Bill Gates hasn’t exactly had kind words for cryptocurrency in the past. Earlier in May, the tech magnate said he would short the coin if could. Although he explained, even that isn’t a great idea because buying in and quickly cashing out might not be as easy as advertised.
“As an asset class, you’re not producing anything and so you shouldn’t expect it to go up. It’s kind of a pure ‘greater fool theory’ type of investment,” Gates said on CNBC’s Squawk Box earlier this month.
Over the years Microsoft has built up a disapproval among programmers and web developers as the company built its empire and vaulted itself to the top of the tech world.
Many argue that it is the products themselves that give Microsoft haters their fuel, but the business practices Microsoft has used has contributed to the distrust and distaste that lingers in the tech developer community when it comes to Microsoft.
Bitcoin Core’s lead maintainer Wladimir van der Laan thinks blockchain developers will now move away from GitHub and has said he won’t continue to use the software development platform and pay “another Microsoft tax”.
He said on Twitter, “I expect this is the beginning of a long painful road of gh toward obsolence (sic), possibly ending the same way as codeplex did.” Although, van der Laan says they have been preparing for a possible failure of GitHub, and security will not be affected, there is still a fear of overwhelming other software development platforms and exposing their scalability issues.
Not everyone in the space is eager to move so quickly. Another active Bitcoin Core contributor, Pieter Wuille said on GitHub’s forums, “While I believe we should always consider other options, and would support in the long term moving to other infrastructure, I don’t believe there is an issue here.”
He said that Bitcoin Core doesn’t rely too heavily on GitHub and emphasized the importance of ease of use. “We mostly use GitHub for its ease of access and community, and not so much for actually managing or controlling or source tree. Unless that changes, I see no reason why the company running it should influence our choice.”
Still, the overall attitude about Microsoft’s
7.5 billion dollar purchase of GitHub is negative. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that GitHub will remain a “developer first” platform, but that hasn’t assured the community of developers or stopped from speaking out against the acquisition in the form of vitriolic memes and a movement to competing platforms.
