alt Hacker NewsI feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.
As so often happens, that didn't last long.
Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.
I'm sure there are countless other examples.
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> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money
It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"
Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.
Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
GitHub had no reason to sell to Microsoft, they could have remained the bootstrapped company they started as, and rode the SaaS boom, since they were profitable on day 1. Seems a bit unfair to blame Microsoft though, because it was the founders who decided they wanted that sweet VC funding and Andreessen was happy to pay out.
Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.
This happens with almost every acquisition from Red Hat to WhatsApp.
If companies actually meant it then they’d sponsor these projects instead of buying them. The reason they choose to buy is so that they can make decisions about the direction of that project. If not immediately, then at least at some point in the future.
GitHub was independent, and then AI happened.
All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going.
> It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. call me a skeptic, but can (and has) such a model existed in a capitalist system?
The problem IMO is that they filled GitHub with Microsoft folks who just don't have the engineering self-sufficient hacker culture that is required to balance the "attraction park" vibe that GitHub paired it with. So now it's just an attraction park for Microsoft employees to go and do silly work with teams of 100 that should have been done by a skilled team of 5 hackers.
I was there for a couple years after the acquisition and just couldn't stand seeing it. I felt I was becoming useless working in a mad house that was becoming more maddening everyday. And MSFT just keeps replacing leadership with more and more disconnected people who just don't get it, who just never used GitHub like the OG users did. Two years ago I interviewed again for my old team, largely out of curiosity, and the Microsoft engineering manager asked me some brain teaser question as my interview. The disconnect is just too large.
They don't take GitHub seriously. It's a toy to MSFT and vibes matter more than the product itself. And they hire for it using MSFT drone logic, fill it with people hired and profiled to be MSFT-lifers, and these two things don't mix.
Sorry I don't have anything great to say. And of course, many of these MSFT folks were actually damn good, but they were swimming in a sea of MSFT drone.