Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation Executive Director, says that he expects generally “good things” for the Open Source world. “This is pretty good news for the world of Open Source he wrote-and we should celebrate Microsoft’s smart move”. On the other hand, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, stated that their acquisition bespeaks to “stay true to the [Git Hub’s] core” bringing more “real value” to it. He mentions Linkedin’s example to foreground what Zemlin also expresses: “Microsoft has the means and the expertise to make GitHub better”.
Can we believe them? We cannot disagree with Nadella when he claims that Microsoft always pays attention to any expanding secular market or segment. And here we’re talking about developers and social coding, “required everywhere” according to Nadella. Thus he assures Git Hub will remain an “open platform project”. And Zemlin supports him when he claims that under Nadella’s leadership Microsoft “has now completed its transition from an adversary of open source to a first-class citizen”.
Still, ¿can we believe them? That’s the kernel of the issue for Microsoft right now. “Trust is everything to us”, Nadella says. And he mentions how one of Microsoft’s main developments in the last years was built on Git Hub, and how the project leader, Nat Friedman, is close to the open source culture and community. Zemlin also underlines the reasons why we should believe that these are good news for the Open Source community -Microsoft has opened up a ton of code and hired developers engaged in open source; they are contributors to Linux Fundation and open source causes...
We cannot be certain about the amount of wishful thinking, conflict of interests, or simply CEO’s lies that is involved in this assertions. However, we can be certain that there’s nothing in this matter about good intentions or bad faith. It is about what was good for business before and what is good for business now. Nadella is absolutely right when he asserts that developers are the “center of a digital economy” that involves everything: from agriculture to banking. And as it is known and Zemlin foregrounds it “open source developer communities are deeply reliant on platforms”.
Thus, despite of the nice and funny geek-memes foreseeing a microsoftization of Git Hub, we should say that it looks more like a attempt from Microsoft to get more involved in the open sourced future of tech development and digital economy. Now it is the big fish who is trying to learn from the small fish. And of course, from here we should be expecting anyway, as usual, catastrophic consequences :)
Sources:
https://twitter.com/hashtag/knockknock?lang=en
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/06/nat-friedman-ama-microsoft-github-deal