GitHub is Still Waning Under Microsoft, No Wonder It Shut Down Its Physical Offices and Had Several Rounds of Mass Layoffs Last Year
Another round of mass layoffs due later this year? Several perhaps? The "roundup and cull" procedure must have become familiar; they're cutting everything because there is no clear and/or foreseeable path to profitability, so they dabble in code plagiarism as a service (led by con artists), only to face class-action lawsuits. Sooner or later they'll need more lawyers than coders.
The latest status:
THIS year, 2024, it seems safe to assume this: GitHub isn't making any money. It's about control (over the competition), not money. Microsoft's GitHub is not even claiming that it makes any money (net profit) and Microsoft, according to its internal presentations, stays quiet when it needs to distract from something and then lets other people 'fill the gaps' (if they can).
"Merging my own pull requests" (on the left) is still a funny meme and Microsoft constantly shares fake, misleading, outdated numbers to fake GitHub's supposed 'popularity'. We covered examples of that before.
Consider these general trends and trends predating the pandemic. Microsoft, according to its very own figures, saw a significant decrease in the number of new projects choosing GitHub after Microsoft had taken over. Only relics and corrupt (paid by Microsoft, idolising the paymaster) officials seem to insist on "everything Microsoft", even for code/Git hosting. Ask IBM.
That's not to say nobody uses GitHub, GitHub is dead etc. It is just not profitable (the original company, GitHub, could not figure out how to make money either), it is waning, and there are office closures, mass layoffs etc. Aside from GitHub being inherently racist, proprietary and deliberately licence-violating, why would you use GitHub for code hosting? It's not safe at all. There are many risks and uncertainties. The alternatives work fine until there are massive DDoS attacks.
It has been half a decade (about 5.5 years) since Microsoft took over GitHub. It's a shame that regulators did nothing to prevent it. GitHub lets Microsoft exercise control over its rivals. It's more about screwing rivals than about creating something. █
"They [Microsoft] have the deepest of pockets, unlimited ambition, and they are willing to lose money for years and years just to make sure that you don't make any money, either. And they are mean, REALLY mean."
--Robert X. Cringely
"Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers."