Agree, it's important that we keep an eye on things and, however we can, hold MSFT and GitHub accountable to keep up the good showing.
We've seen new features launched (e.g. this one) long enough after the acquisition that much (most, all?) of the work happened in the post acquisition environment that I'm optimistic. But I've been wrong before.
It's already here, is just that the userbase and third parties are (happily) doing the dirty work for them. Try going GitHub-free for a month or three and you'll notice how many things rest on the assumption that you have a GitHub account. "Log in with GitHub" is essentially what Microsoft hoped for with Passport, if Passport had actually been successful.
Look at how it shat on Markdown with what it calls "GitHub Flavored Markdown". Look at the things that it calls "wikis". Look at how GitHub's PR merge tool junks up the commit log. Look at how many projects don't even have a way to accept a fix unless you submit it with GitHub's janky pull request workflow. Hell, a bug in Netlify's command-line client managed to make its way into release versions that would straight up cause the process to terminate when cwd was a repo that wasn't hosted on github.com, leading to unhandled exception.
The tacit assumption that you're using GitHub is like the tacit assumption 15 years ago that you were using Visual Studio, only this time, you can't escape just by steering clear of Windows-related tech.
GitHub Flavored Markdown seems like a nice extension to Markdown to me. Fenced code blocks? Great idea. Lots of other flavors of Markdown do the same thing. I don't know who's the leader or follower here, but I'm glad they're doing it. I'm not sure what's the gold standard for wikis, but they all seem like the kind of thing every vendor has similar, flawed, good-enough solutions for. And I know there are other thoughts around how to manage merges, but having a merge commit (or a squash merge or a fast forward) seems like a reasonable contender for handling a feature branch. But maybe there's something I'm missing? I guess any hegemony is bad for innovation?
Are there a lot of walled gardens that only allow sign-in with GitHub? That's not really an issue I've run into. I can't think of any site I want to invite my aunt/uncle/cousin to log into that only accepts GitHub login. In fact, I'm not sure there's a lot of tools I want my colleagues to use that require a GitHub login that isn't already tied to a GitHub hosted repo.
They acquired a company that was doing the thing that they are wont to do and are criticized for, and have poured the significant resources at their disposal into growing the circle of impact. Where it originates from and whether it was or wasn't already independently in full swing (or partial, in this case) before their involvement doesn't matter, the effect on the user is the same. Besides that, if a person's problem with a given practice is whether or not Microsoft is the perpetrator, then that person is a hypocrite and doesn't actually give a shit about the the thing they claim to be concerned about.
I’m worried this is their extend-embrace stage, and the extinguish is yet to come.
I truly hate to be pessimistic, and I’m not trying to start a flame war. I just can’t see this behavior lasting in the long run.