How GitHub became the nexus of software automation | ZDNet
▻https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-github-sneaked-up-on-us-to-become-the-nexus-of-software-automation
To call GitHub a website is to call Italy a place to eat. GitHub is the leading practitioner of an emerging marketplace — and yes, it may legitimately be called a “market” because it does generate revenue. It earned, by several estimates, over $200 million in revenue in 2017, and was evidently valuable enough to Microsoft to prompt it to purchase GitHub outright, in a $7.5 billion all-stock deal last June.
It is accurate and fair to say that GitHub created a market in the supply of open-source software, and the automation of its deployment. There are other competitors in this market, most notably GitLab and Atlassian’s Bitbucket. It’s the presence of those players that legitimizes this market.
What GitHub has become is the most effective example to date of a web service that absorbs the function of an entire industry’s supply chain. Open-source software has been shared online in the past, with SourceForge being one of the most effective practitioners. But the distribution of software through SourceForge, and sites like it, takes place using a content management system — a platform best suited for folks using web browsers.
What does deserve further scrutiny as time goes on, however, is how this deal, by legitimizing the open-source delivery pipeline as a top-tier industry, will alter the character of the open-source movement. If it was ever truly a counter-culture, it certainly isn’t one now. Although GitHub’s profitability may not be directly due to the popularity of sharing code, it is indeed tied to the automated, pipelined supply chain to which open source gave rise. If that model is truly as influential as open source proponents assert it to be, then nothing Microsoft would do to change it one way or the other, in the long run, should have any noticeable effect.
#Logiciel_libre #GitHub #Industrie_du_logiciel #Neurocapitalisme