Microsoft’s acquisition of Github for over $7 billion seems like a Manhattan Project coming to completion; or a Henry Kissinger plot to maintain global supremacy through destabilization.

A wonderful outcome for Microsoft would be mass flight from Github, folks fractioned across a couple different platforms. And then we’ll make more Github alternatives to fix the shortcomings of the current ones, and the user-base will break up more. As you can already expect, there will be crypto-currency-based scams and federation, and yet more platforms in that vain and more splintering (personally, I hope the latter succeeds).

But we had it really, really good being centralized. The open source community may never again be as much a collective body as it was under Github, and that’s why it was bought. The centralization of it was a big part of it’s power, and it’s threat to Microsoft.

And yet staying on Github isn’t an option either, and they’ll make sure of it.

If you haven’t heard the name @jamiebuilds, I still bet most readers have used more software they’ve majorly contributed to than you’ve used from Microsoft in the web/Node space. They’re a massive contributor to Babel, Flow and Yarn, and created the official websites for each. But their top-contributor status goes way back to once-popular Backbone projects too. And to make all their projects, and yours, easier to deploy to package managers, they co-created the quickly-becoming-standard Lerna. Dozens of articles and speeches around the world, and open LGBTQ identity make them a role model to me and surely many more devs.