The DevOps and open source communities have been in a tizzy all week over the massive $7.5 billion Microsoft acquisition of GitHub. Even as many developers rage on Twitter about the deal and still others are rushing to migrate their repositories to alternative solutions—#movetogitlab has trended heavy this week—for the most part the DevOps community is taking it in stride. As DevOps.com’s Don MacVittie explained, complaining or planning a move away from GitHub solely due to long-held grudges against Microsoft seems pretty counterproductive at the moment.
He’s not alone. A lot of developers, evangelists, CTOs and other GitHub users out there doing the work that drives applications into production are looking at this as a potentially great thing. Others are more cautious, but at least believe this won’t set the movement backward. We’ve gathered a few thoughts from these professionals to help balance out the dialogue.
Ensures GitHub Viability
“For those developers that may be anxious and thinking about jumping ship, I am sure they also must realize the hard truth that for GitHub to succeed moving forward it needed an influx of cash. Inevitably, there would come a point where GitHub would need to start to actually turn a profit, something it has yet to achieve, before it would have to shut its doors. ”
—Adam Mansfield, Microsoft practice leader at UpperEdge
Provides Much-Needed Leadership
“Satya Nadella has so far done a great job dropping the Windows religion to embrace the reality of the iOS, Android, Linux and multi-cloud world, which he will hopefully continue with the GitHub community. By putting Nat Friedman—former CEO & co-founder of Xamarin—in place as a technical CEO, Microsoft is sending a clear message that they’re committed to GitHub and the larger developer ecosystem.”
—Jyoti Bansal, former CEO of AppDynamics and current co-founder of DevOps platform Harness
GitHub Champions in Enterprise Have Easier Sell
“For one, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see corporate firewalls allowing access to GitHub now that it’s a Microsoft owned property, and perhaps considered ‘enterprise-ready.’ Microsoft knows how to make products that make enterprise architects feel confident, so their blessing and ownership of GitHub could really encourage social coding within enterprise organizations.”
—Matt Stratton, DevOps evangelist at PagerDuty
Net Neutral Immediate Impact
“Developers should not be anxious about this acquisition nor should they be excited. I honestly think this is an ‘oh well’ moment. Unless Microsoft has some crazy plan to sunset features or support for one vendor or another, everything should behave as business as usual for the foreseeable future. The only thing developers should watch is license fees and terms and conditions. Expect Microsoft to monetize the solution better in the coming months and potentially tie usage into MSDN.”
—Morey Haber, CTO of BeyondTrust
GitHub Already Had Its Own Problems
“GitHub is not strong in this area (DevOps) and never has been; maybe if Microsoft made it easy to deploy to Azure it could be seen as an improvement. As a tangent, GitLab which is now the attractive alternative, has its own CI/CD tooling and can also be self-hosted for free. This is a major advantage over GitHub, and I’m wondering if corporate America will start looking more closely to the FOSS alternative to GitHub Enterprise.”
—Mitch Pirtle, longtime developer and consultant at SpaceMonkeyLabs, former Tech Fellow at Capital One
Opens Eyes for About Dangers of Centralization
” My hope is that – one way or another – this leads to greater competition, more innovation, and less reliance on any one single platform. I don’t feel that centralization around any one platform is good for the DevOps and FOSS communities. I also don’t feel consolidation to larger companies is a good thing, as it creates conflicts of interest and generally a lack of innovation. This consolidation could result in a more decentralized approach to both software development and DevOps integration, which will hopefully drive more innovation. I think that could ultimately be a positive outcome of this acquisition.”
—Jeremy Steinert, CTO of WSM International
Expect Better Integration for More Seamless CI/CD
“Longer term, I expect GitHub’s integration with Azure to expand substantially, enabling some truly exciting developments for one-click code deployment to a Cloud infrastructure. DevOps for smaller companies will gain easier access to Azure resources. For DevOps as a whole, we will see acceleration of seamless code management within the context of actual deployment to containers. DevOps for enterprise has the greatest potential for improvement with this deal. There will be massive investment in improving developer interactions between infrastructure and code.”
—Clint Wilson, VP of product management at DigiCert
Here Come Better Enterprise DevOps Features
“While I think the development community will have mixed emotions about the news, ultimately this is a massively positive moment for GitHub. GitHub is at the center of the developer community, but as a business, they have faced challenges in reaching the enterprise buyer—something Microsoft is extremely well-versed in. With Microsoft’s resources and expertise, GitHub no longer has to wrestle with the internal struggle of being open to the community and being open for businesses, ie. selling to the enterprise. Assuming it’s kept a separate entity and is not beholden exclusively to Azure, this acquisition gives GitHub the opportunity to deliver the features enterprise DevOps and development teams need.”
—Tal Weiss, co-founder and CTO of OverOps
Accelerates GitHub’s Servicing of DevOps Market
“The new Microsoft is not the bogey of the past — VS Code is great; TypeScript is terrific; Microsoft has not merely accepted open source, but become an open source leader through its GitHub contributions. From a business perspective, I think the deal will pay off. Unlike competitors such as IBM and Oracle, Microsoft not only understands developers, but has a proven ability to sell to the SMB as well as to the enterprise market. Microsoft can probably grow the GitHub business substantially by executing better on GitHub’s existing strategic objectives, such as GitHub Enterprise, without alienating users. It may also be able to create significant value by applying its AI technology and VS Code innovation to GitHub’s enormous corpus of code.
—Rod Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Atomist and creator of Spring
Validates Value of What Open Source and Devs Do
“I think overall this is good for the DevOps movement, and open source in general. It’s a very strong validation of how important open source is not just to open source developers, but also the business world. Developers have a right to be anxious, but there are many viable options for open source hosting in this day and age, so if Microsoft does not prove to be a good steward of GitHub, they have other options. However, Microsoft could very well keep GitHub going.”
—Logan Abbott, president of SourceForge.net
