I personally know several companies which use private repos there. And another several of which it's hearsay. All those companies are rather small - for them GitHub is a cheap and reliable way to use git. Small companies are often the "motor of innovation", guys with great ideas.

Why would MS pay 7.5 billion? That's no peanuts, even for a company like this.
Either GitHub is a lot more profitable than you think, or they're after something else. Remember they are held responsible by their shareholders - they must have a plan which justifies this kind of money.

MS GitHub interface leaked ; ) (javascript must be turned on)

Looks like GitLab is taking an advantage of the situation: GitLab Ultimate and Gold now free for education and open source

It's huge amount of money and it's anyones guess why they would pay that, maybe something to do with Google who knows. I'm sure they have a long-term plan, would be stupid otherwise but it doesn't mean it has to be a bad thing for the open source community or the users that use it. I would have preferred GitHub not being owned by a large corporation. This won't be profitable for Microsoft if the users don't trust their service, whatever that might be.

At this point, to me at least, Microsoft seems like a different company compared to 10 years ago when you're looking at development and attitudes toward open source. Because of this I'm willing to give them a chance, I have seen improvements in transparency when it comes to concerns about privacy in the VS Code editor and wasn't expecting that when I started using it.

I never understood why people had to have a public git. I know people like a portfolio and all, but why not just HTTP host your git repo if you want to, and, if not, pick it up with SSH or, really, any other protocol? I thought the big advantage of git and mercurial over the others were that they were decentralized when you needed them to be.

EDIT: So how long until the new EULA that they own your code and can take it from you at any time?

I'm convinced that the knowledge contained there right now is worth the price, even if all users stop using it now.

What do you mean "public"? I'm talking about private repos for internal code - not open source.
I don't know how it's now, but a few years back setting up your own git repository was major PITA... too much work (or money) for small company to invest in if you can just rent it for a fistful of dollars.


They promote open source when it suits them. In reality they fight with fire and sword if ie. public services think about using open source solutions. See Munich or that town on the UK (can't remember the name right now...).

Wasn't it just "git init --bare" or something like that? I google it every now and then, but it's really that simple. Was it ever more than that?

To set up a server? No.

git runs via files, and doesn't have a dedicated daemon, which is probably where your problem comes from. SAMBA (windows network drives), SFTP, FTP (this one might be complex, i'm not sure), etc will all work. The idea is, you just need to establish a filesharing connection and let it rip.

Well, they contribute to open source projects that aren't their own, they are very active in the open source community. I'm expecting them to use open source or develop such projects when it suits them, I'm fine with that. If they fight open source "behind the scene" I'm not too sure about, don't seem like it in recent years at least but yeah they did in the past under different management.

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2409808/microsoft-bullied-mps-over-government-switch-to-open-source-standards

That's not nice if that's something they did, heard similar stories 15 years ago or so but that doesn't change the fact their contribution in open source and developing for Linux, replacing old technologies with open source and so on.

Microsoft isn't nice. The sued a DNS provider (no-ip.com) ex parte (meaning they couldn't even invite the party being sued to court), bringing forth false arguments that there was communication with the DNS provider (when there wasn't), and won the case. The courts awarded MS with all the domain names, temporarily, so MS could spy on who was connecting to the domains. Meanwhile, security cams, baby cams, email servers, anything that relied on their domains basically went down, because they couldn't even competently spy on people. It took days to recover the damage and get things working again. IIRC, this was millions of servers.

IIRC, since microsoft broke the agreement to only spy on what was going on (out of shear incompetence), they gave everything back to the DNS provider in shame.

That’s funny nobody mentioned yet that gitlab.com servers are hosted by… Microsoft ;)

Sorry, not sorry.

They are moving Google servers now https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/