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I'm not sure why this is an article. It's obviously because Microsoft has a reputation for harming open source software. That reputation was very fairly earned, regardless of the company's current stance. The sad part is that no matter what happens now, Microsoft will never get any credit for doing anything right with GitHub. If a new feature is released and people don't immediately like it, it will be, "See, I knew Microsoft would ruin GitHub," or "It doesn't matter that this is optional, it means that Microsoft is trying to control our workflow!" If a new feature is released and people like it, it will be, "I bet Microsoft is going start charging for feature," or "Yeah, but if you spend 50 times the effort, this other forge site kind of almost does the same thing," or "This is just Microsoft trying to shove GitHub down our throats." If GitLab or similar open source forges fail because it can't find a sustainable business model or because GitHub remains an actual better product, people will blame Microsoft for "intentionally destroying GitLab to get a monopoly over forge sites." Regardless of how paranoid the reactions to GitHub are in the future, you can bet that a large portion of the community will be unable to look past their hatred of the company. That's not entirely unwise, and Microsoft isn't the only company with this kind of extremely poor reputation (Oracle and Facebook) or just increasingly unfavorable reputations (Amazon, Google, and Apple), but that doesn't make it less reactionary, either. |