It's been about a week now since Microsoft announced it was buying GitHub, and I think I'm finally allowed to have a normal opinion about it instead of a reactive one.
Quick recap for anyone who was off the internet last Monday: Microsoft is paying $7.5 billion, all in stock, for GitHub. Nat Friedman (the guy who ran Xamarin after Microsoft bought that too) is taking over as CEO. Chris Wanstrath, GitHub's own co-founder and CEO, is sliding into some "Technical Fellow" role at Microsoft, which is corporate-speak for "we're keeping him around but somebody else is driving now." The deal isn't closed yet, it's still got to clear the usual regulatory stuff, but everyone's already treating it as done.
And the internet did what the internet does. Within about four hours of the news breaking there were think pieces, there was a hashtag telling people to move to GitLab, there were a hundred variations of the same joke about Clippy showing up in your pull requests. I saw someone post a screenshot of Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer" back in 2001 like it was a smoking gun, which, fine, that quote is real and it's very funny in this context, but it's also seventeen years old and Ballmer hasn't run the company since 2014.
Here's my actual, unhedged opinion: I don't think this is the disaster everyone spent Monday and Tuesday pretending it was. Modern Microsoft is a genuinely different company than the one that quote came from. They open sourced most of .NET years ago. VS Code, which I use every single day and which is built on Electron of all things, is Microsoft's and it's free and it's good. WSL exists so I can run a real bash shell on a Windows box without installing a VM. If any big company was going to buy the place where most of the world's open source code lives, I'd rather it be the one that's spent four years quietly proving it's not the enemy anymore than, I don't know, Oracle.
What I found more interesting than the deal itself was watching GitLab try to survive the week. They put out a post basically admitting their import tooling was getting hammered, queues backing up, imports that normally took seconds taking closer to an hour, and they were scrambling to add capacity in real time. I believe them, because I tried it myself.
Tuesday night, after work, I decided to migrate one of my dumber side projects over, a little scraper that pulls weather data and dumps it into a spreadsheet I never look at. Sat in the import queue for something like forty minutes watching a spinner. Eventually I just closed the tab and went to bed. Never went back to finish it. So somewhere on GitLab right now there's a half-imported repo of mine just sitting there, presumably judging me.
That's kind of the whole story of this week, honestly. A huge wave of "I'm leaving" energy on day one, a genuine infrastructure strain on GitLab's end because enough people actually tried, and then by Thursday or Friday it had mostly gone quiet again. My own GitHub feed looks basically the same as it did two weeks ago. People are still opening issues, still merging PRs, still arguing about tabs versus spaces in comment threads nobody asked for. The exodus was mostly a mood, not a migration.
I don't want to be the guy who says outrage on the internet doesn't matter, because sometimes it absolutely does, and companies have walked back decisions because enough people got loud fast enough. But this felt more like a group venting session than an actual movement. Most of the projects that made noise about leaving are, as far as I can tell, still on GitHub right now, today, as I'm typing this.
If Microsoft actually starts messing with GitHub in obvious ways once the deal closes, forcing weird integrations, burying features behind an Azure login, whatever, I'll be first in line with my pitchfork. But judging a company on what it might do isn't the same as judging it on what it's done, and so far what Microsoft's done with open source lately has been pretty decent. I'm reserving the outrage for if it's earned.
Still haven't gone back to finish that GitLab import, though. Some things just aren't worth the forty minutes.