During June of last year, one of the biggest providers of version
control services, Github, was acquired by Microsoft. What repercussions
does this entail and how is the future of such services? What can we
extrapolate of such decision? To truly understand the questions in
matter, we need to focus on what we are storing. Data is vital to every
aspect of development, ranging from how we manipulate it, where we store
it and who do we entrust our precious information with. Who has access
to it, what law protects it from unintended use and what projects may
branch out of it. Information has become so critical to us that in order
to keep it safe, we have developed mechanisms to keep a tight control
on how we collaborate and store it.
Data hosting services are
nothing new, we've had Rapidshare, Megaupload and other companies all
provide data hosting services for years before Github was even a thing.
While the services they provide are in essence different, they are all
handling and storing data for end users with paid and free hosting
paradigms. These free plans were the first step towards the snowball
that slowly led the industry to accommodate to newer and different
approaches to paid and free repository services.
To show, or not to show?
GitHub
has always had a free storage option, but in the past, that free tier
was limited to public repositories, where everyone is able to see and
fork a copy of your hard work. If you were an aspiring developer who
wanted to delve into source control at first, the best affordable option
was to make your code public. Even after landing your first developer
job, when it comes time to move on or work on a side project, you might
not want to have your work out, available for anyone or for your current
employer to see and make assumptions out of. A company that in the past
held a free Github account for their source code in serious business
projects usually had as much credibility as a three dollar bill.
Repercussions
At
the end of the day, the deal was almost inevitable, whether it had been
Google, Apple or another company within the cloud of conglomerates that
could have bought Github. So what does it mean for the world's biggest
crowd-sourced code repository to be bought by the world's biggest
software company? For starters, it means that now Microsoft has the
ability to access the repositories of roughly 28 million developers and
organizations. Secondly, Github suddenly becomes a standard for future
companies that might ever want to start with a source control service.
Developers won't be settling for less than the minimum they obtain for
free, and from our perspective, freelance software developers won't be
settling for anything else.
With this being said, the future holds
new and exciting plans as these platforms will continue to shift into
different pricing plans, now instead of being a nuisance to developers
and logistics, they will move to providing different tools along with
the hosting service they provide and for one, I am curious of what we
will see in the following years as we expect more and more companies
adhere to these new plans.
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