Microsoft is purchasing Github for 7.5 billion USD. But with all private and public repositries now falling under the policy direction of a single software vendor, what political or practical impacts do you guys feel this will have on the open source community; especially on the miriad of contributors to our OpenWRT/Lede project?
The Linux Foundation is another entity supported/paid for by corporations. It has been set up to further the use of Linux in the corporate world (and there's nothing wrong with that). Its interests are corporate; they aren't overly concerned about the desktop end-users. They just have a totally different focus than you and me tinkering with our hardware and 'liberating' it.
People who predict Microsoft will use their 'embrace, extend, extinguish' philosophy on Github are fearmongering. Unless Redmond has poured tons of money in the last few years into a huge (and impressive) smokescreen to trick people into believing their corporate culture has actually changed, not much will be happening for the worse with Github short/mid term. If this was all an elaborate ruse, then hats off to them, because they got me. Github competitors stand to gain from people believing Microsoft will burn down the Github house; that means more customers for them. So of course you won't any of these companies/foundations/... saying the purchase is a good thing. They want you to host your code with them, not Github.
I was sceptical too, at first - but Microsoft has made great strides in its atitude towards FOSS, even if it's mostly because they have realised they too could benefit from it. It took them a competitor like Google - who prides itself on supporting open source, but leeches from it more than Microsoft could ever have hoped to do (!) - to realise that; but they finally came around. FOSS doesn't need to hurt your business; it can extend it, you can use it as building blocks, lower your overhead (like Google has done, like Apple has done: FOSS building blocks, and the secret sauce is jealously guarded like Microsoft guards all of its OS code e.g.).
These are different times; hell seems to have frozen over a few times already since I started using FOSS. But with Microsoft, this is not a sudden change of heart; if you have kept an eye on Microsoft, you know this has been a gradual process. Balmer isn't running Microsoft anymore. Bill Gates neither.
Even if MS decides to make "bad things" with it, GitHub is just the repository where the code is placed; owning GitHub does not give them any power over the code or the project, and moving to another repository (like GitLab or similar) is relatively straightforward.
This repository is a mirror of https://git.openwrt.org/openwrt/openwrt.git It is for reference only and is not active for check-ins or for reporting issues. We will continue to accept Pull Requests here. They will be merged via staging trees then into openwrt.git. All issues should be reported at: https://bugs.openwrt.org