We are moving the Roslyn code to GitHub

One of the most important aspects of Microsoft's success is network effect. People use Windows and Office because other people use Windows and Office.

But network effect also works on the development/platform side. Devs write apps in the technologies they know and are comfortable with, and those tend to be the technologies they've used for personal or work projects. Today, far fewer of the top tier (even the top 50% really) of developers are using Microsoft technologies, or are even familiar with them. The "cool kids" code in Ruby or Python or Scala or Golang, or mobile specific languages. If they want to get things done to pay the bills they might fall back on java or PHP. But the idea of using C#, .NET, or coding Windows Apps? Far fewer devs under 30 are doing that than they were 10 or 20 years ago.

With fewer devs coding on your platform that means there will be fewer apps, especially the most desired ones, and eventually that will impact the user base as well and weaken the entire business. The era where nobody cares whether a computer runs windows is on the horizon today, even though it may be many years away. If you look at the big apps and systems from the last 5 years you see that a lot of them are either web based or mobile (specifically android/iOS as well).

Microsoft used to understand this and it was a major reason why they invested in Visual Studio for all those years when it was unprofitable. But they've had a period of unrivaled market dominance which has only recently been challenged, so they lost their way for a while.

Catering to devs is how you maintain market relevancy with your platform, which is something Microsoft desperately needs.

Additionally, improving the relationship with the dev community and attracting more devs to your platform makes hiring easier (especially hiring talented folks). It's almost impossible to objectively quantify the benefit of that but it's an enormous factor. Microsoft has been bleeding talent for years and has been starved of a lot of talent for a long time because they were perceived as being old and boring and requiring a completely different set of proficiencies to work there. If Microsoft wanted to they could turn that around and start paving a road back to relevancy in the dev community again.

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Microsoft's message has been it's a one-stop-shop for your IT needs, as opposed to the general open-source ecosystem where everything has a different vendor (if at all). This, and the difficulty of moving to other platforms/vendors/tools was the core of its vendor lock-in power. In the 80's and most of the 90's, I went full Microsoft, from runtime to database to developer tools, because everything worked so well together.

Microsoft has been changing, of course, but if not even Microsoft uses Microsoft products, why should companies use them?

With this, again, we see the tacit admission a product or service built on top of free software is somehow better than the technologies Microsoft sells.

Everyone is selling, for the right number of billions.

"We are excited about this new stage, because we are better positioned to ..."

Really? So they release the source to a few of their developer frameworks and tools, and they're now "all open"?

Don't get me wrong, as a long time C# developer I do appreciate the gesture and I'm especially happy that they're working their "not invented here" mentality, but with simply providing us with the source code that we already have anyway (via ilspy), all of this just seems over-inflated to me.

Let me compile Visual Studio, and I'll be their biggest cheerleader; or IIS, IE... and I'll promise to stop dressing as one.

On buying Github, though? That could be the final 'E' of their strategy.

How easy is it to pick up your bugs and leave?

People have seen experienced .net devs picking up in a wide assortment of communities. Some interpret this as mind flight, or it might just be that the .net ecosystem has made some wise choices that enable devs raised in the ecosystem to not feel their world has silo walls. It's less "no, this" and more "yes, and."

The reason you see more Github repos without documentation is because writing documentation is "boring" work, and mostly bigger organizations can afford the staff to write and maintain documentation.

And most codeplex repos were Microsoft's own, where they had an interest in keeping their stuff documented. On Github anyone can (and does!) open a repo.

So missing documentation has nothing to do with Github itself as much as the users and organizations it primarely attracts.

To me, it doesn't feel like a natural evolution at all, in fact it feels more like a sign that MS is embracing the open source community. So they can focus their energy on what's important, developing their software and maintaining good connection with the developer community.

This avalanche of pro-community news out of MS since Nadella took over is about MS rebranding itself, particularly with younger people who (incorrectly or otherwise) believe that MS technologies are "greying". They can no longer take their market dominance for granted. I think it's probably too late and doubt whether they can change the perception of MS as an overall closed ecosystem.

But they were using a different tool internally.

And I'm sure when things started going wrong SUN had plenty of money too. Money buys you time. It doesn't buy you survival.