cat posts/2018-06-12-microsoft-buys-github.md

Microsoft buys GitHub, and I'm not moving

· 2 min read · open-source microsoft git

My first reaction last Monday, when Microsoft confirmed it’s buying GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock, was to laugh, because I remember being an MVP in 2005 and trying to explain to Linux people that not everyone in Redmond was evil. It was not an easy sell.

My second reaction was to go look at #movingtogitlab, which was already trending on Sunday before the deal was even official. GitLab said it was seeing ten times its normal daily number of repository imports, and was scaling up to keep up. I get it. I just don’t think I’m joining them.

My reasoning, such as it is, goes like this. The Microsoft of 2018 is a weird company, in a good way, for anyone who remembers the old one. .NET is open source and runs on Linux. VS Code is the editor half my team uses, on Macs. They bought Xamarin and made it free. They have, by most counts, more employees contributing to open source on GitHub than any other company. And Nat Friedman, who’s going to run GitHub, came from Xamarin and has spent his whole career in open source. If anyone at Microsoft is going to leave GitHub alone, it’s him.

Also, honestly, GitHub needed a buyer. Chris Wanstrath said last August that he’d step down as CEO once they found a replacement, they still hadn’t found one, and there have been reports for a while that it was losing money. The likely alternatives were a cloud vendor or an ad company, and I’d be more nervous about the ad company.

What would make me move? If they start tying GitHub to Azure in ways that make it worse on other clouds, or if the free tier for open source starts getting squeezed, or if the API and integrations get worse for anyone not using Microsoft’s tools. Those are the things to watch. None of them have happened, the deal won’t even close until later this year, and Microsoft has every reason to be careful, because the whole value of GitHub is that developers chose it.

There’s one memory nagging at me, though. CodePlex, Microsoft’s own open source hosting site, went read-only at the end of last year after it lost to GitHub. Microsoft is good at running things for developers when it’s paying attention and bad at it when it isn’t.

In the meantime my repos stay where they are. I did take it as a reminder to make sure we have a mirror of our code somewhere else, which we didn’t, until this week. It’s a few lines of cron and git push --mirror, and it’s running now.