Comment by booleandilemma
8 years ago
I completely agree with your comment. As much as I love Microsoft, this is a weird development.
It’s like if Google bought Mozilla and Firefox became just another Google browser.
8 years ago
I completely agree with your comment. As much as I love Microsoft, this is a weird development.
It’s like if Google bought Mozilla and Firefox became just another Google browser.
What isn't commonly known is that GitHub was never profitable and was getting closer and closer to insolvency every day.
Microsoft rescued them.
Any idea how they could possibly make GitHub profitable? It seems more likely that they want to attach the Microsoft name to GitHub to build up positive sentiment among the open source community. Something like keeping GitHub alive without wrecking it could cause some people to hate Microsoft a little bit less.
- It gives then 'streetcred' in the OSS communities using GitHub. This goodwill is valuable.
- It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office. All major players host code there, likely a lot of them in private repos too. Microsoft has a large trackrecord of 'me too' products (i.e. the ones released after the original from another company is successful) and corporate espionage isn't something that's just happening in the movies. This too could make things very profitable
- Developer relations across private repos could increase the value of linkedin profiles which in turn could make that more valuable.
But that's about what I could come up with. I seriously don't understand why one would spent $2B on github if it hosts your OSS stuff. Also, to make sure VSTS become more successful with an integration doesn't make sense to me: GH isn't the most profitable service out there and was losing money. Hell it might even go belly up sooner or later and VSTS would look to be a better alternative.
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How profitable is Visual Studio? Visual Studio Code?
Microsoft wants people to develop for Windows, because with no apps you have Windows Phone. If what you want to use runs on Windows, Windows is what you purchase (or in a few years probably subscribe to along with Office 365 and OneDrive). A lot of that subscription model already exists on the Enterprise side of Windows, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see it expand - "Windows as a Service" has been a topic of discussion for years now.
They will operate them as a loss leader to Azure.
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Source? I thought the story was that Github was profitable from day 1 in 2008?
How did they become unprofitable? Their expenses are servers and people. It seems that there are an enormous number of companies paying for private repos and that should more than cover their costs.
They were profitable in 2008, but by 2016 they were running at a loss.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is...
I'm guessing it was from corporate mismanagement, overbalooned salaries for initial employees, and probably hiring too quickly to meet demand.
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I’m willing to believe this, but what’s it based on? It seems like they have so many customers. What’s the free/public-to-paid/private traffic that would have made them sustainable?
Is it? I imagine VSS and their cloud source control offering (don’t remember the name) probably aren’t doing all that well in the face of GitHub.
They want to be a player in that game, so they’ll transition off they are old product which isn’t that popular onto a new one they purchased that has all the mind share.
As long as they don’t screw it up, and recent Microsoft seems to me like a company that won’t, it will benefit them. And perhaps it will benefit the user some to do have a company with deep pockets behind it.
Microsoft adopt git as their main source control, even in internal projects.
Makes sense they try to control the future of the tool they use in so meny projects.
Github don't control git --
> Torvalds turned over maintenance on 26 July 2005 to Junio Hamano, a major contributor to the project.[25] Hamano was responsible for the 1.0 release on 21 December 2005, and remains the project's maintainer.[26]
I'm guessing Torvalds still has a lot of control if push came to shove, so we can assume git is executively controlled by Torvalds and Hamano.
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Git != GitHub, fyi.
I want Mercurial and Subversion in GitHub.
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AFAIK, I don't think anyone seriously used VSS inside Microsoft, but heard that long time ago they forked perforce in customized way... A bit like google.
Yes, I used that internal Source Depot (based on Perforce I think, or at least something old and convoluted) when I worked on Windows Phone 7 back in 2010, it was not fun. There were a few teams within Microsoft at the time using the visual studio team system source control but I don’t believe it was common, as a lot of the error reporting (watson) had plug-ins for the proprietary Source Depot.
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