Are they paying him to help make an open source alternative to github? If not, then it's not really relevant.

They are actively working against open source tooling for software development by developing features only for their closed platform.

Gitlab is a much better example of a company that fully embraces open source.

GitLab does not fully embrace Open Source.

GitLab Enterprise Edition does not have an open source license. Since GitLab.com runs GitLab EE, their two (presumably) primary sources of revenue (EE licenses and GitLab.com paid accounts) come from non-open source software.

But: it's still fair to call GitLab as a company way more Open Source than GitHub. All of their development happens out in the open, the vast majority of their codebase is Open Source, and the source code for GitLab EE is even made available.

This is a spectrum, not black and white.

And you believe that makes them an "Open Source Company"

To me in order to be a Open Source company your primary product must itself be Open Source.

RedHat as an example... RHEL is open source

GitLab.. GitLab is open source

These are open source companies

Hiring a few devs for work on some side projects that are open source does not make one an Open Source Company

If they open GitHub Core then they can claim to be a open source company

Aaron Patterson, who I'll continue to use as an example, works full time on Rails while being paid by Github. Rails is not a side project for him.

Also as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Github has published plenty of open source software. Electron, Atom, resque, and updates to git itself.

It is a side project for the company, as are all the other projects you mentioned

As I clearly stated, GitHub can not be a Open Source company simply because they hired some devs to work on Open Source

Do you consider Microsoft to be a Open Source Company?

The Atom editor is widely used and was a major inspiration for VS Code. Electron, which is a GitHub project is also used for countless other projects.

"major inspiration for VS Code"

Which is a Microsoft product, and Microsoft is the inventor of EEE. Ergo, GitHub is complicit in an EEE attempt. Q.E.D. Case closed.

/s

So anyone who releases open-source code, that Microsoft might use in another open-source project is complicit in EEE? wow.

My apologies; I should have made the "/s" - which denotes sarcasm - much more apparent.

Yup. GitHub also released/contributed to a lot of other open-source Ruby stuff, like Resque.