All of a sudden there was this announcement from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. I have been a member of Github since 2012 and have most of my Open Source projects as well as this blog hosted there. My first thought was “there goes my cloud repo”.

Cause for concern

As a developer, I have been burned by Microsoft on a couple of occassions, like when I had invested time and effort into learning Silverlight, only for them to introduce drastic changes and eventually deprecate the platform. That move is very similar to the change from AngularJS to Angular, as I had the same issue after learning AngularJS along with the Ionic Platform.

Likewise I am glad, that I didn’t spend time and effort into the Windows mobile platform which also seems to be dead. (I had the opportunity to learn and develop Android apps instead).

I absolutely hate the way Skype works as well as Internet Explorer. Haven’t even tried Edge.

I’m sure people will have more examples. But I don’t trust their intention yet, maybe a couple of years down the line rebrand GitHub as Visual Studio Code Repositoy and messup the system.

Not to Worry?

Having ranted about all my concerns, the new Microsoft under Satya Nadella has embraced open source and contributes to a lot of Open Source tools and most usefully, Visual Studio Code. Taking about VS Code, this takeover could mean the end of Atom. We just have to wait and see the direction they wpuld go with this acquisition.

Next Steps

As with most developers, I went ahead and created an account in GitLab and imported all my GitHub projects there, as a sort of Cloud backup. It is an easy process and by signing up, I was able to get the same usename I have on GitHub as well.

For the time being, I would be keeping this blog hosted here and use GitHub repos as my primary Open Source repo and see how things develop.

References

• https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/
• https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
• https://gitlab.com/midhunhk