Microsoft's Developer Charm Offensive

Just around two years ago, Microsoft surprised the developer community by acquiring GitHub, generating mixed sentiment in the open-source developer community. Although GitHub itself was not really open-source, the company hosted a significant portion of the world’s most popular open-source projects.

Our M&A analysis team at Kähler AI compiled a survey asking developers subscribed to our sister company Nanosai about their opinion on the acquisition. Back then the feeling was somewhat skeptical as illustrated below:

Recently though, our signals indicate a significant shift to a more positive feeling towards Microsoft. When the startup called NPM Inc (the company behind the popular JavaScript developer tool NPM aka Node Package Manager) was in disarray recently, developers and CTOs around the world were panicking about a potentially huge disruption if the startup collapsed. This is because NPM hosts over 1.3 million packages, serving about 75 billion downloads a month. Thankfully, Microsoft owned GitHub and stepped in to acquire NPM Inc, prompting the developer community to breathe a sigh of relief.

‘‘Central to our approach is the belief that the security of open source can only be achieved by all members of the open source community working together. We think npm, as a core part of the open source infrastructure, will let us move open source security forward in meaningful ways. The biggest opportunities are around making the workflows from authoring, validation, and publishing more consistent and secure. ‘‘ - GitHub

Today, GitHub is making a huge change to its already popular repo - potentially bad news for GitLab! The company announced that it’s opening up a new, free tier for developers that want to use the code repository for private development.

• GitHub Free for organizations is immediately available and includes private repositories for unlimited users

• All organizations previously using Team for Open Source now have GitHub Free

• GitHub Free for individual developers now includes unlimited collaborators

• Organizations and individuals using GitHub Free will receive GitHub Community Support

• GitHub Pro will now include 2GB of Packages storage and 10GB of data transfer

• GitHub Pro now has a reduced monthly price of $4

• GitHub Team now has a reduced monthly price of $4 per user with no minimum seat requirement

• GitHub Team will include 3,000 Actions minutes per month for private repositories after May 14

We’ll be updating our developer survey over the coming weeks and share the results with you!

Can GitLab keep up long the term fight against GitHub for developers’ hearts & souls? Share your thoughts with our team!

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