Github and Microsoft

Development
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Do we think it wise to stay using GitHub, when Microsoft is buying it?

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Why do you think it shouldn’t be wise? I do not think there are any changes coming for github users. Moreoer, MS is not evil per se.

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My experience of 30 years is tech is okay, commercial and marketing not to be trusted.
Things they buy are either bent into their ‘family’ or squeezed to death. But that is just my opinion.

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That is not an opinion, it is actual a statement of historical facts, although I believe that the open-source code is not affected by the deal, just its hosting.

Google Code had similar issues years ago, and many projects perished or moved away.

Hosting problems can be easily mitigated if the project is lodged in another service as a backup solution.

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As long as this community stays alert and has a back-up somewhere…

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tl;dr: I don’t think this is a problem.

Thanks for bringing this up, Ruud. IMO, it is a perfectly reasonable and important question. I’ve been anticipating some turmoil in the FLOSS communities ever since this takeover was announced.
My two cents:

I agree with Florian. First and foremost, Microsoft is just a another large tech company that makes money by selling decently written, useful software (with some exceptions ;-)). Nothing wrong with earning money, we all have to.
Secondly, as far as I know, most of the beef between Microsoft and the FLOSS community dates back to the days of their former CEO Steve Ballmer, who once famously compared Linux to cancer in an interview.
But that was in 2001. These days, pretty much every software depends on the Internet, and the Internet depends on FLOSS. The vast majority of the servers run Linux. The war is over.

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War may be over; but I still think there is a good reason for mistrust. Just let’s be aware things might change rather suddenly.

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Don’t worry. The community is the backup. Even in the most dramatic post-apocalyptic scenario, as long as you have a working computer and electric power, the full source code of LanguageTool can be recovered from your machine.
That’s the power of git (developed by Linus Torvalds, the guy who made Linux).
GitHub is just a convenient web platform. If it goes down in flames tomorrow, that’s of course a problem, but it is solvable.

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Since I use to be the guy that disagrees, I start by agreeing with your first lines.

This is correct and not a concern.

The main issue is subversion of projects and the creation of barriers for alternatives adoption.

This affects all projects that can compete with Microsoft solutions and the Windows ecosystem.
For example the secure boot debate

or joining the organizing body that is the Linux Foundation, therefore having increased influence in “the competition”:

IMO, there is nothing wrong with being a company and a for profit organization. Everybody has to do it to some extent, but nobody can deny the conflict of interests, and that “boys will be boys”.:wink:

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And the problem is not not that big. It takes just few hours to bring online some git hosting, e.g. GitLab based or Gogs. And it can be pretty simple to bring a live mirrow of a GitHub repo at GitLab.