UPDATED 10:09 EDT / NOVEMBER 11 2019

INFRA

Q&A: Inside Microsoft’s embrace of GitHub’s strong open-source community

Over the years it seemed Microsoft Corp. was pretty looked down on open-source computing communities. But after Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft’s chief executive officer about five years ago, that strategy began to change. And after the tech giant’s $7.5 billion acquisition of code hosting platform GitHub Inc. in 2018, the company signaled a transformative embrace of open source

Today, Microsoft is planning to use its large resources to boost GitHub’s innovation and then get out of the way, according to Edward Thomson (pictured), product manager at GitHub. One example of this strategy include the recently announced GitHub Actions, which helps developers in GitHub automate workflows.  

“I joined Microsoft about 10 years ago,” Thomson said. “They were not geared up to deal with open source, to use open source — certainly not to contribute to open source. And so that’s the Microsoft that I first saw. And to get from there to here is incredible.

Thomson spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed the GitHub acquisition, Microsoft embracing open source, and GitHub Actions (see the full interview with transcript here). 

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: I’m interested in the culture and maybe culture clash … because Microsoft developers have their own culture. So how does that work, and what has it been like the second time around, this new Microsoft? 

Thomson: The interesting thing about Microsoft is that with so many people, it’s not just like a homogeneous, big company. We do have the developer tools division, which is a little bit different than Office, which is a little bit different than Windows. And so they all have their own sort of unique cultures. And now GitHub slots in as its own unique culture. And we can talk to each other, and we can understand each other, but we don’t necessarily have to be all the same.

Miniman: Every time I’ve seen an open-source company get bought by a public company, there’s always that online backlash. What are you seeing? How has the community reacted over the last year?  

Thomson: I think that Microsoft has allowed GitHub to operate independently. I think a lot of people expected all of a sudden everything to change, and I don’t think everything did change. I think that GitHub now has more resources than it used to to be able to tackle bigger and more challenging problems. I think that GitHub now can hire more and deploy to more places. And so I really just think that we’re going to keep doing exactly what we’ve been doing, just better.

Knight: You’re about to announce the new repository with lots of new capabilities, enabling users to deploy to any cloud. So tell us a little bit about this new tool.  

Thomson: So we announced [what] we call the GitHub Actions. We announced it last year at GitHub Universe, our annual developer conference. And our goal with GitHub Actions was to allow … our users to take those repositories and automate common tasks. So that’s what we did a year ago, and we opened it up into the beta program. And we really quickly got feedback that people liked it and were doing some really innovative things. But the one thing that people really wanted to automate was their builds. 

And we basically built a new platform that supported all of that repository automation capability that we had planned for in the first place, but also allowed for continuous integration build and deployments. We wanted to be absolutely tool-agnostic, so any operating system, any language, and cloud-agnostic. We want to let anybody deploy anywhere, whether it’s to a public cloud or on-premises. 

Knight: So [GitHub] Universe is happening next week. What are some of the most exciting things that you’re looking forward to? 

Thomson: So the biggest thing for me is talking to people about GitHub Actions and showing what they can do with Actions … but we’ve got a lot of other interesting stuff. You know, we’ve done a lot in the last year since our last Universe. We’ve done a lot on the security space. We’ve both built tools and acquired some, and so we’ll be talking about those. GitHub Package Registry, which goes along really well with GitHub Actions. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU