https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywen8x/13000-projects-ditched-github-for-gitlab-monday-morning

On Monday morning, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the popular collaborative software development platform Github for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. The announcement was met with mixed reactions from the developer community. Some looked at the acquisition as inevitable and the only way to sustain a free platform that had grown as large as Github. Others saw it as the death knell for a neutral, community-driven platform that was the de facto home of open source software development.

Rumors of the acquisition first began circulating over the weekend, which led to a mass migration of Github projects to its competitor’s platform, GitLab. A real-time tracker on GitLab shows a massive spike in imported Github projects early on Monday morning, with over 13,000 projects being imported within a single hour. Yet GitLab’s CEO and co-founder Sid Sijbrandij said the mass migration has been going on for nearly a week. “Within the past seven days, we have imported nearly 50,000 projects,” Sijbrandij told me in an email. “We’ve scaled up the servers for GitLab.com three times already.”