GitHub?
It’s an extremely popular online platform where software developers keep, vet and disseminate their codes. Importantly, GitHub is an open source platform, where users access the site and use its content for free, mostly. Now, Microsoft, a company which has not necessarily been a champion of open source products or platforms, is buying 2008-founded GitHub for $7.5 billion (in stocks) and GitHub expects to close the deal by the year-end.
But what does it exactly do?
Simply put, GitHub offers a platform for software developers and programmers to collaborate on projects. About 2.8 crore developers are part of GitHub, which houses billions of lines of open source code. Here, the developers from Google to NASA share bug reports and solutions to bugs and engage in executing many projects that in general are helpful for the greater common good. GitHub offers services for free to the people and organisations that, in return, provide their code for free to the ‘commons’. A paid service exits for those who want to do ‘closed source’ projects (proprietary).
But why Microsoft is buying it?
First off, experts think, this is a course correction for the IT behemoth which has for long been openly hostile towards open source tech. If you recall, the company’s former CEO Steve Ballmer once termed open source tech a cancer. In 2001, an executive with Microsoft’s Windows famously called open source “an intellectual-property destroyer,” and the prevailing mood at the company then was such technology went against the “American Way” of doing business. But of late, under India-born chief Satya Nadella, Microsoft has been aggressively embracing open tech and is seen trying to focus more on tools for developers.
Isn’t that good?
That’s debatable. While a few sections of the coder community agree with GitHub CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath who says Microsoft’s “vision for the future closely matches our own” and both parties believe GitHub needs to remain an open platform for all developers, many in the programming industry are sounding cynical about the acquisition, fearing that this will set off a trend where open platforms and software would be swallowed up by large sharks having a change of mind.
Are they implying this is a moral victory for Microsoft?
Yes, and more. Even though Microsoft says post-acquisition, GitHub will continue to operate independently and will remain an open platform, not many are convinced. Developers say Microsoft, which already has a large and potent presence in the community’s paid compartments — it has some 1,900 (code) repositories and nearly 4,000 coders on the platform — might add tracking or advertisements to all of GitHub’s sites after the buy-out. Popular coder Jacques Mattheij, who said he would delete his GitHub account after the Microsoft deal, wrote: “Yes, the new boss is a nicer guy but it’s the same corporate entity”. Many open source developers echo this and believe GitHub is “too big to fail”.
Ah, now this is interesting!
In fact some time ago, reports suggested Amazon was interested in buying GitHub, which recently approached Google for a deal. Microsoft reportedly paid 25 times the current revenues of GitHub ($300 million). Now many in the coding community have voiced concern that Microsoft, with all its commercial interests, cannot be allowed to be the custodian of this large repository of code, which was built on a purely non-commercial ideology. The projects on GitHub are stunningly diverse: from bitocoin to Upton, which is a “web-scraping framework”. Now, whether these projects (codes) are going to remain in GitHub or whether there will be a migration to a new platform (a spin-off, may be) is a billion dollar question.
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