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Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

What isn't commonly known is that GitHub was never profitable and was getting closer and closer to insolvency every day.

Microsoft rescued them.

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Any idea how they could possibly make GitHub profitable? It seems more likely that they want to attach the Microsoft name to GitHub to build up positive sentiment among the open source community. Something like keeping GitHub alive without wrecking it could cause some people to hate Microsoft a little bit less.

They will operate them as a loss leader to Azure.

This. They own where the code is lands, and will try to build the best, most streamlined CI system straight to profitable Azure deployments. Probably cheapest too, if they update agreements to get a slice of the deployment pie if people do want to deploy to AWS or GCE.

'Extinguish' might be right, but Amazon is the target here and holding off Google in second place. Other cloud providers will have to race to the bottom if they are not already there.

Last I checked, AWS is in first place by a wide margin, followed by Azure and then IBM in third. Google is trailing all of them at the moment.

How profitable is Visual Studio? Visual Studio Code?

Microsoft wants people to develop for Windows, because with no apps you have Windows Phone. If what you want to use runs on Windows, Windows is what you purchase (or in a few years probably subscribe to along with Office 365 and OneDrive). A lot of that subscription model already exists on the Enterprise side of Windows, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see it expand - "Windows as a Service" has been a topic of discussion for years now.

- It gives then 'streetcred' in the OSS communities using GitHub. This goodwill is valuable.

- It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office. All major players host code there, likely a lot of them in private repos too. Microsoft has a large trackrecord of 'me too' products (i.e. the ones released after the original from another company is successful) and corporate espionage isn't something that's just happening in the movies. This too could make things very profitable

- Developer relations across private repos could increase the value of linkedin profiles which in turn could make that more valuable.

But that's about what I could come up with. I seriously don't understand why one would spent $2B on github if it hosts your OSS stuff. Also, to make sure VSTS become more successful with an integration doesn't make sense to me: GH isn't the most profitable service out there and was losing money. Hell it might even go belly up sooner or later and VSTS would look to be a better alternative.

> It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.

That sounds incredibly unlikely if not borderline ridiculous.

>It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.

Allows logically, not legally though I'd expect.

I imagine, in my paranoia, the first thing MS will do is change the T&Cs.

Source? I thought the story was that Github was profitable from day 1 in 2008?

How did they become unprofitable? Their expenses are servers and people. It seems that there are an enormous number of companies paying for private repos and that should more than cover their costs.

They were profitable in 2008, but by 2016 they were running at a loss.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is...

I'm guessing it was from corporate mismanagement, overbalooned salaries for initial employees, and probably hiring too quickly to meet demand.

And probably to some extent people treating it more and more as a free hosting platform for all types of content.

I put all my cooking recipes and links in a free repo yesterday, published with pages. History of changes, fast, reliable, mobile-friendly. Owns. PR me a recipe man!

I’m willing to believe this, but what’s it based on? It seems like they have so many customers. What’s the free/public-to-paid/private traffic that would have made them sustainable?

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