Comment by Marco Alka on "Microsoft has been talking about buying GitHub. What's your opinion on this?"

Imho, Microsoft buying GitHub is a bad idea.

If GitHub is owned by Microsoft, it loses its neutral role and I am very sure that companies will remove their source code from GitHub; maybe not even re-uploading it elsewhere. It might be harmful to OpenSource
Microsoft might decide to introduce unpleasant changes for some of us, like requiring a Microsoft account to login at some point or adding certain legal terms for uploaded source code.
Many FLOSS developers have negative feelings towards Microsoft for various reasons. They might remove their source from GitHub and re-upload to different other sites, increasing fragmentation (which also has its merits)

People already started moving their repos to Gitlab 🤷‍♀️ monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer

If companies remove their code from Github: if the code was open source why would they remove it? And if closed source, how does it hurt open source?

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.

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