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Really concerned to read this morning that GitHub is going to be acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. Yes, that is billions! Of all companies, Microsoft just isn’t the right fit for Open-Source Software despite them being the largest OSS committers on GitHub with over 2 million commits.

To make matters worse, Chris Wanstrath, GitHub CEO, is no longer going to lead GitHub so we rely on Microsoft to lead OSS.

To own GitHub is to own Open-Source Software and with it comes, arguably, the greatest responsibility. GitHub was started on the premise that Chris didn’t want one company to own OSS (it was SourceForge at the time) and thus GitHub was born but, in a full 360-degree turn, GitHub became that one company.

I’m sorry, but I just do not trust Microsoft with this responsibility and I wouldn’t be surprised if people start the migration to other platforms like GitLab or BitBucket as their primary tool to house their projects.

I have almost 50 OSS projects that I actively maintain at https://github.com/justinhartman and I pay GitHub monthly for a range of private projects that I host with them. I don’t know that I want to retain these projects on GitHub any longer.

For me, GitHub needed to retain its independence and in one fell swoop that independence is now gone; along with it my trust in GitHub.

I’ll blog about this later where I can get more in-depth in terms of what this means for Open-Source Software in general.

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