The End of GitHub?
When Microsoft purchased Github a lot of users thought it was a harbinger of bad things to come in the coding universe. Then again, some believe it will improve GitHub because of the money that Microsoft can throw at it and, if done properly, this could actually make it a better platform (they have already introduced many new features, including a mobile app). The one thing that can’t be debated is that as soon as Microsoft purchased GitHub, they shifted its monetization scheme dramatically.
So what’s in a name?
“GIT”, created in 2005, is a program that stores and organizes open source code (as well as all of its revisions and tags) that also provides its own protocol for communicating with remote servers to store and fetch. Although not the first out of the gate for this type of platform, that title goes to BitKeeper, Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) wrote Git, stuck it in “the cloud” and gave free public access.
How it Works
GitHub commercialized Linus’ creation, becoming essentially a storage extension of Git; a website to host the actions, if you will. Within it there are 2 types of repositories: public and private. The public ones were (and still are) free, and are for open source developers/projects. The private repositories are for those who want to host open source code on the platform but don’t want to grant public access. This was how GitHub created its initial user base.
Now originally these private repos, both individual and group ones, cost around $8/month per user. That was GitHub’s main influx of money. They also host a marketplace where third-party developers can tout and sell integrations/apps/add-ons for users that they are likely receiving a percentage of the sales on. And that, in a nutshell, was GitHub’s entire monetization model. It is likely that it was not doing much more than breaking even at this point; the cause took precedent over the cash.
Rivals soon joined the fray, pitching both public and private repositories for free, as well as offering integrations with Jira and Confluence. More recently, services like GitLab — a remote-only company that pushes heavily towards automated deployment using CICD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) — have popped up as Bug Bounty Hunting becomes more popular as a source of income for many programmers.
Enter Microsoft
As soon as Microsoft bought up GitHub, they stopped charging for private repositories in order to play catch-up with the other big players, gearing their new model to focus more on SMBs (Small to Medium Businesses) as opposed to the individual. They also significantly slashed the prices of team collaborations and introduced actions — GitHub’s term for CICD integrations.
Although seen as an overall uptick, this required a lot of internal and external changes to take place, resulting in instability issues (particularly in the last 3–4 months), including significant downtime — a death knell for this type of service to say the least. In Microsoft’s pursuit to profitability, they fell into the classic “too-much-too-fast” trappings.
Adding insult to injury, Microsoft got hacked in GitHub — not GitHub as a platform itself it’s important to note, but Microsoft’s presence in GitHub — meaning a person(s) in the Microsoft organization fell victim to social engineering.
It certainly doesn’t help that Microsoft’s previous CEO, Steve Ballmer, called open source code a “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” or that their business model is “Embrace, extend, extinguish” which they tried with Internet Explorer (and Google is copying with their Chrome browser and Android OS).
Somehow, the irony police let that Hummer through their roadblock.
In all fairness, current Microsoft president Brad Smith now believes the company was wrong about open source saying, “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century…” As usual, change occurs in big companies when it’s change for a hundred instead of a one — and when dollars make sense instead of cents.
Don the Tin Hat
The purchase of GitHub is rife with conspiracy theories, as Microsoft are perceived as having multitudes of janky software and are known for stealing code from others. People are afraid that they will continue this practice of stealing source code from other private repositories in GitHub for their own private repositories/uses. Of course there are those that purport that due to the amount of code Microsoft had up on GitHub, they had to purchase it to avoid this very same thing happening to them.
Another popular assumption is that some of the available software will experience degradation in quality as bottomline-centric thinking kicks in. Think Skype here, an Estonian-created platform that came out of the gate as a pretty popular and stable video communication platform. Once Microsoft bought it, they focussed on business use, forsaking the individual. Spock may tell us that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” but that should only apply to an entirely different type of Enterprise. Each feeble attempt at new feature integration by Microsoft turned Skype into something as relevant as MySpace and AOL.
Finally, there’s those that fear that because of Microsoft’s alleged association with the NSA, GitHub will be yet another “Big Brother” portal for invasion of privacy, bringing it to a whole new level.
So What’s Next?
It truly is hard to predict whether the benefits will outweigh the hindrances with Microsoft’s GitHub purchase in the long run, especially when considering residual positive uses of Github like how it helps for recruiting talent in a job market shortage that is almost as problematic in cyber security as the breaches. Why look at a CV when the proof is in the code?
It will most likely come down to each user’s needs and preferences, and the size of their wallet. But like any product that gets too big or comes out-of-favour with the street voice, something else will come along to take its place before it too gets bought out. The cycle continues as the circle shrinks.
