Microsoft acquiring GitHub is a good thing. Here’s why.

GitHub is no longer independent. Microsoft today acquired GitHub after a 10-year run as an independent company, for a solid $7.5 billion dollars. GitHub now has a long term home, and doesn’t need to go public.

Developer reactions across my own network and the wider internet have been broad, with some reacting positively but the vocal negative group is decrying GitHub going to that company.

I actually believe Microsoft acquiring GitHub is the best result for everyone including GitHub itself, and wanted to take a look at how we ended up here.

The struggle

For lack of a better analogy, GitHub has been wandering in the desert for some time. It’s a company that’s immensely well capitalized, with somewhere in the range of $350M in venture capital money poured into it — but ultimately ended up stagnating as it grappled with the realities of business.

That wound up in the company shipping nothing meaningful for a number of years, which lead to many popular contributors writing an open letter to the company in 2016 about how poorly it had managed its own platform:

“However, many of us are frustrated. Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. We’ve gone through the only…