lanbrown wrote:The point I was making is that Microsoft will start to move away from Git; so moving to another service that is compatible won't be a seamless move. So Github could turn into a closed system.
I wasn't, in fact, addressing my post to you, but rather to the more general audience that may not have completely understood the difference/relationshop between GitHub (service) and Git (technology).
Having said that, there are a lot of products using Git client technology (both to communicate to GitHub and also to manage privately hosted/maintained Git repos) that's outside of Microsoft/GitHub's control. That itself will be the canary in the coal mine: if Microsoft changes GitHub to use some kind of proprietary changes to the Git technology, all those integrations will break and there will be a ton of outcry. That will be a sure sign that it's time to start looking for alternate solutions.
Git is different than the end-user things that Microsoft has acquired then subsequently messed with because it's developer centric so any kind of trickiness will be immediately noticed by developers who are already wary of them. Contributions to the Git technology will continue to go through the open source process they use now. If Microsoft attempts to alter this process, then again you'll have outcry in the developer community that Microsoft is doing something bad and it'll be time to start looking for alternatives.
IBM, who used to be a very proprietary company, is now one of the largest contributors to open source software. So in this respect it is possible for a leopard to change his spots so to speak!
My bottom line is that it's too early to tell what Microsoft will do, but that there will be plenty of very noticeable warning if they start doing bad things, certainly enough time to migrate to other solutions.