As GitHub CEO steps away, unit’s independence vanishes in reorg

When GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced he was stepping down at the end of the year in a blog post this week, it was a monumental moment for the Microsoft property. Up until now, the unit Microsoft bought in 2018 for $7.5 billion has remained for the most part independent. With Dohmke’s announcement this week, however, that independence appears to have vanished. 

In Dohmke’s post, he revealed that GitHub’s role was changing inside Microsoft in a fairly substantial way. “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” Dohmke wrote. Axios later reported on the nitty gritty details of the leadership changes.

CoreAI is itself a division established in January this year to consolidate Microsoft’s AI efforts. As AI has become central to Microsoft’s mission (and every enterprise software vendor out there), the fact it brought the various pieces together under one unit makes sense from an organizational perspective.

IDC analyst Arnal Dayaratna, who has been covering Microsoft and GitHub for some time, says that as AI has become increasingly important to GitHub’s mission, making it part of that CoreAI team makes a lot of sense. It enables the company to share learnings in a more organized way, react to competitive pressure more quickly and protect the market advantage it has with GitHub Copilot.

“One way to protect that advantage is to integrate GitHub more tightly into Microsoft's AI research and allow the innovation that's enabled by its research team to flow more directly into the GitHub portfolio of products,” Dayaratna told FastForward. And that learning could flow both ways with GitHub also sharing its findings with the company more broadly.

The open source question

But GitHub is more than just its AI coding products, it’s also a large repository of open source software, and as it loses its previous independence, and becomes more tightly integrated into Microsoft, some are worried about the status of that repository. There were similar concerns when Microsoft bought the company.

Dayaratna says that those concerns at the time of the purchase were unfounded and he believes Microsoft will continue to prioritize the developer experience in its new guise. “I would say Microsoft as a company, particularly under Satya, has consistently prioritized developers and demonstrated a keen awareness of the importance of developers and the freedom of developers, so I don't think that there's going to be any significant clash in the developer community,” he said.

One way to protect that advantage is to integrate GitHub more tightly into Microsoft's AI research and allow the innovation that's enabled by its research team to flow more directly into the GitHub portfolio of products.

But Runtime’s Tom Krazit isn’t so sure. While he agrees that Microsoft has been a good steward of the platform up until now, he writes that there are concerns about how this reorg could impact the repository, “Much of the initial concern about the acquisition in 2018 was around whether or not Microsoft would remain committed to GitHub's open-source principles, but Microsoft has walked the walk when it comes to shedding its past as the world's biggest opponent of open-source software,” he wrote. “Now those worries are shifting to the CoreAI group's plans for the enormous amount of code hosted on GitHub.”

Regardless, Dohmke says that he will remain until the end of the year, after which he has plans to pursue another startup. “Still, after all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again,” he wrote in the blog post.

As Dohmke moves onto his next adventure, the company he led for almost four years is going through some substantial changes, and it remains unclear for the time being how these changes will impact GitHub, a repository that has been central to the open source community.

Featured photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash