Microsoft Buying GitHub

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When I logged into my GitHub account this morning, I saw the banner across the top that said Microsoft was buying GitHub. I am not really sure how I feel about that. My first response was kind of negative, but I think that was really based more on thinking from 15 years ago when Microsoft was a very different company. There was a time when Microsoft would buy a company like this, and strip it apart for use in its own products and the open source world would lose something cool. The Microsoft of today seems to have embraced open source and has really been adding to the community, so I think this could be a really good thing in the long run. 

I had mentioned in one of my previous posts, how I have been using TFS and GitHub both, and there are things I like about both systems. I like how Microsoft has really embraced Git as it is the recommended source control for TFS, and I think the way they have implemented wikis is much better than GitHubs implementation. I also like the way Microsoft has implemented project management tools into the project area, but I like the way GitHub has issue tracking that seems to work better for collaborating on bugs and new features. I was actually thinking that it would be nice to merge the positives from each system into one. I am not sure if that is what will happen, but I think it wouldn't be a bad outcome. I do hope they keep both GitHub and TFS separate products. There are a lot of people who would be unhappy to be pushed into TFS even if it has all the features of GitHub. 

I am sure there will be a lot of companies that will not be happy about this news. I can see how saving all of your source code in a repository that is controlled by Microsoft could be a little scary especially if you consider Microsoft your competition. If you have super secret intellectual property, you will save your code in a locally hosted repository. GitHubs real strength is for open source repositories where you are sharing your tech with the world. If you are already sharing, then Microsoft can already see it, so who owns and controls the server, really doesn't matter. 

Every since Microsoft open sourced their MVC platform, I have been really happy with the direction the company has been going. There was time it felt like Microsoft really didn't like their developer community, but now they really are doing exciting things, and really treat their developers well. With platforms like .Net Core and tools like Visual Studio Code all being open source, I think adding GitHub will be a very good thing for everyone who uses it. 

What do you think? Do you think Microsoft will ruin Github, make it better, or keep it the same? Let me know in the comments.

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