Some developers think it’s the beginning of the end for GitHub as they know it as the platform gears up for a leadership change.
On Aug. 11, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke shared an internal post sent to employees with the GitHub community announcing his departure from the company at the end of the year. Dohmke, who became CEO of the cloud-based platform in 2021, said GitHub and its leadership team would “continue its mission” as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization. The company has not yet named a successor to Dohmke, who plans to found a startup following his exit.
Microsoft formed its CoreAI division early this year. The purpose of the engineering organization is to “build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack” for Microsoft’s first- and third-party customers to build AI apps and agents. The branch is also responsible for building out GitHub Copilot.
What’s all the (Git)Hubbub? While GitHub has long been a part of Microsoft’s Core AI organization and has not disclosed any changes to its terms of service for its users as part of the organizational shift, the leadership transition has left some feeling a bit uneasy.
Amirul Islam Al Mamun, a data engineer at Truxco Energy, a sustainable energy solutions company, told IT Brew that the announcement signals the “final step” for GitHub’s loss of independence. Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. At the time, the tech giant said the platform would maintain its “developer-first ethos” and operate independently.
“Honestly, when I first saw it, I was like, ‘Bye GitHub, it was nice knowing you,’” he said.
Islam Al Mamun said the loss of independence, even if just “symbolic” for now, has caused some to fear that GitHub will begin “feeding Microsoft’s AI ambition,” focusing on AI-first features as opposed to the needs of the developer.
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“Even if nothing breaks tomorrow, it feels like your favorite neighborhood café just got bought by a [giant chain],” Islam Al Mamun said. “So, you know the coffee will still come, but you are not sure if it will taste the same.”
Rafid Hossain, CTO of the global gifting marketplace Sugary, said his concerns were around the safety of private repository codes and the high trust he has had in the platform will remain.
“The main concern, the thing we are worried about, is that our code is being used to train an AI model,” he said.
Microsoft did not respond to IT Brew’s request for comment on the concerns. A spokesperson for GitHub also declined to comment beyond Dohmke’s post.
What the people want. Following the announcement, some GitHub users hope to continue to see business as usual.
“From the platform perspective, what I would really like to see is basically no change,” said Csongor Keller, a freelance software engineer and avid GitHub user.
Some users say major changes in terms of service and user experience could make or break their loyalty to the platform. For Adriel Martins, a senior machine learning engineer at cloud consulting and engineering company Caylent, a shift away from transparency and freemium services would cause him to seek out alternatives in the market.
“If there is a [change of] direction in that grand quality, or being [closed-source], or training on my data, or not privacy-focused, I’m switching,” Martins said. “And my guess is…30%, 40% of GitHub would move to GitLab eventually over [a] 10-yearspan.”