GitHub Roadmap: Better for Everyone

The announcement of the acquisition of GitHub had raised many concerns and questions. What will Microsoft do with GitHub? Microsoft, the champion of closed source, buying an open source flagship? Many people did not see it coming. Without getting into this debate, the optimists had some good reasons to believe in improvements.

Step 1: Azure Pipelines

Microsoft has implemented the integration of GitHub for Azure Pipeline, allowing to quickly and easily set up a CI/CD chain using GitHub as a repository. And all this while being free for open source projects! Free, but without Azure Artifacts and Azure Test plans, indeed. But Microsoft's support for open source could not be clearer. Microsoft spends money on its infrastructure for Open Source projects.

At the same time, GitHub released a public pre-version to manage GitHub pull requests directly in Visual Studio. There's the little bit you can do when you buy GitHub at this price.

Step 2: Integration With Jira

Certainly, Jira is not an open source tool and is not free for everyone. Jira has its critics, even if I myself really appreciate this tool. I wouldn't get into this debate, but for companies that use Jira, having this integration with Jira helps to promote GitHub in companies, and in a way reassures them about GitHub. I have often heard that GitHub is for startups and open source projects. The point on which my politeness prevents me from answering it.

Step Three: GitHub Free and GitHub Enterprise

GitHub has simplified and improved its offers. If you have a free account, you can now have an unlimited number of private repositories, as long as you have only three accounts associated with your plan. I would call it the right worm in the fruit. In fact, on corporate projects, when there is no corporate policy on repositories, you are forced to fend for yourself. This is a good way for developers to use GitHub for small projects, and thus promote GitHub in Enterprise. And that's good, because GitHub has revised its Enterprise policy. There used to be a SaaS and an on-premise offer, which are now merged, and which allows you to be on-premise, or cloud, or hybrid via GitHub Connect. And you only pay by the number of users. So this is good news for the democratization of GitHub in companies.

It is clear that GitHub's policy is to cover all types of users, and to provide them with the answers they want. These serve as accelerators rather than brakes for open source projects, and blocker removers for companies.