I’m speechless after hearing the news… 
Here’s the article published on itsfoss.com.
I don’t think this bodes well for the open source community.
What do you guys think?
It does seem that such an acquisition would be bad for individuals who use GitHub to host their own work. Microsoft and its partners would no doubt profit from it for a while, even if only by convincing newer devs to embrace their platforms.
I am definitely not a fan of Microsoft but I am also not a fan of GitHub. GitHub is not only an open source platform, some projects are proprietary software (GitHub Enterprise). In my opinion each project should have an own website to see information about it and to get the code.
I am rather disappointed that Microsoft is spreading more and more its power and its lobbying all over the world as seen in Europe.
Regards
Mickey 
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Microsoft is a giant monopoly, unyielding and uncompromising. It will suck the life blood out of open source if it can get its hands on GitHub.
My hope is that once again they can not achieve their goal of crushing anything in opposition to their model.
As I watched the video about what is happening in Europe I was reliving what has already happened here in the U.S. It was and is heartbreaking. We are giving away our freedom willingly and foolishly.
Fred
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After the mess they made out of the Skype acquisition (not to mention Windows 10), that is a clear dealbreaker for me and I won’t continue using a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
Skype I kinda stil grudgingly keep around due to the lack of viable alternatives but I hope that can end sooner than later…
(Btw. at this point I believe the likelihood of Microsoft acquiring Canonical has dramatically increased - right now I’d be surprised if that does not happen before the next LTS release).
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Linux and its community represents the computing of the people of the town, if you buy little by little what it is for the people, goodbye to freedom, to privacy and what GNU-Linux is.
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To play devil’s advocate here: how does this affect most projects? It probably doesn’t. GitHub is already a proprietary platform for (mostly) open source projects. Under Microsoft it’ll still be a proprietary platform for open source projects.
Based on the trend, though, once Microsoft acquires it it becomes a worse product (see Skype, LinkedIn, for example). But a GPL project remains a GPL project no matter where it’s hosted.
That said, a part of me wants this deal to go through, and even to make GitHub significantly less appealing. It’ll drive a lot of projects to actually open source hosting platforms, like GitLab.
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According the most recent news it’s now only a matter of time; the deal has been made.
Wish I had an extra $7.5B to throw around. Here it is from a local Seattle area TV station’s news this morning.
For the ones who are more interested:
An article from OMG Ubuntu:
Mickey 
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The deal happened. 
Can’t trust this big corporation nor figure out their motives… but as long as they keep it exactly the way it is today, then I’ll be OK. They did say this:
Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.
…
Most importantly, we recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform. We will always listen to developer feedback and invest in both fundamentals and new capabilities.
(bold emphasis mine)
Their official announcements:
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If this carries on the direction it looks to be going and Microsoft, in their ongoing mission to muscle in on open source, acquire Cannonical and, by implication, Ubuntu then I am gone .
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That would be the logical response.
When Apache acquired OpenOffice, the developers took the open source code and gave us LibreOffice. This is the open source way. Even if M$ did acquire Canonical, that doesn’t change the fact that Ubuntu is open source, and as such the source code at the time of acquisition could be forked to a new distribution.
So yeah we would be gone, so to speak, but not really.
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I’m pretty sceptical about the measures Microsoft is taking. They continue to say that they “love open-source and Linux”, but if that means gathering relevant projects under their thumb then… 
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I’ve read many calls for us to keep calm and remember that Microsoft is not the same company as in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but this is usually by people who are locked into Microsoft dev tools and their cloud platform. The old enemy can hire a friendly, smiling CEO, and become a platinum member of The Linux Foundation, but their shareholders still seek to dominate the market and so can never be trusted.
I have imported my repos to GitLab and plan to delete my GitHub account soon.
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To be honest this sounds a bit like an overreaction to me. I’m certainly not locked into any Microsoft technology (I use LinkedIn because it’s convenient, but I don’t rely on it and I’m free to close it at any time), and I’m not threatened by this acquisition, nor by Microsoft.
GitHub is darn convenient and there is a huge number of open source developers on it, which means more collaboration, which in turn means a better open source ecosystem. If little old Microsoft can get rid of that ideal, then we have bigger problems. If they manage to break GitHub (which is possible, of course) then users will flock elsewhere, and both projects and users will follow.
The beauty of git is decentralization. GitHub is just another convenient location to keep a remote. I don’t see it being any less convenient in the foreseeable future.
That said, I’d probably be really freaked out if Facebook had been the one acquiring this, then I would close my account, but that’s a different story
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I’ve certainly never heard them called “little old Microsoft”, but if that’s how you feel, then by all means stay. Others will choose to go elsewhere. GitHub invented neither Git nor decentralization.
@telemaque - that’s a fair point, I guess I felt like calling them that because I feel the free software movement is much bigger than a company like Microsoft. For the larger portion of my career they seem to have existed, in my eyes, in a parallel plane to Linux and free software in general. I’ve never had to fight them, and it has always been easy to avoid their products.
Other companies, like Google and Facebook, for example, I feel like they get pushed down our throats whether we like it or not. When I got rid of my Facebook account years ago, I got a backlash of people contacting me concerned about me being “missing”. And I still cannot find suitable replacements for a handful of Google products. These two companies seem to be actively trying to make things worse.
But Microsoft? I just reformatted my disk, installed Linux, and no one even noticed. It just hasn’t been part of my life for so long that it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, lately (I guess with their current CEO), they have done plenty to cater to developers in general, and it seems pretty clear that when it comes to open source, it’s either embrace or die.
My apologies if I came off too rude. Maybe I’m just tired of everyone at work and elsewhere coming to me (y’know, the Linux guy) for the last two days asking me what I’m going to do with my life now that “evil M$” is taking over all of my code… meh.
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I see what you mean, there are certainly other, more visible threats to Open Source and even open society. My problem with MS is that 1. I began my career in the mid 90’s and saw how bad tech beat good tech using an army of lawyers and advertising execs, and 2. I am deeply distrustful of their “embrace” of Open Source. They cannot keep us from using open source, but they CAN convince every business and government that their software and tools are the only safe and secure way to do business.
I’ve never been as adamant about Free Software as Richard Stallman, but maybe I’m on my way
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Vkareh, you mention you are not locked into any Microsoft technology. For many years, I try not to be locked into Microsoft technology and certainly not pay Microsoft for their (bad) product, but that is extremely hard:
- For years I try to buy a reasonably priced Laptop without Windows installed in the Netherlands. Not many companies deliver pre installed Linux Laptops (or without OS). A lot of them stopped because suppliers stopped delivering Windows-free notebooks (See in dutch: https://forum.linuxmintnl.nl/viewtopic.php?t=1057). I bought my last two notebooks in Germany and replaced the German keyboard by a US keyboard.
- I am also aware that every product I buy (or at least 99% of the products I buy) contains a percentage of the price that is going directly to Microsoft licenses, since there is virtually no company in the world that does not have Microsoft licenses installed.
B.t.w. For me it’s not about having free software (I donate a small monthly amount to the Ubuntu Mate project), but about not wanting to pay for something bad, that I do not use, to a company that I think does not deserve it.
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