What Will Microsoft's GitHub Buy Mean for Controversial Code?

Microsoft announced it has bought GitHub, the open source code repository that’s basically a social network for developers. It’s one of the most beloved and popular sites on the web, hosting everything from Bitcoin’s code to Germany’s laws and regulations to NASA’s exoplanet hunting software. But it’s also home to the code that allows people to make deepfakes: AI-assisted nonconsensual porn videos that realistically swap one person’s face onto another person’s body. And now the very mixed bag of a site is Microsoft’s problem. “The tech giant will face similar content moderation challenges that peers like Facebook and Google have,” writes security reporter Louise Matsakis. “But with code instead of speech.”

How’s the GitHub community taking the news? Well, according to Matsakis, the top repository on GitHub Tuesday was the “GitHub Evacuation Center.” But people aren’t just moving elsewhere because the open source town got a sheriff. Microsoft’s business entanglements put it at cross purposes with a lot of big GitHub projects. On the semi-frivolous end, there’s Xbox emulators, which allow gamers to play console games on their computers (without, ahem!, buying an expensive console from Microsoft). But GitHub also provides valuable resources for people who only have access to heavily censored areas of the internet. GitHub has run afoul of major Microsoft customers like China because it hosts things like tools for circumventing China’s internet censorship and the Chinese edition of The New York Times. “GitHub isn’t a perfect defender of censorship, but they still host [articles about the student-led protests at] Tiananmen Square,” says Rob Graham, CEO of Errata Security. “That’s likely to disappear under Microsoft.”  (Wired, June 5, 2018)