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Comment by zachruss92 | Hacker News Reader

I am a GitLab user and have been for about 2 years now. With that being said, I think this acquisition makes a ton of sense strategically. Microsoft has really been trying to change their identity from being a stuffy close-source corporation to an open company that developers can rely on. And they have done pretty well at this. They open sourced .net, run MS SQL on Linux, and have released the WSL (which would have been unfathomable a decade ago). They also moved their VCS over to Git for Windows development.

GitHub, however, has a business issue of not making money. I think with the resources that Microsoft can provide GitHub can continue to build a great product and tap further into Microsoft's enterprise user base to make sales and release more features that customers want/need.

Congrats to everyone at GitHub for this momentous acquisition!

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That was also the Linkedin acquisition pitch. I wonder how that played out.

LinkedIn still exists and still seems to think they are a separate company.

Rumor has it that Satya is furious he still gets so many LinkedIn emails, but is keeping hands off.

> Rumor has it that Satya is furious he still gets so many LinkedIn emails, but is keeping hands off.

Well, he's exhibiting far more self control than I would be able to. Linked-in has the worst email practices of any legitimate company I can think of.

But their email spam can be contained. It took me a couple of years but now they have gone almost completely silent.

Maybe it's ageism?!?! ;-)

It may make a ton of sense strategically for Microsoft and Github but it doesn't make an ounce of sense strategically for me.

So long github.

It's a great move for both, and as a developer I like the opportunities this creates for tooling and productivity. Good to see those two dev focused organizations team up!

What opportunities does it create for tooling and productivity that wouldn't otherwise exist?

It is reported that GH makes about $200M a year.

Right, but my understanding is they are not profitable (they were, but have been trying to work back toward profitability).

Why did GitHub become unprofitable? Did they spend too much money hosting open-source projects, compared to what they made on private repos? Maybe the lesson is that free hosting never works.

If I learned anything working at large companies is that hardware is never close to being as expensive as headcount.

Github tried hard, but clearly didn't achieve enough diversity[1] and still had too many white women[2].

[1] https://blog.github.com/2016-05-26-diversity-and-inclusion-a... [2] http://i.imgur.com/7YaVYUx.jpg

No, that’s not why.

Magic 8 ball says: Sorry, try again.

I have been looking for a source to that claim (not the first I have seen) and haven't found one (either for or against profitability). Does anybody have one?

To your very good post you forgot to add that majority of large corps with lrge projects scramble at the moment to move and delete off of their source codebase from GitHub so that Microsoft programmers dont get access to their repos and secret souce.

I just don't understand this take. How many of those companies run Windows on any of their devices? Either you trust Microsoft or you don't. If you don't trust Microsoft, you have bigger problems than them owning GitHub.

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