If you’re a listener of Founders Talk, you’ve heard first-hand the perspective of Zapier from co-founder Bryan Helmig when it comes to their remote-only workforce policy. In this story from Business Insider, Rosalie Chan covers not only Zapier, but also how GitLab and InVision are going all-remote, and how that’s playing into the exodus of top talent from Silicon Valley.

In Silicon Valley, there’s a war constantly raging to recruit the very best talent. Startups and mega-corporations alike try to lure new recruits with the promise of lavish perks to go with their famously high salaries.

By hiring only remote workers, though, startups are finding that they can bypass that battle altogether. Rather than go toe-to-toe with corporate giants in the major metropolitan areas, all-remote companies are finding success by recruiting from places that traditionally aren’t thought of as tech talent hubs.

That’s a lot of Billions attached to a company built on the back of open source Linux. To give a quick reminder, we JUST DID A SHOW with special guest Joseph Jacks titled “Venture capital meets commercial OSS” and, of course, Red Hat was mentioned several times. They’re also on the $100M+ revenue commercial open source software company index we talked about.

We’ll dig into this and keep you updated on this breaking news that’s just days off the heels of Microsoft’s official acquisition announcement of GitHub. Needless to say, this has been a BIG WEEK for commercial open source software companies.

A year ago, Business Insider said “You may never have heard of GitLab…” as part of their announcement of their Oct. 2017 raise of $30 Million (no valuation was provided then). This year, Microsoft changed that by putting this market on high alert with their acquisition of GitHub for a whopping $7.5 Billion.

…over 100,000 code repositories were moved to his platform from GitHub following the news of the Microsoft acquisition.

Sid said “the deal served as a ‘wake-up call’ to developers, giving them the impetus to look at competing platforms” — like GitLab. The deal also served as a wake up call to those who had been investing or wanted to invest in GitLab and bring the money to them…Sid was quoted on TechCrunch saying:

…GitLab’s original plan was to raise a new funding round at a valuation over $1 billion early next year. But since Iconiq came along with an offer that pretty much matched what the company set out to achieve in a few months anyway, the team decided to go ahead and raise the round now.

What’s interesting is that I can recall a time when GitLab was known in developer circles simply as a straight up, open source, GitHub clone. Continued development, great leadership, and a $1.1 Billion valuation later…they have been cemented as a serious GitHub contender.

On Friday, Business Insider reported that Microsoft has held talks to buy GitHub.

Matt Weinberger writes for Business Insider:

GitHub is a $2 billion startup that claims 24 million software developers as users. On the most surface level, the logic of Microsoft buying GitHub is pretty clear. Developers love GitHub, and Microsoft needs the love of developers.

Here’s the current speculation…

If Microsoft were to acquire GitHub, it would mark a significant change of course from where the startup stood just six months ago. As recently as late 2017, insiders said GitHub was fully committed to staying independent and eventually going public. It’s also possible that instead of striking a deal to buy GitHub outright, Microsoft may make an investment — possibly with an option to buy — and allow one of its top engineers to be poached as CEO.

h/t Dan McClain for sharing this in Slack.

What do Rafael Avila de Espindola, Chris Lattner, Tanya Lattner, LLVM Foundation, Linus Torvalds, and Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst have to do with this question? They’re all in the mix of a wide debate over whether developers of the software and open source community should be required to behave respectfully to each other.

Re: Rafael Avila de Espindola…

Last week, a software engineer publicly quit a very popular open-source project, setting off a firestorm of debate within the programming world.

Re: Chris Lattner…

Chris Lattner tweeted: “I am definitely sad to lose Rafael from the LLVM project, but it is critical to the long term health of the project that we preserve an inclusive community. I applaud Rafael for standing by his personal principles, this must have been a hard decision.” He also followed up with a longer blog post about the incident.

Re: Linus Torvalds…

In 2013, Linus Torvalds was called out for profanity-laced rants on the Linux email lists, which set the tone for the open-source world. He and the Linux community did an about-face — sort of — in 2015, telling members that their work would be criticized but asking them to “be excellent to each other” and to feel free to report abuse.

Re: Jim Whitehurst…

Red Hat is famous for its “meritocracy,” modeled after the Linux Foundation. Amid the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct, especially in the workplace, Red Hat says it’s doing several things to make sure its culture is more welcoming, including sending its executives on a “listening tour.” Jim Whitehurst says he has also been encouraging the company’s top female engineers to get out and be role models and to speak up in open-source communities about being nice to each other.