[colbyh]

It would benefit Github to own a CI/CD tool if said tool was used in the vast majority of projects and there was little worry about disrupting the rest. E.g. if Codeship was used by 99% of Github customers it would totally make sense for them to purchase the co and integrate more tightly.

But since the pipeline space is varied and rich, as you say, they benefit quite a bit by being a centralized tool that connects to all of them. Just pointing out that should that change in the future (in some unrelated area, say code review as a service?) we could very well see GH plop down a ton of cash and break out of that "code development tools" vertical.

[moritzplassnig]

I think that's a good point. There's quite some fragmentation in the cloud CI/CD space (if we look beyond Jenkins). If necessary, GitHub could still acquire down the road. The downside risk is small.