From Startup To World-Leading … (Microsoft) GitHub

One of my best finds was installing Micrsosoft Visual Studio for Mac OSX. It has changed my whole environment for software development. And one of my best finds for my research and teaching is … GitHub. I have since moved all my teaching material towards it, and porting all my research code there too. A new world is being built in GitHub.

You get the feeling that we are moving into a world where technology is dominated by cash-rich companies. Facebook now own Whats App and Instagram, Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and now Microsoft has acquiring GitHub.

From a fairly closed source infrastructure, Microsoft is now one of the major companies involved with open source software. This includes PowerShell, Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Edge. It has also acquired Xamarin in order to create code which runs across different mobile platforms.

Github

If you are a major player in the market, such as with Microsoft, Google and Facebook, it just seems obvious that you can throw money at an emerging market, and you’ll succeed. Few startups, thus, ever have a chance of muscling in, as they lack the market reach and sustained investment.

But sometimes a start-up comes along and beats off the major players in the market, and it has happened in open source code repositories…