Free software a money-spinner

Microsoft is to pay $7.5bn for a business that makes it easy for software developers to collaborate with one another, but doesn’t itself actually make any money.

The purchase of GitHub (to be paid for in Microsoft shares) is an important development in the slow, tectonic collision of the libertarian ideals of late 20th-century California with reality.

GitHub and its users were once the sworn enemies of Microsoft and everything it represented. Bill Gates’s firm built software for profit and tried with every means at its power to ensure no one used anything else. Most of us now use the computers in our pockets (known for historical reasons as “phones”) as much as those on our desks or laps, but anything that won’t fit in a pocket will likely be running some kind of Microsoft software.

GitHub, by contrast, grew out of the free software movement, which had similar global ambitions to Microsoft. The confused ideology behind it, a mixture of JeanJacques Rousseau with Ayn Rand, held both that humans are naturally good and that selfishness works out for the best. Thus, if only coders would write and give away the code they were interested in, the results would solve everyone else’s problems. This was also astonishingly successful. The internet now depends on free software.

Possibly the most important of all the free software projects is the Linux operating system, which is built and maintained by programmers all over the world. Linus Torvalds, who started and still runs the Linux project, built a piece of software called Git to impose order on this potential anarchy. GitHub, in turn, is a place where people and companies can store copies of the files managed with Git and anyone in the world can find them easily; 25-million people now use it.

The value of GitHub lies in the trust reposed in it by users. It is culture, not code, that’s worth those billions of dollars. London, June 4