as i was writing about this in another thread:
I remember when they did buy Minecraft and the studio behind, it was mainly for the potential value of the user base.
If you think Microsoft produces a lot of developing tools and platform, which now supports also non traditional Microsoft programming languages, like Visual Studio Code. I would not be surprised if they did this move to strengthen their position, by reaching out on thousands of developers. I don't think it may necessarily be a bad thing.
Plus there are these statement, from Microsoft and Github
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/ Given all of this, together with GitHub, we see three clear opportunities ahead.
First, we will empower developers at every stage of the development lifecycle – from ideation to collaboration to deployment to the cloud. Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.
Second, we will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services.
Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
It seems that the CEO of github will continue to work on it with Microsoft
https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/As for me, I’ll be taking on a new role at Microsoft working closely with Nat and the team, and will share more details on that in the future.
We will have to wait and see how it evolves.