Comment by ChicagoDave

Reading through replies to this and especially about "the death of free software" makes me ask, "Was software ever free?"

From my perspective, any software that has made it to production use ended up supported by some large for-profit corporation.

Java<-Oracle Linux<-multiple distro's with paid-for enterprise support

And IBM and other companies hiring developers to work on "free software".

Without the support of corporations, most software just dies.

So Github is losing money and can't figure out a model to become profitable. They could start charging for all repositories. They could go public, but then they're beholden to some small set of investment groups.

Microsoft, under Nadella, has been about as pro-open source as you can get.

The only change I expect from Microsoft re: Github is that they will very likely bake DevOps into their tools (Code/Visual Studio) and their cloud (Azure) so that developers can be more productive.

The illusion of free software has always been just that. An illusion.