Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has acquired GitHub, and the official confirmation of the deal is expected to take place today, Monday, June 4, 2018. Of course, not everyone can be happy.
You can just look at the posts circulating on Twitter and you will see that there are many who, along with the “death” of GitHub, are declaring the death of open source software. There are also many who say that they will switch to other competing services, such as BitBucket and GitLab.
But let's see what is happening or what is going to happen, as rationally as possible.
GitHub plays a vital role in the software development ecosystem. In addition to the fact that countless companies that develop their own commercial software rely on the platform, it is also the center of the open source community, with 80 million repositories hosted on the site.
Anyone who develops software for a living depends on GitHub, even if they don't have their own account.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn’t always operate in the spirit of open source and collaboration. For years, Redmond has been a leader in the controversy. The company has “won” several antitrust lawsuits in both the United States and the European Union. The lawsuits explicitly stated that Microsoft was using its leading market position to exclude competition.
Microsoft has also been accused of using a “cuddle, expand, and extinguish” to consolidate its position in various areas: from productivity software to the broader Internet.
Recall that in 2001, then-CEO Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as a “cancer,” which upset many open source fans.
With all of the above, you can understand why there are many developers who see the GitHub acquisition as the end of the service.
But is the Microsoft of 2018 the same as the Microsoft of 1998?
When Satya Nadella took over the company in 2014, he tried to reshape the company from the ground up. For the first time, Microsoft stopped working entirely behind closed doors. It uploaded major projects to GitHub and made them available under open source licenses. Today, you can read the code for the .NET framework or see the code for Visual Studio. That was unthinkable ten years ago.
Microsoft doesn’t just have a page on GitHub. The company is one of the most active, with contributions to open source that surpass those of Google and Facebook.
When it’s not opening its code to the public, it’s porting it to other platforms. Visual Studio code, for example, now runs on Linux and macOS. The SQL Server database system has been ported to Linux.
And if that doesn't tell you something, the company brought Linux to Windows, via the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and shipped the Bash shell with Windows 10.
So we see that all of Nadella's projects at Microsoft are trying to achieve a sense of transparency. If the company doesn't get smart with GitHub, it will lose all the change it has been trying to demonstrate over the past four years.
Another fear with the GitHub acquisition is that the service could lose its identity and be absorbed by Microsoft as another business unit.
But looking at the company's recent major acquisitions, that fear seems unfounded. When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, nothing changed for users. LinkedIn has retained a large part of its autonomy and identity. The company is still run by the CEO it had before the acquisition, (Jeff Weiner) although it works with Microsoft's leadership.
Will things change with GitHub? No one can know. But the company is a favorite in the developer community and has a very strong brand name. So big changes could spell trouble for Microsoft.
The most worrying thing about this deal is that by owning LinkedIn and GitHub, Microsoft will be able to define how hiring works in the tech industry.
But fears of a repeat of the 90s confrontation are unfounded. Microsoft is clearly a different company.
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