1. A well-known major company sees that people are relying on something broken and it's hindering progress.
2. The company decides to compete with that thing, but it's not part of their mission, so they make it free.
3. Because the new thing is free, and run by a major company, lots of people come to depend on it, even though it's intentionally not the best.
4. Another company builds more competition and works to actually be the best.
5. The major company sees that their original objective of replacing the bad version is fulfilled, so they sunset the thing.
6. People who came to depend on the thing feel betrayed.
This is why we should all be cautious about any non-core free service from major companies.
Github is free for a large class of users, but it's also an enterprise product that feeds off the funnel created by the free userbase. Almost every developer knows github by now, knows how to use it and integrating your own source control management with the place where all of your open source dependencies live is a significant lock-in effect. And while I don't know the numbers for Github, I'd expect that GH itself is profitable or at least could be profitable.
Very close actually. Their strategy has always been to build essential developer tools. Developers, developers, developers.
So I think it is core to the way Microsoft expands and holds market share. And that market has changed to not only want windows only tools, so they change with it. Microsoft culture has always been kind of pragmatic. They were a walled garden for developers when they could get away with it (and still are for some), but now they have opened up a bit out of need.
Microsoft has over six thousand repos on Github including flagships like Typescript and VSCode. For all intents and purposes, it is a core service.
Microsoft is a different beast because so much of their revenue is B2B. Continuity of operations is kind of their whole deal. Google Workspace is the equivalent Google product and they're much less likely to dump a service, unlike the rest of Google.
They're sharing a lot of the resources as pragmatically as possible it seems. GH Actions and DevOps workflows are really similar, and afaik run on the same clusters of hardware.
There's also some pretty decent integration features for DevOps projects with source control in GitHub for that matter iirc. Not to mention the potential upsell to/from GH Enterprise and/or Azure DevOps.
I can imagine at some point, GH Enterprise and Azure DevOps may become more similar and share more infrastructure over time.
