text stringlengths 0 1.22k |
|---|
**Jerod Santo:** Well, those stocks are publicly traded, so they're as good as cash in terms of you can immediately turn around and sell that stock... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** Unless there's like vesting, and stuff... I don't know how these how these insentives work. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, there's always some sort of details. |
**Jerod Santo:** But yes, I think that's definitely worth pointing out. The speed at which this happened - of course, on the outside it all looks very fast, because as we said, we heard the rumor on Friday, and then on Monday we have official announcements from both parties... Microsoft on their official blog, and then... |
So this conversation here, this Spotlight we're doing is to just share initial reactions... Both of these companies are a big part of our world, and this will have, like I said on Changelog News, broad, sweeping implications, and we're just not sure what they are. Things are going to change, they could be better, they ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a couple different angles you can look at this, though... One, it's a success story, right? Three fellas got together one time in a bar, decided on an idea, executed, it was a Rails app... This was a darling of a thing; it's grown into something different, so the facets of which you can look... |
\[04:05\] Then you look at it like "How is this gonna change the community? How is this gonna change the way open source communities organize and ship software... Primarily, a lot of that happens on GitHub, although it's not the only place... It is the primary place, so when you mention open source, it's sort of as lik... |
On one side, I remember sitting in the room with Chris and Tom in 2008, literally three months after they created GitHub, and they were just like very nonchalant... It was not at all the GitHub it is today. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I can remember sitting there and thinking like, this is the next big thing. Everybody knows it, but it wasn't there yet. So on one side of my perspective, I'm like "Congrats. Huge congrats on this momentous occasion, this huge success." From zero to 7.5 billion is not easy. And then also, at the sam... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. And from Chris' perspective... Like I said, the pain on whether your happy or sad or mad or joyful - it kind of depends on who you are and where you're at, and from Chris' perspective specifically, and no doubt too the early holders of GitHub equity, it's a huge win. And we know that Chr... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This is the second time, too. He had to step back into CEO, and this is the second time stepping down. |
**Jerod Santo:** So this landing at Microsoft is not simply a cash deal from that perspective, it actually comes with it a CEO, a replacement for Chris, which is Nat Friedman, one of the co-founders of Xamarin, who's been at Microsoft for a couple of years with -- Miguel de Icaza came there when Xamarin was acquired, a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** 400 million, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** What's that, the acquisition? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The Xamarin acquisition I believe was around 400 million. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, sounds right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So that's happening, and Nat has a good post up - which is kind of funny - on a GitHub Pages domain, called Hello, GitHub, which we'll link up, but which you've all probably seen on Reddit, as these things are making waves through our community. |
So that's happening, from Chris' perspective. From Microsoft's perspective - what does this mean for Microsoft? We can talk about what it means for GitHub, and then we can talk about what it means for every day users like you and myself. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** At some point I wanna speculate a little bit... So if we can't talk about it now, let's earmark the fact that, given that conversation we've had with Julia White at Build, I have this suspicion that their next move will be to open source it somehow... |
**Jerod Santo:** To open source GitHub... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, like go to an open core model of some sort, too. Give the community what they have been asking for, which is -- they open sourced so much, and I think GitHub had to hold their technology somewhat close to their vest to get to this point... But I think now - I'd personally like to see Microsoft... |
What do they have to lose? I guess 7.5 billion dollars in stock...? \[laughter\] That's a lot of money. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, they already signed that away, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They did. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there's a lot of value there. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But consider all the developers that will leave just because of the Microsoft name... And you and I know, we've been tracking this story for several years on this change, that we began skeptically on this story, but over time you and I have both sort of like lightened up to the suspicion of Microsof... |
\[08:14\] And we talked to folks inside of VS Code about just the way that project is run - that's super open source. And we see a lot of that change, and I just hope that others kind of give them a chance to at least state their case before they say they're totally bad. |
**Jerod Santo:** I agree with you that the -- well, on both accounts, first of all; I think that open sourcing it would win a lot of street cred for them on the community's behalf, and I also agree that we've seen this transition that by my best take is not a facade, is not a front, is not just marketing talk. It's leg... |
But let's talk about our initial reactions, and then we'll talk about community reactions, because there have been both positive and negative community reactions... But I wanted to start with the way you felt, because when you wrote about it a little bit, even talking in our Slack - this fired up quite an interesting l... |
You seemed very optimistic about this long-term. Is that a fair assessment of the way you felt about it initially? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm positive, because that's my nature. It's not because -- I think because of our history in the conversation of trusting or not trusting, and the evolution of Microsoft, and that shift, because of that (only because of that) can I be more comfortable... And I'm just naturally the kind of person to... |
And everybody may not agree with the direction he takes it, but I think he would hand it off - or have enough couth - to hand it off to the right kind of next leadership. He's also looking at the next ten years, so he's not just saying like "Okay, for the next 1-2 years Microsoft will manage this well." No, he's thinki... |
**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm. Somewhat mixed bag of emotions... My first reaction was just surprise. And I wasn't surprised for Microsoft's side. It makes total sense from them. I call that shrewd business from them, right? That's just a good move, in my opinion. I was surprised that GitHub would sell to Microsoft; not becau... |
Now, I know they had some losses early on, but startups have losses all the time. So the revenue was happening. What was it - like 98 million in revenue in 2016, something like that... It seemed like, from the very start, GitHub had good financial ground. And we know they've had some ups and downs with regard to leader... |
So because I wasn't thinking about those things, I was just surprised that GitHub would sell. And the more I thought about it, and I've had -- these are Friday afternoon feelings for me... But the question is "Will this happen?" I was thinking -- it seemed like it was actually a rumor, but a pretty solid rumor, so I th... |
\[12:12\] Now, do I think it's a net win or a net loss for the greater developer community? I don't know, man... \[laughs\] I'm probably slightly less optimistic than you are, but not necessarily a doomsayer with this circumstance. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'll address that skepticism and rewind a little bit. I think totally having one of the Big Four - Big Four as noted by Scott Galloway: Microsoft, Google, Amazon... Who else? Who is the fourth? |
**Jerod Santo:** Facebook? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Facebook. So all four of those are deeply investing into open source. GitHub is where "open source happens", and one of those takes ownership of that place. Something's gonna change, naturally. Hopefully, it stays a neutral ground, which is why I think everybody's pushing for an independent GitHub. ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and I feel like most of it is my support for independent business. That's where I feel like something's been lost, where it's like, this is consolidation of power, even if we think that's benevolent power; if we think that that's going to produce more value than it's going to take, which is kind ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** But for me it's just like, there was an independent entity, and now that's gone. That entity is not just any -- like, it's been a core center of our life for the last ten years... Our business life, at least. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, literally. |
**Jerod Santo:** So that's like a little bit of the skepticism or the sadness. This actually resonates with what -- I pulled a few tweets out, to get everybody's reactions, and here's one from a fella named Masukomi on Twitter... He says, "Now that it's official, I have to admit - my emotional reaction is sadness. I do... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, I think it remains to be seen, but it seems clear that change is coming. What that change is, we may not know. If they can promise to the other bigger players who may have concerns and stop using GitHub, which may change the ecosystem and social network that it has become for programmers a... |
The other thing to consider is the viability of GitHub. You alluded to their revenue and run rate, and loss, and things like that... Obviously, they're a business; it's not just this happy place, free code gets hosted, and somehow magically it does. Bills get paid, money has to get made, it's a business. |
The next step for GitHub to become the GitHub that needs to be there for the next 10 years to keep that going needs to be a GitHub that can go through either, dare I say, an ICO or an IPO, right? ICOs are interesting new ways to fund things through cryptocurrencies; there's been a lot of speculation around that... Or a... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.