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from the good-business-or-something-else dept.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/06/01/microsoft--github-acquisition-talks-resume.html
Microsoft held talks in the past few weeks to acquire software developer platform GitHub, Business Insider reports.
One person familiar with the discussions between the companies told CNBC that they had been considering a joint marketing partnership valued around $35 million, and that those discussions had progressed to a possible investment or outright acquisition. It is unclear whether talks are still ongoing, but this person said that GitHub's price for a full acquisition was more than Microsoft currently wanted to pay.
GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in its last funding round 2015, but the price tag for an acquisition could be $5 billion or more, based on a price that was floated last year.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fadrian on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:39PM (6 children)
... for Microsoft; bad for everyone else.
That is all.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:55PM (1 child)
M$ has made a lot of big purchases in recent years. If you look at them individually they do not make economic sense and have no possibility for return on investment. However, if you look at the fact that M$ makes its money from monopoly rents, not software or services, then they make sense in that they cut out competitors to the monopoly. M$ has purchased lately these:
And there are more, too, but none of those will bring in anything close to their purchase price, let alone leave room for a profit on top of that. All of those are past peak and M$ overpaid. If you take the devices that people actually use into consideration, M$ Windows has dropped to 36% of the market [statcounter.com] and even if you limit the scope M$ Windows has dropped to 82% of the market [statcounter.com]. The cutoff to be able to pull in those rents probably was around 85% of the desktop market, but when it drops below 80% even people not paying attention will notice.
M$ also seems to be shuffling its budget around to give the illusion that Azure is doing ok economically.
So when it goes, it will deflate rather quickly though because of its cultlike nature there will be a very long tail.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 02 2018, @05:57PM
the biggest and fastest growth market in history... buggy whips, indeed.
I anticipate a periodic gasp of mildly exciting profitability to emanate from Redmond in the future, similar to IBM's performance over the past 25 years. We do need to keep them on a short leash with respect to monopoly rents, that has always been the nature of their beast.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:57PM
It would be good for gitlab
For internal non-FOSS use, Google cloud source is a nice looking product hampered and punished by a disturbingly marketing influenced name. Its just your average hosted git, its hardly limited to cloud-y stupidity. It has some integration with google cloud services making it easy to use, but its hardly required. So aside from the stupid name the billing is bizarre something like people times repos and just so you don't turn it into a file sharing site they have ridiculous high limits by source code standards for storage and network, so like one project with four people is free but two project with three people you gotta pay.
I always kinda thought Redmine with a separate git repo would be nicer than github, but I've never tried it. Its Ruby on Rails IIRC so its gonna be slow and unscalable but for corporate internal use its certainly good enough for companies with less than 10000 people.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @03:31PM (2 children)
The only way this could work out OK is if Microsoft just buys them for physical and intellectual property.
If the people are kept, some of them may be able to work their way up into the rest of Microsoft. Many of the people who founded github were great, but mostly they are gone now. The company is coasting along, now run by a bunch of toxic SJWs who refuse to focus on the business.
This, BTW, is why gitlab is pulling ahead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @07:55PM (1 child)
> The only way this could work out OK is if Microsoft just buys them for physical and intellectual property.
Expect a "burning platform" speech 2 hours after the acquisition.
I never shook off the fishy sensation with github, caused by their wanting to become the single point of failure of free software projects. Start cloning to your HD, guys.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday June 02 2018, @08:38PM
that's why as much flack as GIT get's we all use it. Github is (was) for sharing, but git works just fine when LDAP/SSH/VPN etc...
And anyway, SOURCEFORGE and their clicky-insert malware tendencies will be followed by Micro$oft.
They have form. When they (M$) bought Nokia , and foisted their Crapware M$ tools onto my N8 with NO way of removing.
This will not end well....