Crypto community react to Microsoft buying Githubs in a $7.5 Billion Acquisition

Microsoft, a leading tech company has decided to buy San Francisco-based company known as GitHub for $7.5 Billion, for the supposed acquisition of the world's most popular code repository, that is also an essential tool for Blockchain developers. Github, as of 2018 hosts up to 27 Million software developers working on 80 Million repositories of code, making it the most popular service among Blockchain developer to utilize. Check out this Website that sums up some of the recent progress and milestones of Github

It’s also a social network of sorts for developers, especially for a platform like Steemit that has community backed developers in different parts of the world, who come together to work on improving Steem's Code on Github. Developers interested in improving Steem can submit a proposal on Github and it allows coders to easily work with one another, making Github the ideal social network for Coders

By now, it's already a habit for Blockchain enthusiasts to find the official Github of a Cryptocurrency Project that they're interested in, with the intention of reviewing code to determine whether there is a group of people actively working on the project, GitHub activity is definitely an interesting metric when analyzing ICOs and crypto projects. If you're interested, check out Santiment.net a website that tracks dev activity and compares projects based on Github Metric stats. You'll find out that Steem/Ethereum/Bitcoin have the achievement of getting most coding done by committed individuals based on Github activity alone

Even though Github was a for-profit company, it has essentially become an integral part of the decentralized open-source Crypto community. GitHub offers free hosting for open-source projects and has risen to become the premier service for collaborative, open-source development: the authoritative source repository for many of these projects, with GitHub's own particular pull-request-based workflow becoming a de facto standard approach for taking code contributions. Open-source software allows developers to tinker with, improve upon and share code -- an approach that threatened Microsoft’s business model.

Do we need to be concerned of the latest acquisition of Github? Since a majority of Cryptocurrency project rely on Github services and it has become the preferred code repository for popular projects like Ethereum. The answer to that is, No! Because Github can be replaced with an alternative data repository as explained by Ivan on Tech in the Video below

However, the fact that a Tech giant like Microsoft who have also shown great interests in Blockchain Technology in the past has been eager to own Github for quite some time now, leaving us with some uncertainty as to the main motive behind this acquisition. There seems to be some backlash from communities of developers, as to the impact this will have on the CryptoSpace

It's not just the Crypto Community but developers from around the World are disappointed with Microsoft, claiming that the company is centralized and is not be trusted by the open-source Community as Microsoft have the intention of generating profit.

Companies that are too big to fail and that lose money are a dangerous combination, people have warned about GitHub becoming as large as it did as problematic because it concentrates too much of the power to make or break the open source world in a single entity.

Microsoft pointed out that GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and is going to operate independently in order to provide an open platform, giving us the impression that they understand the responsibility and value proposition of Github and plan on retaining its value in the future

We have yet to see the outcome of this acquisition, as Microsoft seems to have a better plan on how it intends to operate GitHub after the expensive buyout. With the growing concern of centralization, groups of Crypto enthusiasts are worried and considering alternative services like GitLab as the result of Microsoft acquisition. Time will tell if Microsoft manages to successfully maintain GitHub as the world's most popular data repository and gain the trust of the Blockchain Community regardless of its history of takeovers and conspiracy theories surrounding the company interests in Blockchain Technology

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