I woke up this morning to the news that the CEO of GitHub was stepping down. GitHub hosts (what I assume is) the vast majority of open-source projects, so the company has a tremendous amount of power to shape the average developer’s interactions with the open-source world.

I wouldn’t be writing about it if this was just a leadership change. The detail that prompted me to comment on the news was that GitHub is being stripped of its independence.

Microsoft isn’t replacing Dohmke’s CEO position, and the rest of GitHub’s leadership team will now report more directly to Microsoft’s CoreAI team.

It seems that GitHub will now operate as just another product in the Microsoft umbrella, a product within the AI branch of the organization.

I’m not foolish enough to try to predict exactly what this means for GitHub. There’s already been a clear focus on AI at the organization for the past few years. No one will give me favourable betting odds that we’ll see an increased focus on Copilot and other LLM tools.

What I’ll add to the conversation about this news is that I’m disappointed. When I was younger, I was enamoured by the potential of open-source software. As an idealistic teen, I believed that all software should be open-source.

I’ve since grown more pragmatic. I admit that there are issues with open-source. Some of those issues are solvable, but there are others that I’m not so sure are. Governance is a thorny problem. Funding maintenance isn’t always feasible. Users and contributors have wildly varying expectations. The open-source world can be messy.

There’s lots to like about open-source, too. My experience working on Solidus has been decidedly positive. I’ve built a business helping organizations make the most of it, an open-source project. Companies all over the world derive a ton of “value” (a.k.a. billions of dollars in sales) from it. Solidus is a great fit for the open-source model, and I don’t think it could have succeeded without it.

So, like I said, I’m disappointed. Many projects, wary of the proprietary nature of GitHub, fearing its eventual monetization, watching the trend of enshittification in the tech industry, have moved to other platforms. Some have been hosting their own code all along, having never seriously considered proprietary hosting. I respect them for putting the work in, especially at the expense of visibility in the open-source world.

GitHub leveraged a wave within the tech industry to become the dominant code hosting platform for both open-source and proprietary software. They led the world to believe that their product was private code hosting, a product that whose value was augmented by also being the de facto host of the open-source world. It was a model that made sense.

Moving GitHub under the CoreAI umbrella makes it clear that AI is the product. Copilot is the product. GitHub.com is an avenue to sell that product. What’s worse is that due to GitHub’s existing position, the code-hosting product can be a very effective avenue without having to fight off competitors. They already won.

We find ourselves in a position that anyone with any sense always knew we’d reach. Capital, in its quest to extract value wherever it can, has found in GitHub a new source of value. Being the world’s premier code-hosting platform was not enough to protect GitHub. This news confirms it.

That which can be used to shill AI will be used to shill AI.