GitHub has never made money.

Microsoft buys GitHub and says we're going to let them operate independently as they see fit.

Where do you see the profit motive?

Microsoft's been orienting themselves as a developer services company over the past few years. Azure, vscode, open source dotnet, they want free onramps onto their services.

They were missing CI/CD tools, and source control. They had VSTS and Team Foundation Server but there's no way theyd beat the ubiquity of git.

I'm betting they're going to now start offering CI via GitHub like Gitlab (or offering a unified marketplace to allow other companies to fill this role and they take a cut) and then folding GitHub Enterprise into their suite of developer tools. Just like Visual Studio is vscode++, GitHub Enterprise will be invested in to where it does a whole lot more fancy things, and free GitHub is the onramp. And then Microsoft will have a portfolio that spans the entire code development pipeline.

Microsoft has incredible CI/CD tooling -- check out Visual Studio App Center, Azure App Insights, HockeyApp -- and many enterprise customers use this along with VSTS. However, many companies will never use VSTS, especially non-Microsoft-stack companies so making a big deal about how Microsoft's CI/CD tools work for non-Microsoft projects hosted at places like GitHub or any other hosting provider that supports the issuing of webhooks on checkin/merge events (eg: BitBucket, GitLab, Kiln, etc).

Did you realize that your Java/Android Studio project in GitHub could be connected to App Center such that for every source check-in the project is built, unit tested (code-level), UI-tested on physical hardware (Xamarin Test Cloud), and if all tests pass the build is pushed to beta testers via HockeyApp which also captures reams of telemetry and debugging information? App Center can even be set up to automatically push the app all the way to Google Play automatically when you merge down to your release branch.

Ditto iOS apps written with Swift in Xcode.

If you think Microsoft doesn't have massive amounts of CI/CD tooling that is agnostic to language and platform you should check it out.

https://www.visualstudio.com/app-center/

This is an OS/2 vs. DOS argument. Doesn't matter if they have superior technology if nobody uses it.

Yeah. They do have great tools. And I appreciate that link, I never heard of it.

But I think that sort of makes my point. If a company makes world class tools that people don't know about or don't want to use, are the tools that valuable/good? Microsoft just spent $7.5 billion to say "we don't think Team Foundation Server can cut it for the developer population at large". By doing that, they threw themselves into the center of millions of developer workflows around the world. I think it was a great buy for them, and is definitely a strategic move.

> Where do you see the profit motive?

I never wrote anything abut profit motives. You just made the same leap of logic again.

Do you know factually that , "Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern."

I agree with you here. I doubt Microsoft is committed to losing money on a product.

There could be a direct (selling subscriptions / additional addon products) or indirect (marketing dollars, community goodwill, 'mindshare) profit motivations.

I think Microsoft sees this as a way to get into businesses that would have never entertained a relationship with them. When those github enterprise contracts come up for renewal, I expect large discounts for trying Azure and other Microsoft products to come with them.

The fact that Microsoft tried as many times as they did to push Windows Phone -- even buying Nokia to have a captive device maker -- shows how committed they can be to losing money.