Since a few days, there are a lot of rumors that Microsoft is in talks to acquire GitHub. These rumors heated up on Sunday, where the first reports appeared, that the deal is done and that the coding site was acquired by the software giant from Redmond.
The news started two things:
- Twitter goes wild with a lot of negative tweets
- Many projects immediately started to flee towards GitLab
Honestly I’m still wondering why there is so much hate involved and why so many try to escape from GitHub. Wake up and smell the Coffee! If Microsoft acquires GitHub, nothing will change short term! Don’t panic…
GitLab did the right thing and send a congratulations message towards GitHub. And if you see how many projects moved since yesterday, that might be the best that could happen to GitLab. At least from the marketing perspective.
We all know, that some of the Microsoft acquisitions didn’t go so well, remember the Nokia experiment? Others say: “Look what they did to Skype”, and they are partly right. From the end user perspective, the Skype acquisition was not so well. Microsoft, on the other hand, took the technology and transferred a lot of it into the new lineup. And Skype still works well, and I know many people that still use it on a daily base. And I can chat and talk to them via my Skype for Business account.
Other acquisitions went into another direction, what exactly has changed negative after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn? How about the acquisition of the Outlook mobile app? It was started as Acompli, that was acquired in December 2014 by Microsoft.
One of the newer acquisitions that went well, at least if you ask me, was Xamarin. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft February 2016 and is now perfectly integrated in the Visual Studio ecosystem.
And the list goes on, and on…
On the other side, GitHub had a lot of problems… They lost there CEO and lost a lot of money. Go public or sell yourself to a bigger player!
And for Microsoft the deal could make perfect sense:
- Microsoft is one of the biggest GitHub contributors.
- Microsoft could (and should) try to move a much as possible towards Azure (A perfect Showcase, in my opinion)
- Microsoft should continue to show that the “We love Linux” and “We love Open Source” is more than a marketing slogan. And it is, in my opinion!
- Integrate GitHub deep in the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code ecosystem.
And yes, there are a lot of alternatives. If you really want to move everything away from GitHub, do it. To be honest: I also use a few other services! And they are good for a lot of different use-cases.
I use GitLab when I need a private repository or project where i can invite as many external parties/users as needed, without a subscription. Perfect for small projects that involved customers.
I use BitBucket since a long time! It is part of my Atlassian subscription and why should I pay for another service? And Atlassian pushed BitBucket a lot within the last years.