Everyone complaining about Microsoft buying GitHub needs to offer a better solution

Microsoft is buying GitHub for $7.5 billion dollars, and predictably, there's a developer backlash.

GitHub, though notionally a for-profit company, has become an essential, integral part of the open-source community. GitHub offers free hosting for open-source projects and has risen to become the premiere service for collaborative, open-source development: the authoritative source repository for many of these projects, with GitHub's own particular pull-request-based workflow becoming a de facto standard approach for taking code contributions.

The fear is that Microsoft is hostile to open source and will do something to GitHub (though exactly what isn't clear) to undermine the open-source projects that depend on it. Comments here at Ars, as well as on Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News, suggest not any specific concerns but a widespread lack of trust, at least among certain developers, of Microsoft's behavior, motives, and future plans for the service.