Yesterday morning, rumors were rife in the tech media world that global tech giant Microsoft is all set to buy software development platform GitHub. By the afternoon, it was confirmed the Microsoft acquired GitHub at a whopping amount of $7.5 billion.
The merger was officially announced on GitHub’s Twitter account.
We're thrilled to announce that we've entered into an acquisition agreement with @Microsoft! https://t.co/4DezuXTJfV pic.twitter.com/LUZxjXFVVw
— GitHub (@github) June 4, 2018
GitHub’s acquisition: What’s the fuss about?
GitHub is the most popular git repository with the largest number of users and projects. However, since the announcement of the acquisition, the developer’s community has not taken the news very positively.
They’re in a bit of worry that Microsoft buying GitHub might actually result in the downfall of the platform if the company brings commercial interest perspective to the independent platform. Similar to what Microsoft has done in the past with its other several acquisitions.
Devs lack trust!
Going by the track record, the company bought the popular online audio-video call app Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion. But since Microsoft acquired the platform, the active users started to decrease, reason being, the company forced users to migrate to Microsft’s email domain to use the service.
While many registered users got blocked-off their own accounts, others switched to simpler alternatives to Skype, leading to almost death of the platform.
Hence, devs are concerned, that the acquisition of GitHub will bring a lot of changes to the platform and are continuously switching to rival GitLab. The Dutch startup has seen a 10-fold increase in the number of developers moving their repositories across from GitHub, since yesterday.
They even took Twitter to announce the same and also promoted offers for devs joining.
GitLab: Why the Dutch startup is the best alternative!
The Dutch startup already has big clients in its kitty including NASA, CERN, Alibaba, SpaceX, O’Reilly, IBM, and Expedia. GitLab works on a slightly different model as compared to GitHub and lets users keep an unlimited number of private code stores online at once, without any cap on how many programmers can access them.
On the other hand, GitHub has an unlimited number of public repositories for free and has different paid tiers for private ones. Further, GitLab also lets companies download and run GitLab on their own servers for free under an open-source license.
GitLab is the second most popular choice after GitHub. And with Microsft’s acquisition, it seems it won’t take time for the Dutch platform to score the top position.
Furthermore, GitLab is providing easy migration from GitHub, though at a cost. The company reportedly is offering paid hosted services with an option of not forcing users to deploy GitLab on their own server.
Reportedly, GitLab is also running a Twitter hashtag #MovingtoGitLab, boosting users to share their stories and reasons to quit GitHub.
We're seeing 10x the normal daily amount of repositories #movingtogitlab https://t.co/7AWH7BmMvM We're scaling our fleet to try to stay up. Follow the progress on https://t.co/hN0ce379SC and @movingtogitlab
— GitLab (@gitlab) June 3, 2018
Other alternatives
Meanwhile, there are other alternatives in the market too. Apart from GitLab, a traffic switch has also been reported by Bitbucket and SourceForge, which provide similar services.
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech media world!
