GitHub to be taken over by Microsoft

Last Tuesday’s Guardian reports in the financial section that Microsoft is buying GitHub for $7.5bn. Amazingly, nearly half the editorial (Journal section) is taken up with this. I shouldn’t think most readers have heard of GitHub and probably think that it is a meeting place for gits. :-)

Does it matter? It sounds bad news to me. Microsoft claim that they will keep it going with the same mission: GitHub would continue to operate independently and would remain an open platform, Microsoft said. Well, we have heard talk like that before when a company is about to swallow another, e.g., Softbank with ARM (see thread “And so it continues” in this subforum).

I dont mind Microsoft so I’m not really that worried, and I prefer subversion over git, but I do understand why people may be worried.

Before you know it, you’ll need an MSDN subscription to use github’s paid services. xD

It’s bad.
GitHub is a giant code repository. If somebody links you to code, chances are it’ll be there.
Now name me something Microsoft has bought into that they didn’t subvert into their own products (FoxPro, many others), eventually shut down (Wunderlist), muck up (Skype, Rare), or make a huge mess of (Nokia)…

I would consider the last line of James’ post to be prescient.

There were okay when they bought hotmail. WebTV was duffed up spectacularly. I’m very annoyed about them pulling the plug on Windows Phone/Nokia so know I’ve had to jump to sailfish. Never had any problems with skype.

Did they mess up LinkedIn? I don’t use it, but I don’t think they did.

Groove is okay, albeit unpopular.

Suffice to say, MS acquire a lot of stuff. some works out, some is messed up. Lets just wait and see.