GitHub, in my eyes, has become an instrumental part of modern development. To my knowledge, it hosts over one million projects, and I personally check it before anywhere else for information on open-source projects. I raise an eyebrow for projects that haven’t been published on GitHub. It’s the de facto infrastructure of the modern open source world.
Some grim news came across my screen yesterday, however. GitHub was bought by Microsoft.
It’s probably nothing. Maybe Microsoft really does “love open source” now - and I’d love to see GitHub flourish in its support of open-source projects under Microsoft - but color me skeptical. The company whose former CEO called Linux a “embrace extend extinguish” suddenly does an about-face to “embrace” Linux in the face of Linux technologies that support scaling and make DevOps possible. All under the same leadership that built the privacy nightmare that is Windows 10.
Throw in the differences in license between Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Code, and it’s not hard to see why GitHub’s acquisition terrifies me. In response, I’ve deployed a GitLab instance and moved my handful of projects to it.
And now, for a moment of silence.