Photo source: Blue bengal kitten: taste of freedom - 0 @ Flickr
Github is the biggest Open Source repository (and the sexiest one as of yesterday). Today I saw many people in my social networks that seemed surprisingly shocked by this commercial move, which is actually a very obvious one after a cold business analysis. It looks like we suddenly find ourselves into a situation where the surprise is not for the actual sell of Github, but for the reactions from the Open Source sphere.
$7 billion USD for a git company acquisition
Remember Linus Torvalds? this dude created Linux and companies freely use their stuff to make billions, he creates "git" and the same happens. Throw away all your investing signals, just follow this guy and put your best bid on startups converting Linus' creations on successful products, you'll easy make 5 figures for just 1% stake.
Why?
"Why not?" is my answer. Github was in financial struggle and Microsoft's CEO is known for systematically buying 'good karma' for his company. OK, OK, we all know what happened to MySQL after its acquisition. Corporations use their capital to buy assets or to eliminate competition.
What will happen to Github?
Two things and both are great:
1.- To stay as the new flickr (alive enough)
2.- Bankruptcy
I don't know how many people is planning to move their private repositories into "safer" lands. If they are too much, then Github business will be lost forever due to unrecoverable cashflow troubles. Time will tell...
Why Gitlab is your new friend
Simple, Gitlab already has official support to automate your repositories' migration out from Github:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
AND gitlab is Free/Libre Open Source under the MIT license, along with a company of the same name that offers cloud services for enterprise grade git support. Trust me, they made it right!
Go #Gitlab!
P.S: Github and Microsoft are registered trademarks of a proprietary software corporation, stay away! ;)