It must be nice having tons of money to throw around. Microsoft just made its first major purchase of Satya Nadella era, GitHub. You know, that site where all the open-source nerds host all their projects. For free. Well it turns out that Microsoft is hosting a bunch of their stuff there too since they closed down CodePlex in 2017. I mean sure, it is a cool site, so I can kind of see the appeal, but they bought it for $7.5 Billion! That is like buying a nice little bungalow by the beach for a couple of tons of gold bullion. A slight overspend there.
Here is the thing, while there is a massive amount of data on GitHub, Git is an open-source version control system, and there is nothing, I mean nothing stopping people from making a new GitHub-esque site somewhere else. Not to mention GitHub was only bringing in about $140 Million a year in revenue, so it will add next to nothing to Microsoft’s already massive bottom line. This is nothing more than a vanity purchase. Microsoft wanted to prove that they are down with open-source, so they bought where it is all stored (for the time being).
I just don’t understand it. Hosting a bunch of projects on GitHub already sent the message Microsoft was trying to make, and if it is a code ownership thing, Microsoft could have made their own Git site in the blink of an eye, but so can all those aforementioned open-source nerds, so now it is just a count down until GitHub becomes an empty wasteland as the multitude of anti-Microsoft code jockeys leave to self made geekier pastures.
