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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

I'll take the "con" side. A lot of the core Rubyists left for Shopify after the sale, and I'm sure Nat had a contract to stay on for X amount of time, where Microsoft would make no major changes. Now that this is expiring, I fully expect Microsoft to start making changes with the site that will appeal to large corporations, at the expense of what I would prefer, as an individual user. I guess time will tell.

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Nat comes from the Microsoft side, not the GitHub side.

You are technically right, but Nat comes from Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin. He definitely is not a lifelong Microsoft employee.

I don't think that matters in the context of what's being discussed here.

If there were any retention contracts that came with GitHub acquisition, that probably didn't apply to him.

You misunderstand why I brought up him being from Xamarin.

The initial conversation was about how Nat was likely leaving because his contract ran out. The counterpoint was that he was from the Microsoft side and therefore he didn't have a retention contract. I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.

That being said, these contracts probably had little to no effect on his decision though, as I'm sure he would have made more money than he could spend in a lifetime regardless of whether he had stayed or not.

> I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.

Microsoft bought Xamarin in February 2016. I'm sure five-year retention contracts are possible, but that seems extraordinarily long; I've rarely seen longer than two years.

To me, Nat and Miguel come from Xamarin Desktop, which made Linux on the desktop an actual pleasure in the late 90's/early 2000's. They're a couple of my heroes.

Aside that Nat came from Microsoft, they made already tons of changes to GitHub. Both for the Enterprise and for the public open source.

I do not see any indication about that being bound to a contract. They are also promoting the chief product officer which indicates that he did so far a good job. Which means, we can expect that they continue like they have done in the last year.

I don't see it. MS has Azure DevOps for their Ms-specific stack and Enterprise. GH is the closed source app where people come to do open source, and way too valuable as-is.

Bingo. This is precisely my point. I think they're going to phase out DevOps and replace it with GitHub in their lineup.

In the grand scheme of things it does make sense to focus on one or the other. However, they better execute this with precision because they risk interrupting big business in both products

> Microsoft to start making changes with the site that will appeal to large corporations, at the expense of what I would prefer, as an individual user

So exactly what GitHub tried to do before the acquisition?

What changes are you expecting?

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