So Friday afternoon Bloomberg drops this report that Microsoft is close to buying GitHub, and by Saturday morning my Twitter timeline had basically turned into a group therapy session for developers. I spent way more of this weekend than I'd like to admit refreshing Hacker News threads about it instead of, you know, doing anything productive with my own repos.
Nothing is official yet as I'm typing this on Sunday night. No press release, no dollar figure confirmed, just the Bloomberg story and a wall of anonymous-sourced follow-ups. But that didn't stop half the internet from acting like the deal already closed. GitLab tweeted out that they were seeing a massive spike in import requests, something like ten times their normal traffic, and had to scale up servers to keep the migration tool from falling over. People were mirroring entire orgs "just in case."
I get the instinct, I really do. GitHub has been the default place developers keep their code and, more importantly, their identity as developers, for basically a decade now. Your GitHub profile is your resume in a lot of hiring pipelines. So the idea of Microsoft owning that infrastructure hits some old nerve for anyone who remembers Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer" back in 2001, or the whole embrace-extend-extinguish playbook from the Internet Explorer days. That history doesn't just evaporate because a company changes leadership.
And yet. I didn't move anything.
Partly that's laziness, sure. But mostly it's because the Microsoft doing this rumored deal isn't the Microsoft of 2001. This is the company that's been shipping VS Code as a genuinely excellent free editor, that put .NET Core out under an MIT license, that's been quietly one of the top corporate contributors to the Linux kernel for years now. Satya Nadella's Microsoft talks a very different game than the old one did, and mostly it's backed the talk up with actual code and actual licenses. I'm not saying I'd bet my career on it. I'm saying the knee-jerk "Microsoft bad, panic now" reaction feels like it's fighting the last war.
What I found more interesting than the acquisition rumor itself was watching GitLab handle the moment. Whoever runs their Twitter account had a good weekend, cracking jokes while also being straight about the technical strain the traffic spike was putting on things. That's a hard needle to thread and they mostly threaded it. If this deal is real, GitLab just got the best marketing weekend of its existence without spending a dime on it.
A small complaint while I'm here: the discourse around this got exhausting fast, in the specific way that developer Twitter discourse always does, where everyone needs to have a hot take within the hour and the hot take needs to be maximally certain in one direction or the other. Either it's "this is the death of open source as we know it" or "you people are insane, nothing will change." Neither of those is a serious position, they're just poses. Most acquisitions like this land somewhere boring in the middle, three years later nobody remembers why they were mad.
I did do one thing this weekend, which is finally set up a proper local backup script for the handful of repos I actually care about, the ones with more than five commits and an actual README. That's probably the sane move regardless of who ends up owning GitHub: don't put all your eggs in any single platform's basket, corporate parent or not. I should have had that script two years ago honestly, and it took a Bloomberg headline to get me to write forty lines of bash for it.
We'll know more soon, probably even by the time anyone's reading this on Monday. I'm not going to pretend I know how the acquisition talks end. But if you spent your weekend mass-exporting repositories out of pure panic, I'd gently suggest saving that energy for when there's actually a signed deal to react to.