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Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

> Nat Friedman, although I was not familiar with him prior to this, seems like an ideal candidate to run GitHub.

Nat Friedman is a legend in the open source community. He founded Ximian in '99 with Miguel de Icaza, who both meant a lot for the Gnome community (e.g. via products such as Ximian Evolution) and Mono (FOSS .NET for *NIX). They got bought by Novell where he also got a top position. Nat has been busy with FOSS for a long time, and he _believes_ in it.

Some verification on the above plus other details can be found here on Wikipedia [1]

As a final note, "I’m not asking for your trust, but I’m committed to earning it." is very humble, professional, and clever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Friedman

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He is the perfect transition guy, who is likely going to be replaced in a few years time when MS decide they want to capitalize on the money they spend on a un-profitable but popular service.

Which is a pattern we have seen from their takeover of hotmail and more recently with skype, where they also waited a few years before starting the transition from independent brand to a sub brand under one of Microsoft estates.

What you are going to see when MS is done integrating the leadership of github into MSFT and Nat have been replaced by a next phase CEO, is that githubs CI hooks will become more and more symbiotic with azure, and the a lot of the documentation tools offered will hook directly into office365 tools, which will require a synchronization of accounts with MS other SaaS offerings.

I think everyone can agree that Microsoft is going to push Azure very hard once they start sinking their teeth into GitHub-- that's not surprising.

However, I'm very skeptical about the idea that GitHub is going to somehow become an Azure-only walled garden. It makes little sense business-wise. The entire point of buying GitHub was to acquire an audience that they are aware is not necessarily interested in Azure or their stack. Forcing it on them will only cause them to leave (there is plenty of competition in the code hosting space now), which will in turn reduce revenue. I give MS enough credit to know that the only way they succeed in this space is to provide value, not vendor lock-in. This is true now, and it will be even more true in 5 years when other big companies inevitably start following Microsoft into this space and competing for market share.

If they wanted to just sell services to people already using MS products, they already had VSTS for that.

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