What isn't commonly known is that GitHub was never profitable and was getting closer and closer to insolvency every day.

Microsoft rescued them.

Any idea how they could possibly make GitHub profitable? It seems more likely that they want to attach the Microsoft name to GitHub to build up positive sentiment among the open source community. Something like keeping GitHub alive without wrecking it could cause some people to hate Microsoft a little bit less.

- It gives then 'streetcred' in the OSS communities using GitHub. This goodwill is valuable.

- It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office. All major players host code there, likely a lot of them in private repos too. Microsoft has a large trackrecord of 'me too' products (i.e. the ones released after the original from another company is successful) and corporate espionage isn't something that's just happening in the movies. This too could make things very profitable

- Developer relations across private repos could increase the value of linkedin profiles which in turn could make that more valuable.

But that's about what I could come up with. I seriously don't understand why one would spent $2B on github if it hosts your OSS stuff. Also, to make sure VSTS become more successful with an integration doesn't make sense to me: GH isn't the most profitable service out there and was losing money. Hell it might even go belly up sooner or later and VSTS would look to be a better alternative.

> It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.

That sounds incredibly unlikely if not borderline ridiculous.

>It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.

Allows logically, not legally though I'd expect.

I imagine, in my paranoia, the first thing MS will do is change the T&Cs.

How profitable is Visual Studio? Visual Studio Code?

Microsoft wants people to develop for Windows, because with no apps you have Windows Phone. If what you want to use runs on Windows, Windows is what you purchase (or in a few years probably subscribe to along with Office 365 and OneDrive). A lot of that subscription model already exists on the Enterprise side of Windows, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see it expand - "Windows as a Service" has been a topic of discussion for years now.

They will operate them as a loss leader to Azure.

This. They own where the code is lands, and will try to build the best, most streamlined CI system straight to profitable Azure deployments. Probably cheapest too, if they update agreements to get a slice of the deployment pie if people do want to deploy to AWS or GCE.

'Extinguish' might be right, but Amazon is the target here and holding off Google in second place. Other cloud providers will have to race to the bottom if they are not already there.

Last I checked, AWS is in first place by a wide margin, followed by Azure and then IBM in third. Google is trailing all of them at the moment.

Source? I thought the story was that Github was profitable from day 1 in 2008?

How did they become unprofitable? Their expenses are servers and people. It seems that there are an enormous number of companies paying for private repos and that should more than cover their costs.

They were profitable in 2008, but by 2016 they were running at a loss.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is...

I'm guessing it was from corporate mismanagement, overbalooned salaries for initial employees, and probably hiring too quickly to meet demand.

And probably to some extent people treating it more and more as a free hosting platform for all types of content.

I put all my cooking recipes and links in a free repo yesterday, published with pages. History of changes, fast, reliable, mobile-friendly. Owns. PR me a recipe man!

I’m willing to believe this, but what’s it based on? It seems like they have so many customers. What’s the free/public-to-paid/private traffic that would have made them sustainable?

Is it? I imagine VSS and their cloud source control offering (don’t remember the name) probably aren’t doing all that well in the face of GitHub.

They want to be a player in that game, so they’ll transition off they are old product which isn’t that popular onto a new one they purchased that has all the mind share.

As long as they don’t screw it up, and recent Microsoft seems to me like a company that won’t, it will benefit them. And perhaps it will benefit the user some to do have a company with deep pockets behind it.

Microsoft adopt git as their main source control, even in internal projects.

Makes sense they try to control the future of the tool they use in so meny projects.

Github don't control git --

> Torvalds turned over maintenance on 26 July 2005 to Junio Hamano, a major contributor to the project.[25] Hamano was responsible for the 1.0 release on 21 December 2005, and remains the project's maintainer.[26]

I'm guessing Torvalds still has a lot of control if push came to shove, so we can assume git is executively controlled by Torvalds and Hamano.

Not many people use git without Github though, whether it's Github proper or a local installation of Github Enterprise. It's pretty tough to do code reviews without it. There are tools out there to do it, but Github is the standard.

Github does own a vast share of the git-related developer mindshare tho, which is probably more valuable to Microsoft.

Git != GitHub, fyi.

I want Mercurial and Subversion in GitHub.

Why not just use a service that supports them?

Use RhodeCode then - but it is a self-hosted solution.

AFAIK, I don't think anyone seriously used VSS inside Microsoft, but heard that long time ago they forked perforce in customized way... A bit like google.

Yes, I used that internal Source Depot (based on Perforce I think, or at least something old and convoluted) when I worked on Windows Phone 7 back in 2010, it was not fun. There were a few teams within Microsoft at the time using the visual studio team system source control but I don’t believe it was common, as a lot of the error reporting (watson) had plug-ins for the proprietary Source Depot.

Why was it not fun? I had no trouble with sourcedepot when I was there.

I think git and decentralized source control are great, but I get a little suspicious of people saying tooling is "not fun" simply because it isn't their favorite or most familiar.

That’s fair, I’m probably being too harsh on it. It was my first job out of college so my first time interacting with professional-scale source control. I don’t remember specifically what I didn’t like about it, I think mostly that it was slow and a bit unintuitive, but I can’t say with any conviction that it was actually a bad system. I do remember there being a general sense on my team that people wanted to move off of it and onto something more modern, so perhaps I just internalized that.

Ugh, Perforce. That was painful. Perhaps it’s time to see what’s next in source control systems, ie bzr.

Hah, our team is a bit of split - half of us know perforce well, the other half git, then almost all other developers are perforce driven (game company with several studios).

I like it, and really love that they added web interface (review, overall view of changes, etc.).

P4 is very easy to get started, all you need is to learn several things, and tools underneath can easily be changed, learned to do this for you. Then it's easy to comprehend changes, since all CL's are monotonically increasing, so once gets perception when a CL is announced whether it affects him, or her, etc.

And the elephant in the room is the really, really huge files: psd, tiff, max, maya (ma/mb) models, fbx, zip, iso, exe installs, etc.

There are some peculiarities, like text files handling and conversion (e.g. \r\n <-> \n).

Then some useful (but controversial) features: locking (per extension), or manually per file.

Having all your projects from different teams in one place, but each team/project can customize a view to its own work (a bit opposite of what google is doing with their mono-repo, but unlike g4 there ain't option to sync only what you want, and have the rest off the network).