Microsoft is Not Going to Steal Your GitHub Private Code

Could GitHub steal source code from private repositories before the acquisition? The question is the same for Microsoft.

As someone who has worked at Microsoft for almost four years, let me explain.

Misconceptions

1. GitHub was open-source: Then who did Microsoft sell it to? Not the community. It was a for-profit corporation founded by Chris Wanstrath and Tom Preston-Werner. Git is not Github. The former still survives as an open-source tool by the community.
2. Microsoft was a shady-company in 90’s, we don’t trust Microsoft: There’s a difference in monopolistic practices, crushing competitors and outright stealing from them. Anti-trust violations are murkier territory morally and legally- is Google immoral when it shows it’s flight results ahead of Expedia’s, is Apple immoral for forcing me to use Apple Maps with Carplay? These don’t have straight out answers. On the other hand, Microsoft, Google or Apple would be immoral and face everyone’s wrath if they’re to straight out steal data/ assets.

What I can tell you as Microsoft employee

This private code from the internet might as well be Greek to me

1. Microsoft already deals with data from competitors and consumers: Azure is the second largest cloud provider. But not only that, Microsoft has billions of files hosted on OneDrive and Azure. Moreover, Yahoo uses Bing, Facebook uses Bing Maps/ Translate, Siri was using Bing. If these companies were concerned about Microsoft snooping on their data, the deals would never have gone through. If there was anything worth stealing, it already is on Microsoft servers. If Microsoft didn’t steal despite it, some code in Github repositories won’t change the equation.
2. Code in itself is worthless: If I snooped on a competitor’s codebase I’d get nothing out of it. There’s a lot of build tools, documentation which makes any of the code relevant. I can assure you having worked on the Excel code-base for 3 years, if you to somehow got access to it, you wouldn’t be able to do anything with it because it’s so complicated on it’s own and there’s a ton of context. It takes months for new engineers to make any significant change. How do large software companies prevent programmers from copying the source code of a product elaborates ways in which companies make sure employees don’t steal code. Other corporations have the same insurance policy against Microsoft.
3. Research secrets are harder to replicate than code: For all the hype tech companies have created on changing the world, one would think writing an app is rocket science. The reality is it’s a lot of module integration, fighting with frameworks and everyone is doing it. The critical weightlifting happens in research, and Microsoft Research remains one of the pioneers of research and releases a lot of it’s results for benefit of community. So do Google Research and IBM Research.
4. Legal nightmare: All said and done, if sense doesn’t prevail then it becomes a very serious litigation with damages to reputation, lost customers as well as several million dollars in fines.
5. We can’t read data hosted as-is anyways: There is no button which developers have saying “Show code”. There are various tiers of data classification, and I can tell you what as a Bing employee one can see. It’s mostly aggregated user data (how many users searched for FIFA WC’18). Or in the case of working on personalized recommendations, the data will say User with ID “268–137” (fictional ID) searched for given football teams, and clicked on particular one (can’t see content). It’s not like I can see a person’s tax returns if they happened to view it on Bing or Excel.

So rest assured Microsoft is not snooping your private code anymore than GitHub was. If anything, Microsoft has a larger reputation to preserve, and Nadella is serious in his quest to be identified as a team player.

I am not representing Microsoft here, and views expressed are my own

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