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Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, however, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing ms would put the wider software community’s needs before their shareholder profits.

The situation with GitHub has radically changed, it is no longer a neutral and independent project which exists solely to provide a service to entire developer community. It is now a tool to leverage more profits for one software company — a company who has proven they care much more about market dominance than the wider tech ecosystem.

I’m not trying to imply some forgone conclusion that GitHub is doomed or that ms will ruin it, but the entire purpose of the project is now completely different than when it was an independent company and we would be wise to keep this in mind.

I particularly think we should be watching and cautious to see what types of changes they try to leverage into git itself.

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Perhaps I am a bit cynical, but why do you say Github "exist[ed] solely to provide a service to entire developer community"? They made money too.

The economics were aligned with the customers. The whole business model was based on paying for private services using the same great tooling that was available for open source projects. People developed familiarity with open source and naturally clamored for the same tooling within companies. It was a loss leader of sorts.

Now the economic incentives are different. This would be true if Google acquired Github or if Amazon or Facebook or Twitter or any other company acquired it. Since it's not a standalone company, the parent company optimizing for greatest comprehensive profits will make decisions that are not always optimal if GitHub were standalone.

I'm pretty sure that the economics were aligned with getting bought out by someone. Upselling people who used the free product was not making them profitable and they weren't on the path to profitable.

The GitHub story is complex. There was a time years ago when they were profitable: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... They and Sidekiq were the poster children of bootstrapped profitable businesses around open source. Something very clearly changed (most likely raising a boatload from VC firms and the ensuing perils) that flipped the situation.

GitHub had thier first round of VC funding in 2012.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github

GitHub was relatively independent in that hosting git repositories was the only product that it sold and it didn't clearly favor any sort of tech stack. Now, MS says that they will not remove any of the existing functionality, but their press release did hint that they would add features to make it easier to launch apps onto MS platforms like Azure.

> They made money too.

Sure, but it isn’t profit motive that I think we should be concerned about in this case. Its the entire space in which GitHub exists is now radically different. Until the buyout, they were an independent company who hosted software repos. Now they are owned by a company who has many many many different interests and ms has a tendency to use most of their various software projects to feed into their own proprietary ecosystem.

There are many ways this might be problematic, all of which are obviously just speculation. I’m just trying to say, an enormous part of the software ecosystem is currently in a really precarious spot and we might be wise to consider and work on some alternatives just to give ourselves some wiggle room should ms decide to behave in ways we’ve seen them behave so many times in the past.

"independent" is a bit strong. They've accepted money from Microsoft for some time.

I might be mistaken, so please, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I feel like you may be missing my overall point.

yeah i probably am. i haven't gone back to read it, yet, and it is like me to question minutia before i question the larger narrative.

Fortunately, acquisition of GitHub and the bread and butter income of todays's Microsoft (Office365) do not conflict. In fact, they probably can be brought together, usefully and economically, for Enterprise customers and Microsoft itself.

It could work well. We'll see how it goes. I am optimistic.

Assuming for the sake of argument that they were acting wholly from benevolence anyway, that dynamic would have changed regardless of whether it was Microsoft or Google acquiring them.

The reason I point out the difference in vibe between the two companies is that while sure, there are definitely valid reasons to be skeptical here, I am leaning towards more optimism because it was Microsoft who made the acquisition and not Google.

Yeah I’m not sure any of the big tech empires purchasing GitHub would be necessarily better than the others. It would have been nice to see them bought by someone who we could consider neutral and someone who didn’t have such a long history of using products to leverage market dominance in other areas. But that’s not what happened :/

Im hopeful that ms stays out of it and let’s it remain it’s own entity but practically speaking I just really don’t see that happening.

Microsoft just sponsored four of the live podcast at Apple's WWDC. Microsoft realizes that it has to appeal to developers wherever they are.

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