With Microsoft and IBM recently acquiring GitHub Inc. and Red Hat Inc., respectively, the two tech giants have put themselves in the middle of the open source world, according to Silicon Angle. Microsoft has been heavily involved in open source and IBM, with its purchase of Red Hat, will be joining it as one of the world’s top open source contributors.
Github has over 4,000 employees contributing to its open source software, so Microsoft’s acquisition of the company puts it number of contributors well over that of open source giants like Google (1,850) and Red Hat (1,549).
News of the acquisitions has not been met with smiles from invested members of the community. Many speculate the acquisitions are not sincere investments in the development of open source, but rather are trying to flex their cloud services muscles.
Red Hat isn’t a cloud computing service but it plays a major role in build cloud services, and IBM has been struggled to get to the top of the cloud computing food chain, according to Wired. The acquisition cost $34 billion, the biggest open source deal of all time.
Microsoft, whose purchase was a little slimmer at $7.5, is walking back previous comments that chastised the use of open source software.
Whether people like it or not, these two companies are getting in the open source game. Microsoft has promised to not change GitHub’s services at their core, which includes “developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform.”
On the flip side, GitHub has said this new relationship will help them to “empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.” GitHub’s CEO Nat Friedman added, “We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform or cloud.”
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