Microsoft Brings GitHub Closer to Its AI Team | Tech Field Day News Rundown: August 13, 2025

CSG gets data protection. Is Intel's, CEO in or out? Ai profit sharing Dial up has some hangups.

And we're gonna take a look at the resignation of GitHub's CEO in this episode of the Tech Field. A rundown. Hello everyone.

Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown. Today is August the 13th, and, And we are hoping that you're enjoying today with a nice glass of some bubbly alcohol. 'cause it's National Prosecco Day, but if you don't drink, um, treat yourself to a filet mignon 'cause it's National Filet Mignon Day.

It's almost like those two things go together, sort of. But what goes together is us here at the rundown with the news, maybe a little bit of snark. We'll see what happens.

But together with me this week is my good friend Chris Grinderman. Chris, welcome to the Rundown this week. Hi, thanks for having me.

Well, we're very happy that you could jump in and, uh, co-host with us today. Uh, it's been an exciting week in the news and, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on. I, I, I think we might have a few opinions about it.

We'll, we'll have to dive in and see what happens. We're gonna kick off though with an acquisition because Cloud software group, also known as CSG, is going to acquire Data Protection Company Arc Terra later this year using cash on hand. Arc Terra, which spun out of Veritas after Cohesity acquired them in 2023, serves tens of thousands of customers, including most of the names that you'd recognize from the Fortune 100 and earns over $400 million annually.

It's products that you no doubt have heard of, like backup exec, InfoScale, and Insight platform add compliance, resiliency, and security features to CSGs analytics and management tools, which addresses growing cybersecurity and privacy demands formed in 2022 from the MERG merger of Citrix. And Tibco, CSG has been expanding its enterprise software portfolio and plans, more acquisitions of mission critical solutions. Chris, do you think CSG buying into the data protection market is going to give them a leg up on their competition?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, obviously they think so. And, and this really to me, marks a continuation of the consolidation we're seeing in the cybersecurity market.

It seems like the last few years this has been ramping up. Uh, we've seen more and more purchases and acquisitions and mergers along these lines. Uh, as you mentioned, right?

CSG was formed in 2022 when Citrix and TIBCO came together. Those who might not know, TIBCO is itself a data management and analytics and analytics vendor. Uh, since then, they've added in a few other brands, information Builders, which is a data quality platform, Spotfire, uh, data analytics platform.

And Jaspersoft, which I think does generate, uh, report generation. com for those domainers out there. So Art Terra adds additional data protection capabilities to this family of, of companies.

Uh, that makes a lot of sense, right? Uh, Krista case from Pure Term Group has commented on this, this, um, you know, addition of data management capabilities across compliance, resilience, and protection is a natural fit. And in addition to that, it also exposes CSG to Arc Terra and probably broader Veritas, uh, from before the spinoff, uh, customers.

Right? Um, I think what's really interesting here though, in this particular acquisition is that Art Terra's platform, uh, which was called the Data Compliance platform. I think now it's called Insight.

Um, it recently expanded its capabilities to support large language model logging and protection, uh, which seems very timely indeed. Uh, so, uh, this acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025. As you said, it's gonna be cash, but we don't know how much.

And we do know that, uh, CEO Tom Cross has said that CSG is planning on making more acquisitions. So this isn't the end. In other big company news, uh, Donald Trump has urged Intel's CEO lip boo tan to resign, citing alleged conflicts tied to his investments in Chinese tech companies.

Though he gave no specifics. The call follows Senator Tom Cotton's warning about Tan's ties to China and passed leadership at Cadence Design System, which violated US export controls. Uh, tan who was appointed in March is steering intel through cost cuts and is cautioned that it may drop next gen chip making without a key customer.

Uh, Intel, the only US producer of advanced semiconductors has received billions in subsidies, but trails, T-C-M-T-S-M-C, uh, neither Intel nor the White House commented, although I do believe, uh, today, um, they may be backing away from this a little bit on the announcement, shares of Intel fell 3%. Uh, Tom, is this, uh, a real security concern for the US or is this, uh, Trump's famous deal making in action? So I'm gonna give you the shot and then I'm gonna give you the chaser.

So stay tuned. Here's the shot. This is stupid.

Sorry that, that's my professional opinion. This is stupid. You just announced that you are going to put a 100% tariff on any company who's not making chips domestically.

Um, nevermind the fact that TSMC is opening plants in Arizona to specifically get around this. We know that Intel is the only manufacturer of chips domestically, and then you call for the resignation of their CEO over what exactly the fact that he worked with a Chinese company. Good luck finding people that haven't.

That's the problem is that almost everybody in this industry has worked either for a Chinese company or a Chinese company subsidiary in a, you know, uh, in a business sense for quite a while. In fact, I would argue that the reason why a lot of the CEOs that don't make it in the industry industry aren't making it is 'cause they're not working where that's happening. I mean, look at a lot of those domestic companies that you love so much.

They're, they either have people on the board or people who are in, in management who have some ties to China or, you know, something along those lines. So why would you cut off your own nose, spite your face? Yes, we have reported over the last few weeks that there are problems that Intel is having, that they are basically kind of turning the ship as it were.

They realize that foundries are not an immediate panacea for their problems. They're gonna take investment. Uh, those chips act funds come with some strings, and now they're looking at the real possibility that they may not get to stick around long enough to enjoy the fruits of those labors.

Uh, I was listening to a video that was recorded by Gamers Nexus here recently, where they pulled no punches and saying that this is a huge problem for Intel. And those are the folks that are working on it from the game. The, uh, videographic side, you know, these are not enterprises.

Now, all that being said, here's the chaser lip. Bhutan went to the White House on Monday, and suddenly after having a closed door meeting with the president, president says he is an okay guy. President says it's all cool until stock jumped 3% on the news.

So I wonder what was said behind that closed door that could possibly make the president of the United States who's notorious for sticking to his guns on every decision that he makes suddenly about face. I wonder if it has anything to do with the other big news that was coming out this week from the competitors to Intel. Hmm.

Let's analyze that, Chris, because I wanna hear your thoughts on the fact that Nvidia and a MD are gonna be sharing 15% of their Chinese revenue with the US government in return for licenses to sell the H 20 and MI 3 0 8 chips. There. You may recall those chips were specifically banned from being sold to Chinese markets.

Of course, everyone's favorite president brokered this deal. It's quite unusual because I can't remember in recent memory when a corporation paid the US government a cut of their profits. But it is highly beneficial because it lets both companies keep a foothold in the Chinese market and avoids letting them lose ground to companies like Huawei.

Although there is the possibility there could be future levies. The agreement highlights the strategic importance of semiconductors while leaving China torn between its need for advanced chips and its frustration over added costs and political concerns. I will also note that in a news article released this week, China says they don't want the H 20 anywhere near any of their sensitive government, uh, data for some reason or another.

So, Chris, I have to ask, given what happened with Intel and given this news, do you think it's bribery like I do? Well, the only good thing about this potential bribery is that the money is going to the government and, and not at least what we've seen publicly into any individual, uh, individual pockets, right? So this 15% is gonna be paid into the us.

It's basically a tax, uh, I guess it's not really a tariff since it's not being levied at the board. It's for exports, not imports. But anyway, um, there is money coming into the US for this, and it, it probably at least helps, uh, Nvidia and a MD, right?

5 billion on not being able to sell H 20 chips into China. And Jensen Huen, you know, came out and said, this is gonna cost us over the next two or three years, $50 billion. So I'm, I'm sure that he is breathing a sigh of relief and maybe the Nvidia shareholders as well that this is gonna end up costing quite a bit less.

Uh, there's a really good chance, um, despite what the Chinese government has said, that the H 20 chip is going to grow rapidly in the Chinese market and potentially make up something like 70% of NVIDIA's market share in China fairly rapidly. So even with a 15% tax tariff fee bribe on top of that, uh, it, it's still gonna do quite well for both Nvidia and their shareholders. And as you said, this also hopefully moves Nvidia or continues to move Nvidia into a place where their chips are being used in AI applications even in China.

I think the outright ban has a potential to split the market, right? Where we see AI development happening completely separately in, in two different parts of the world. Um, now there are other geopolitical concerns here, right?

I mean is, you know, is this just a money thing where selling the chips matters only because of the money that's gonna come back to the us or does this matter because selling the chips allows China and their companies to get a foothold up on ai. There's some interesting questions that I don't have answers, whether this is the right move or not, from the AI arms race perspective, call it. Um, I do think that, as you mentioned, kind of related back to the Intel thing, that this is probably a sign of things to come.

I think there's a pretty good, um, prospect that we will see additional individual company deals with the US government, with the US president, uh, what that means exactly, I'm not sure. Uh, but I do think we will see this to continue. Um, some places where I think some folks might be worried is in smaller organizations, if you are not the CEO of Intel, if you're not running Nvidia, if you're not running a MD, uh, and you just happen to be beholden to these other big tariffs and you can't find a way to do a deal with the president of the United States to get out of it, uh, what does that mean?

What does that mean for our economy? Uh, only something like, I think, think it's like 20%, 18% of the US population is employed by Fortune 50 companies. Uh, so most of us work for smaller businesses that may not have the ability, uh, to show up like Tim Cook did with a bar of gold and some glass, uh, after making some significant investments in the US to bring Apple back in terms with the president.

Um, so the fallout here could be widespread. Um, it's also possible that we'll just all get rich off of Nvidia stock because they can now sell VH 20 into, uh, China. Lots of to determined there.

Um, one thing that is not gonna be determined anymore, because it has been, is the a OL will end its dial up internet service on September 30th, 2025, closing a chapter in internet history that began in 1991. Uh, the shutdown also ends related software like the A OL dialer and the A OL Shield browser, uh, while largely obsolete dial up still had about 265,000 US users in 2019. The, the most recent data I have here, many of them were sticking with it out of habit, some fear of losing access to familiar services, um, for others, ending their subscription was an emotional step even after switching to broadband.

They hang on to that. A, uh, a OL connection. Um, maybe remembering the nostalgic sounds that it made, uh, when they first dialed up this move definitely marks, uh, both the end of that nostalgic era and also a broader shift away from older online models.

Uh, Tom, what does this mean for broadband generally and, and maybe technology and specifically are, are we putting things to bed too soon or is this the right move at the right time? Well, I've done the math, Chris and I figured out that by September 30th, I'll just about be out of those 1000 free hours that I got from Intel, which is great because, uh, I ha I like hate letting things go to waste. Uh, this news was kind of interesting because I'm sure just like a lot of people out there, someone went wait, a will still offered dial up, which was then quickly followed by wait, a OL is still in business.

Uh, by the way, uh, they, they were sold off to Verizon along with the rest of the Yahoo thing. Uh, for those of you who may remember the heady days of a OL Time Warner owning damn near everything, and now we're at like, oh yeah, they're still around. Most of the people who were subscribing to that, uh, to the service, you know, those 200,000 something people, uh, I think actually the latest report says that it's down under 200,000.

Now they are, uh, they're, they're stodgy. They're probably older folks who don't like change. Uh, they, it AOL's comforting, right?

It, it's everything you need at your fingertips. Even if you go to like your a OL newsfeed now, it's basically a Yahoo newsfeed with yellow all over it. But I think that one of the reasons why it was still floated the way that it was, was that there was revenue to be made from having a portal.

Like we all remember the days of your homepage being set to Yahoo or a OL or com server prodigy or, or whatever. And, and you did all your work there. And very rarely did you escape out into the wider internet.

I can still remember, I, I made the choice for CompuServe 'cause it made the most sense to me. But downloading NCSA mosaic for the very first time and using it to go outside of CompuServe. And I feel like a lot of people have that same opinion about a OL.

Uh, there's the kinds of people who are still on dialup are the kinds of people that think that you still need to use a OL to access the internet to be able to check your a OL email, not knowing that it's been web mail for years. And finally it got to the point where the amount of money they were making off the portal did not equate to the amount of money that they're making, you know, that's costing them to keep the the system up. But another thing that you need to consider here is the fact that traditional carriers are dumping their local loop access as quickly as possible.

This is something that I've been tracking for quite a while in the telecom industry, is that companies like at and t and Verizon have been mandated for years to provide 9 1 1 access to households. And the way that they do that is they bundle up their, you know, rural telephone access and they sell it off to a company. And then that way they can say they're partnering with those companies to provide that access, but they're not taking on the debts and the maintenance costs for those local loops because they're still pretty outdated.

But we live in a world now where most people have a cell phone, uh, for one reason or another, and the idea of having a home phone is kind of quaint and archaic. And that means there's no money in maintaining those lines anymore. 'cause you're not getting those fat wonderful subscriber fees from them.

So what to do? Well, I would like to divest that crap as much as possible if I was in a phone company that was paying for not very much profit. And that means that the services that use that are gonna slowly go away.

And that's not just a OL dial up. That's things like fire alarms that are, you know, using traditional telephone lines. So there could be a bigger story here.

However, I don't think the people who are using a LL are gonna know anything about it. Um, maybe there's a rural ISP that they can use that has some kind of a wisp. I don't know if we can teach them how to tether off of their phone.

It's gonna be tough. If only there was someone to tell me that I've got mail to make it all better. We had a story that we wanted to take a closer look at this week because it could potentially have some big implications for development at large.

Microsoft is going to be making GitHub part of its core AI team. After GitHub, CEO Thomas Domkey announced that he is going to be leaving to get back into the startup game, according to his press release, domkey is gonna stay on at Microsoft until the end of 2025 to help with the transition. You're probably wondering to yourself, well man, GitHub is a huge thing.

I wonder who they're gonna get to take over as CEO for this crown jewel of their, uh, product offerings. Uh, well, they're not, the Microsoft team has decided that rather than keeping GitHub kind of off on its own, they're gonna be moving it under Microsoft's AI group, which is led by Jay Paric. This move shows that Microsoft has a plan to connect GitHub more closely with its AI tools and developer platform as they go all out on ai, but it has a lot of people in the industry very concerned about what would happen to a platform that's so universally loved like GitHub if suddenly it becomes an AI factory.

Chris, what do you think is going on here? Uh, I think that people are right. Uh, I think it's really interesting to think about this.

I mean, so just, just contextualizing this move in some ways, at least in my head, the way I think about it, right, is that, uh, Git was actually created in 2005 by Linus Als, uh, who was most famous for creating Linux, or some people call it Linus, um, in honor of his name. Um, but, uh, Linux, you know, and so Git was created as a place to be able to maintain the Linux source code because, uh, license for Bit Keeper had been like the non-commercial license for Bit Keeper was removed. And so out of necessity, uh, Linus and team created Git.

Now, then a few years after that, some other folks came along and built GitHub to make it a little bit easier to use. And by about 2011, this was the place, um, beating outsource, forge and a bunch of others to put your open source code. Uh, in 2018, people started to freak out a little bit when Microsoft came in and bought GitHub.

Um, but honestly it didn't really make that big much of a difference. I think people have continued to use GitHub. Uh, Microsoft kind of stayed outta the way, let it operate independently.

Um, people haven't been too worried about the ownership by Microsoft. That may all change right now, um, 20 years after the invention of Git because as you said, they are intentionally moving the entire GitHub organization underneath their AI org, right? Which signals pretty loudly.

I think that they probably have been and definitely will be using this code themselves for training, uh, as much as possible. This is something that Microsoft has already done. Um, we've seen this with LinkedIn where, you know, the, again, same kind of thing, right?

The original acquisition caused some people to get a little bit worried. Uh, then over time they said, oh no, it just works. It's all fine.

Um, and now I believe we're fairly certain that Microsoft is using this data to train AI models. Now this obviously isn't just Microsoft. Um, it is now fairly apparent that Elon Musk, uh, bought Twitter for the data data to create AI models.

This has been going on and on and on. Uh, other folks didn't even buy companies. They just went out and took the data off the internet to train their AI models.

So this is something that's definitely part of the zeitgeist right now. I do think it could have a fairly significant chilling effect on the open source community and their use of GitHub. Um, now that said, maybe no one cares anymore.

Maybe everyone's fine sharing their code with the AI overlords and it won't have an effect. I I think that we will see some fallout though. Uh, what do you think, Tom?

How dare you besmirched the vibe coding community by saying that code has to be uploaded somewhere and isn't generated by a programmatic interface? Yeah, I got nothing there. I agree with you.

This is a problem. Um, I can remember the alarm bells going off when Microsoft bought gi and that was like an $8 billion acquisition. And people are like, what are you gonna do with GitHub?

Because you can't run ads on it. I mean, you kind of can, but like, what? Where's the value?

And and they mollified them a little bit at first by saying, no, no, no, no, it's gonna be run independently. We're gonna, we're gonna let them do their thing and we're just happy to be associated with it. And I know several people who worked as community developers over there and, and worked with the community to kind of write that ship and make people understand that this was something that Microsoft owned but didn't have a finger in.

But you've noticed over the last few years that they keep dipping their toe in the water of AI things. Maybe we're gonna add this AI coding assistant to kind of help you do a little extra code generation or, you know, we're gonna let you have the option to opt in to letting AI scan your repositories. And what happened almost every time GitHub community got the pitchforks and the torches out and said, we don't want this.

This is wrong. This is not the kind of advancement that we are supporting because we're GitHub dammit, and this is what we do. And I think Microsoft was taking notes, if I'm being completely honest with myself.

And they said, okay, we can't ease people into this, so we buy it our time, right? We, we give GitHub its ability to do its thing and eventually Thomas Domkey gets bored. 'cause that's what startup people do, is they get a nice cushy job at a big company with, uh, free bananas in the break room, and then they get bored because there's no hustle anymore.

There's no grind, there's no life or death situations about pushing code out the door. And they want to get back to that. Microsoft said, great, that's awesome.

We love that for you. You didn't have any plans for what you wanted to do with GitHub after you left, right? Because we have plans.

And so they put those plans in place by saying, we're not gonna hire a new CEO, we're not gonna promote from within. We're gonna give it to Jay Par, who, if I'm being generous, has a pretty bad reputation in the industry for management of companies. And now we're going to consume all of GitHub.

So if I'm someone on the outside looking in, what am I thinking? Anything I upload to GitHub now is gonna be munched through, uh, you know, OpenAI because Microsoft's gonna take it. They're gonna feed it to the monster.

And then what does that mean for my code in the future? There's no attribution. There's no nothing.

All of that stuff means that I may not wanna use GitHub anymore. And then we run into this positive feedback loop, right? Of, if I don't want to use GitHub, I'm not gonna upload my code there.

Which means there's fewer submissions being uploaded to GitHub, which means there's fewer, um, data points to be ingested into, uh, OpenAI. And then that means eventually there's gonna be a trickle of information as opposed to the flood that we have. Now, the problem, of course, is the same problem that you have when you mentioned Twitter, uh, x whatever you wanna call it today.

This is where everybody is like, like GitHub is universal at this point. Uh, you know, you can use it, your GitHub profile page as identity verification for things like PGP keys. You can't recreate GitHub overnight.

I'm sorry folks. You can't, it's just impossible because it's the combination of creating a platform that people want to use and encouraging them to get there. It's the reason why Twitter hasn't disappeared yet is because it's where everybody is.

We all do deference to places like thing in Mastodon and Blue Sky and all those other places. Twitter is still where everybody's at. So GitHub has some time, they probably have at least a year if not more of kind of coasting on this.

But eventually people are gonna wake up and they're gonna say, I don't quite trust this unless there are some very bright lines drawn right now. We're not gonna be using this to train open AI data. We're not gonna be using it to do all these other things.

We're not gonna use it to compete against you. Please continue to use our service. Please continue to pay us to use the service.

The question is, would a company like Microsoft come out and say that and mean it? So there is another potential way to look at this, which is that Microsoft just wants to be the platform for ai. Uh, there was a recent, um, dust up, uh, I think it was on X or or or Twitter or whatever we're calling it where Elon said something about OpenAI is gonna come and eat Microsoft for lunch.

Um, and Microsoft's CEO, um, replied by saying that people have been trying to do that for 50 years. And that's the fun of it. Uh, and then went on to say, I'm excited for GR four on Azure and looking forward to Grok five, which seems like a really playful way of saying, Hey, you're still using Microsoft.

Um, now that doesn't mean they're not going to completely, you know, just train on all of the code that's on GitHub. Um, but also doesn't mean that they're gonna do anything nefarious. Maybe just having that there and being able to train on it, um, maybe that does lead to Microsoft just being this kind of more open than they have been in the past platform for AI where all comers can get the benefit.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure either. And the altruism behind just wanting to be the platform and the place where everybody goes is the optimistic solution.

But, um, I, I also see how a lot of places that build the platform or the place where everybody wants to go suddenly start trying to find ways to monetize that platform after a while. And that doesn't always work out for people. I can tell you what does work out for people that's Tech Field Day.

'cause we have lots of great upcoming Tech Field Day events that you're gonna want to take part in. Next week is a big one. Uh, just about a week from now we're gonna be in Cleveland for Tech Field Day Extra at Share.

Uh, Stephen Foskett has some great presentations coming out of, uh, everybody's favorite jewel of Lake Erie. com. Then we're gonna take a couple weeks off, let the heat die down a little bit, and then Alistair is gonna be back with AI Infrastructure Field day three.

This is another event that's shaping up to be quite jam packed with great presentations. And then I'm gonna be back at the end of September for the next edition of Security Field Day because we are excited to hear from companies like One Password about some of the cool stuff they're doing in the enterprise. com for the latest on all of the things that we're doing with these events and more stay tuned because you never know when we might sneak one in on you and you won't wanna miss any of the action.

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We're gonna be back next week to talk about all of the IT news that happened between well now and then. But until then, make sure you guys take care of yourselves, make sure that you are looking out for each other, and we hope that we will see you in the next edition of the Rundown.