GitLab, one of the code hosting platforms like GitHub has seen a huge traffic spike after GitHub announced that Microsoft has acquired the company. The statistics from the GitLab’s portal show that thousands of projects and code repositories are being imported every hour. Majority of developers feel that Microsoft buying GitHub will give the company access to millions of private repositories that contain private projects of the companies which are currently being hosted in GitHub’s premium service.
While GitLab provides a free and commercial version of the source code hosting which is similar to GitHub. GitLab provides an open source version of the software so that software developers can run their own version of GitLab on their servers. BitBucket and SourceForge have also seen a spike in their traffic. At present GitHub hosts around 80 million code repositories in 27 million developer accounts.
Rumours started were appearing about GitHub being acquired by Microsoft, however the deal was already done according to the Bloomberg’s report. The report also said that GitHub execs opted to sell the company to Microsoft rather than going public. The company was previously at $2 Billion in 2015. Microsoft has brought GitHub for $7.5 Billion.
When Microsoft has appointed new CEO Satya Nadella the company has been focusing on cloud-based services and open source market rather than simply being an OS maker. The company has been slowly reducing itself in the mobile market and opting to develop services like Windows, Skype and Azure which makes the company purely developer-centric. Many developers are panicking since Microsoft has a track record for buying products that they don’t need and then letting them die. It would appear that this deal actually makes sense for Microsoft’s vision as the cloud-based version control system GitHub has a vital role in the company’s cloud business.
The company has already integrated several Linux distros in their operating system to run on Windows as VMs and they have even open-sourced their scripting language PowerShell. Most of the developers are not accepting Microsoft buying GitHub hence they have started petitioning to stop this deal.
Will Microsoft improve GitHub or make it worse?, let us know your thoughts