GitHub was relatively independent in that hosting git repositories was the only product that it sold and it didn't clearly favor any sort of tech stack. Now, MS says that they will not remove any of the existing functionality, but their press release did hint that they would add features to make it easier to launch apps onto MS platforms like Azure.
The economics were aligned with the customers. The whole business model was based on paying for private services using the same great tooling that was available for open source projects. People developed familiarity with open source and naturally clamored for the same tooling within companies. It was a loss leader of sorts.
Now the economic incentives are different. This would be true if Google acquired Github or if Amazon or Facebook or Twitter or any other company acquired it. Since it's not a standalone company, the parent company optimizing for greatest comprehensive profits will make decisions that are not always optimal if GitHub were standalone.
I'm pretty sure that the economics were aligned with getting bought out by someone. Upselling people who used the free product was not making them profitable and they weren't on the path to profitable.
The GitHub story is complex. There was a time years ago when they were profitable: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... They and Sidekiq were the poster children of bootstrapped profitable businesses around open source. Something very clearly changed (most likely raising a boatload from VC firms and the ensuing perils) that flipped the situation.
Sure, but it isn’t profit motive that I think we should be concerned about in this case. Its the entire space in which GitHub exists is now radically different. Until the buyout, they were an independent company who hosted software repos. Now they are owned by a company who has many many many different interests and ms has a tendency to use most of their various software projects to feed into their own proprietary ecosystem.
There are many ways this might be problematic, all of which are obviously just speculation. I’m just trying to say, an enormous part of the software ecosystem is currently in a really precarious spot and we might be wise to consider and work on some alternatives just to give ourselves some wiggle room should ms decide to behave in ways we’ve seen them behave so many times in the past.