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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Great PR move? Amazing build of trust?

Microsoft bought GitHub for over seven billion dollars. You don't buy something for that kind of cash unless it has that kind of value. Saying they 'should' do something as though there is a problem is silly. Engineers here on HN are so quick to say what someone "needs to do" something... but in response to what? What problem are you identifying? A vocal minority of engineers have complained about the acquisition, meanwhile GitHub has 28 million users. Most of those users don't care that this happened.

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1. They have great competition in Gitlab. Gitlab's main point is it's open source.

They simply will be more competitive.

2. They want to improve their "Open Source Friendly" image and they've been taking meaningful steps towards it.

3. Why not? What's the downside of doing so?

Apple has great competition in Android, however it would be silly to open source iOS. GitLab/Android are customizable and have a ton of features, while GitHub/iOS are more cohesive. Differentiation is how competition exists.

Even if you prefer Android/GitLab, you can't deny that most of the early innovation was copied from iOS/GitHub. In fact, most open source projects (Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc) take their lead from closed source competition... and for all those examples, that competition was Microsoft. That's not to say they can't eventually innovate, however much of the R&D, creation of a marketing, etc come from closed source.

The downside of Open Sourcing so is losing billions of dollars from companies who say "rather than paying $10k/mo, I'm going to just fork it for free".

Lastly, part of the value of GitHub is the network effects. If everyone's hosting it on their own, then there's no network effect.

GitLab :: Android

GitHub :: iOS

CodePlex :: Windows Phone

Makes complete sense...

Github value comes from userbase not the platform which could copied pretty easily.

Yeah, good point. You could probably do that in a weekend I bet.

Ironic perhaps? Cloning the Github interface would take thousands of man hours at least. Still completely negligible compared to $7.5 billion, but certainly not a weekend project.

Definitely being sarcastic and just poking fun. Classic developer, thinking they can replicate a startup in a weekend. :)

Github is SaaS and its value lies in its userbase and network effect. They do license out the github software product, but I imagine that that's a relatively small section of their money intake, and there are plenty of opensource alternatives (gitlab, gogs/gitea, others). They would probably more than recoup the costs with the goodwill they'd get.

> Microsoft bought GitHub for over seven billion dollars. You don't buy something for that kind of cash unless it has that kind of value.

That is NOT what happened. Microsoft is in the process of purchasing GitHub, which likely won't happen before the end of the year. The agreed price was $7.5B in stock not cash.

.. why is this distinction significant?

I made two distinctions.

.. why are either of these two distinctions significant?

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