Microsoft has officially announced its acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion. What remains to be seen is how it will integrate its services into GitHub. But the company's biggest problem right now is not the integration.
It's not adding parts of GitHub to Azure, nor does it seem to be controlling the management of the developer platform.
Microsoft's biggest challenge is trying to keep developers and make them forget the company's not-so-distant past, which characterized it as a very aggressive behavior towards every open source product. And we're not talking about former CEO Steve Ballmer about Linux, which he called a cancer. We're talking about Microsoft's attempts to threaten open source developers and their customers with patent lawsuits and more.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, of course, knows the company's past very well.
“Judge us on the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions in the present, and our actions in the future,” he said during a detailed press conference in today’s announcement.
Judge us by the actions we've taken in the recent past, our actions today and our actions in the future
Nadella promised to keep GitHub open, so developers can use any language, any cloud, and develop for any device from the platform.
Microsoft is already GitHub’s largest partner. With the purchase, Microsoft is trying to participate in “every stage of development,” company officials said today.
GitHub will continue to function as a code repository and will provide developers with a place to learn, develop, collaborate, and document their code. GitHub is not just an open source repository. It also exists to store private code that is not covered by open source licenses. Microsoft did not mention integrating GitHub with LinkedIn, but it could do so in the long term.
Microsoft is looking at the GitHub Marketplace as a way to make its own tools and services available to developers. Nat Friedman, the new CEO of GitHub, said that Microsoft plans to put all of its development tools and services on the GitHub marketplace.
Meanwhile, the reactions on Twitter and Reddit continue. But there are also some who believe that Microsoft's actions in recent years show that the company has changed and that it will be a good steward of GitHub.
Of course, there are many others who think that Microsoft will not change, and its new plan is to "embrace, expand and erase" open source software through the acquisition of GitHub.
It remains to be seen whether the "new" Microsoft can win over the impressions, and the trust of developers. Of course, immediately after that we will have to wait and see if the GitHub project will last.
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