Of all the companies to acquire GitHub, Microsoft is probably the best. What was a critical piece of internet infrastructure held up under a venture capital model will now at least be sustained by one of the biggest tentpole companies in the software industry. They will presumably be able to bring some organizational support and work to shore up the sites notoriously rocky reliability. And a company like Microsoft will hopefully not be able to shrug off a sexual harassment claim the way GitHub did.

I don’t see this alleviating a major problem with software engineering culture, the over-reliance on GitHub as a centralized home of code. Git is distributed by nature and most of the value added by GitHub (PRs, issues, wikis, etc.) are found on competitive platforms like GitLab and Bitbucket. But many companies rely exclusively on GitHub, and many tools like Travis CI support GitHub exclusively. Competition makes everyone better, and Microsoft will probably use its existing platforms to further lock in developers and companies and reduce competition.

I personally use a self-hosted instance of GitLab on my VPS server (which is quite easy to install nowadays), which provides me with all the features I would want and an unlimited capacity of private repositories. I use it for continuous integration and continuous deployment with its built-in Docker image registry, and those images get deployed automatically to servers. I’m hoping to do a tutorial on setting that up.

Interesting timing with WWDC kicking off tomorrow, though.

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