[Ubuntu-US-CA] Confirmed! Microsoft Has Bought GitHub for $7.5 Billion | It's FOSS

[Nathan Haines]

On 06/07/2018 04:57 AM, Charlie wrote:
> Confirmed! Microsoft Has Bought GitHub for $7.5 Billion | It's FOSS
> I'm against this deal. I don't like a corporate giant jumping into our 
> open source community and exerting its influence with money. We of the 
> free and open source software community need to be alarmed by this and 
> if any of you have code on github, I'd suggest you put it somewhere 
> else. Linux is about being open source and FREE and I don't want 
> anything to do with Microsoft. Microsoft, as you all know, is all about 
> the money and their proprietary software that's weak and virus/malware 
> prone. Their closed environment philosophy is against what we stand for. 
> Mark my word, Microsoft WILL try to cash in on our hard work and make it 
> all about profit and take all the code internal and eschew open source 
> philosophies. If they don't, I'll eat my words.

It's hard to say just what the end result will be.  Remember, Mark 
Shuttleworth jumped into the Free and Open Source community 14 years 
back, exerting his influence with money.

And before that, IBM jumped in, exerting their influence with money. 
They're not the only ones.  And Microsoft has been one of the top 5 
contributors to the Linux kernel in the past few years as well.

Microsoft is bound by the same copyright laws as all of us, and cannot 
just take random work and take the code internally unless the authors 
expressly allowed it via software license.  It's worth noting that the 
first few "open source" experiments by Microsoft were released with a 
custom license, and for the past few years they've used standard 
licenses--even the GPLv2 for Linux kernel drivers.

Skepticism is always good, but it's also important to keep an open mind.

With Github, we see two things:

1. Github has always been proprietary and is not Free or Open Source 
Software and never has been.  It didn't have adequate funding and was 
looking for a buyer for some time.

2. Microsoft is in a position to let Github do anything it wants because 
the money involved is negligible.  This is no guarantee but is more 
positive than a lot of acquisitions.

Of course, Gitlab has been growing in popularity, but as is usual, the 
competition should spur both services to make constant improvements.  So 
that's helping everyone, no matter which service they use.

(Meanwhile, I'm still happiest with bzr.)

-- 
Nathan Haines
Ubuntu - https://www.ubuntu.com/