What the acquisition of GitHub means for the Microsoft Dynamics community

Microsoft recently announced that it will acquire the GitHub developer platform for $7.5 billion of stock. On a new episode of the MSDW podcast, we delve into the potential impact of the acquisition for the Dynamics NAV, CRM, and 365 community. Erik Hougaard, VP of software development at E Foqus, and Nicholas Hayduk, the founder and lead developer at Dynamics 365 and CRM consulting firm Engineered Code Consulting, joined the podcast to talk about their own experiences with GitHub in the context of Dynamics-related work and why it matters for the larger community.

Git vs. GitHub

Hougaard remarked that despite developer familiarity with GitHub, plenty of people still have much to learn about what this deal is really about.

I was not surprised by the announcement, there've been a lot of rumors. Microsoft is one of the biggest GitHub customers at this point. For the Dynamics channel, we need to specify what we're actually talking about. I've had this conversation with a lot of people in our part of the channel. A lot of people think it's the same thing as Git. Git was invented by Linus Torvalds for distributed control for Linux server control because there was no free tool to do it. He invented it to make his life easier. You can have Git on your machine or on a Git server in your office. MS is not taking over Git.

Hougaard added that GitLab, GitBucket, and multiple other offerings are all doing the same thing as GitHub. He received many questions from users that used GitHub as the offering, without understanding that Git is a technology by itself. ...