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posted by janrinok on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @01:09PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 04 2018, @01:09PM (#688334) Journal

    I don't see any posts analyzing this situation rationally.

    Fair enough.

    What exactly can MS do to ... Github? The worst I can think of is to make the service really crappy, long downtimes, add bugs, etc.

    This part is certain:

    Github can view anything in a private repository (they aren't encrypted). If Microsoft buys Github, that sentence changes to "Microsoft has full access to any private repository." The implications are similar, but much more far reaching.

    This part is simply FUD, admittedly, but very plausible:

    Github could have management problems like Sourceforge did. Sourceforge had a serious problem where its management was very out of sync with its membership such that management thought it was okay to put crapware on top of free software, turn the site into a malicious advertisement cesspool, and other such things that made it evil for someone to send a customer/client there for a download, leading to the great mass exodus away from Sourceforge (and largely to another single point of failure, Github).

    If Microsoft buys Github, then instantly, at a stroke, Github will have management that is very out of sync with its membership. I do not suggest that Microsoft will suddenly start adding malware, but that isn't out of the realm of possibility since Microsoft isn't really cognizant of what features make a product malware (and many of their software products intentionally have a range of malware features that they don't consider malware). More to the point, I don't know *what* nonsense Microsoft will come up with, because I don't think like them--but I know enough about them, and about free software, to know whether I want to depend on Microsoft to keep any project I work on alive. (It's a "no" for most of them.)

    Pro-Microsoft Bit: I think VSCode is a really good programming editor. I am using a MS Natural Keyboard 4000 to type this. Not hating on Microsoft, just pointing out that oil and water don't mix all that well.

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