Why would Microsoft buy GitHub? Anil Dash looks at "the cost of acquiring developers for a platform" as one explanation and suggests that "the far greater value comes from radically increasing the number of people who can create software, while improving the quality of software." Both are good reasons but my explanation is a bit different. It's this: Microsoft has finally acquired its social network technology, so it can challenge Facebook and Twitter, but crucially, it's also a distributed consensus mechanism for creating works collaboratively. Git is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that has been used and tested over time. It creates an ordering of contents, and also creates a way for contents to converge with each other. This is really important, and in my view if properly applied gives Microsoft the core technology it needs to compete in social networks - and more.
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