Microsoft buys GitHub -- INVESTIGATION REVEALED!

About the GitHub acquisition by Microsoft -- Find out what you may not know!

SAVE YOURSELF SOME RESEARCH TIME ABOUT THIS EVENT

Once I heard the news about Microsoft's $7.4 Billion Dollar purchase of GitHub, I dropped everything and began reading everything I could on the subject until I felt I had enough of a backgrounder of what happened, what to expect, and what we may see in our future.

I'll reveal a summary of my investigation and save you the pain of having to spend the hours finding this info yourself.

• LEAKED RUMOR June 1, 2018
  Julie Bort and Becky Peterson, two authors on businessinsider.com put out a news article about how Microsoft has been talking about buying out GitHub

(see cached version): HERE - http://www.businessinsider.com/2-billion-startup-github-could-be-for-sale-microsoft-2018-5

-- It turns out that there was an internal rumor at GitHub (as per the above article) that leaked the info that Nat Friedman was going to be the new GitHub CEO. (Nat Friedman cofounded a popular developer tools company called Xamarin, bought by Microsoft in 2016 for as much as $400 million or more)

• GITLAB REACTS June 3, 2018
  gitlab sends out a tweet: "We're seeing 10x the normal daily amount of repositories [..] We're scaling our fleet to try to stay up."
  See their blog post here

• GITHUB CONFIRMS IT June 4, 2018
  GitHub has a blog post on their site that confirms the acquisition here

---

Luckily no. GIT (see link) is open source, created by Linus Torvalds for Linux in 2005 for version control changes in software development and managing source code.

Git can be used without GitHub

GitHub (see link) on the other hand is a public (and private) hosting service that enhances the Git tool

Since decentralized open source development is so popular these days, having your public repository posted on GitHub is the most popular way to distribute (and contribute) to source code.

TONS of cryptocurrency software projects and other open source projects use GitHub as their means of distribution, and have done so, for so many years.

Our own steem witnesses retrieve their software from GitHub right now too. :)

This is a shock to many. Not knowing how to react is causing many developers and users to sit and wait to see how this turns out in the long run.

There are many GitHub alternatives for public repositories to be hosted.

Gitlab is one of them. So is BitBucket, so is sourceforge.

Here's a comment someone made:

• "Having your stuff someplace everyone is familiar and comfortable is a major advantage. "

...this is true! This is why GitHub has been this popular. The more people that use it, the more preferred it is as a platform when launching any project.

Here's another comment someone made about why GitHub alternatives aren't popular:

• "devs are slow to adapt about some things. look at HTML5 :) but no they won’t be leaving GitHub because leaving the community is harder than just using another product. That’s why the GitHub challengers failed, not because they could not do what it does, they just couldn’t do the community."

QUICK LIST OF GITHUB LIKE PROJECTS

--> MOST ALL ARE STALLED OR DEAD

• gitchain.org
  https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain
  Latest commit 2baefef on Jun 16, 2014
  Gitchain is an application of ideas behind Bitcoin, Namecoin and DHT applied to Git hosting. Once you install it, it
  acts as a local proxy to the entire Gitchain P2P network.

• https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent
  Latest commit 7b25402 on Sep 25, 2015
  A decentralization of GitHub using BitTorrent and Bitcoin

• https://github.com/axic/mango
  Latest commit 83ef808 on Jun 24, 2016
  Using Ethereum and P2P content addressable networks (Swarm, IPFS, SSB) as a backend to Git

• https://datproject.org/
  https://github.com/datproject
  Latest commit e24d8d3 on Apr 18, 2018
  Dat is a nonprofit-backed data sharing protocol for applications of the future.
  Why use Dat instead of git? see here

• https://ellcrys.co/
  Blockchain for Trustless, Censorship-resistant Software Development
  .
  

• GitHub’s thriving community has more than 12 million+ members

• GitLab, a startup that provides developer tools, announced April 6, 2018 that it is abandoning Microsoft Azure for Google Cloud Platform.

So do you think people will still use GitHub?

• Sure. Although recently Bitcoin developers said they may be transitioning from GitHub.

What about Microsoft? Can we trust them long term with the Github acquisition?

• ...as someone else said :

History is littered with the carcasses of those who trusted MS. Trust Microsoft at your own peril.