Last week, the news that caught our attention was undoubtedly the purchase of GitHub by Microsoft for the not insignificant figure of 7,500 million dollars . And the other thing that also caught the attention was the reaction of the open source community, a lot of skepticism, thousands of repositories being moved to GitLab and concerns about the future of the reference platform for developers around the world.
However, in the open source world there is an organization that seems not to share any of these fears and in fact thinks that it is good news: the Linux Foundation . In an article written by Jim Zemlin, director of the foundation that has been offering support to open source communities for 18 years, explain just that, and that ” we should celebrate the intelligent movement of Microsoft because it is good news .”
Zemlin states that he decided to wait a few days before writing his thoughts on the subject since it is something that deserves much reflection. But he concludes that this is good news for the open source world .
In the open source community there are still small spaces of very deep distrust towards Microsoft. I accept my responsibility for that, I spent a good portion of my career getting involved with Microsoft, something that the previous management was doing too easy. But times have changed and it is time to recognize that we have all grown – the industry, the open source community and even me.
Zemlin says that probably the open source community should not be worried about this, that buying GitHub is not a sinister plan by Microsoft to take over the more than 70 million open source projects on the platform. “Most of the important projects on GitHub are under open source licenses, which also address who owns the intellectual property.”
Jim sees this as many others, not a sudden change, but the evolution of a Microsoft that has long since become one of the biggest contributors to Linux , that develops and distributes Linux products, that opened .NET, and that also support the same Linux Foundation as a platinum member since 2016.