Sourcegraph CEO here. Just to be clear, so internet rumors don’t get started, there was no “offer” here. We started Sourcegraph with the intent of remaining independent because building really good code search and intelligence means working across all code (not just on GitHub), all devs, and all code intelligence sources (code nav plus every dev tool you use that knows stuff about code, not just the ones in the GitHub/Microsoft suite bundle). We’ve never entertained any kind of acquisition interest for this reason.
We don’t think any of today’s code host vendors with their current strategies can make truly great code search and intelligence because they’ll be biased toward their own bundled tools and limited to the subset of code hosted on that instance. It’d be kind of like Encyclopedia Britannica or The NY Times building a web search engine: helpful, but so much more limited compared to what the independent Google became.
And yes, none of this was a surprise. GitHub’s new code search has been out for 14 months now.
GitHub's code search product looks limited compared to what Sourcegraph provides, but I don't think being limited to code on their instance is a problem. Even if a company doesn't want to use the full GitHub source code management stack, if GH search becomes good enough, people could mirror their repos onto GitHub or GitHub Enterprise Server just to use its search functionality, and Microsoft will go after that segment if they see a market there.
We don’t think any of today’s code host vendors with their current strategies can make truly great code search and intelligence because they’ll be biased toward their own bundled tools and limited to the subset of code hosted on that instance. It’d be kind of like Encyclopedia Britannica or The NY Times building a web search engine: helpful, but so much more limited compared to what the independent Google became.
And yes, none of this was a surprise. GitHub’s new code search has been out for 14 months now.
OK, hope this puts an internet rumor to rest!