Getting the preposition right

Topics/tags: Miscellaneous, language, short

One of the big items in the news yesterday was Microsoft’s confirmation that they were purchasing GitHub [1]. I was surprised to hear Youngest Son’s reaction, which I recall was something like, Yeah, Microsoft has been making a big push into open source. I find that amusing, given how opposed Gates and Allen were to anyone sharing their BASIC compiler [2,3].

When Michelle texted me the news, the first article I found was an article on The Verge entitled Microsoft confirms it’s acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion [4].

Midway through the article, I found the following strange claim.

Microsoft killed its own GitHub competitor, Codeplex, in December and is now the top contributor to GitHub,

Of course they are the top contributor; they are contributing $7.5 billion. Sarcasm aside, I found that strange. I would assume that the GitHub employees are the top contributors to the GitHub platform. I’m not sure who the top contributors are to Git itself. Let’s check … the GitHub pulse says that Junio C. Hamano, aka gitster, a Google employee, is by far the top contributor. But I may be misreading since that’s a read-only repository.

So it really doesn’t make sense to me that Microsoft … is now the top contributor to GitHub. Fortunately, they linked to another article on The Verge. That article says

Microsoft is now the top organization with the most open source contributors on Github [sic].

Ah, that makes sense. They aren’t the top contributor to GitHub; they are the top contributor on GitHub.

You’d think they could get the preposition right.

Postscript: For some reason, Grammarly suggests that I should should You’d think they could get the proposition right.

[1] I wonder how our alums who work at GitHub feel knowing that they will soon by Microsoft employees.

[2] Or was it an interpreter?

[3] I wonder if they gave any royalties to Kemeny and Kurtz for inventing BASIC? Probably not.

[4] I really hope that our alums who work at GitHub get a piece of that.

Version 1.0 of 2018-06-05.