Here's the news: thisisinsider.com/2-billion-startup-github-could-…
I'm not so worried about it. Microsoft has been much friendlier to open source in the last 5 years. They open-sourced .NET Core, VS Code, TypeScript, etc. They have a community edition of Visual Studio. They are one of the most prolific contributors on GitHub already.
They already have their own competing solution, Visual Studio Team Services that uses Git, so they're not buying tech. (I honestly think VSTS is nicer tool than GitHub. Plus they offer a free tier that has private repos unlike GH).
Some have speculated that the move is so that they can push people to Azure, which is the real moneymaker. I would think that they wouldn't want to alienate developers away from that by mucking the product they all love.
if the code was open source why would they remove it?
Apple hosting code at Microsoft? Bad advertisement. It's political, really!
if closed source, how does it hurt open source?
It does not hurt OpenSource, and that's not what I meant. It's very likely, that the closed-source stuff will be moved away first, anyway. I am pretty sure that there are many companies, like Google, who were willing to outsource to a neutral company, but will have problems with direct competition.
However, it means that developers are fragmented over several tools, depending on the company they work for and the OSS they contribute to, which I would say is a bad thing.
Marco Alka
Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor
Imho, Microsoft buying GitHub is a bad idea.