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Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

Satya Nadela's done differently to his predecessors, maybe this will go well.

I understand the concern of a few companies dominating everything that we use, but time will tell.

Microsoft has been setting a very (almost unthinkably) different course since Ballmer departed. Bash on Windows, Visual Studio Code, as well as other seemingly genuine commitments to open source. It's wonderful that competitors like GitLab exist, and today is probably a great day for them, but I'm willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on this one - we won't be moving.

Meanwhile the rent-seeking on FAT patents continues

Intel and IBM also have their own share of not so FOSS friendly actions, yet devs keep embracing them.

I wonder what people would have thought if Github had just disappeared instead of selling to Microsoft? I mean I understand some concern, but this can really only be a good thing for Github in the long run. It isn't like Microsoft was producing a competitor and just bought them to kill them. Honestly, I like this better than Amazon or Google buying them.

Issues and old repots would be lost but people would move on to another service.

This is an important point. Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub means that Amazon and Google lost out on a major component of the developer ecosystem.

I doubt we'll be able to predict how they'll respond. Their own code hosting services are... anemic, in Amazon's case, and dead, in Google's case.

Yeah, it'll be interesting.

In hindsight, it's amazing the other hyperscale cloud providers didn't buy it.

That definitely wasn't the only alternative.

The reason this happened is to get a payday for the investors. I'm happy they invested, but when you look at GitHub it is a utility, not a commercial enterprise and should be treated like public transport rather than like an oil company.

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