After Microsoft messed up its Codeplex project and shut it down last year; it announced to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion, yesterday. GitHub is the world’s leading web-based hosting service for version control using Git which is used by more than 28 million developers and is home to more than 85 million code repositories..
FUD among developer community
Several developers have raised concern over this deal. Their fear and doubt over Microsoft is understandable as Microsoft has been known as an enemy of open source initiative since the beginning.
It’s about 2 decades when Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer called the free software Linux kernel "communism". He was the one who called Linux a "cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". But everything changes with time. He was also the person who openly changed his stance in 2016 and supported his successor Satya Nadella’s open source commitments.
Since 2014, Microsoft has open-sourced some of its most vibrant developer tools and frameworks like the .Net framework, Visual Studio Code, and Typescript. This is a good proof about its embracing of open sourced culture.
Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explicitly stated in his blog:
the real power comes when every developer can create together, collaborate, share code and build on each other’s work. In all walks of life, we see the power of communities, and this is true for software development and developers.
More importantly, he has given a clear message to developer community:
Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.
He has emphasized the fact that Microsoft is the most active organization on GitHub, with more than 2 million commits.
Thus Github is not going to see any major changes and will retain its independent identity. Just like we didn’t see any visible changes in Linkedin after acquisition by Microsoft.
No, it’s certainly not the end of open sourced development.
Gitlab is gaining a huge traffic.
Github + Microsoft = Gitlab
Skeptical developers have already started to flee GitHub to alternatives like GitLab or Bitbucket.
According to its recent tweet, GitLab is seeing an influx of 10 times the normal daily repositories. This has necessitated to scale up their operations. In fact, they have created an exclusive Twitter account viz. movingtogitlab for addressing issues in migrating to GitLab from GitHub. “How to” videos are being released, help documents are being publicized and many developers are rushing to move their projects on GitLab.
Projects like GIMP and KUWAITNET Team have already moved to GitLab. Infragravity has publicly tweeted the reason behind their move.
But people perhaps forget that Google is the major investor in GitLab.
Can A GitHub alternative be made on a blockchain?
The reason behind the sale of GitHub was the difficulty in generating its revenue. Presently all of its revenue was being generated by charging its users. But can’t a project like this be created on some blockchain like Steem or EOS where hosting of publicly useful open-sourced code need not be paid by its developers? Community support should be more than enough to meet the hosting and development cost of such projects.
Of late, Utopian has been a great help for open source contributors. Could this be extended for hosting repositories too? Any thoughts?
- What do you think about the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft?
- Is it a threat to the open source GitHub community?
- Should Steem too move over its code base from GitHub?
