Is the fox about to gain control of the hen house? The twitter-sphere, blog-sphere and general tech news sites are all agog today with speculation that Microsoft, once the arch-enemy of the open source movement, is about to acquire GitHub, the world's largest repository of open source code and an essential tool for open source software coders. GitHub is also a social network of sorts for developers.
Speculation started on Friday when Business Insider reported that talks had been taking place between the companies. Quoting unnamed sources, the report noted that the companies had been having on-again-off-again talks for some years, but that these had become "more serious" in recent weeks.
Also on Friday, CNBC reported that talks between the companies had touched on discussions around a possible investment or outright acquisition, but it was unclear whether the talks were still ongoing. An unnamed source was quoted as saying that Microsoft was unwilling to pay the price GitHub was asking for a full acquisition.
Then on Sunday, business and financial news organisation Bloomberg, quoting yet more unnamed sources "familiar with the matter", reported that the deal had apparently been struck and the details would likely be announced on Monday (today). And the Internet went wild.
However, by midday (SA time) today, no announcement had been made. Bearing in mind Redmond, Washington where Microsoft's head office is located, is nine hours behind SA, it could be hours before any announcement is made: if an announcement is made. Neither Microsoft nor GitHub has issued any comment or statement about the speculation since Friday.
Nevertheless, there seems to be little doubt in the minds of open source industry watchers that the announcement is just a formality: for most, the deal is done. And opinions on the matter vary widely.
On the one hand, there's a commonly expressed fear that Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub would give the giant software company full access to the millions of private projects that companies and developers are currently hosting through GitHub's premium service. There were dozens of negative comments, similar to this one: "MS simply can't be trusted the way a neutral entity like Github can. Would Google host code here?"
An information poll run on a popular tech Web site which asked whether its readers would continue to use GitHub if speculation about its sale to Microsoft was correct, produced an unequivocal response: more than two-thirds of respondents said they would move their code repositories to a different service; the rest said they would stay with GitHub.
Those two thirds, and many other members of the open source community, appear to have long memories and are not yet prepared to forgive Microsoft for its highly critical stance regarding open source back in the early 2000s. At that point in time, the open source movement was a direct threat to Microsoft's business model.
However, a great deal has changed since then. Not only is Microsoft under current CEO Satya Nadella supportive of many flavours of Linux, it uses open source models on some of its major cloud and other products itself. In fact, Microsoft is now one of the largest contributors to GitHub.
GitHub, which hosts some 27 million software developers working on 80 million repositories of code, has been in a state of uncertainty following the resignation of its CEO and one of the company's co-founders, Chris Wanstrath, last August. The company has reportedly been battling financially.
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