Wow, very interesting. Microsoft acquiring GitHub. To this end, I am not surprised about this. I have already been reading about how prolific a GitHub organization Microsoft is earlier, so it seems natural they would buy the product that they use the most so that they have full control over it.
But, those are my words and opinions based off of intuition. What does Microsoft have to say about this? Well, they go toward their own ends to say that “they were always a developer-focused company.” Well, that is only superficially true if you ignore all but the earliest of their history. But, suffice it to say, it’s an interesting proposition. If you look at Microsoft as a company today, they are quite segmented into non-cooperating markets and divisions. For example, here is my assertion:
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Consumer culture: tablets, smartphones, online web accounts
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Gaming: Xbox, Minecraft
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Office software: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office
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Business web: LinkedIn, Lynda.com
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Vestigial business: Visual Basic, .NET, Microsoft Windows, HyperV
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Trending software development tools: cloud (Azure), AI
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Open source: Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub
Also, we still do remember that one period in Microsoft’s history where they were really anti-open-source. Well, that would be an understatement. Even from the beginning, they weren’t as supportive of it as other participants in the computing profession.
20180604/https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/
20180604/https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/