GitHub is no longer just a source code management company. They've started their horizontal integration, and are firmly in the more general "Developer Tools" c

GitHub is no longer just a source code management company. They've started their horizontal integration, and are firmly in the more general "Developer Tools" category. This would be another addition to their horizontal integration, and increasing the amount of the development pipeline they're involved in. The specific advantage is that it makes switching providers really hard. You develop in Atom, store the code in GitHub, use GitHub Actions for CI/CD (if that's viable, I'm not super familiar with the product), use GitHub to manage the released artifacts, and publish them to GitHub's app store. That makes it really appealing to buy because you don't have to talk to 7 different vendors and duct tape their solutions together with Python scripts. You talk to 1 vendor, who gives you all the pieces, and the pieces are already able to communicate natively. It makes it really appealing to sell because once you buy in, it's really hard to get back out. Imagine trying to replace all of those components, and the developer time you lose as people get used to the new systems and how they all work together. Bonus points if you can only publish to the GitHub app store from GitHub installations. GitLab can do a lot of those things, but they don't have an app store. As others pointed out though, it would compete with Microsoft's existing app store. I would not be terribly surprised to see some kind of integration between GitHub and MS's app store, or Azure and their app store though.