Microsoft Buys GitHub: Good or Bad?

Microsoft just bought GitHub for $7.5 billion. GitHub launched back in April 10, 2008 and had around 26 million users back in March of 2017. There are a lot of people speculating whether this purchase is a good or a bad one, but there are a few things to consider.

The call deck was probably released to settle the nerves of those developers currently moving their repositories to other source control systems. Below are a few of the highlights.

Excerpts from the Microsoft and GitHub Call Deck

GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform

Many developers are afraid GitHub will change for the worse in the hands of Microsoft. Microsoft understands how critical GitHub is to the developer ecosystem and shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that.

Opportunity Ahead: Empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle

Microsoft wants to play more in the Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) space. GitLab is a competing company with their own CI/CD solution called GitLab Runner which is written in Go. The runner provides host and docker based builds just like Jenkins. Maybe Microsoft will provide additional integrations with Visual Studio Team Services so you can view your pipelines from GitHub?

…bridge the gap from code to cloud and code to edge

Microsoft will use GitHub to simplify the deployment process for applications to their Azure cloud to ultimately increase cloud adoption.

VS Code customers will be able to flow productively between the GitHub experience and the VS Code experience…

VS Code is a solid code editor so I’m sure this tighter integration will be welcomed.

You can view the full call deck here. You can also download a PDF of the presentation here.