Comment by wbillingsley
8 years ago
This is a furphy. GitHub is already monetized -- it is highly profitable, selling fee-paying plans to corporations. MS's major customer is corporations. Of course they're not going to do a SourceForge because this is a traditional acquisition where the purchaser has recognised that GitHub's current monetization ties in well with their existing business model, and they gain value in the acquisition from it building their reputation with business as the go-to place for corporate cloud. They have no interest in damaging the corporate value they gain by fiddling with the consumer and open source side.
Sources for highly profitable ? According to the linked article they were not and lost >60M in 2016. They could probably still optimise to make a profit, but seems like they were struggling a bit with making money.
Hmm, looks like that's changed. Back in 2012, they were reported as "profitable nearly the entire way" in their history. https://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-...
and more recently there've been articles on their revenues hitting 100m. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run...
but it sounds like their costs have outgrown their earnings.
I stand corrected.
I think I should have said sourceforge/skype - I don't think MS is going to detonate GitHub the same way sourceforge went.
But I also don't have a lot of confidence in them doing well by the community either... it could be as "harmless" as a move to "Microsoft logins" that kills it off.
One click deploy to Azure and AD integration is very compelling for businesses as well.