It looks like the Octocat is out of the bag. Microsoft is acquiring Github for what one can only imagine is a few Brinks trucks of cash. There’s been quite a lot of response in the Linux and free software community already on this. One of Github’s primary rivals Gitlab has already seen such an influx of users and repositories from Github that their importer is at the time of writing down.
It’s certainly understandable given Microsoft’s past history of calling Linux and open-source a “cancer” that their purchasing the dominate platform for open-source development that there would be some cause for concern. Gitlab is also at its core an open-source product where Github is and always has been a proprietary one; indeed, even without Microsoft it makes a lot of sense the the open-source community might migrate to Gitlab. The question to me becomes is the community correct to be concerned? To answer that question, we need to figure out what Microsoft could be doing with Github.
Microsoft Loves Open-Source: Many open-source enthusiasts are surprised to learn that Microsoft is leading contributor to a number of open-source projects including the Linux kernel itself. In fact, they have been aggressively releasing a number of their core technologies as open-source such as .Net, .Net Core, Powershell Core and Visual Studio Code. It would seem that Microsoft agrees with the community that open-source is the way to go for developer tools and platforms. What better way to make an even bigger splash in the community than to buy Github?
Azure: Whether Microsoft really loves open-source in the deepest darkest bowels of its heart, it absolutely head over heals loves Azure. Microsoft has been doing a lot to push developers to adopt their AWS competitor and it is pretty clear that Azure is the future of their developer facing business. Imagine how many developers, especially inexperienced ones who have a hard time figuring out how to deploy software to the cloud, would take advantage of a simple one or two click “deploy to azure” button. This button is already a reality in places and if Microsoft owns Github they could simply make it available on most if not all repos. Implementing something like this globally on the Github platform even if it has another step or two beyond just a simple button click would be a powerful advantage in their competition with Amazon’s AWS for cloud hosting superiority. All roads lead to Azure.
CI / CD Revenues: The unsung hero of Microsoft’s development tools offerings is Visual Studio Team Services. It has on the whole been fairly successful especially since Microsoft’s purchase of Hockey made it a go to solution for many mobile developers. Still, it hasn’t really gained traction with the wider development community especially those working on open web / server platforms. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, but it’s pretty clear that a primary one is that a good deal of developers had already setup their continuous integration and testing solutions using tools integrated with Github and felt no real reason to find an alternative solution. By picking up Github, Microsoft now has an easy route to more effectively compete with the likes of Codeship and Travis CI. This becomes a lot more viable once you remember that the primary barrier to getting developers started with CI / CD is the difficulty in setting it up correctly. If Microsoft, can get this down to a few click and a credit card number process, then that’s going to be the go to solution for a lot of new developers.
What do you think? Is Microsoft James Bond or Jesus Christ or a little bit of both in their purchase of Github. Is it going to affect how your use of Github? Want to learn about some cool C# aerospace stuff I’ve been up to, checkout my white-paper.
