could be a direct (selling subscriptions / additional addon products) or indirect (marketing dollars, community goodwill, 'mindshare) profit motivations. I think Microsoft sees this as a way to get into businesses that would have never entertained a relationship with them. When those github enterprise contracts come up for renewal, I expect large discounts for trying Azure and other Microsoft products to come with them.
      • chomp 8y ago
        Microsoft's been orienting themselves as a developer services company over the past few years. Azure, vscode, open source dotnet, they want free onramps onto their services. They were missing CI/CD tools, and source control. They had VSTS and Team Foundation Server but there's no way theyd beat the ubiquity of git. I'm betting they're going to now start offering CI via GitHub like Gitlab (or offering a unified marketplace to allow other companies to fill this role and they take a cut) and then folding GitHub Enterprise into their suite of developer tools. Just like Visual Studio is vscode++, GitHub Enterprise will be invested in to where it does a whole lot more fancy things, and free GitHub is the onramp. And then Microsoft will have a portfolio that spans the entire code development pipeline.
        • mikece 8y ago