Microsoft’s Github acquisition — Some quick thoughts

As I mentioned in a quora answer yesterday, nobody knows what really transpired into Microsoft for this buying decision, all we have are wild speculations at this point and one is as likely or unlikely as the other.

And when there is uncertainly and speculation in the market, it naturally gives rise to undue panic and exodus too, not unlike the one that is happening from Github to Gitlab presently. Some 13,000 large projects migrated after the news came, and so did individual developers like Derek Taylor.

Personally, I think this sudden and panicky exodus is uncalled for. According to Github blog, its going to take at least 3–4 months for the deal to close and they don’t expect it to happen before the year end. Even assuming that Microsoft does the worst (such as integrating with their existing products like Skype/Linkedin or changing the code contribution agreement), that won’t be happening for months and there is still lots of time to evaluate other options like Gitlab, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, etc. or even self-host, and do a proper migration instead of this hasty exodus.

Besides, Gitlab isn’t the only available alternative out there. For most use cases, self-hosting an instance of gogs or gitea should be more than enough. For others, who have more advanced use cases like complex integrations or build systems, they can either self-host a copy of Gitlab or use a free instance from a non-profit such as salsa.debian.org.