Really hope these talks fall through and nothing comes of it. Too many bad experiences with Microsoft buying something out, mismanaging it, and it goes down the drain. As much as I love GitHub, I won't be using a Microsoft-owned GitHub for any of my company's work.
I was at a container orchestration conference the other day, and got the distinct impression that microsoft are not the great satan, and azure is probably a really good choice for cloud service. I can't believe I'm saying that. I'm having dinner with a prolific debian maintainer tonight, maybe he'll beat some sense into me.
The REST APIs and CLI/Powershell interfaces are much, much nicer. The web Portal seems to get revamped every other year and the latest incarnation is not very good.
All 3 major clouds have consoles that are good in certain things but mostly bad. Azure's console made a big mistake with the vertical blade design, but at least it always loads fast.
I agree and I would feel that same way if it were any other large tech company.
So many nice products have passed on in acquisition either because users abandoned them or the acquiring party did. I'm not sure which would happen first here.
If GitHub is financially strapped and looking for a buy out, I hope they're exploring other options for funding.
Agreed. Buying Nokia of all things stinks of Ballmer. I was listening to an interview where he seemingly took responsibility for the whole stuff up. Not sure how much weight that holds
Buying Nokia wasn’t the issue. Microsoft’s handling of Nokia was the issue. Microsoft is not good at making a physical product and releasing it to the world like Apple and Samsung. The fact many countries had to wait > 12 months to get the latest phone was retarded. Windows phone was awesome, but Microsoft screwed themselves by not doing minimum what it’s competitors were doing.
Huh? Microsoft has several very successful hardware product lines: peripherals (the Microsoft ergo keyboard is the gold standard in many circles), Xbox, the surface line. Maybe they can’t generate Apple hype but they do know how to make consumer hardware.
The surface line isn’t avaliable world wide on release. Windows phones were released in like 3 markets. Less than surface line. Xbox gets world wide releases.
Phones, people generally want what’s new. A 12-18 month old phone is not new.
I don’t think surface qualifies as good consumer hardware. It has been pleagued with driver problems and weird behaviour. But agree on periphericals and Xbox.
I had the top-of-the-line Nokia Lumia 920 (designed just before the acquisition), and the plastic case was too soft and collected dents & scratches like crazy. The matte finish was also too slippery to hold onto (I ended up putting some skateboard tape on it).
OTOH, I found the Windows Phone operating system to be highly responsive and I was able to navigate screens more quickly than the previous iPhone or the current Android I have. The problem was that as third-place in the market, few apps were available for it, and those that were weren't being maintained.
It got more bloated... My kids still use an old version to avoid that (they only play with each other so they don't need the latest version that is required to play on most servers online)
1. They already have such offering (VS Team Services).
2. Their competitors (GitLab, Bitbucket) already have that offering.
3. I don't think they're interested in GitHub for its revenue, but for its strategic value. GitHub has to protect its revenue model by disallowing free private repos, Microsoft can afford to be more flexible.
4. They've already made similar moves. They acquired Xamarin, which was expensive, and made it free.
VSTS, Microsoft's hosted TFS solution, gives you unlimited private git repos for up to 5 users, 40 hours worth of hosted builds per month, complete project management, a private markdown based Wiki, and free orchestration of local build and deployment agents.
How many projects are there out there that repositories hosted in GH, run in GH, and have package manifests that directly reference other GH repos. I'm sure there are a lot.
Golang can be the biggest offender in this regard because you import by typing the URL to a github repository... Better hope someone mirrors those projects if they ever go poof. It's not even a generic import to a package[0]. Gotta be fun to have to update all those imports later if a project moves to another host to avoid Microsoft.
Well that's the beauty of git, as long as anyone anywhere has a checkout of the Repository nothing will be lost. If tags are GPG signed you don't even have to put any trust in the surviveing source. That said for mantained code 99.9% of the time you would just use one of the core develops local copies.
In SIT (decentralized collaborative information tracker, https://sit.fyi) there's an issue tracking module and an import tool (https://github.com/sit-fyi/sit-import) that allows to convert all issues and PRs into self-contained issues that can be worked with using SIT issue-tracking,
so at least there's a relatively smooth way out to decentralized issue tracking.
It's just the stickiest app of all time To me it barely exists. I'm a hirer in the UK.
Before anyone touts how much wider our reach might be for potential hires, can I point out that my little firm has hired people from the other end of Europe directly ("real" friend of friend etc). Oh and just in case you are wondering - we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.
> IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with.
Linkedin is way way better than other job sites. For instance, Glassdoor doesn't even support basic keyword search. If you happen to track job ads for C programmers then you'd get all ads which may have a C character somewhere in their text, and forget abou searching for C++ because Glassdoor doesn't recognize the plus character. With linkedin at least basic keyword searches do work.
I'd argue LinkedIn is much worse than it was pre-acquisition, but it was already on that trajectory. The "news feed" and discussions around current events, etc. They've locked down more and more of it without a $30/mo subscription. Privacy controls are a nightmare to decipher.
I think it's significantly worse albeit probably short of totally "screwed up". Just marginally worse in a lot of small ways that add up to a less useful, less efficient experience for me.
just so you know, i know quite a few people at both linkedin and microsoft and for the most part they are still very seperate entities. linkedin is still using google docs and slack for instance. most of the influence microsoft has had on linkedin in smaller isolated integrations. so anything youve seen go downhill in linkedn consumer app is very much due to independent choices/acts by linkedin itself.
As someone with lots of friends at LinkedIn (I used to work there), I can agree somewhat. But I also know that things can be screwed up in non-obvious ways to rank and file employees (Tumblr/Yahoo and Flickr/Yahoo as examples, which I sadly was there for both).
They had a decent Android app, then someone saw that it was too fast/responsive and was using too little memory and took that as a challenge, how can I make skype worst? React Native!
Obviously that didn't pleased people (see rating in Play Store), and they had to provide something for low/mid range phones, and skype lite was born (which is really good one).
They undoubtedly did a bad job, but I think that Skype has a lot going against it from external factors anyway.
Everyone I know is using FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. The only time I hear Skype anymore is people using it for podcasts. Obvious anecdata but it seems reasonable that services with better device integration (FaceTime) or social graph access (Facebook) would do better in the long run.
Hangouts is a great example of another horrible UI. The whole tie in to Chrome made it unusable for anyone non technical (where did it go? What did you want me to click? I am in the call, but you're not there... oh you're in another call? How do you hangup? I don't see the window anymore, etc.)
A standalone app would fix this, but there seems to be some strange internal agenda tying it to Chrome... Chromebooks I guess?
Skype used to be mainstream. It was essentially a cross platform iMessage & FaceTime, almost ahead of its time. It was also efficient in terms of network usage, being peer-to-peer for the most part.
Had it continued to be usable, it would still be mainstream and might have the place of WhatsApp today. Instead, we now have this garbage Snapchat-like UI, a server-based model that doesn't even work (it was supposed to "fix" the P2P model, but for me it's been way worse than P2P which always worked), and a shitty Electron client that melts your battery and looks awful (they killed a gorgeous - especially on Mac - native client to replace it with this shit).
They wanted total control over the data so they converted the p2p supernodes to Microsoft servers... now the government can get what it needs more easily.
I think people forget how bad Skype was in a lot of ways though. The big reason they shifted to the cloud model, for instance, was how unreliable message delivery was on phones with peer-to-peer. I remember when, in order to send images, you and the other person had to be online at the same time.
They made some missteps, sure, but Skype was already a very dated solution.
Haven't really used group chats that much on it, but for call establishment, I stand behind my words when I say it used to be a lot better.
With P2P it would sometimes take a bit longer (10 seconds?) but it would always work. When it wouldn't, it was because of a problem on either one of the endpoints, and switching network connections or rebooting the router fixed it.
With the current model it would just randomly not work (the client also sucks and sometimes hangs in an inconsistent state after the failed call attempts), without anything we can do - it's something with the software and/or servers.
I used to trust Skype calls to actually go through - now even if I see "ringing" I have no faith in whether it's actually ringing on the other side (and if it was, whether the call would actually connect once picked up).
The design history of Skype for iPhone was particularly misguided: First it was a native UIKit app, then MS put a lot of effort into making it look and behave exactly like a Windows Phone app [1], down to the unusual gestures. When they gave up on that, the app reverted to a native UIKit design, but just a few updates later we got the current Snapchat clone instead. Needless to say, features regularly got lost during these radical redesigns.
That‘s still very clearly the same Microsoft where a gazillion layers of dumb middle management ruin everything[2].
It doesn't provide any value to the regular user; most people I know receive lots of emails mostly from body shops but rarely get a job from LinkedIn. The UI is designed to make it hard to configure privacy, and to make you casually spill your contact list. They are always trying to sell premium accounts.
To be fair it should provide some value to a junior dev who doesnt have a Network yet but LinkedIn doesn't even try to hide the fact that you are the product (unlike say fb).
Shameless plug here but I'm also so sick of LinkedIn that I've started building an alternative for developers by myself - https://able.bio/
Still very much alpha but the idea is to have a clean UI and allow developers to write their own insightful articles for the community to read and reward the author with reputation. Like Medium but with more specific language, library, framework topics etc. Then use that to help recruiters who can't code advertise and source candidates for technical interviews. No inbox spamming free for all, they can only contact you when you've applied for a position.
I'd be interested to know what people think of this and if they have any feedback.
So, previously Microsoft used to have a program to integrate new companies, called “venture integrations”. I wonder if LinkedIn is going through VI, or not.
I would understand if they sold, but it would make me sad. GitHub has done a great job. I'd hate to see them have to answer to someone other than themselves.
I don’t know, isn’t Microsoft the only software company left? I love Google, but they sell ads, their mission isn’t to make software.
Microsoft is more and more cloud and services, but they still have a developer mentality and they have done some good stuff with open source lately.
If someone is going to buy Github, Microsoft is probably the most friendly to developers. Unless Google or Facebook wants to go full altruist and buy for the credibility.
A lot of people would say Google these days... now that they're starting to move beyond Material Design 1.0 a lot of their products are becoming more visually mature and unique, along with their substantial investment in machine learning to make their software more personalized, etc.
I'm only a relatively casual user, but doesn't Atlassian mostly buy and then manage existing software products? They didn't develop Trello, HipChat, Bitbucket etc.
Every time I run into an issue with Atlassian software, I find a JIRA ticket from 7 years ago. If they have a capable dev team, it's probably working on projects off my radar?
Ignoring Azure, all the major MS products I can think of are at least partially ad supported (even when they release something that doesn’t serve ads, it’s a safe bet that it gathers data for better targeting...)
Hell, Windows is ad-supported now. Ever updated and get your free "gift" of Bubble Witch Saga 2: Electric Boogalo? I would pay double for an enterprise version of Win10 without that crap.
How has Kaggle fared under Google? Just asking. Also, ms has been focusing on open source quite a bit. Largest contributor on Github. Makes sense. It'll also send a message to the tech community. Mostly Google hogs the limelight for open source stuff.
Yeah, I agree. I would immediately delete my github account if this happened. I don't buy that MS has seen the light and is a different company now. In the last 2 weeks, 3 people have told me their Windows 10 install updated itself and was completely borked. At least one of these people are going out and buying a new Windows machine as a result (thus giving MS a little more revenue). It absolutely disgusts me.
This update has broken computers until the SSDs in question were blacklisted. For people who auto-downloaded the update after that, Windows "only" showed annoying and absolutely unhelpful error messages every single day since the 1803 release.
GitHub clearly needs change of management. I havent seen much inmovation from them compared to GitLab. Microsoft is very strong on innovation since change of management.
I'm not super familiar with GitLab besides self hosted instances. Even then I prefer the simplicity of gogs. So what do you feel are still be innovations GitLab has but GitHub lacks?
GitHub is easy to use, and I’ve found the important features work really well.
I’m all for improvements, but I’m not even sure what I would want. At this point, I’m more worried any attempt at innovation would break the things I like about GitHub now, than I am excited for something new.
I use gitlab for all my private projects and don’t find it to be remarkably better in any way, and the UI always confuses me.
Well, my only request would be that it be more like GitHub.
The only reason for this is familiarity. GitHub is the market leader now and I use it every day at work. It's a lot easier to get used to a new UI if it is similar to the one you are used to. I'm sure if everyone used GitLab at work everyday, it would be fine. The UI doesn't strike me as bad, just very different.
Otoh, GitLanpb seems to have a messy code that is slow and taking much memory by slapping new stuff in frequently. (My impression from reading several comments on HN.)
Our team is actively working on improving the performance of GitLab.com. If you are referring to the merge requests, we're close to converting the merge request view to Vue, this should speed it up considerably.
Some of us are old enough to remember Microsoft of the 90's and early aughties. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was the name of the game then, many of us haven't forgiven Microsoft for that yet (and nor do we plan to).
Right, I know that, and that's just idiotic behavior. You should concentrate on what is happening today, not what happened decades ago and hold grudges. That attitude leads you into unhappy places.
That would've been my exact reaction while reading this. Good thing I have no large projects on Github.
Well, I guess Gitlab would be happy about the new customers. If they're clever, they'll work on some tools to easen the transition.
From this perspective, Git has made some fundamental things right: Because it only functions as a decentralized system, it strongly reduces lock-in. In the case of Github, you "only" had to port over issues and pull requests. Imagine how great it would be if there was a standard way to save issues in a git repo[1] that was supported by pretty much every provider.
There's no standard, of course, but [shameless plug] I've recently built SIT (https://sit.fyi) -- a tool that allows to collaborate on information in a decentralized, "true serverless" manner. Its first application is (duh!) issue tracking and it has been operational since almost day zero and SIT itself is using it. There's even a GitHub -> SIT import tool (pre-release)
Now, what's also great (did I mention "shameless"?) about the approach used in SIT is that while you can use it with Git (and this is how I've been using it so far), it does not depend on Git's structures but just files -- so it can be easily carried over to whatever might replace Git in a decade.
I've just been thinking: If one manages issues within a separate git repo -- couldn't we also store pull requests this way? I've always been very impressed by how good `git diff` and `git apply` work together, so theoretically, one should just be able to store the result of `git diff master...HEAD` in a new issue. The rest sounds like a tooling problem...
The list of key MS acquisitions isn't that long and out of several products only Nokia is a definite failure. Skype gotten worse but I wouldn't count it as failure just yet. Remaining big acquisitions (Forethought PowerPoint, Hotmail, Visio, Navision Dynamics, LinkedIn) where rather successful.
Many people mention Microsoft's past history as reasons for worrying about this. However, I disagree. I don't think this would be bad because it's Microsoft.
I think it would be bad because GitHub wouldn't be a generally independent entity, with no business interests besides making a product good enough that people will pay for it anymore. Currently, GitHub doesn't really have any incentive to care what tools and platform you are using, or where you deploy your code. To the contrary, they want to appeal to the widest audience possible.
This would all change if owned by Microsoft. GitHubs role would then instead likely instead be to channel users into other Microsoft products and services, especially Azure. Instead of functionality that benefits everyone independent of platform, it will be in their interest to add features that only benefit users of the Microsoft ecosystem. Azure CI, deploy to Azure, .NET integration, LinkedIn integration. I don't think this is the kind of platform most FOSS projects would want to use, certainly not me.
This is what I was thinking also (though you articulated it much better than I would have).
A large company doesn't make an acquisition like this without a business incentive. For them, it's driving people to their products. Maybe making the tooling in github for interacting with microsoft-y products a little bit better. Maybe adding whatever licenses microsoft likes to the front of the default licenses you can pick from when you create a new repo. Things generated by their editors going into your .gitignore by default.
I don't see any reason they'd acquire github and then entirely leave it alone.
Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling. C# is a pleasure and visual studio code is an excellent, extensible coding tool.
Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.
I wonder what Linus Tovalds is thinking right now. If I remember correctly, he wrote Git because Perforce was forcing him to use Microsoft software licences.
Git was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper (which was originally provided freely to Linux kernel developers under the agreement that they not develop a clone).
Git was not developed as a clone of BitKeeper, it has a very different design (snapshot-based content-addressed filesystem, versus the SCCS "weave"). If anything, git was a (much faster) clone of Monotone, minus the heavy cryptography focus which made Monotone so slow.
Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.
I'm not enthused about the idea of Github being bought. But on what grounds do you suspect that the Microsoft of the 90s is just lurking, like a conscious spirit, to reveal itself after a decade?
CEO Nadella started working at Microsoft in 1992, but the executives who coined and lived the EEE phrase are all out. Is Nadella a sleeper agent? If not, what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?
> what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?
I agree, it seems that both Gates and Ballmer have found new callings in life, which has left Nadella with pretty much control of the company. I remember almost feeling sorry for the guy when he took over, what freedom could he possibly have between those two? A lot, it seems in retrospect.
I've mentioned this a number of times, some of Microsoft's open source tooling is under the very permissive MIT license. In the case of GitHub it just means competitors will rise up and replace GitHub. Remember when SourceForge was the GitHub of the day, and then it became bad, and finally it's acceptable with the new owner. People will outright ditch GitHub if evil is truly done to it, but Microsoft doesn't want that, they'll do everything they can to not screw up GitHub.
Whoa, hang on a second. SourceForge? Acceptable with new owners? Have you tried to download anything from the site recently? They may not be bundling crapware with downloads anymore but it's still an ad-laden slow-loading pile of trash unusable website. (I don't think I'm being hyperbolic there, to be honest!)
2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes.
3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.
I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone willing to give up liberty for security will receive neither.
> I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates
I think this largely was only true of the period between the internet becoming a thing and the smartphone becoming a thing. Nowadays there's phones, tablets, and chromebooks that serve the needs of those people better and in a more convenient form factor. Desktops are for people who do work, create stuff, or are hobbiests.
I think a lot of the reasons computers suck today is because of this idea that they need to cater to some strawman drooling moron of a user.
Those devices only take you so far. They are consuming devices only, similar to a television. People still have and use normal PCs and will do so in the future. (Notebooks included of course)
That's kinda my point though. The strawman user these kinds of arguments prop up as the reason everything needs to suck is pretty much 100% consumer. There might be a few things, like typing documents and printing that aren't entirely covered by smartphones, tablets, and chromebooks, but that's a rapidly shrinking set of things.
Doubt that. "Desktop" is defined by mouse, keyboard and display. A chromebook satisfies this. I have yet to meet a user who uses a smartphone instead of a PC to do stuff that are notably easier to do on a PC. (while having both)
I would also bet that every user would chose a keyboard over a touch interface to type text.
Maybe you have a point, but I don't feel like connecting a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to a smartphone makes it a desktop. Regardless, I don't think those OSs are good desktop OSs either. I still maintain that this is a poor excuse for having shitty tools.
3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.
I wouldn't mind forced updates if they were only used for critical security updates. They are not; Microsoft abuses the privilege, and therefore may not be trusted to have it at all.
Forced updates can be bad, for example I narrowly missed having a bricked workstation when the April update was released and it borked machines using Intel 600p SSDs. I hadn't used that machine for a few weeks and it had been powered off; by the time I finally started using it again Microsoft had blocked the update for machines with that hardware.
Anyway, I can manage the limited telemetry via hosts and I can defer updates (which I will do from now on), but my biggest gripe is forced installation/reinstallation of previously removed apps and games. I run Windows 10 Pro and I end up with a few variations of Candy Crush games, Minecraft, Autodesk drawing apps, and others after initial OS installation and after every major update so far. This is while using an offline account, and even if I used my Microsoft account on this workstation I've never purchased/downloaded any of those apps in the past.
I get that "Pro" at this point means home power user, and companies should be using Enterprise, but Microsoft shouldn't be pushing any software back onto the machine once the user has uninstalled it. That's user-hostile and takes control out of the hands of the one person who should be in complete control of the system.
Once full, non-buggy support for Ryzen APUs arrives in Linux, I'm switching Windows 10 to a VM and going back to Linux on this machine as the daily driver OS.
I saw one happening on a PC in a conference room two weeks ago at the very moment a talk should begin. Nobody could do anything with the pc until the update was over. Great user experience.
I recently had to do the forced April Windows 10 update, and not only did it take 10 hours, the UX was horrific... e.g. Random CMD prompt windows popping up etc.
If that is allowed to pass QA in Microsoft, then it kind of scares me what can happen if they were to acquire GitHub.
No, forced updates are also bad. I own my computer, I built it, and I paid for Windows. Microsoft shouldn't get to decide how I run it (I can't turn off Windows Defender permanently) or when it updates (you can only delay them so long before it forces you to update). If their updates were stable it would maybe help the argument, but they routinely break my system such that I lose time that was intended to be spent on playing a game. They also conveniently reset some of my settings which always tends to favor the way Microsoft would like for me to use my computer. Or they reinstall fucking Candy Crush.
For god's sake, even Apple, the prime example of knows-better-than-you lets you never update, if that's what you really want.
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Microsoft is a big company, that's a different team with a different set of leadership. The guy in charge of Windows stepped away. Windows 10 is the last version of Windows basically. Not sure if that means someday they may release a distro (crazy I know) but it's interesting nonetheless.
I know about that one, but I mean one that'd be consumer driven in some way. I know the ship has sailed but I'd love to see Microsoft create an Android / iOS competitor, and maybe something open source would give them an edge in that regard. It would be best if it were somehow privacy / security focused. Microsoft has the resources to make amazing products the issue is and I've mentioned it before, the company is ever so big, with ever SO MANY PRODUCTS and projects. We know they've got quite a bit going on on the user facing front, but I can't imagine how many internal tools they've got that they rely on as well.
Automatic updates are great, I use it on most of my dev servers
I could even see that defaulting auto update to "on" is a good move too. If you know what you're doing you can turn them off.
I haven't adminned a windows machine since '98 -- can you really. Or turn off automatic windows updates?
As for any telemetry stuff, that should be opt in, and have a target server to send to, which you can point to your own box if you want to.
Microsoft today is different to Microsoft in the 90s though. In the 90s it was a software company that used embrace extend extinguish to maintain and extend its monopolies, but it wrote software and the software was the product.
Now it seems it uses the "user is the product" ala Google, Facebook etc. I'm not aware of apple doing that. Still I guess inevitable as companies penny pinch more and more.
I lived through the nineties as well, that doesn't mean I think everything that was amazing back then still is amazing today nor that everything that sucked back then still sucks today...
I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.
Personally I'm not so much worried about Microsoft going back to Microsoft'95 but more about the fact that they, like most (all?) other big tech companies, collect more and more data and integrate more and more tightly into our lives. Still I feel that currently Facebook, Google and Amazon are all scarier in that respect.
> I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.
If they've managed to change that much, then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft as soon as a new CEO steps in.
That's why I prefer Microsoft to stay away from the products and projects everybody loves. Furthermore, I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.
> I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.
Microsoft has experience handling online code repositories and team services. Azure integration has the potential to improve deployment pipelines for many users. Microsoft has lots of experience doing things at scale, and can potentially find cost reduction maneuvers for Github. Visual Studio integration can bring more users to Github. Cooperate users are more likely to upgrade their existing agreement with Microsoft than they are to enter a finical relationship with a new company. Microsoft has just as much or more to offer Github as any other top 5 tech company.
Yes they want... yet it has been Windows only for a year and a half, so far. That's the problem with Microsoft buying big things like Github. It turns people not using their flagship OS into second class citizens.
Azure, VS... Yes, I know Microsoft has tons of things to offer to their customers. But not everybody in Github is into Microsoft tech. In fact, most are not. So that's what worries me: trying to tie Github to their products and strategies.
It might happen, but I suspect they will continue to play nice with other tech stacks. Their recent strategy is to provide good tech that can integrate with other tech, to compete on superior products instead of locking in users. They haven't recently extended or extinguished, just embraced, and embracing has done great things for their stock price.
> then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft
Well, the world has changed and there is no longer any opportunity for a 90s Microsoft. So I'm pretty sure that unless the world changes back to the 90s, Microsoft wouldn't survive such a turn.
I reviewed the data that Microsoft has on me and there is nothing in there that makes me feel uncomfortable. Facebook on the other hand.. not only is the data wrong but if it gets public I can see it damaging me
I'd say that Microsoft is worse than most other companies because it caters to governments, not consumers. Skype and MSN mysteriously worked in China at a time when no other service did. What's their incentive to push back against LE backdoors when they're not an edgy consumer brand anyway?
Corporations only exist as legal constructs. I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just saying that it is always going to be the case that a business, any business, will work within the law and with lawful government because they ultimately depend on contract and property law.
All companies have to comply with the law, but Microsoft sells lots of software to governments. They aren't going to put up a fight over end-user privacy if they make more money from gov't contracts than from privacy-conscious consumers. The financial incentives are completely different than for e.g. Apple, and I don't see how that is ever going to change.
All companies, including Apple sell lots of products to the government because, next to Walmart, its the largest employer in the country. It has a $4T budget.
Apple doesn't give a s* about your privacy. They claim to give a s* about your privacy. Those are different things.
If you want this to change you have to get involved with legislation to change the rules/law. That's the only option. None of them "care" about you or really anything, because they aren't human. Companies respond to changes in the law which bound the approved set of behaviors. That's it.
And the more Apple doubles down on protecting its users, the bigger this financial incentive becomes. Of course that doesn't stop me from supporting better legislation (GDPR was a great start).
I lived through the 90s too. It's been 20+ years since the peak of the Microsoft that gave them the reputation you're reflecting.
If "I lived through the 90s" was how I measured technology and companies, I'd sure as hell not be using Apple products - their technology was pretty terrible then, and the company was incoherent. Would any rational person say that the terrible tech and incoherence then translates to how one would accept what they produce in 2018? Some companies change, some don't (see: oracle). It seems a healthier approach is to measure the behavior and state of a company in the present.
Re: macs. Yes. MacOS releases up to 1999 lacked features common in other systems, like full preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Windows NT had that in the mid 90s, and various Unix flavors had it for decades. I liked the UI on the macs vs windows95/98/NT or Linux/Solaris, but the stability of macs was a joke. Everyone was pretty happy when they cleaned up NeXTSTEP and turned it into the basis for OSX - that was a very smart move.
Yeah, let's evaluate corporations for decisions made decades ago by people no longer at the company. At least spend 15 minutes reading about the progress MS has made in recent years before throwing around shade.
Well, you know, this wasn't just an "insane" guy at the top who now left the company and everything's cool. Companies have culture, and while we can agree today Microsoft's not the same Microsoft from 10 years ago, we shouldn't forget their history so soon.
> this wasn't just an "insane" guy at the top who now left the company and everything's cool
Satya Nadella has completely re-organized MS inside-and-out since taking the helm in 2014. It is a VERY different company than it was even 5 years ago. In March [1], Microsoft even went so far as to officially disband the Windows department and merge it into something called "Experiences & Devices".
It's different, but not very different. They still have a lot of lock-in like Outlook (ActiveSync), DirectX, exFAT and so on and so forth. They show no sign of dropping lock-in, except in markets where they are way weaker than competition.
How is DirectX a lock-in? Vulcan/OpenGL are available. Using Outlook/ActiveSync is no more a lock-in than depending on GSuite (or ANY business productivity suite), and I fail to remotely even understand how exFAT is a problem. Weak arguments.
It's MS only. It's more obvious in cases like Xbox, where MS don't support anything except DirectX. I.e. developers are forced to use it if they want to release for Xbox.
exFAT is an issue since it's a patented filesystem that MS pushed as a standard for SD cards. You can't freely use it (unless you just ignore those patents on your own risk).
ActiveSync doesn't have commonly available FOSS clients, so you can't use it on Linux easily. It's highly irritating (since it's widely entrenched in corporate environments). And etc. and etc.
The progress they've made? Baking in more spyware into Windows and other products than ever before? Taking more control away from computer users than ever before?
You can proliferate the doublespeak if you want but I'll call it what it is.
Like rebooting computers whenever they feel like it. Reenabling previously disabled options etc. Your head is in the sand but you don't have to live this way.
Probably news to the Win32 devs of the world that their technology is "not the same as real native like C++." What distinction do you mean to make here?
UWP is native, you can code rich GUI in C++ without any GC involved.
Currently it only works for MS platforms (Windows incl. ARM, xbox, embedded) but they might make it cross platform in some future. Technically the API is not that complex, i.e. unlike WPF it’s not that hard to port from the current Direct3D to Vulkan or GLES or Metal.
Microsoft has been relying on Github to share all of its UWP samples for the last few years. This year, they added all their developer docs to Github so they can be directly addressed and updated by the community. They've done a good job of responding to PRs and issues. I write Hololens software and I could not have achieved such rapid development without their examples and developer outreach.
However, Github is one of my favorite services, professionally and for hobbies, and I really don't want significant changes. I also use VSTS (Microsoft's code+PM online service) and it is a beast. They don't need to be heavily intermingled.
They are however embracing open source in a manner that feels very sincere to me.
For the record, the so-called "spyware" is telemetry which exists only in the SDK for .NET Core and not the actual runtime that you would ship to the user with the software. It is anonymous data, completely open source so it really is only what they say it is, and the first time you use it it tells you how to disable it.
> Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling.
Not going to deny this, but that's really the reason I'm not comfortable with the idea of a MS owned Github. Microsoft doing open source development is great. Microsoft trying to influence open source and FOSS development as a whole, not so much. Them aquiring a central hub of such development efforts doesn't signal good things to come: The users of Github have nothing to gain from this, whereas MS has, and there's a non-zero chance of them ruining the thing for everyone in the process.
The one thing that I like about Github is that everything is public by default and you have to pay to keep your code private. I feel like a positive consequence of that business choice was the opening up of way more software. Gitlab, while being very awesome doesn't have that same rule and neither does Bitbucket. It's my assumption that this is the biggest reason there's so much open source code flowing right now.
It makes me wonder whether I'll be able to find as many random interesting projects just by searching for things anymore.
Though there is indeed much more software open source lately, I feel that is mostly a consequence of the free and easy availability of open source hosting.
I still remember the old days where most opensource projects were doing self-hosting or using sourceforge. Self-hosting is something that most developers that just want to build something nice won't consider. And using sourceforge back then was also atrocious (they didn't exactly have an easy to use UI, if I remember correctly).
This makes me think that what contributed the most to there being so much open source, is the easyness of creating your own repository on GitHub. With just a few clicks you have one.
Seems like the view here is pretty negative. I feel like most people here haven't worked with Microsoft dev products recently. They're getting better. I guess the crowd here isn't typically in the .NET world.
Particularly with how they interact on GitHub now, it's quite impressive. I've reported issues for docs.microsoft.com, participated in discussions on Visual Basic development, etc. and while there's still definitely that corporate veil to some degree, they're extremely responsive, they're very active in responding to requests and discussing fixes.
I generally now hope that whatever Microsoft thing I'm dealing with somewhere ends up linking to GitHub, because everyone on the side of the company that's working with GitHub is pretty on point.
Which is what gives me some hope that they could manage this acquisition right: They're already doing GitHub the way GitHub should be done.
Even when it leads from GH to internal email chains, they're really good about keeping those on the GH issue in the loop... often from only parallel issues.
Issue filed in node sql driver... azure tech notices the issue, raises to sql team... sql team dev starts replying and working to resolve... recommends patch to upstream project in github... issue resolved.
Oracle would NEVER do something like that. It was actually very impressive, and that's just my one anecdote, and I've seen many others.
I think that's the point. I'm personally worried Microsoft may have a very narrow view of what GitHub is. A lot of tech hosted there doesn't even run on Windows, or isn't even related to software. (legal, political, docs, guides, etc.)
Since the Core era, not all .NET applications are built for Windows either.
Considering you bring up the second part, it makes me wonder if maybe outside of the obvious (owning GitHub), perhaps they're after the extra talent to bolster their SharePoint product.
what makes you think that? they killed off their own code hosting site in codeplex and moved everything to github. they are one of the largest if not the largest open source contributors in the world. and .net core is setting itself up to be a major player in cross-platform application development. it has a chance, if microsoft brings over uwp, wpf, and windows forms to .net core, to take over cross-platform gui development. with the windows subsystem for linux, windows 10 can run most linux-based software. they've developed the hottest ide at the moment on top of github developed technology.
You mention a lot of stuff that's in the same '.NET world' skellera mentioned, but the currently dominant GUI platform is the web, and neither is going to do take over. There's also still embedded software, hardware description, databases, emulators/simulators, competing virtual machines and GUI frameworks, a whole bunch of non-tech stuff, etc.
They do get a lot of this stuff, but I feel like whatever they want to do with Github is more geared towards average Joe .NET developer. Possibly making the platform less attractive for everything else through neglect.
The new Microsoft has made it clear that they want to support as many areas as they can. Azure does not have any lock-in of a specific platform (other than Azure itself in some ways) and Microsoft is constantly trying to get their tools to work in Linux and Mac. While they obviously would prefer you to be on .Net, they realize that lock-in ultimately hurts them.
Just give it a little more time. They are turning around years of company culture and they're doing a great job at it. If VS Code is a sign of future products, I'm excited to see what they come out with down the road.
not really. half the stuff i mentioned is all about the web. that’s the core market for .net core and visual studio code. visual studio code is certainly not .net centric at all. the in the box language support primarily targets web languages.
and i don’t get why you are mentioning those other things. what do they have to do with anything regarding microsoft understanding github? microsoft is no doubt and expert in all of those fields anyway, at least internally.
and what cross-platform gui framework would compete with a .net core cross-platform implementation of uwp, wpf, and windows forms? nothing, in my opinion. people would flood the .net ecosystem to get away from things like c++ and qt and the horror of writing script-based GUIs in python.
Depends on who you talk to... I'm pretty sure it's MS developers that drove the integration of git repositories into TFS (many were already using git locally for local branches and commits with TFS repos). The move to GitHub for all MS OSS was probably developer driven too.
The Office team is probably more than happy to not be hamstrung to windows only. Particularly Office 365. Azure has been using a lot of non-ms/windows tech from the start.
I'm sure there's some in the recently re-org that used to be Windows still have issues, but the old guard is largely gone now.
Azure team gives a shit about "not invented here". They are exclusively interested in your cpu cycles and bytes in memory. Who organizes the cycles and bytes, they do not care.
Surely, there are preferred stacks (e.g. in the high level PaaS areas), but this includes node, python and .NET.
PS: one save bet: Java will never be on their support list :). But only for legal reasons :)
It's actually really interesting. Seems like internally, MSFT has kind of been let loose and no longer has to adhere to the more strict style Ballmer was a fan of. We've seen this with them hiring OSS talent (Miguel de Icaza, who was a pretty big advocate of trying to make MSFT less proprietary and locked down).
Externally though, the image looks completely different to those who don't really care for what's happening at MSFT - they just seem like an outdated Apple. That's slowly starting to change, I think the Verge recently put out a piece claiming they've switched positions. However, a lot of major consumer problems (Windows Update, Skype) have plagued the company tremendously. No amount of loving Typescript or VSC is going to change that.
Well it's not like the reason for being negative is unfounded. MS has a long history of running services into the ground, and their recent 'we love open source' charade brings back strong memories of E3 for many folks.
The fact that the Microsoft of the past 2 years is "getting better" at something they've tried to do for many decades is a great reason to be worried about them taking ownership of a product they are unfamiliar with.
e.g. "GitHub is really starting to improve again" - Devs in 2050
Why do you think "they are unfamiliar with it"? On the contrary, Microsoft has a lot of stuff ongoing in GitHub. Seems many critical people in this thread don't have a clue.
I have never seen any good .NET code in the wild. A typical story IMO is to come into a workplace where they are trying to dump legacy .NET systems as soon as possible because they are incredibly brittle. .NET seems to be one of the biggest software scams of all time. Great vendor lock-in though. Visual Studio, MS-SQL, LINQ, Entity framework etc... the only solution is to rewrite everything.
That's very subjective. C# has tons of useless keywords that you just know some arrogant dev is going to use because they can, which then no junior can work with. It also has a worse ecosystem for writing server software (while obviously a better ecosystem for writing Windows applications) and is less suitable for cross-platform work.
Can you elaborate on this "keyword" statement? I find the statement very confusing especially when comparing it to C, modern C++, modern Java or any functional "magic" languages.
The second part is true. .NET does not share the same wide ecosystem as Java.
It is subjective, but things like genetics and reflection I think are better in C#. I am not sure which keywords you think are "useless." Either way though, they're quite similar. There is no innate quality about C# where the code has to be terrible and the only hope is a total rewrite in something else.
I have hands-on experience with Unity3D and .NET Core 2. Both are cross-platform and worked relatively well. I’ve built MacOS, iOS, Android software with Unity, and Linux software with .NET Core.
I’ve heard Xamarin is also good for mobiles but haven’t personally used it.
I've done legacy work in both and I'd never choose Ruby over C#. It might be a little faster to write the code the first time around, but maintaining a big legacy project stinks.
Also, none of Atwood's reasons is "I don't like working in C#." And several of the concerns in this post are obsolete.
Well who cares about that, really. I'm not talking about how pretty the code is; I'm talking about the ease of maintaining it. Ruby code frequently requires digging through the method and methods it calls to figure out the expected input.
The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing, but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.
I like the fact Github is independent of all the big players. I really, really, really hope it stays a neutral ground.
Also, if acquired by MS, I'm not that afraid for github itself. However, what is at risk in my opinion is all the integrations around github. There is a rich and striving ecosystem surrounding github. Tools like appveyor, travis-ci, coverall, readthedocs, codacy are really useful, ease a lot development and are infinitely easier to setup/maintain than a Jenkins box plus a few slaves. What would happen to this ecosystem remains to be seen.
That's the point. No one acquires GitHub so no one can eventually corrupt it with partisan "my stuff is better than your stuff" idiocy.
GitHub works because it effectively belongs to "no one" as far as the big players are concerned. Sure they might themselves go bad one day but there is no point in hasting this for some two cents Azure/AWS/GCP mode.
If the acquisition goes through, VS Code is probably going to kill Atom, which is my go-to editor for many tasks. VS Code may be better overall, but it's not for me, and I'll have to change my workflow.
1. LinkedIn's dark UI patterns are as bad as they've ever been. Bringing the same to GitHub or otherwise LinkedIn-ifying it seems like a very real risk.
2. Ramping up telemetry. Key loggers in Windows 10, opt-out telemetry in .NET Core, seems impossible to get VSCode to stop phoning home.
I constantly remind myself that HN does not actually represent what most customers want and/or need in the real world.
Most routine jobs/contracts at the coalface are still Java/.NET (possibly with a bit of Kotlin thrown in) - I even see companies looking for PHP developers on a weekly basis.
They are definitely alive and kicking, though if you judged based on this website alone, they all ceased to exist 10 years, replaced by Golang, Elixir and Clojure.
Mild exaggeration (and it's not a criticism of the people here), but you get my drift. People here like to talk about new/shiny/cutting-edge - and that's fine, but it's also not necessarily what customers/clients want or need.
C#/.NET in particular, though not perfect, is one of the most pleasurable languages/frameworks to work in.
Many visitors to HN are concerned with selling their skills to various customers, whereas others are concerned with the best technologies for building a successful startup. If you're selling your skills to a legacy institution and want to switch to selling them to a startup, looking at tech discussed on HN could be useful.
That one was really sad. Sunrise was an excellent product. I'm actually tempted to recreate it myself. I'm sure it would be possible to commercialise something like that.
It's a big company and hard to blame an individual for mistakes. But they totally missed out on being the mobile OS of the future under him. And they ended up getting a late, slow start to cloud computing (minus SAAS).
They made a lot of money, but were not successful. Business software companies become irrelevant decades before their revenues go away (eg IBM). Microsoft lost its future relevance under Ballmer.
Ballmer may have hurt microsoft, but they are still alive and well. The truth of it is that for a lot of things they do, there just isn't a competitor, nor will one arise soon. No one is replacing excel. As for windows -- there are a couple of niches where mac or linux could step in, but for most of them, that just isn't an option. Azure, typescript, vscode, ms office, office 365 are massively successful.
Really? It's become nearly unusable for me. I used to have it open all the time and talk to lots of people. Now it feels closer to an infection on my computer that I only pull up when I have to talk to someone on it and then promptly struggle to logout and make sure it's truly closed.
I used to like Skype, but they've made a bunch of terrible choices.
Their integration of Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft IDs into Skype has meant that I now have two or three contacts for some people, and I have to switch which contact I send messages to depending on what device they are currently using.
They've also broken other basic functionality like sending messages - even with a solid internet connection on both sides, it will often refuse to send messages leaving them in a 'Sending' state.
Other times i'll be in the middle of a conversation and I won't get a reply to certain messages that appear to have sent correctly. Hours or days later I'll get a confused "What?" message from that person, to which I've got no idea what they're talking about, and then they send me a screenshot showing a half dozen messages suddenly showing up from previous conversations.
Then there's situations where I'll get messages on one device, but not on another (eg phone). So I've got someone pissed at me because I'm not responding to them, when the notifications are all piling up on my phone or another laptop, or whatever.
All in all, Skype has become so unreliable that I will only use it to make calls, because at least that way I can be sure the messages are getting through.
I haven't bashed Microsoft for a long time, and I won't any time soon. However, this development has me worried.
There's a big difference between engaging the developer community with great products and purchasing important services that the developer community relies on.
Microsoft has succeeded many times with products and services they've built themselves, and with products they've purchased, but how often have they succeeded with services they've purchased?
Most of those are products. Of the services you mentioned, I would only call Hotmail a success in the sense that there wasn’t a net detriment to users because of the purchase.
Maybe the founder are fed up with running it. I can understand your want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.
Maybe the founders are fed up with running it. I can understand you want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.
I can't help but be insanely sceptical. Microsoft has a massive legacy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and I don't want the GitHub ecosystem to suffer from the same reoccurring pattern. Call me jaded by Microsoft's past behaviour, but I just cannot forget the numerous times Microsoft has absolutely ruined thriving ecosystems by using the same tricks.
Heck Microsoft killed their own competitor TFS and pushed people to migrate to Git, and uses GitHub themselves for hosting several products. Microsoft also has full Git support in Visual Studio Online (their enterprise competitor to GitHub), Visual Studio, and VS Code.
Microsoft would likely use GitHub to advertise their development products, tools, and services like Azure. I doubt they'd want to "extinguish" GitHub because it just means less eyes on their adverts.
They extinguished Skype. They will manage to do the same with Github eventually. They are the biggest user already and would therefore be forced to cater to their own needs first over those of the rest if the community. This would drive the service squarely into the ground by doing everything right.
This is negative value. The only reason the big companies host their source code on GitHub is because it's independent. They will stop doing that tomorrow if GitHub is acquired and it will lose all its value.
As someone who has always despised git for its complexity and being a movement more than a new technology I have been waiting years for this. Let git fracture and die. Maybe then we can get tools that work for us instead of the other way around.
I enjoy Mercurial as much as the next person. But git is an engineering feat simply because it works well enough for so many use cases. Also, if git is the worst part of your tooling, that's some great tooling and a good problem to have.
It's just software. My experience with git was about a month long phase where I devoted a few hours a week to learning it. Now I can use it but I still have to google commands for anything other than the basics. That's the problem with git. Git without google would be unusable. That's why I consider it to be extraordinarily poorly designed. You've seen git commands, I'm not going to go look up some esoteric command just to prove a point to you. The point is a good program would not force you to google everything, it would just work.
I consider git to be more of an advertising feat. It fascinates me how many people drank the kool-aid.
For the comparisons of this acquisition to Skype, yes Microsoft bungled the Skype acquisition.
But they have been killing it with Typescript and Visual Studio. I feel like that at such a large company, the Typescript recent history matters more than the Skype history. Two very different areas with different people in charge, etc.
As much as I love VSCode, you live in a buble. A communication app affects way more people than a programming language or a text editor. Even my mother uses the former, while only a fraction of all the programmers I met in my life use the laters.
And MS did messed up on other major products or companies
- Rare video games. They did freaking golden eyes and conkers bad day and they manage to kill it.
- they messed up Wn10, which is still not as good as Win7 after all those years but spies more on you and forces update at the worse moment on you
- the latest outlook is barely usable. Sometime mails can't be sent. Sometime it freezes or crashes. It's very slow, the search sucks and I never find the buttons I'm looking for.
- they killed Nokia and the windows phone despite all the investments the community did in it. And it was considered a good product.
- they are milking minecraft like disney is milking SW, so that all the creative community has moved to private servers.
I mean, we are talking about a company that had a monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world. The player and browser, the most used software ever by the non tech saavy users.
And to this day, none of their versions is remotely as good as the competition.
Many of your criticisms may be justified, but this one reads a bit silly to me:
> monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world
I know it's a trope to say that IE was a monopoly, but the longest view of these stats I can easily find comes from W3Counter[1] and at what appears to be its market peak in 2007, IE6 and IE7 had 50% and 17% of the market.
OK, so the combined share was downtrending since the actual peak in 2004, according to ADTECH data from Europe[2]...
Huh. There are stats that go way further back, to before IE was dominant, and Wikipedia says it actually peaked in 2002, with 96% of the market.[3] I stand corrected?
I started my reply to make a point, and upon doing the basic research found that it appears I don't know what I'm talking about. These stats are really interesting, though!
FWIW, I have not been primarily a Windows user since I was about 14 years old. That was in 1999, when Netscape was still a player in the market, and I began my switch to Linux. I guess I forgot (or blacked out, it was traumatic) the fact that there was a point in time in the Browser Wars when IE was effectively declared the winner. It's been a steady downhill trend since then!
Aaand this is the weakness of centralizing everything in Github. Inevitable that it gets acquired by something with other motives (or is forced to exploit its central position in some way because business). The fact it may be Microsoft that seals the deal is just a cherry on top.
We need proper decentralization.
There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.
> There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.
The Web is decentralized, and so everybody’s using Google to discover it. The problem with decentralization is you still need global entry points, i.e. some sort of centralization.
As a long time GitHub user I really do hope these talks do not result in an acquisition. I would really like GitHub to be independent from OS vendors, or vendors of platforms, ecosystems, compilers, IDEs etc.
I want GitHub's goal to be a good GitHub. Not a good part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Those may initially be the same, but it takes very little for them to not be the same.
At first they will just inject random commits that don't change any files but inform you about the latest price offerings on One Drive and Azure hosting. Later on if you're still on the "free" plan some of the commits will modify your hosted software to show their ads at runtime. Have fun!
> will do away with GitHub's current, open nature.
Apparently the Gnome folks concluded that GitHub was already too closed to even consider them in the competition for the question "Where will the Gnome project live in the future?"
GitLab won that competition, btw, and icrosoft wasn't even part of that calculus.
With current trends in Microsoft's Developer Division, it's possible that GitHub could end up way more open if Microsoft acquired them. GitHub's core business is GitHub and they need that to stay closed to stay competitive. GitHub under Microsoft could have less financial pressure to keep closed.
Is it likely? I don't know. It is an interesting possibility though, that would certainly change the game.
There is precedent. Prior to Microsoft acquiring them, Xamarin was closed-source and licensing was $1000 per platform per year. At the Build conference in March 2016 Microsoft announced (1) that they were acquiring Xamarin, (2) that pricing would be dropping to zero, and (3) the Xamarin platform code would be open sourced as soon as possible after the acquisition.
This seems, to me, to illustrate perfectly how Microsoft still doesn't understand open source as an idea nor as a culture. The whole movement exists as a reaction against central, corporate control.
Large companies think that, by acquiring important hosted open source infrastructure, they'll somehow acquire the users or act as gatekeepers. But open source tooling is so decentralized these days that is not easy to be a captive user. The cost of switching is so low -- plenty of other comparable services supply collaborative utilities for git -- that, for most projects, a weekend spent altering URLs and configs should suffice.
If such a deal goes through, Microsoft will spend millions on the acquisition and, simultaneously, alternative providers who appear more independent (Gitlab, BitBucket, etc) will see a surge in new accounts.
And I, for one, think it'd be a good thing for open source. Every time an OSS sugar daddy turns on its users -- SourceForge, BitKeeper, Oracle, SCO, etc -- the community has grown more robust, more decentralized, and more resilient.
Does anyone have insight into what they're been working on recently at Github? I feel like the user experience hasn't changed/improved in the last couple of years at all. It feels to me like there is a lot of low hanging fruit to make a ton of money. For one they could integrate or replicate the functionality of Bountysource and let people donate to users. There is also tons of room for improvement in licensing like making copywriter-assignment frictionless and letting people dual license their software (so I could at a click of a button buy a proprietary license for someone's GPL'd library)
People are being overly pessimistic. This would be a potentially great deal. GitHub is very successful at what they do and I don't think MS would change that. More likely they would use GH as lead-in to selling cloud services the same way Google uses GitLab.
If you've watched the last couple Build Conferences (Microsoft's annual developer conference) they frequently demonstrate their CI/CD pipeline based on Github checkins, not VSTS checkins (just takes a webhook invocation and all the source-hosting sites support sending those out on check-in or merge).
What does GitHub's choice of cloud have to do with Microsoft's aptitude to take over an existing, huge, critical piece of the open source world? From a business perspective, or an operational one?
Some of my pessimism is not just with Microsoft, itself, even though I do have that. I think an argument can be made that we should not want all the decent software companies to be bought up by the same big five giant companies, no matter who it is.
AFAIK the timeline of profitability is somewhat like this:
- really profitable after introducing private repos
- burning quite some money for growth after they took VC money
- really profitable again after they changed their pricing to per-seat pricing
Most companies leave startup status long before they are profitable. It has much more to do with the stability and maturity of the business model and whether it can be scaled.
I have the opposite opinion. I think every few months I see an interesting feature being added that are slowly making github a better platform. Just for the last few months we've seen a lot of improvements for Enterprise, improvement to gitHub pages, saved replies, team discussions, security alerts. I love the pace they have to release meaningful improvements.
lol, it can be slow on larger projects but its innovative and complete. i really like the packages system/community. always open to suggestions, whats better?
I don’t know why you’d willingly be against competition though. GitLab makes GitHub better, but GitHub makes GitLab better. Why isn’t that a good thing?
It's getting depressing to see that mid tier companies are all now reliably getting swallowed up by larger ones. It is starting to feel like the golden age of technology - where brand new small companies emerge and become giant ones - is waning. Were Google, Amazon and Facebook actually the last of the tech giants to emerge and from now on, it's just a procession of watching every other company merge into the existing 5 or 6 big companies? I guess it is inevitable but it still makes me sad if we are transitioning to a more mature, but fundamentally more boring phase.
I really hope this doesn't happen. Microsoft design and services are all over the board, not in a good way. I'm sure they would add more features, or make it more enterprise-y, which could have benefits, but I would definitely move to a self hosted setup if this went through. It's nice to have diversity of brand/company personalities in the tech ecosystem.
I run Windows. I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, and the sense that Microsoft is ritually unclean will drive many of them away from github. It's the best thing that's happened to BitBucket and Altassian ever. If I have a choice between MS tools and Altassian tools I will usually take MS. (Visual Source Safe really did suck, but Visual Studio is not that bad...)
Also, Microsoft acquisitions do not seem to go well. Look at Skype, LinkedIn, etc.
TFVC is being outphased. Microsoft doesn't want to openly say it but everything in MS' docs is pushing Git. When you have an on-prem TFS installation, the default version control for new projects is Git. Visual Studio Team Services doesn't allow to import anything into TFVC, only into Git. Visual Studio lists Git first, when you want to add version control. Visual Studio Code makes working with Git a lot easier than working with TFVC.
TFS as the development process management solution will live on as an on-prem service, but TFVC is unofficially feature-complete and in the maintenance phase.
Oh yes... i especially love it when my co-worker locks 10 000 files and goes on 2 week vacation... can't merge for days
I also love it how it detects changes on unchanged files ( they look at last modified timestamp) and you can't undo the unchanged unless you install TFPT and google for a bit for the command.
I also love it how when doing merges sometimes you have 10 000 conflicts even tho the files are unchanged :)
TFVC is bad and it should die... I'm glad they took up on git... now all i have to do is train my team on how to use git :)
I'll be really honest. This would lead me to start looking at alternatives for all of my projects very quickly.
After years of watching Microsoft gobble up and assimilate companies, I'd rather jump ship before they start the extinguish portion of the cycle. Mojang is starting to leave the extend part with updates that are pushed out early for the "bedrock" version of minecraft.
Intel has followed Apple into the rabbit hole of style over substance. I know so many people who want to do neural networks and they want to buy a mac and sorry you can't do that because Apple picked the wrong horse in the GPU race and it might be a few more years before they refresh their models.
Back in 1984 Apple released the first microcomputer that came without a software development kit. Since then it has all been about the computer using you than the other way around, a proud tradition of bay area companies such as Google, Facebook, Palantir, etc.
I'd be interested to learn why there's the perspective that the LinkedIn acquisition hasn't gone well. I feel like most of the stories I've read about it have been pretty positive.
I am sure that some journalists interview PR people from Microsoft and some self-promoters who promote the idea of promoting themselves on LinkedIn and say it is great.
I think they've gone down the road of harvesting.
I don't know if anybody is left at LinkedIn rather than life coaches, scam artists, offshore development companies, self-promoters, "business development" people, salesmen who can't sell (maybe that is what "business development" means?), recruiters that can't recruit (ex. they have been contacting you for years because you once said something about Cold Fusion and they badly need somebody to move to Nome, Alaska but they never hire remotes...), people who seem to write 20 articles about data science a day that verge on word salad (you'd think if they knew that much they could write a better neural network to generate the text.) And people who are gullible enough to think that there is some value in sending somebody an InMail or using all of those search features they sell so you can do more refined searches of life coaches, self promoters, ...
Numerous design problems with how the forums work mean that good discussions get drowned out. The same fraudulent messages get spammed that were being spammed six years ago and they won't do, don't do, or can't do anything about it
LinkedIn has closed off most access to the API and you cannot get anything interesting out of it... except all of the email addresses of your contacts so if you do that "Lion" thing you will probably need to change your email address at some point. (I think many people don't know they get so much spam because they have a LinkedIn account.)
I am on the threshold of nuking my Facebook account now that I've disconnected all of the sites that I need to log in that use Facebook. I still haven't decided if I nuke my LinkedIn account or just delete 95% of my contacts.
An acquisition would mean the inevitable split of support between the MS toolchain and the OS toolchain, which would eventually be left to die. Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS.
I'm not sure that's true, but it is true that MS would have motivation to leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software.
At a conference years ago, a Microsoft rep told me over beers that almost everything his division did had the ultimate objective of selling more SQL Server licenses. That's why SQL Server is a required component of almost all MS enterprise software.
So you might for instance see a SQL Server backend option, and then "Github Enterprise" sold with that configuration.
Give it time. MS does what it has always done to competitors (even to MS internal products) that it acquires. Takes awhile sometimes and you younger kid will get to live through what others already have.
It's history, not condescension. Weird to take it so personally. If you are older than me, you already know the pattern, meaning you're being disingenuous (or deliberately ignorant) to dismiss it.
MS just want you using Azure and don't care whose toolchain you use. If they bought GitHub it would be entirely so they could get people _not_ using other MS products onto Azure. So there is no way they kill off the OS toolchain and turn it in to another VSTS.
I'm happy that Microsoft has gotten so on board with git recently and made contributions to the project, but this kind of consolidation still makes me nervous, for multiple reasons.
Unrelated to that incident, but I feel their web UI to be extremely slow lately. Working with PRs (or "merge requests" as GitLab calls them) and CI pipeline is a pain, you're looking at 1 second response times.
To me it doesn't look like it's a front-end issue. I am mainly complaining about the HTTP response time. It seems extremely slow on both pipelines and merge requests, and Vue ain't gonna fix that I'm afraid.
I don't know if it's an optimisation issue with the software itself, or if it's just GitLab.com being overloaded..
I can't understand why Github hasn't built out a clear path from repository hosting, to continuous integration, ending in low-friction renting of cloud instances.
I don't want Google or Amazon to buy them, and that almost leaves Azure.
It seems like something they could have done themselves a few years ago, though. Puzzling.
Considering that software powers most of the modern economy, it's pretty sad how small the market is for quality software development tools. Programmers get paid high six figures, but balk at paying for quality debugging tools. Visual Studio, despite being a strong debugger and exceptional piece of technology in its own right, is not a real revenue driver for MS, it's just an exceptionally sophisticated way to nudge programmers to Microsoft's libraries and platforms.
Github has generally been platform agnostic (except for git itself), and it would sadden me to see Github start to compromise those values and start favoring one platform or another. (One could easily see Github / Visual Studio plugins, enabled by default, with built-in subtle nudges towards the MS Cloud platform).
Possibly Amazon. They tend to leave acquired companies alone to manage how they prefer, apart from Bezos micromanaging how to cut costs and restructure logistics, which is often a good thing. Plus Amazon (like Microsoft or Google) also has economy of scale opportunities for hosting GitHub on AWS.
I do believe Amazon would interfere less with what users like about GitHub than Microsoft would.
Apple. I know it's not Apple's style but imagine if Apple started expanding outside of it's bubble like Microsoft has. If they really went all in it would be amazing.
Yea but I don't think it's continued focus that will help here. Apple has continued it's modus operandi and quality has decreased like you mentioned. Granted, acquiring GitHub is most likely not the right fix, but I think something about Apple's particular way of operating is holding it back.
I use mostly Apple products, for 25 years, but I would not want Apple to own GitHub.
Microsoft has always been a developer-tools company. They are many other things besides, and I have had some nasty experiences with their sales reps (who would say anything to close a deal), but I have always felt that at its core, Microsoft is a developer-driven organization.
Apple likes developers too. They taste like chicken. And a cloud-based developer institution would let Apple destroy two populations - cloud operations and developers - with one asteroid.
Not too keen on GitHub being acquired. If Microsoft wants to do something good here, they should give GitHub enough money to form a Foundation similar to Mozilla. That would be the best way GitHub could pursue its mission.
This is our chance to gain a GitHub+LinkedIn integration. Just imagine... your LinkedIn profile and endorsements will auto-populate based on commit & PR activity.
Don't really agree with most comments trashing this hypothetical deal, bringing up the Skype precedent.
Its been what, 2 years since the Linked-in and Xamarin acquisitions? Nothing seems to have changed. Microsoft just seems to know that the desktop is no longer the cash cow that it used to be, office still is but may not last long, so its a good idea to diversify its portfolio.
I foresee a great future... for Gogs [1], Gitea [2], Gitlab [3] and other Github-alternatives. I was a late and somewhat reluctant adopter of Github as I don't like the idea of centralising so much of the free software infrastructure and putting it in the hands of one company, even a supposedly 'friendly' company like Github. I mirror everything I do on Github to a local Gitea-instance as a backup and exit strategy for when Github becomes a liability. If these talks go through and Microsoft does take over the latter will become true and I'll remove my accounts there.
I wonder how projects like Electron are figuring into the interest that Microsoft has in GitHub. How would Microsoft move forward with such a project if they bought GitHub? Would its continue to be based on Chromium? Would future versions of Office follow VSCode and be build as Electron apps?
I was in DevDiv at the time of the launch of VS Code (but on a different team): The pressure was on to ship a cross-platform editor ASAP to support the new cross-platform .NET infrastructure. This was very much an "IBM PC"-project with the Directors tasking a small team to get something done and to disregard the NIH culture. Atom was chosen as the platform because it was already close to what they needed with the right license. Heck, the rush to ship was so intense that they screwed up the name (I forget the story exactly, but "VS Code" was not the name the MSFT naming department came up with, but the name they initially chose turned out to be used elsewhere and they didn't have the time to come up with something trademarkable so they just sighed and shipped as "Visual Studio Code").
Anyway - I think the VS Code experience helped with Microsoft's institutional "fear" of pushing ahead with a JavaScript ecosystem elsewhere - I think the knock-on effects contributed towards the Office org's recent announcement to add JS as a first-class macro language in Excel, I just wish it was TypeScript instead.
This has me wondering, what Microsoft wants GitHub for? It's not like they can't use it without owning it, and I doubt they want to improve it as it is. Probably they want control before integrating it with their products.
Microsoft has been investing in developer services for a number of years - they acquired hockeyapp (mac/ios crash analytics), and have a whole bunch of other tools under the azure brand https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/
It's almost worth re-asking the question as...what does Azure want Github for, to try and strip away thinking about MS's windows/office products. There could be some crossover between github's Atom efforts and VS Code, and MS already worked on projects like Git virtual filesystem (GVFS) for their own needs ( https://github.com/Microsoft/gvfs )
GitHub do for developers what Microsoft want to do for the rest of business through SharePoint.
Maybe they could add Office 365 editing to GitHub and pitch it as the successor to SharePoint. Or try to integrate it with their other products in some kind of Frankenstein mess.
They seem to be doing much better with these things lately though. MS Teams is incredibly good. VSTS is pretty nice as well. I'm frankly unsure why they'd take on Github, other than better integration points into Azure services, CI/CD and other tooling for commercial/enterprise users.
They already have a bunch of tooling to make it easy for users on VSTS to ship their software to Azure, but VSTS users are probably 100% already in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Buying GitHub and then adding tooling to make shipping from GitHub to Azure easy (and the obvious choice) would help them push Azure more to companies not currently using other Microsoft products.
They want to join the social networking data with linkedin and office 365, yammer, enterprise Skype, etc, etc.
They have a clear long-term strategy of owning professional social networks, both within and across companies.
That way they can sell you access to your professional network, and your employer access to info you don’t even realize exists about you, and also sell it insights into its own org structure.
Because much of the free software world uses it as a coordination place - it's a weak, undefended target. If they were to buy it and quickly shut it down, the free software world would be in a tailspin for quite awhile. Microsoft could use the delay to push for legislation across the world to force developers to have a Microsoft(Linkedin/Ripple enabled) license attached to their (Microsoft) global ID. Within a year or two it could be illegal, worldwide to possess non-Microsoft licensed crypto software, then eventually all software. Especially look for software relating to the boot process/BIOS related stuff - that's another weak point right now, but there are probably others.
If SendGrid and Twilio could IPO, then surely GitHub can. Keep incentives aligned and do that instead, please. If Microsoft acquired GH it would a non-neutral platform, and I would be off to Gitlab immediately.
.NET is great and the openness is great, I don't really see why so many people are up in arms about this. Microsoft is a large user of github. Maybe this will push you all to use gitlab ;)
I don't understand why all the bashing, there is no better time to cash in. Gitlab in few years time will make Github worth less.
Gitlab.com and self host GitLab offer the best of both worlds. Gitlab right now still isn't as good as Github, but it is good enough for many things. And we see improvement coming in every few months. Not to mention Microsoft will likely move the whole Github infrastructure to Azure.
HOT TAKE: The things that drove Skype to change from the Golden Age Of Skype were largely market-driven things like the rise of the smartphone that killed pretty much every other popular communications platform at the time (AIM is dead now, too) and there is no evidence that an independent Skype would have weathered the market shift any better than a Microsoft-owned Skype did.
Microsoft has been the largest contributor to Git for a while. Getting to a point where all of Windows is building out of Git repos has caused them to solve problems that Git has never faced previously.
For all the silly unicorn IPOs of companies which don’t necessarily have a clear product or revenue, GH seems like the type of company that could successfully go public and actually succeed. It would fend off potential suitors for a while too.
I don't think anyone really understands what Github is. It's more like a spirit then a thing. I bet Microsoft is prepared to pay a lot for the goodwill, they don't care about the product/tech.
GitHub being bought buy Microsoft is like the opposite of what it represents. If Microsoft wants to pay for goodwill they should drop a big chunk of cash on forming a GitHub Foundation similar to Mozilla.
If this goes through, it's going to impact users of Atom and VS Code - one of the two has no reason to survive. I wouldn't be surprised if the former is discontinued then.
That would be kind of awesome, but I don't know how the github culture would meld with a big corporation. It would be an interesting case study for other similar start ups.
Didn't github already deliberately kill their own culture a few years back with policy changes and a layer of middle management?
edit: This isn't snark. Didn't they legit cut a bunch of perks, refocus everyone's priorities, and hire some people to start cracking whips? Or was I reading the public accounts of that situation wrong? Got bad scuttlebutt?
I think you are saying that they shifted from the full holocracy ambition to one with a more traditional management element because it wasn't working as well as they wanted.
I hadn't heard that. That stands to reason. Business people actually detest that "flat organization" model. They really get off on hierarchy and power.
Aren't dev tools are going cloud. MS might have just bought a bunch of servers with nasty dependencies on Jenkins in the hopes it results in more deployments to Azure.
E3 -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Stems from at least the 1990's. The MS behavior as opposed to the term can be argued to pre-date that decade.
I'll just remind people who may think I'm being old, crotchety, and living in the past, that this has been a repeated pattern of theirs that has resurfaced so often and reliably as to become considered by many to be a core component of MS culture. Repeated including in the face of DoJ prosecution and monitoring.
Almost nobody who even worked at Microsoft in 1996 still actually works at Microsoft. You are bringing up something said in one meeting from when floppy disks were still pretty important to the computing world.
I can't fathom a single statement from 1996 about a computer company that is still accurate today, and EEE falls into that category as well.
But with the latest news that MS is looking at buying GitHub demonstrates nothing has changed at MS.
Instead of helping and pushing the industry forward like Google does instead we have them hurting the industry. They buy GitHub and we will have a mess as FB, Google and the others that contribute to the greater good of the industry will have to go else where and we have a fragmentation mess. Google gave us map/reduce and K8s and so many incredible papers and a big one is VP8 and VP9 stopping the mpegla from trying to extort ridiculous license fees.
Or finding all the big security vulnerabilities like Shellshock, meltdown, Cloudbleed, Heartbleed Spectre and so many more and sharing and helping the entire industry.
I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.
If Microsoft buys github I will be pulling all my repositories, deleting my account, and finding any software that I use on github and quickly cloning it and importing it to some competing server(Probably gitlab)...and I would encourage everyone else to do the same.
edit In the meanwhile I would recommend filing an issue on every single project as you would normally file issues on, asking what their migration plan in the event of a Microsoft takeover is, before, not after this happens.
Leave it alone! Github pricing is perfect for all incomes. They'll slap on a few features, create a tiered payment system and charge $20 for the first tier.
100% will take my code somewhere else if this acquisition goes through. Go acquire Atlassian if you want to "diversify" your portfolio. Go stick it up your Azure MS.
Is there a truly decentralized peer to peer alternative to github or gitlab? And please no lectures about how git is inherently decentralized. Obviously there is something missing that causes us to rely on github etc.
- Github user account migration/integration with outlook.com
- A much-internally-championed Github/Office/LinkedIn integration effort created by some sharp but inexperieced program manager fresh just out of Washington State, that happens to require Github project descriptions to be authored in .docx format, launched as an improvement from that primitive format made by a certain mac fanboy.
- An effort to migrate the Github infrastructure to Azure cloud on Win 10 that ties up 85% of all development resources for the next five years and ultimately fails.
And that’s from when they weren’t allowed to use BSD or Linux internally and Windows Server was rudimentary. Microsoft would have no problem migrating Github to Azure quickly.
I mean the other option is to just not sell and if money is a problem adjust pricing. I find their plans to be incredibly cheap for what they offer so they definitely could have room to grow in that regard.
Please no. I spent months to find strategies to limit my google product usage between mails, search, phone, calendar, contacts, maps, streaming, dns, adsense, cdn and analytics. It's a struggle. They are everywhere. I really hope they don't eat github too.
Has Google ever killed an acquisition or product of Github's scale? Most products that come to mind were niche things like iGoogle, or things that got deprecated/integrated into other products, e.g. Buzz, Wave, Picasa
Google Reader is the product that seems to leave the most bitterness, but that too seems to have been relatively niche.
Google killed Google Code in 2016 and moved much of their code base to Github. Maybe they'll rebrand Github back to "Code", but outright killing it seems unlikely.
Github is a niche product. Average people do not use it at all, its utility value is entirely niche. The average person will never know what Github is or what it does. It's useful to less than 2% of the US population, and less than 0.5% of the global population.
They've killed / destroyed / butchered large acquisitions before, yes.
Metaweb / Freebase cost them a reported $200-$300 million.
Feedburner cost them $100 million.
Slide.com cost them $228 million.
Motorola was a $12 billion disaster. They might as well have killed it.
DailyDeal cost them $114 million.
Wildfire Interactive cost them $450 million.
There are a couple dozen more in the $30m to $100m range.
If you want to get Google search results and not give them any personal info or create a search bubble, try startpage.com or ixquick.com (same company). They have built a privacy-focused search engine that rides on Google's results. I'm not affiliated, I just enjoy using it.
If you don't trust Startpage you can try DuckDuckGo with a !g modifier, it will search Google (mostly) anonymously for you.
As far as I understand, the !g modifier doesn't search anonymously for you, it just redirects you to the google results page. It's useful when you know that ddg won't give you a result as good as google.
You can also use the !sp flag, that redirects you to the startpage result page, without passing through google at any time, so that's what you should use instead of !g.
Really hope these talks fall through and nothing comes of it. Too many bad experiences with Microsoft buying something out, mismanaging it, and it goes down the drain. As much as I love GitHub, I won't be using a Microsoft-owned GitHub for any of my company's work.
such a presumptuous statement. Why proclaim you won't use a MSFT owned github, even as a hypothetical?
Microsoft's own history answers this question.
And in the end, it's still going to be used.
Some of us don't have short term memories and lived through the peak-evil-microsoft years.
If it were maybe 5 years ago I would be horrified, but under Nadella they are a lot less ... Microsoft-y.
I was at a container orchestration conference the other day, and got the distinct impression that microsoft are not the great satan, and azure is probably a really good choice for cloud service. I can't believe I'm saying that. I'm having dinner with a prolific debian maintainer tonight, maybe he'll beat some sense into me.
They actually have to compete now, is why.
I assume
I agree in theory, but have you ever actually tried to use Azure? The management interface is ridiculously overcomplicated. It feels very “Microsofty”
The REST APIs and CLI/Powershell interfaces are much, much nicer. The web Portal seems to get revamped every other year and the latest incarnation is not very good.
no I haven't used azure in anger but I have colleagues that have. Personally I care not for GUIs so by the sounds of it the API side is ok.
I do, and while it's not perfect, I find it fairly serviceable.
AWS, on the other hand, I found an absolute nightmare (though to be fair, I haven't touched it in 2 years).
All 3 major clouds have consoles that are good in certain things but mostly bad. Azure's console made a big mistake with the vertical blade design, but at least it always loads fast.
That's what they want you to believe :D
I don't know why every massive corporation is trying to rebrand as "the friendly AI conglomerate!" but I'm not buying it for Microsoft or anyone else.
I agree and I would feel that same way if it were any other large tech company.
So many nice products have passed on in acquisition either because users abandoned them or the acquiring party did. I'm not sure which would happen first here.
If GitHub is financially strapped and looking for a buy out, I hope they're exploring other options for funding.
To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.
Last I looked, Minecraft seemed to be quite in order as well.
Shall we talk Nokia...
Pre-Nadella tbf, who was opposed to the acquisition when Ballmer was CEO.
Agreed. Buying Nokia of all things stinks of Ballmer. I was listening to an interview where he seemingly took responsibility for the whole stuff up. Not sure how much weight that holds
Buying Nokia wasn’t the issue. Microsoft’s handling of Nokia was the issue. Microsoft is not good at making a physical product and releasing it to the world like Apple and Samsung. The fact many countries had to wait > 12 months to get the latest phone was retarded. Windows phone was awesome, but Microsoft screwed themselves by not doing minimum what it’s competitors were doing.
Huh? Microsoft has several very successful hardware product lines: peripherals (the Microsoft ergo keyboard is the gold standard in many circles), Xbox, the surface line. Maybe they can’t generate Apple hype but they do know how to make consumer hardware.
The surface line isn’t avaliable world wide on release. Windows phones were released in like 3 markets. Less than surface line. Xbox gets world wide releases.
Phones, people generally want what’s new. A 12-18 month old phone is not new.
I don’t think surface qualifies as good consumer hardware. It has been pleagued with driver problems and weird behaviour. But agree on periphericals and Xbox.
I had the top-of-the-line Nokia Lumia 920 (designed just before the acquisition), and the plastic case was too soft and collected dents & scratches like crazy. The matte finish was also too slippery to hold onto (I ended up putting some skateboard tape on it).
OTOH, I found the Windows Phone operating system to be highly responsive and I was able to navigate screens more quickly than the previous iPhone or the current Android I have. The problem was that as third-place in the market, few apps were available for it, and those that were weren't being maintained.
It got more bloated... My kids still use an old version to avoid that (they only play with each other so they don't need the latest version that is required to play on most servers online)
Plus I'm sure under Microsoft they will have some sort of free private repos like GitLab, Bitbucket and Visual Studio Team Services already do.
Lack of free private repos is the main (only) reason why I don't use GitHub.
What do you base this on?
1. They already have such offering (VS Team Services).
2. Their competitors (GitLab, Bitbucket) already have that offering.
3. I don't think they're interested in GitHub for its revenue, but for its strategic value. GitHub has to protect its revenue model by disallowing free private repos, Microsoft can afford to be more flexible.
4. They've already made similar moves. They acquired Xamarin, which was expensive, and made it free.
When did you last look at GitHub? They've had free private repos for well over a year (maybe longer).
I have ~50 private on my account... Embarrassingly bad half-completed side projects mostly.
GitHub private repos are still $7/month, but available for free as part of the education discount
VSTS, Microsoft's hosted TFS solution, gives you unlimited private git repos for up to 5 users, 40 hours worth of hosted builds per month, complete project management, a private markdown based Wiki, and free orchestration of local build and deployment agents.
Huh? Not that I see. Private repos require a paid plan.
Paid plans of GH are too expensive.
IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with. It's just the stickiest app of all time. Something something network effects.
How many projects are there out there that repositories hosted in GH, run in GH, and have package manifests that directly reference other GH repos. I'm sure there are a lot.
Most of the golang ecosystem, I think. Not to mention any other language-specific package managers that support pulling from GitHub...
And I was thinking JS/npm, not even golang.
Golang can be the biggest offender in this regard because you import by typing the URL to a github repository... Better hope someone mirrors those projects if they ever go poof. It's not even a generic import to a package[0]. Gotta be fun to have to update all those imports later if a project moves to another host to avoid Microsoft.
[0]: https://godoc.org/github.com/lib/pq
Well that's the beauty of git, as long as anyone anywhere has a checkout of the Repository nothing will be lost. If tags are GPG signed you don't even have to put any trust in the surviveing source. That said for mantained code 99.9% of the time you would just use one of the core develops local copies.
Except for issues and pull request metadata, which are important part of the project knowledge.
In SIT (decentralized collaborative information tracker, https://sit.fyi) there's an issue tracking module and an import tool (https://github.com/sit-fyi/sit-import) that allows to convert all issues and PRs into self-contained issues that can be worked with using SIT issue-tracking, so at least there's a relatively smooth way out to decentralized issue tracking.
It's a good thing computers are good at search and replace.
and since the standard library includes a parser for go you don't even need to do it textually
I remember the CocoaPods debacle of 2016.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652
[1] https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...
It's just the stickiest app of all time To me it barely exists. I'm a hirer in the UK.
Before anyone touts how much wider our reach might be for potential hires, can I point out that my little firm has hired people from the other end of Europe directly ("real" friend of friend etc). Oh and just in case you are wondering - we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.
If you pay everyone equally, I don't think I'd want to work there.
Maybe it isn't a thing wherever you are but here:
we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.
... means that we do not discriminate unfairly. Do I really need to spell it out?
> IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with.
Linkedin is way way better than other job sites. For instance, Glassdoor doesn't even support basic keyword search. If you happen to track job ads for C programmers then you'd get all ads which may have a C character somewhere in their text, and forget abou searching for C++ because Glassdoor doesn't recognize the plus character. With linkedin at least basic keyword searches do work.
I'd argue LinkedIn is much worse than it was pre-acquisition, but it was already on that trajectory. The "news feed" and discussions around current events, etc. They've locked down more and more of it without a $30/mo subscription. Privacy controls are a nightmare to decipher.
I think it's significantly worse albeit probably short of totally "screwed up". Just marginally worse in a lot of small ways that add up to a less useful, less efficient experience for me.
just so you know, i know quite a few people at both linkedin and microsoft and for the most part they are still very seperate entities. linkedin is still using google docs and slack for instance. most of the influence microsoft has had on linkedin in smaller isolated integrations. so anything youve seen go downhill in linkedn consumer app is very much due to independent choices/acts by linkedin itself.
As someone with lots of friends at LinkedIn (I used to work there), I can agree somewhat. But I also know that things can be screwed up in non-obvious ways to rank and file employees (Tumblr/Yahoo and Flickr/Yahoo as examples, which I sadly was there for both).
How about Skype, though?
People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.
They had a decent Android app, then someone saw that it was too fast/responsive and was using too little memory and took that as a challenge, how can I make skype worst? React Native!
Obviously that didn't pleased people (see rating in Play Store), and they had to provide something for low/mid range phones, and skype lite was born (which is really good one).
Hey, thanks for mentioning skype lite. That a mile better than skype .
They undoubtedly did a bad job, but I think that Skype has a lot going against it from external factors anyway.
Everyone I know is using FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. The only time I hear Skype anymore is people using it for podcasts. Obvious anecdata but it seems reasonable that services with better device integration (FaceTime) or social graph access (Facebook) would do better in the long run.
Or google hangouts. It's skype but in the web and with an interface that actually works.
Minus a few gigs of ram
Hangouts is a great example of another horrible UI. The whole tie in to Chrome made it unusable for anyone non technical (where did it go? What did you want me to click? I am in the call, but you're not there... oh you're in another call? How do you hangup? I don't see the window anymore, etc.)
A standalone app would fix this, but there seems to be some strange internal agenda tying it to Chrome... Chromebooks I guess?
Disagreed.
Skype used to be mainstream. It was essentially a cross platform iMessage & FaceTime, almost ahead of its time. It was also efficient in terms of network usage, being peer-to-peer for the most part.
Had it continued to be usable, it would still be mainstream and might have the place of WhatsApp today. Instead, we now have this garbage Snapchat-like UI, a server-based model that doesn't even work (it was supposed to "fix" the P2P model, but for me it's been way worse than P2P which always worked), and a shitty Electron client that melts your battery and looks awful (they killed a gorgeous - especially on Mac - native client to replace it with this shit).
Yup, all these came after Skype started sucking, most probably because of it.
They wanted total control over the data so they converted the p2p supernodes to Microsoft servers... now the government can get what it needs more easily.
I think people forget how bad Skype was in a lot of ways though. The big reason they shifted to the cloud model, for instance, was how unreliable message delivery was on phones with peer-to-peer. I remember when, in order to send images, you and the other person had to be online at the same time.
They made some missteps, sure, but Skype was already a very dated solution.
I am not sure how "unreliable" the peer to peer model was. From what I remember it's always been perfect for me.
Media uploads could have been solved by a server-based "media" service, while keeping the reliable & battle-tested P2P architecture.
As of currently, the server-based architecture is an absolute disaster, way worse than P2P.
I regularly had whole chatrooms that wouldn't update for days. I had no way of knowing if a message I sent would really like... ever... get delivered.
I've been a pretty big Skype user in the past, and still use it a bit now, and it is actually so much more reliable now that Microsoft runs it.
Haven't really used group chats that much on it, but for call establishment, I stand behind my words when I say it used to be a lot better.
With P2P it would sometimes take a bit longer (10 seconds?) but it would always work. When it wouldn't, it was because of a problem on either one of the endpoints, and switching network connections or rebooting the router fixed it.
With the current model it would just randomly not work (the client also sucks and sometimes hangs in an inconsistent state after the failed call attempts), without anything we can do - it's something with the software and/or servers.
I used to trust Skype calls to actually go through - now even if I see "ringing" I have no faith in whether it's actually ringing on the other side (and if it was, whether the call would actually connect once picked up).
The design history of Skype for iPhone was particularly misguided: First it was a native UIKit app, then MS put a lot of effort into making it look and behave exactly like a Windows Phone app [1], down to the unusual gestures. When they gave up on that, the app reverted to a native UIKit design, but just a few updates later we got the current Snapchat clone instead. Needless to say, features regularly got lost during these radical redesigns.
That‘s still very clearly the same Microsoft where a gazillion layers of dumb middle management ruin everything[2].
[1] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/06/skype-redesign-iphone-app... [2] http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
LinkedIn was so screwed up I don't know what they could have done to make it worse.
> To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.
I'm not sure if LinkedIn could be any less "screwed up" than it was when Microsoft bought it.
Can somebody explain to me why LinkedIn is screwed up? I am genuinely asking ;)
It doesn't provide any value to the regular user; most people I know receive lots of emails mostly from body shops but rarely get a job from LinkedIn. The UI is designed to make it hard to configure privacy, and to make you casually spill your contact list. They are always trying to sell premium accounts. To be fair it should provide some value to a junior dev who doesnt have a Network yet but LinkedIn doesn't even try to hide the fact that you are the product (unlike say fb).
Shameless plug here but I'm also so sick of LinkedIn that I've started building an alternative for developers by myself - https://able.bio/
Still very much alpha but the idea is to have a clean UI and allow developers to write their own insightful articles for the community to read and reward the author with reputation. Like Medium but with more specific language, library, framework topics etc. Then use that to help recruiters who can't code advertise and source candidates for technical interviews. No inbox spamming free for all, they can only contact you when you've applied for a position.
I'd be interested to know what people think of this and if they have any feedback.
So, previously Microsoft used to have a program to integrate new companies, called “venture integrations”. I wonder if LinkedIn is going through VI, or not.
100% to the guy that said LinkedIn wasn’t a great product to begin with. X10
To be fair, they did screw Skype.
They didn't need to screw up linkedin -- they bought it that way.
I still miss Sunrise.am
They also killed Danger Mobile.
I would understand if they sold, but it would make me sad. GitHub has done a great job. I'd hate to see them have to answer to someone other than themselves.
I don’t know, isn’t Microsoft the only software company left? I love Google, but they sell ads, their mission isn’t to make software.
Microsoft is more and more cloud and services, but they still have a developer mentality and they have done some good stuff with open source lately.
If someone is going to buy Github, Microsoft is probably the most friendly to developers. Unless Google or Facebook wants to go full altruist and buy for the credibility.
Atlassian is very much a Software Company.
I wouldn’t exactly call them the gold standard of software. JIRA is a holy mess and well... many of us are still stuck with HipChat
Who is the gold standard?
37 Signals is well loved.
A lot of people would say Google these days... now that they're starting to move beyond Material Design 1.0 a lot of their products are becoming more visually mature and unique, along with their substantial investment in machine learning to make their software more personalized, etc.
I'm only a relatively casual user, but doesn't Atlassian mostly buy and then manage existing software products? They didn't develop Trello, HipChat, Bitbucket etc.
Every time I run into an issue with Atlassian software, I find a JIRA ticket from 7 years ago. If they have a capable dev team, it's probably working on projects off my radar?
Please. There was no reason to bring up JIRA. Uncalled for by any sane man's standards.
Adobe.
And another big one is Autodesk
Ignoring Azure, all the major MS products I can think of are at least partially ad supported (even when they release something that doesn’t serve ads, it’s a safe bet that it gathers data for better targeting...)
Office is ad-supported? vscode and typescript are ad-supported? MSSQL is ad-supported?
Hell, Windows is ad-supported now. Ever updated and get your free "gift" of Bubble Witch Saga 2: Electric Boogalo? I would pay double for an enterprise version of Win10 without that crap.
Look up windows LTSB. Don't remember if it gets rid of ads, but you don't have automatic updates every other hour.
They do have an enterprise version of Windows 10...
Most of the big software firms also make hardware these days (unless they are selling open source or managed services).
Examples include Apple, most of the enterprise hardware space, IoT/wearables, *aaS, the top 10-100ish cloud vendors, etc.
Even Microsoft is a hardware company now.
How has Kaggle fared under Google? Just asking. Also, ms has been focusing on open source quite a bit. Largest contributor on Github. Makes sense. It'll also send a message to the tech community. Mostly Google hogs the limelight for open source stuff.
It could be worse, Oracle or SalesForce could have been in talks...
OTOH it speaks to the direness of the situation if you had to mention those two for an even worse scenario.
Why would Oracle buy it?
Yeah, I agree. I would immediately delete my github account if this happened. I don't buy that MS has seen the light and is a different company now. In the last 2 weeks, 3 people have told me their Windows 10 install updated itself and was completely borked. At least one of these people are going out and buying a new Windows machine as a result (thus giving MS a little more revenue). It absolutely disgusts me.
You must have very weird friends. My family and I havent had any issues since Vista.
Random recent example. Using an Intel or Toshiba SSD is decidedly not weird:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12742/latest-windows-10-versi...
This update has broken computers until the SSDs in question were blacklisted. For people who auto-downloaded the update after that, Windows "only" showed annoying and absolutely unhelpful error messages every single day since the 1803 release.
This is not an outlier, but a strategy: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2878026/microsoft-to-b...
I like how you attack my friends and family and ignore the main point.
https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505
Isn't minecraft ok, under the new Microsoft?
https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT
GitHub clearly needs change of management. I havent seen much inmovation from them compared to GitLab. Microsoft is very strong on innovation since change of management.
Depends what you like. I prefer my Git hosting suppliers to have better than 50% uptime.
User of both GitLab and GitHub here. GitHub also goes down.
I'm not super familiar with GitLab besides self hosted instances. Even then I prefer the simplicity of gogs. So what do you feel are still be innovations GitLab has but GitHub lacks?
We have a comparison page for GitLab Premium and GHE - https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/gitlab-eep-vs-github-ent...
Most features have a link to their respective documentation for more information.
GitHub is easy to use, and I’ve found the important features work really well.
I’m all for improvements, but I’m not even sure what I would want. At this point, I’m more worried any attempt at innovation would break the things I like about GitHub now, than I am excited for something new.
I use gitlab for all my private projects and don’t find it to be remarkably better in any way, and the UI always confuses me.
Any way we can improve the UI? We'd love to make it more enjoyable.
You can also open an issue directly in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
Well, my only request would be that it be more like GitHub.
The only reason for this is familiarity. GitHub is the market leader now and I use it every day at work. It's a lot easier to get used to a new UI if it is similar to the one you are used to. I'm sure if everyone used GitLab at work everyday, it would be fine. The UI doesn't strike me as bad, just very different.
Otoh, GitLanpb seems to have a messy code that is slow and taking much memory by slapping new stuff in frequently. (My impression from reading several comments on HN.)
Our team is actively working on improving the performance of GitLab.com. If you are referring to the merge requests, we're close to converting the merge request view to Vue, this should speed it up considerably.
This Microsoft is quite different!
Why does it matter to you so much who owns GitHub if it's a good tool? Sounds unnecessary vitriol.
Some of us are old enough to remember Microsoft of the 90's and early aughties. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was the name of the game then, many of us haven't forgiven Microsoft for that yet (and nor do we plan to).
And a more recent example: Skype.
Right, I know that, and that's just idiotic behavior. You should concentrate on what is happening today, not what happened decades ago and hold grudges. That attitude leads you into unhappy places.
I doubt its about grudges. The mid level exec culture in a company does not change fast.
Forgiving them too easily shows them that they can get off the hook easily, which isn't a good thing either.
Found the Microsoft stock-holder... ;-)
I agree, as they say, 'snakebit and doomed to die' http://www.memidex.com/snakebit
That would've been my exact reaction while reading this. Good thing I have no large projects on Github.
Well, I guess Gitlab would be happy about the new customers. If they're clever, they'll work on some tools to easen the transition.
From this perspective, Git has made some fundamental things right: Because it only functions as a decentralized system, it strongly reduces lock-in. In the case of Github, you "only" had to port over issues and pull requests. Imagine how great it would be if there was a standard way to save issues in a git repo[1] that was supported by pretty much every provider.
[1]: Such as https://pythonhosted.org/pyditz/
There's no standard, of course, but [shameless plug] I've recently built SIT (https://sit.fyi) -- a tool that allows to collaborate on information in a decentralized, "true serverless" manner. Its first application is (duh!) issue tracking and it has been operational since almost day zero and SIT itself is using it. There's even a GitHub -> SIT import tool (pre-release)
Now, what's also great (did I mention "shameless"?) about the approach used in SIT is that while you can use it with Git (and this is how I've been using it so far), it does not depend on Git's structures but just files -- so it can be easily carried over to whatever might replace Git in a decade.
Good to know, thank you very much for the link!
I've just been thinking: If one manages issues within a separate git repo -- couldn't we also store pull requests this way? I've always been very impressed by how good `git diff` and `git apply` work together, so theoretically, one should just be able to store the result of `git diff master...HEAD` in a new issue. The rest sounds like a tooling problem...
SIT's issue tracking module stores merge requests (aka patches) in SIT itself, therefore, they can all be stored in a git repo. Case in point: https://github.com/sit-fyi/sit/commit/e9f96b84edc560bb1b0c0f...
And this is how it looks in SIT: https://imgur.com/a/UCFmbsZ
The list of key MS acquisitions isn't that long and out of several products only Nokia is a definite failure. Skype gotten worse but I wouldn't count it as failure just yet. Remaining big acquisitions (Forethought PowerPoint, Hotmail, Visio, Navision Dynamics, LinkedIn) where rather successful.
Success for Microsoft doesn't mean success for the users of the acquired product, e.g. Skype users on Linux, and anyone using RoboVM.
From business perspective, supporting Linux is a waste of money.
What's a good alternative in case it goes bad?
Many people mention Microsoft's past history as reasons for worrying about this. However, I disagree. I don't think this would be bad because it's Microsoft.
I think it would be bad because GitHub wouldn't be a generally independent entity, with no business interests besides making a product good enough that people will pay for it anymore. Currently, GitHub doesn't really have any incentive to care what tools and platform you are using, or where you deploy your code. To the contrary, they want to appeal to the widest audience possible.
This would all change if owned by Microsoft. GitHubs role would then instead likely instead be to channel users into other Microsoft products and services, especially Azure. Instead of functionality that benefits everyone independent of platform, it will be in their interest to add features that only benefit users of the Microsoft ecosystem. Azure CI, deploy to Azure, .NET integration, LinkedIn integration. I don't think this is the kind of platform most FOSS projects would want to use, certainly not me.
This is what I was thinking also (though you articulated it much better than I would have).
A large company doesn't make an acquisition like this without a business incentive. For them, it's driving people to their products. Maybe making the tooling in github for interacting with microsoft-y products a little bit better. Maybe adding whatever licenses microsoft likes to the front of the default licenses you can pick from when you create a new repo. Things generated by their editors going into your .gitignore by default.
I don't see any reason they'd acquire github and then entirely leave it alone.
Maybe MS understands this concern and at least keeps it comfortable for the devs not to leave for alternatives else what's the point.
Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling. C# is a pleasure and visual studio code is an excellent, extensible coding tool.
Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.
I wonder what Linus Tovalds is thinking right now. If I remember correctly, he wrote Git because Perforce was forcing him to use Microsoft software licences.
https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...
Git != GitHub
Git was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper (which was originally provided freely to Linux kernel developers under the agreement that they not develop a clone).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper
> Git was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper
Git was not developed as a clone of BitKeeper, it has a very different design (snapshot-based content-addressed filesystem, versus the SCCS "weave"). If anything, git was a (much faster) clone of Monotone, minus the heavy cryptography focus which made Monotone so slow.
I lived through the 90s, so I disagree. Anyone who feels perfectly comfortable with Microsoft's embracing of things they like is ignoring history.
Maybe it's different this time, maybe it isn't.
Sort of like the ship of Theseus, if all the people working at and running microsoft are different, is it even the same company?
Culture can persist despite replacing all employees over time.
Well since companies are people, more like skin cells. They all get replaced every whatever days but you're still you!
Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.
That's not to say they couldn't revert to their embrace, extend, and extinguish tactics of the 90s, even under future leadership.
I feel that no big corporation should own GitHub, even if their investors feel differently.
I'm not enthused about the idea of Github being bought. But on what grounds do you suspect that the Microsoft of the 90s is just lurking, like a conscious spirit, to reveal itself after a decade?
CEO Nadella started working at Microsoft in 1992, but the executives who coined and lived the EEE phrase are all out. Is Nadella a sleeper agent? If not, what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?
> what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?
I agree, it seems that both Gates and Ballmer have found new callings in life, which has left Nadella with pretty much control of the company. I remember almost feeling sorry for the guy when he took over, what freedom could he possibly have between those two? A lot, it seems in retrospect.
I've mentioned this a number of times, some of Microsoft's open source tooling is under the very permissive MIT license. In the case of GitHub it just means competitors will rise up and replace GitHub. Remember when SourceForge was the GitHub of the day, and then it became bad, and finally it's acceptable with the new owner. People will outright ditch GitHub if evil is truly done to it, but Microsoft doesn't want that, they'll do everything they can to not screw up GitHub.
Whoa, hang on a second. SourceForge? Acceptable with new owners? Have you tried to download anything from the site recently? They may not be bundling crapware with downloads anymore but it's still an ad-laden slow-loading pile of trash unusable website. (I don't think I'm being hyperbolic there, to be honest!)
I usually get to a download page and it auto prompts for downloads. I mean why are you not using an ad-blocker?
Windows 10's forced updates and telemetry say otherwise.
Telemetry is bad, forced updates is not.
Playing the devil's advocate here, but some of the forced updates come as a result of problems found in telemetry data...
But I generally agree, I want my OS to ask me every time it wants to send a crashdump (or anything else).
Updates are ok when they're bug fixes and security patches. They're not when they're forced feature and UI changes and often break installations.
Forced updates are bad.
1. Updates can introduce breaking changes.
2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes.
3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.
I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone willing to give up liberty for security will receive neither.
There are literally billions of Windows users. Less than 5% understand why keeping your computer up to date is important.
Forced updates may suck for you, but understand that it is you they suck for, not the vast, vast majority.
> I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates
I think this largely was only true of the period between the internet becoming a thing and the smartphone becoming a thing. Nowadays there's phones, tablets, and chromebooks that serve the needs of those people better and in a more convenient form factor. Desktops are for people who do work, create stuff, or are hobbiests.
I think a lot of the reasons computers suck today is because of this idea that they need to cater to some strawman drooling moron of a user.
Those devices only take you so far. They are consuming devices only, similar to a television. People still have and use normal PCs and will do so in the future. (Notebooks included of course)
That's kinda my point though. The strawman user these kinds of arguments prop up as the reason everything needs to suck is pretty much 100% consumer. There might be a few things, like typing documents and printing that aren't entirely covered by smartphones, tablets, and chromebooks, but that's a rapidly shrinking set of things.
>but that's a rapidly shrinking set of things
Doubt that. "Desktop" is defined by mouse, keyboard and display. A chromebook satisfies this. I have yet to meet a user who uses a smartphone instead of a PC to do stuff that are notably easier to do on a PC. (while having both)
I would also bet that every user would chose a keyboard over a touch interface to type text.
Maybe you have a point, but I don't feel like connecting a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to a smartphone makes it a desktop. Regardless, I don't think those OSs are good desktop OSs either. I still maintain that this is a poor excuse for having shitty tools.
Using keyboard/mouse/monitor with smartphones is very uncommon.
2. Can be delayed.
3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.
I wouldn't mind forced updates if they were only used for critical security updates. They are not; Microsoft abuses the privilege, and therefore may not be trusted to have it at all.
Feature updates can be delayed for up to a year.
On Pro and up. Not on Home.
2. Can only be updated so many times until Daddy Microsoft knows best and will forcibly shut down your computer.
3. "Users have freedom to do what they choose unless it makes more work for me"?
> Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.
Agreed, but this had only ever actually been true with free software.
Forced updates can be bad, for example I narrowly missed having a bricked workstation when the April update was released and it borked machines using Intel 600p SSDs. I hadn't used that machine for a few weeks and it had been powered off; by the time I finally started using it again Microsoft had blocked the update for machines with that hardware.
Anyway, I can manage the limited telemetry via hosts and I can defer updates (which I will do from now on), but my biggest gripe is forced installation/reinstallation of previously removed apps and games. I run Windows 10 Pro and I end up with a few variations of Candy Crush games, Minecraft, Autodesk drawing apps, and others after initial OS installation and after every major update so far. This is while using an offline account, and even if I used my Microsoft account on this workstation I've never purchased/downloaded any of those apps in the past.
I get that "Pro" at this point means home power user, and companies should be using Enterprise, but Microsoft shouldn't be pushing any software back onto the machine once the user has uninstalled it. That's user-hostile and takes control out of the hands of the one person who should be in complete control of the system.
Once full, non-buggy support for Ryzen APUs arrives in Linux, I'm switching Windows 10 to a VM and going back to Linux on this machine as the daily driver OS.
I saw one happening on a PC in a conference room two weeks ago at the very moment a talk should begin. Nobody could do anything with the pc until the update was over. Great user experience.
Fault from the admin I would say. Updates can be delayed or scheduled. I know that this won't help in the moment.
Enterprise versions are updated based on the admin policy.
I recently had to do the forced April Windows 10 update, and not only did it take 10 hours, the UX was horrific... e.g. Random CMD prompt windows popping up etc.
If that is allowed to pass QA in Microsoft, then it kind of scares me what can happen if they were to acquire GitHub.
10 hours? You on a dinosaur computer or something???
No, forced updates are also bad. I own my computer, I built it, and I paid for Windows. Microsoft shouldn't get to decide how I run it (I can't turn off Windows Defender permanently) or when it updates (you can only delay them so long before it forces you to update). If their updates were stable it would maybe help the argument, but they routinely break my system such that I lose time that was intended to be spent on playing a game. They also conveniently reset some of my settings which always tends to favor the way Microsoft would like for me to use my computer. Or they reinstall fucking Candy Crush.
For god's sake, even Apple, the prime example of knows-better-than-you lets you never update, if that's what you really want.
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It's that kind of crap, not even the telemetry that got me to switch off of windows entirely at home.
Microsoft is a big company, that's a different team with a different set of leadership. The guy in charge of Windows stepped away. Windows 10 is the last version of Windows basically. Not sure if that means someday they may release a distro (crazy I know) but it's interesting nonetheless.
You are behind on the crazy: they already announced their first Linux distro, it's called Azure Sphere OS and intended for secure/maintained IoT.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/microsofts-bid-to-se...
I know about that one, but I mean one that'd be consumer driven in some way. I know the ship has sailed but I'd love to see Microsoft create an Android / iOS competitor, and maybe something open source would give them an edge in that regard. It would be best if it were somehow privacy / security focused. Microsoft has the resources to make amazing products the issue is and I've mentioned it before, the company is ever so big, with ever SO MANY PRODUCTS and projects. We know they've got quite a bit going on on the user facing front, but I can't imagine how many internal tools they've got that they rely on as well.
Automatic updates are great, I use it on most of my dev servers
I could even see that defaulting auto update to "on" is a good move too. If you know what you're doing you can turn them off.
I haven't adminned a windows machine since '98 -- can you really. Or turn off automatic windows updates?
As for any telemetry stuff, that should be opt in, and have a target server to send to, which you can point to your own box if you want to.
Microsoft today is different to Microsoft in the 90s though. In the 90s it was a software company that used embrace extend extinguish to maintain and extend its monopolies, but it wrote software and the software was the product.
Now it seems it uses the "user is the product" ala Google, Facebook etc. I'm not aware of apple doing that. Still I guess inevitable as companies penny pinch more and more.
I lived through the nineties as well, that doesn't mean I think everything that was amazing back then still is amazing today nor that everything that sucked back then still sucks today...
I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.
Personally I'm not so much worried about Microsoft going back to Microsoft'95 but more about the fact that they, like most (all?) other big tech companies, collect more and more data and integrate more and more tightly into our lives. Still I feel that currently Facebook, Google and Amazon are all scarier in that respect.
> I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.
If they've managed to change that much, then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft as soon as a new CEO steps in.
That's why I prefer Microsoft to stay away from the products and projects everybody loves. Furthermore, I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.
> I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.
Microsoft has experience handling online code repositories and team services. Azure integration has the potential to improve deployment pipelines for many users. Microsoft has lots of experience doing things at scale, and can potentially find cost reduction maneuvers for Github. Visual Studio integration can bring more users to Github. Cooperate users are more likely to upgrade their existing agreement with Microsoft than they are to enter a finical relationship with a new company. Microsoft has just as much or more to offer Github as any other top 5 tech company.
Let's not forget that they developed GVFS to support large monorepos.
Let's also not forget this only runs on Windows.
They've stated that they want to bring this to other platforms as well.
https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS/issues/4
Yes they want... yet it has been Windows only for a year and a half, so far. That's the problem with Microsoft buying big things like Github. It turns people not using their flagship OS into second class citizens.
Re: Skype
Their MacOS implementation that they linked to is pretty cool and understandable even for a filesystem lay-person.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/03/15/gvfs-for-...
GVFS is a contribution Microsoft has given git, not a contribution Microsoft can bring to Github. That is why I left it out.
Azure, VS... Yes, I know Microsoft has tons of things to offer to their customers. But not everybody in Github is into Microsoft tech. In fact, most are not. So that's what worries me: trying to tie Github to their products and strategies.
It might happen, but I suspect they will continue to play nice with other tech stacks. Their recent strategy is to provide good tech that can integrate with other tech, to compete on superior products instead of locking in users. They haven't recently extended or extinguished, just embraced, and embracing has done great things for their stock price.
> then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft
Well, the world has changed and there is no longer any opportunity for a 90s Microsoft. So I'm pretty sure that unless the world changes back to the 90s, Microsoft wouldn't survive such a turn.
That's like saying IBM could come back as a monopoly. It won't happen even if they want it to.
How is Microsoft different exactly?
Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
Do they not spy on users of Windows 10?
> like most (all?) other big tech companies
"The other children are doing it" and then you're mother would say "that doesn't make it right". It's a child's defense no doubt.
But anyway, it's also factually not true.
I reviewed the data that Microsoft has on me and there is nothing in there that makes me feel uncomfortable. Facebook on the other hand.. not only is the data wrong but if it gets public I can see it damaging me
I just want to point out, aside from the discussion, that Microsoft owns a significant stake in Facebook.
I'd say that Microsoft is worse than most other companies because it caters to governments, not consumers. Skype and MSN mysteriously worked in China at a time when no other service did. What's their incentive to push back against LE backdoors when they're not an edgy consumer brand anyway?
"caters to governments"
Corporations only exist as legal constructs. I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just saying that it is always going to be the case that a business, any business, will work within the law and with lawful government because they ultimately depend on contract and property law.
All companies have to comply with the law, but Microsoft sells lots of software to governments. They aren't going to put up a fight over end-user privacy if they make more money from gov't contracts than from privacy-conscious consumers. The financial incentives are completely different than for e.g. Apple, and I don't see how that is ever going to change.
All companies, including Apple sell lots of products to the government because, next to Walmart, its the largest employer in the country. It has a $4T budget.
Apple doesn't give a s* about your privacy. They claim to give a s* about your privacy. Those are different things.
If you want this to change you have to get involved with legislation to change the rules/law. That's the only option. None of them "care" about you or really anything, because they aren't human. Companies respond to changes in the law which bound the approved set of behaviors. That's it.
EDIT: I got the budget wrong. Changed that.
I don't care what Apple claims to care about, just like I don't care about Microsoft's newfound love for free software (haha).
However, I highly doubt that government and enterprise purchases make up a large share of Apple's income. And consequently I'm convinced that news of a backdoor in iMessage would cause Apple way more financial damage than these things did to Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728294, https://www.scmagazineuk.com/skype-backdoor-missed-by-micros... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
And the more Apple doubles down on protecting its users, the bigger this financial incentive becomes. Of course that doesn't stop me from supporting better legislation (GDPR was a great start).
Maybe they should rebrand themselves then.. A new name perhaps? :)
A lot of the tooling is released under the MIT License. It's kind of hard to say they have ulterior motives when you get the right to fork and keep.
I lived through the 90s too. It's been 20+ years since the peak of the Microsoft that gave them the reputation you're reflecting.
If "I lived through the 90s" was how I measured technology and companies, I'd sure as hell not be using Apple products - their technology was pretty terrible then, and the company was incoherent. Would any rational person say that the terrible tech and incoherence then translates to how one would accept what they produce in 2018? Some companies change, some don't (see: oracle). It seems a healthier approach is to measure the behavior and state of a company in the present.
First off were the 90s macs really terrible in comparison to the present state of the art at the time?
Second its easier for people to grow to be better at their job than to grow into being better people.
Re: macs. Yes. MacOS releases up to 1999 lacked features common in other systems, like full preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Windows NT had that in the mid 90s, and various Unix flavors had it for decades. I liked the UI on the macs vs windows95/98/NT or Linux/Solaris, but the stability of macs was a joke. Everyone was pretty happy when they cleaned up NeXTSTEP and turned it into the basis for OSX - that was a very smart move.
Visual Studio was the best Java editor by far. I wish Sun hadn’t blocked them as it took almost 5 years for Jetbrains to make a decent editor.
I loved through the 90s and think that Microsoft not requiring Windows shows that the danger from the 90s isn’t the same today.
Now it’s cloud vs OS lockin.
I lived through the 90s, and Ace of Base was the best band ever.
There is enough just criticism of Microsoft's bad practices that remain damaging to this day.
So no, MS is clearly a bad steward for GitHub.
Yeah, let's evaluate corporations for decisions made decades ago by people no longer at the company. At least spend 15 minutes reading about the progress MS has made in recent years before throwing around shade.
They can reverse those decisions. Yet they don't, because they benefit from it. So it's not a justification.
Well, you know, this wasn't just an "insane" guy at the top who now left the company and everything's cool. Companies have culture, and while we can agree today Microsoft's not the same Microsoft from 10 years ago, we shouldn't forget their history so soon.
> this wasn't just an "insane" guy at the top who now left the company and everything's cool
Satya Nadella has completely re-organized MS inside-and-out since taking the helm in 2014. It is a VERY different company than it was even 5 years ago. In March [1], Microsoft even went so far as to officially disband the Windows department and merge it into something called "Experiences & Devices".
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176220/microsoft-window...
It's different, but not very different. They still have a lot of lock-in like Outlook (ActiveSync), DirectX, exFAT and so on and so forth. They show no sign of dropping lock-in, except in markets where they are way weaker than competition.
How is DirectX a lock-in? Vulcan/OpenGL are available. Using Outlook/ActiveSync is no more a lock-in than depending on GSuite (or ANY business productivity suite), and I fail to remotely even understand how exFAT is a problem. Weak arguments.
> How is DirectX a lock-in?
It's MS only. It's more obvious in cases like Xbox, where MS don't support anything except DirectX. I.e. developers are forced to use it if they want to release for Xbox.
exFAT is an issue since it's a patented filesystem that MS pushed as a standard for SD cards. You can't freely use it (unless you just ignore those patents on your own risk).
ActiveSync doesn't have commonly available FOSS clients, so you can't use it on Linux easily. It's highly irritating (since it's widely entrenched in corporate environments). And etc. and etc.
The progress they've made? Baking in more spyware into Windows and other products than ever before? Taking more control away from computer users than ever before?
What planet are you people on?
> Baking in more spyware into Windows
Lost your argument as soon as you said "spyware". It's like calling everyone you disagree with a "terrorist".
> Taking more control away from computer users than ever before?
Like what?
You can proliferate the doublespeak if you want but I'll call it what it is.
Like rebooting computers whenever they feel like it. Reenabling previously disabled options etc. Your head is in the sand but you don't have to live this way.
C# is managed with GC, VS Code is Electron. MS has no native tools. QT rules that one.
There's .NET Native, not to mention older techs like Win32.
Not the same as real native like C++.
Probably news to the Win32 devs of the world that their technology is "not the same as real native like C++." What distinction do you mean to make here?
UWP is native, you can code rich GUI in C++ without any GC involved.
Currently it only works for MS platforms (Windows incl. ARM, xbox, embedded) but they might make it cross platform in some future. Technically the API is not that complex, i.e. unlike WPF it’s not that hard to port from the current Direct3D to Vulkan or GLES or Metal.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Microsoft has been relying on Github to share all of its UWP samples for the last few years. This year, they added all their developer docs to Github so they can be directly addressed and updated by the community. They've done a good job of responding to PRs and issues. I write Hololens software and I could not have achieved such rapid development without their examples and developer outreach.
However, Github is one of my favorite services, professionally and for hobbies, and I really don't want significant changes. I also use VSTS (Microsoft's code+PM online service) and it is a beast. They don't need to be heavily intermingled.
That code you mentioned has opt-out spyware. It's not in the spirit of free software at all. It's just part of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Microsoft has never been about free software.
They are however embracing open source in a manner that feels very sincere to me.
For the record, the so-called "spyware" is telemetry which exists only in the SDK for .NET Core and not the actual runtime that you would ship to the user with the software. It is anonymous data, completely open source so it really is only what they say it is, and the first time you use it it tells you how to disable it.
> so-called "spyware" is telemetry
Doublespeak.
Who is this guy?
> Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling.
Not going to deny this, but that's really the reason I'm not comfortable with the idea of a MS owned Github. Microsoft doing open source development is great. Microsoft trying to influence open source and FOSS development as a whole, not so much. Them aquiring a central hub of such development efforts doesn't signal good things to come: The users of Github have nothing to gain from this, whereas MS has, and there's a non-zero chance of them ruining the thing for everyone in the process.
The one thing that I like about Github is that everything is public by default and you have to pay to keep your code private. I feel like a positive consequence of that business choice was the opening up of way more software. Gitlab, while being very awesome doesn't have that same rule and neither does Bitbucket. It's my assumption that this is the biggest reason there's so much open source code flowing right now.
It makes me wonder whether I'll be able to find as many random interesting projects just by searching for things anymore.
I'm a bit sad about this.
Not having to pay for private is the reason we chose Bitbucket back in the days.
Same here, but for each one of us there was another who probably said 'screw it' and just put their stuff on github anyway.
Though there is indeed much more software open source lately, I feel that is mostly a consequence of the free and easy availability of open source hosting.
I still remember the old days where most opensource projects were doing self-hosting or using sourceforge. Self-hosting is something that most developers that just want to build something nice won't consider. And using sourceforge back then was also atrocious (they didn't exactly have an easy to use UI, if I remember correctly).
This makes me think that what contributed the most to there being so much open source, is the easyness of creating your own repository on GitHub. With just a few clicks you have one.
Looking forward to the big rebranding to Microsoft GitHub Team Cloud Services for Enterprise 365 2019®.
*subscription required
Seems like the view here is pretty negative. I feel like most people here haven't worked with Microsoft dev products recently. They're getting better. I guess the crowd here isn't typically in the .NET world.
Particularly with how they interact on GitHub now, it's quite impressive. I've reported issues for docs.microsoft.com, participated in discussions on Visual Basic development, etc. and while there's still definitely that corporate veil to some degree, they're extremely responsive, they're very active in responding to requests and discussing fixes.
I generally now hope that whatever Microsoft thing I'm dealing with somewhere ends up linking to GitHub, because everyone on the side of the company that's working with GitHub is pretty on point.
Which is what gives me some hope that they could manage this acquisition right: They're already doing GitHub the way GitHub should be done.
Even when it leads from GH to internal email chains, they're really good about keeping those on the GH issue in the loop... often from only parallel issues.
Issue filed in node sql driver... azure tech notices the issue, raises to sql team... sql team dev starts replying and working to resolve... recommends patch to upstream project in github... issue resolved.
Oracle would NEVER do something like that. It was actually very impressive, and that's just my one anecdote, and I've seen many others.
MS buying GitHub will be one of the worse things to happen to the industry in a long time. But should end all discussion that MS has changed.
FB, Google and the other big tech companies that contribute so much will have to go elsewhere and we will have a fragmentation mess.
I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.
I think that's the point. I'm personally worried Microsoft may have a very narrow view of what GitHub is. A lot of tech hosted there doesn't even run on Windows, or isn't even related to software. (legal, political, docs, guides, etc.)
Since the Core era, not all .NET applications are built for Windows either.
Considering you bring up the second part, it makes me wonder if maybe outside of the obvious (owning GitHub), perhaps they're after the extra talent to bolster their SharePoint product.
what makes you think that? they killed off their own code hosting site in codeplex and moved everything to github. they are one of the largest if not the largest open source contributors in the world. and .net core is setting itself up to be a major player in cross-platform application development. it has a chance, if microsoft brings over uwp, wpf, and windows forms to .net core, to take over cross-platform gui development. with the windows subsystem for linux, windows 10 can run most linux-based software. they've developed the hottest ide at the moment on top of github developed technology.
i have a feeling they get it just fine.
You mention a lot of stuff that's in the same '.NET world' skellera mentioned, but the currently dominant GUI platform is the web, and neither is going to do take over. There's also still embedded software, hardware description, databases, emulators/simulators, competing virtual machines and GUI frameworks, a whole bunch of non-tech stuff, etc.
They do get a lot of this stuff, but I feel like whatever they want to do with Github is more geared towards average Joe .NET developer. Possibly making the platform less attractive for everything else through neglect.
The new Microsoft has made it clear that they want to support as many areas as they can. Azure does not have any lock-in of a specific platform (other than Azure itself in some ways) and Microsoft is constantly trying to get their tools to work in Linux and Mac. While they obviously would prefer you to be on .Net, they realize that lock-in ultimately hurts them.
Just give it a little more time. They are turning around years of company culture and they're doing a great job at it. If VS Code is a sign of future products, I'm excited to see what they come out with down the road.
Strongly disagree. MSFT is aggressively chasing the "open source"/Silicon Valley crowd, even at the expense of Joe .NET Developer.
Their main competition is AWS and GCP. Very different world.
not really. half the stuff i mentioned is all about the web. that’s the core market for .net core and visual studio code. visual studio code is certainly not .net centric at all. the in the box language support primarily targets web languages.
and i don’t get why you are mentioning those other things. what do they have to do with anything regarding microsoft understanding github? microsoft is no doubt and expert in all of those fields anyway, at least internally.
and what cross-platform gui framework would compete with a .net core cross-platform implementation of uwp, wpf, and windows forms? nothing, in my opinion. people would flood the .net ecosystem to get away from things like c++ and qt and the horror of writing script-based GUIs in python.
IIRC, internally Microsoft views GNU/Linux and GitHub as Big Satan and Little Satan, respectively.
Depends on who you talk to... I'm pretty sure it's MS developers that drove the integration of git repositories into TFS (many were already using git locally for local branches and commits with TFS repos). The move to GitHub for all MS OSS was probably developer driven too.
The Office team is probably more than happy to not be hamstrung to windows only. Particularly Office 365. Azure has been using a lot of non-ms/windows tech from the start.
I'm sure there's some in the recently re-org that used to be Windows still have issues, but the old guard is largely gone now.
Azure team gives a shit about "not invented here". They are exclusively interested in your cpu cycles and bytes in memory. Who organizes the cycles and bytes, they do not care.
Surely, there are preferred stacks (e.g. in the high level PaaS areas), but this includes node, python and .NET.
PS: one save bet: Java will never be on their support list :). But only for legal reasons :)
It's actually really interesting. Seems like internally, MSFT has kind of been let loose and no longer has to adhere to the more strict style Ballmer was a fan of. We've seen this with them hiring OSS talent (Miguel de Icaza, who was a pretty big advocate of trying to make MSFT less proprietary and locked down).
Externally though, the image looks completely different to those who don't really care for what's happening at MSFT - they just seem like an outdated Apple. That's slowly starting to change, I think the Verge recently put out a piece claiming they've switched positions. However, a lot of major consumer problems (Windows Update, Skype) have plagued the company tremendously. No amount of loving Typescript or VSC is going to change that.
> Seems like the view here is pretty negative.
Well it's not like the reason for being negative is unfounded. MS has a long history of running services into the ground, and their recent 'we love open source' charade brings back strong memories of E3 for many folks.
The fact that the Microsoft of the past 2 years is "getting better" at something they've tried to do for many decades is a great reason to be worried about them taking ownership of a product they are unfamiliar with.
e.g. "GitHub is really starting to improve again" - Devs in 2050
Why do you think "they are unfamiliar with it"? On the contrary, Microsoft has a lot of stuff ongoing in GitHub. Seems many critical people in this thread don't have a clue.
I have never seen any good .NET code in the wild. A typical story IMO is to come into a workplace where they are trying to dump legacy .NET systems as soon as possible because they are incredibly brittle. .NET seems to be one of the biggest software scams of all time. Great vendor lock-in though. Visual Studio, MS-SQL, LINQ, Entity framework etc... the only solution is to rewrite everything.
I don't know what you're on about. C# is basically a "better Java" so there's no particular reason you can't write good software in it.
That's very subjective. C# has tons of useless keywords that you just know some arrogant dev is going to use because they can, which then no junior can work with. It also has a worse ecosystem for writing server software (while obviously a better ecosystem for writing Windows applications) and is less suitable for cross-platform work.
Can you elaborate on this "keyword" statement? I find the statement very confusing especially when comparing it to C, modern C++, modern Java or any functional "magic" languages.
The second part is true. .NET does not share the same wide ecosystem as Java.
It is subjective, but things like genetics and reflection I think are better in C#. I am not sure which keywords you think are "useless." Either way though, they're quite similar. There is no innate quality about C# where the code has to be terrible and the only hope is a total rewrite in something else.
> is less suitable for cross-platform work
I have hands-on experience with Unity3D and .NET Core 2. Both are cross-platform and worked relatively well. I’ve built MacOS, iOS, Android software with Unity, and Linux software with .NET Core.
I’ve heard Xamarin is also good for mobiles but haven’t personally used it.
I would say StackOverflow is a pretty good example
Stack Overflow works pretty well.
But perhaps not without some pain for those involved making it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
I've done legacy work in both and I'd never choose Ruby over C#. It might be a little faster to write the code the first time around, but maintaining a big legacy project stinks.
Also, none of Atwood's reasons is "I don't like working in C#." And several of the concerns in this post are obsolete.
Actually, I find Ruby code much easier to look at than most Java / C# UglyCapsRunOn word-soup. YMMV.
Well who cares about that, really. I'm not talking about how pretty the code is; I'm talking about the ease of maintaining it. Ruby code frequently requires digging through the method and methods it calls to figure out the expected input.
I don't care if MS is getting better lately.
The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing, but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.
I like the fact Github is independent of all the big players. I really, really, really hope it stays a neutral ground.
Also, if acquired by MS, I'm not that afraid for github itself. However, what is at risk in my opinion is all the integrations around github. There is a rich and striving ecosystem surrounding github. Tools like appveyor, travis-ci, coverall, readthedocs, codacy are really useful, ease a lot development and are infinitely easier to setup/maintain than a Jenkins box plus a few slaves. What would happen to this ecosystem remains to be seen.
> The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.
This is such a prejudiced statement. It can be said of any company.
That's the point. No one acquires GitHub so no one can eventually corrupt it with partisan "my stuff is better than your stuff" idiocy.
GitHub works because it effectively belongs to "no one" as far as the big players are concerned. Sure they might themselves go bad one day but there is no point in hasting this for some two cents Azure/AWS/GCP mode.
I am not worried about the ecosystem. See VS Code.
If the acquisition goes through, VS Code is probably going to kill Atom, which is my go-to editor for many tasks. VS Code may be better overall, but it's not for me, and I'll have to change my workflow.
I agree. Atom is definitely in danger. They will not give up VS Code and maintaining two "identical" products makes no sense.
Microsoft products are becoming worse on privacy:
1. LinkedIn's dark UI patterns are as bad as they've ever been. Bringing the same to GitHub or otherwise LinkedIn-ifying it seems like a very real risk.
2. Ramping up telemetry. Key loggers in Windows 10, opt-out telemetry in .NET Core, seems impossible to get VSCode to stop phoning home.
This is the stuff we very badly want to avoid.
1. Agreed.
2. (Windows 10) Isn't that only in the technical preview versions? Or is the keylogger in the release versions too?
I constantly remind myself that HN does not actually represent what most customers want and/or need in the real world.
Most routine jobs/contracts at the coalface are still Java/.NET (possibly with a bit of Kotlin thrown in) - I even see companies looking for PHP developers on a weekly basis.
They are definitely alive and kicking, though if you judged based on this website alone, they all ceased to exist 10 years, replaced by Golang, Elixir and Clojure.
Mild exaggeration (and it's not a criticism of the people here), but you get my drift. People here like to talk about new/shiny/cutting-edge - and that's fine, but it's also not necessarily what customers/clients want or need.
C#/.NET in particular, though not perfect, is one of the most pleasurable languages/frameworks to work in.
Many visitors to HN are concerned with selling their skills to various customers, whereas others are concerned with the best technologies for building a successful startup. If you're selling your skills to a legacy institution and want to switch to selling them to a startup, looking at tech discussed on HN could be useful.
The ghost of the skype acquisition would make me panic.
They can stop updating the Github web interface and put all development efforts on a new Github for Windows Store UWP app.
http://blog.sunrise.am/
That one was really sad. Sunrise was an excellent product. I'm actually tempted to recreate it myself. I'm sure it would be possible to commercialise something like that.
That's Steve Ballmer. He had the reverse-Midas touch, but he's gone now.
Microsoft was actually highly successful under Ballmer. Just not in terms of image or in the consumer-facing world.
It's a big company and hard to blame an individual for mistakes. But they totally missed out on being the mobile OS of the future under him. And they ended up getting a late, slow start to cloud computing (minus SAAS).
They lost their market leading position in not just mobile, but also browsers and consumer operating systems.
They might have made money under Ballmer, but he was also responsible for Windows 8, Windows Phone and restricting open source within the company.
They made a lot of money, but were not successful. Business software companies become irrelevant decades before their revenues go away (eg IBM). Microsoft lost its future relevance under Ballmer.
Ballmer may have hurt microsoft, but they are still alive and well. The truth of it is that for a lot of things they do, there just isn't a competitor, nor will one arise soon. No one is replacing excel. As for windows -- there are a couple of niches where mac or linux could step in, but for most of them, that just isn't an option. Azure, typescript, vscode, ms office, office 365 are massively successful.
Sure, MS is alive and well and may outlast every other tech giant today (except probably Amazon). But that doesn't make Ballmer a good CEO.
I never said he was, just that he didn't sacrifice their future relevancy.
No. Microsoft's market cap remained steady during a 10 year boom that gave rise to most of the dominant players in the tech industry.
https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/08/23/the-steve-ballmer...
Why? I've been using Skype as my main video/text chat app since ~2002. It hasn't changed much after the acquisition.
You must not have updated your client.
Really? It's become nearly unusable for me. I used to have it open all the time and talk to lots of people. Now it feels closer to an infection on my computer that I only pull up when I have to talk to someone on it and then promptly struggle to logout and make sure it's truly closed.
Comparison of Skype to (Say) Discord is like a different universe (Sometimes [Electron!])
I used to like Skype, but they've made a bunch of terrible choices.
Their integration of Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft IDs into Skype has meant that I now have two or three contacts for some people, and I have to switch which contact I send messages to depending on what device they are currently using.
They've also broken other basic functionality like sending messages - even with a solid internet connection on both sides, it will often refuse to send messages leaving them in a 'Sending' state. Other times i'll be in the middle of a conversation and I won't get a reply to certain messages that appear to have sent correctly. Hours or days later I'll get a confused "What?" message from that person, to which I've got no idea what they're talking about, and then they send me a screenshot showing a half dozen messages suddenly showing up from previous conversations.
Then there's situations where I'll get messages on one device, but not on another (eg phone). So I've got someone pissed at me because I'm not responding to them, when the notifications are all piling up on my phone or another laptop, or whatever.
All in all, Skype has become so unreliable that I will only use it to make calls, because at least that way I can be sure the messages are getting through.
Have you checked the mobile client? The last 2 features I've noticed on Skype for iOS are:
* colors - you can change your Skype colors from blue to red or green
* stories - follow your friends just like on Instagram or Snapchat
I haven't bashed Microsoft for a long time, and I won't any time soon. However, this development has me worried.
There's a big difference between engaging the developer community with great products and purchasing important services that the developer community relies on.
Microsoft has succeeded many times with products and services they've built themselves, and with products they've purchased, but how often have they succeeded with services they've purchased?
FrontPage was purchased and pretty successful back in the day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
Powerpoint was a purchase. Hotmail was another one. Frontpage, Visio, Navision, Skype, Linkedin. They’ve had quite a few which were pretty successful.
Most of those are products. Of the services you mentioned, I would only call Hotmail a success in the sense that there wasn’t a net detriment to users because of the purchase.
Linkedin is the same. Skype kind of sucks.
Github shouldn't sell. It has an opportunity to be a once-in-a-generation tech company. I can't believe they even held the talks.
Maybe the founder are fed up with running it. I can understand your want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.
Maybe the founders are fed up with running it. I can understand you want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.
I can't help but be insanely sceptical. Microsoft has a massive legacy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and I don't want the GitHub ecosystem to suffer from the same reoccurring pattern. Call me jaded by Microsoft's past behaviour, but I just cannot forget the numerous times Microsoft has absolutely ruined thriving ecosystems by using the same tricks.
Microsoft wouldn't benefit from killing GitHub.
Heck Microsoft killed their own competitor TFS and pushed people to migrate to Git, and uses GitHub themselves for hosting several products. Microsoft also has full Git support in Visual Studio Online (their enterprise competitor to GitHub), Visual Studio, and VS Code.
Microsoft would likely use GitHub to advertise their development products, tools, and services like Azure. I doubt they'd want to "extinguish" GitHub because it just means less eyes on their adverts.
They extinguished Skype. They will manage to do the same with Github eventually. They are the biggest user already and would therefore be forced to cater to their own needs first over those of the rest if the community. This would drive the service squarely into the ground by doing everything right.
TFS is not dead. And the TFS native source management (one small pilar in TFS) is just quite unpopular right now :). But not dead.
If you can see MS itself is a big customer, why kill it when their own teams have moved over to it over their own code plex?
Why does GitHub need to be acquired at all?
Do the costs of running the servers and hosting the free services not cover the revenue from Enterprise users?
I believe that any Enterprise users won't notice even a doubling of the subscription fee, if GitHub really needs it.
I don't know why there needs to be more than a handful of employees working at github, just don't break what's already there!
I agree. I guess most of us here pay for GH account.
Exactly.
>Why does GitHub need to be acquired at all?
So VCs can cash in.
IPO?
Because that turned out so well for Etsy.
What happened with Etsy? Their stock price has recovered to their IPO price. It did seem bad from an internal sense with layoffs etc.
Exactly. The spirit of what they were trying to do got killed.
> Why does GitHub need to be acquired at all?
They raised a 250MM round a few years ago. You don't get to take that kind of money from VCs for a cut of yearly residuals.
This is negative value. The only reason the big companies host their source code on GitHub is because it's independent. They will stop doing that tomorrow if GitHub is acquired and it will lose all its value.
Positive for Atlassian I guess.
As someone who has always despised git for its complexity and being a movement more than a new technology I have been waiting years for this. Let git fracture and die. Maybe then we can get tools that work for us instead of the other way around.
I enjoy Mercurial as much as the next person. But git is an engineering feat simply because it works well enough for so many use cases. Also, if git is the worst part of your tooling, that's some great tooling and a good problem to have.
lol an engineering feat.
It's just software. My experience with git was about a month long phase where I devoted a few hours a week to learning it. Now I can use it but I still have to google commands for anything other than the basics. That's the problem with git. Git without google would be unusable. That's why I consider it to be extraordinarily poorly designed. You've seen git commands, I'm not going to go look up some esoteric command just to prove a point to you. The point is a good program would not force you to google everything, it would just work.
I consider git to be more of an advertising feat. It fascinates me how many people drank the kool-aid.
So, Which Microsoft login will I need to use for Microsoft GitHub?
My Microsoft Personal Account? Microsoft Work Account? Azure AD Account? Microsoft GitHub account?
p.s. All of the accounts have the same username, you just try different password and 2FA combinations til it works.
Does that not depend on you? Personal account - well that's your personal account ending in maybe @outlook.com
Microsoft Work Account - Defined by your workplace. Ending in @workplace.com
Azure AD Account - Same as your work account, unless your workplace uses a different tenant account for Azure.
Github Account - Well they still need to support the older accounts.
For the comparisons of this acquisition to Skype, yes Microsoft bungled the Skype acquisition.
But they have been killing it with Typescript and Visual Studio. I feel like that at such a large company, the Typescript recent history matters more than the Skype history. Two very different areas with different people in charge, etc.
MS has always been pretty good at making products.
MS has always been pretty bad at providing services.
Azure is pretty nice to use... Office 365 is second to none imho. Teams is great.
As much as I love VSCode, you live in a buble. A communication app affects way more people than a programming language or a text editor. Even my mother uses the former, while only a fraction of all the programmers I met in my life use the laters.
And MS did messed up on other major products or companies
- Rare video games. They did freaking golden eyes and conkers bad day and they manage to kill it.
- they messed up Wn10, which is still not as good as Win7 after all those years but spies more on you and forces update at the worse moment on you
- the latest outlook is barely usable. Sometime mails can't be sent. Sometime it freezes or crashes. It's very slow, the search sucks and I never find the buttons I'm looking for.
- they killed Nokia and the windows phone despite all the investments the community did in it. And it was considered a good product.
- they are milking minecraft like disney is milking SW, so that all the creative community has moved to private servers.
I mean, we are talking about a company that had a monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world. The player and browser, the most used software ever by the non tech saavy users.
And to this day, none of their versions is remotely as good as the competition.
Many of your criticisms may be justified, but this one reads a bit silly to me:
> monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world
I know it's a trope to say that IE was a monopoly, but the longest view of these stats I can easily find comes from W3Counter[1] and at what appears to be its market peak in 2007, IE6 and IE7 had 50% and 17% of the market.
OK, so the combined share was downtrending since the actual peak in 2004, according to ADTECH data from Europe[2]...
Huh. There are stats that go way further back, to before IE was dominant, and Wikipedia says it actually peaked in 2002, with 96% of the market.[3] I stand corrected?
I started my reply to make a point, and upon doing the basic research found that it appears I don't know what I'm talking about. These stats are really interesting, though!
FWIW, I have not been primarily a Windows user since I was about 14 years old. That was in 1999, when Netscape was still a player in the market, and I began my switch to Linux. I guess I forgot (or blacked out, it was traumatic) the fact that there was a point in time in the Browser Wars when IE was effectively declared the winner. It's been a steady downhill trend since then!
[1]: https://www.w3counter.com/trends
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#AD...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Re...
Totally with you on all of that and that I live in a comfy bubble of tech stuff.
Conveniently, Github fits right into the technology bubble. :)
Win10 could be better than win7, but too much time adding in ads and not enough refactoring the old UX all the way.
It really could. And they did try, at least the system PATH UI is better :)
Could be worse. It could be Oracle.
Or IBM.
Or Google. At least Oracle would keep its dead corpse alive while it was still producing revenue.
Until Oracle starts opening up lawsuits against people/companies that have high traffic open source projects
Oracle will declare it their code and start sueing :)
Aaand this is the weakness of centralizing everything in Github. Inevitable that it gets acquired by something with other motives (or is forced to exploit its central position in some way because business). The fact it may be Microsoft that seals the deal is just a cherry on top.
We need proper decentralization.
There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.
> We need proper decentralization.
> There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.
The Web is decentralized, and so everybody’s using Google to discover it. The problem with decentralization is you still need global entry points, i.e. some sort of centralization.
These entry points could be run by networked organizations like Sensorica (except more developed) and run on free software.
As a long time GitHub user I really do hope these talks do not result in an acquisition. I would really like GitHub to be independent from OS vendors, or vendors of platforms, ecosystems, compilers, IDEs etc.
I want GitHub's goal to be a good GitHub. Not a good part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Those may initially be the same, but it takes very little for them to not be the same.
Something makes me feel like Microsoft acquiring Github will do away with Github's current, open nature.
If the extreme advertising in Windows 10 is any sign...
At first they will just inject random commits that don't change any files but inform you about the latest price offerings on One Drive and Azure hosting. Later on if you're still on the "free" plan some of the commits will modify your hosted software to show their ads at runtime. Have fun!
This comment made me giggle at first, but then the truth hidden in the outlandish idea hit home and I cried a little bit.
They are not that foolish. The only company that stupid was the one behind sourceforge.
> will do away with GitHub's current, open nature.
Apparently the Gnome folks concluded that GitHub was already too closed to even consider them in the competition for the question "Where will the Gnome project live in the future?"
GitLab won that competition, btw, and icrosoft wasn't even part of that calculus.
With current trends in Microsoft's Developer Division, it's possible that GitHub could end up way more open if Microsoft acquired them. GitHub's core business is GitHub and they need that to stay closed to stay competitive. GitHub under Microsoft could have less financial pressure to keep closed.
Is it likely? I don't know. It is an interesting possibility though, that would certainly change the game.
There is precedent. Prior to Microsoft acquiring them, Xamarin was closed-source and licensing was $1000 per platform per year. At the Build conference in March 2016 Microsoft announced (1) that they were acquiring Xamarin, (2) that pricing would be dropping to zero, and (3) the Xamarin platform code would be open sourced as soon as possible after the acquisition.
Yeah, for dev tools Microsoft was always very open. Github and Microsoft might make a great combo, boosting dev productivity and open source
They already do: Visual Studio Code is based on GitHub's Electron shell. :-)
That precedent is even more useful as a measuring stick with Nat Friedman (formerly CEO of Xamarin) announced to takeover the CEO role at GitHub.
Yep, and vaccines are bad for you and the earth is flat...
What extreme advertising? I've been using Win 10 from the beginning and haven't seen ONE add.
This seems, to me, to illustrate perfectly how Microsoft still doesn't understand open source as an idea nor as a culture. The whole movement exists as a reaction against central, corporate control.
Large companies think that, by acquiring important hosted open source infrastructure, they'll somehow acquire the users or act as gatekeepers. But open source tooling is so decentralized these days that is not easy to be a captive user. The cost of switching is so low -- plenty of other comparable services supply collaborative utilities for git -- that, for most projects, a weekend spent altering URLs and configs should suffice.
If such a deal goes through, Microsoft will spend millions on the acquisition and, simultaneously, alternative providers who appear more independent (Gitlab, BitBucket, etc) will see a surge in new accounts.
And I, for one, think it'd be a good thing for open source. Every time an OSS sugar daddy turns on its users -- SourceForge, BitKeeper, Oracle, SCO, etc -- the community has grown more robust, more decentralized, and more resilient.
Does anyone have insight into what they're been working on recently at Github? I feel like the user experience hasn't changed/improved in the last couple of years at all. It feels to me like there is a lot of low hanging fruit to make a ton of money. For one they could integrate or replicate the functionality of Bountysource and let people donate to users. There is also tons of room for improvement in licensing like making copywriter-assignment frictionless and letting people dual license their software (so I could at a click of a button buy a proprietary license for someone's GPL'd library)
People are being overly pessimistic. This would be a potentially great deal. GitHub is very successful at what they do and I don't think MS would change that. More likely they would use GH as lead-in to selling cloud services the same way Google uses GitLab.
If you've watched the last couple Build Conferences (Microsoft's annual developer conference) they frequently demonstrate their CI/CD pipeline based on Github checkins, not VSTS checkins (just takes a webhook invocation and all the source-hosting sites support sending those out on check-in or merge).
A zillion companies use Github. This does not qualify them to operate Github.
Hasn't GitHub been running on Microsoft Azure for a few years now?
What does GitHub's choice of cloud have to do with Microsoft's aptitude to take over an existing, huge, critical piece of the open source world? From a business perspective, or an operational one?
Some of my pessimism is not just with Microsoft, itself, even though I do have that. I think an argument can be made that we should not want all the decent software companies to be bought up by the same big five giant companies, no matter who it is.
these talks are actually not new. the same rumor appeared back in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/github-is-raising-a-second...
imho, github feels a bit too slow innovating, which is kinda surprising since they are still "a startup"
GitHub has not been a startup for a few years, and it's business model is more or less mature now.
Have they ever turned a profit yet? Last I heard they were still losing money in 2017. Not what I would call mature.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been profitable since the first month of private repos.
AFAIK the timeline of profitability is somewhat like this:
- really profitable after introducing private repos - burning quite some money for growth after they took VC money - really profitable again after they changed their pricing to per-seat pricing
They lost 66 million as recently as 2016.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574
They introduced the new pricing in the middle of 2016[0].
[0]: https://blog.github.com/2016-05-11-introducing-unlimited-pri...
Most companies leave startup status long before they are profitable. It has much more to do with the stability and maturity of the business model and whether it can be scaled.
I have the opposite opinion. I think every few months I see an interesting feature being added that are slowly making github a better platform. Just for the last few months we've seen a lot of improvements for Enterprise, improvement to gitHub pages, saved replies, team discussions, security alerts. I love the pace they have to release meaningful improvements.
That's almost entirely because of the competition with Gitlab.
If the outcome is that they're adding more features to make the product better who cares? That's competition functioning as intended.
i'm also a big fan of the atom editor
Yes, it's so snappy...
Indeed; why pay the overhead of shared libraries or timely security updates: https://www.noobslab.com/2017/07/atom-text-editor-can-now-be...
lol, it can be slow on larger projects but its innovative and complete. i really like the packages system/community. always open to suggestions, whats better?
You’re kidding, right? Anyway Microsoft will kill it and replace it with VS Code, a much better editor.
i actually love atom and kind of hated vs code. ill check it out again tho. what do you like more about it?
Oh snap. Atom would be killed of. No business can afford developing two same products.
I hope they don't innovate that much. It seems everytime they do, the designs gets worse and worse.
> I hope they don't innovate that much. It seems everytime they do, the designs gets worse and worse.
Can you share some examples?
At this point I just hope that the acquisition goes through, is completely terrible and gitlab becomes the new standard.
I don’t know why you’d willingly be against competition though. GitLab makes GitHub better, but GitHub makes GitLab better. Why isn’t that a good thing?
I'm personally really happy with Github. I feel like anything they can add would like detract from my experience.
It's not perfect, but it's simple, easy to use, and gets to the point.
It's getting depressing to see that mid tier companies are all now reliably getting swallowed up by larger ones. It is starting to feel like the golden age of technology - where brand new small companies emerge and become giant ones - is waning. Were Google, Amazon and Facebook actually the last of the tech giants to emerge and from now on, it's just a procession of watching every other company merge into the existing 5 or 6 big companies? I guess it is inevitable but it still makes me sad if we are transitioning to a more mature, but fundamentally more boring phase.
I think it is a cycle. When the middle tier companies vanish, the small ones start to rise again.
I really hope this doesn't happen. Microsoft design and services are all over the board, not in a good way. I'm sure they would add more features, or make it more enterprise-y, which could have benefits, but I would definitely move to a self hosted setup if this went through. It's nice to have diversity of brand/company personalities in the tech ecosystem.
Oh shit.
I run Windows. I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, and the sense that Microsoft is ritually unclean will drive many of them away from github. It's the best thing that's happened to BitBucket and Altassian ever. If I have a choice between MS tools and Altassian tools I will usually take MS. (Visual Source Safe really did suck, but Visual Studio is not that bad...)
Also, Microsoft acquisitions do not seem to go well. Look at Skype, LinkedIn, etc.
Perhaps they perceive that AWS and GCP seek to own more of the work infrastructure and they're trying to get out ahead of this.
* email/domain integration
* code hosting
* issue tracking/kanban-based project planning
* CI/CD processes
Developer tooling is evolving and there's a land-grab happening, from small workshops all the way up to global-scale enterprises.
Its a smart way to increase Azure uptake. Acquire the tools needed as a dev, make your platform a first class citizen and everyone else runner up.
Source Safe is ancient. TFS is their new jam and it's pretty solid. Especially if you're in the Visual Studio and Azure world.
TFS (or more accurately TFVC) is old news. Git is their new jam and it's pretty solid. ;)
(Not entirely a joke. The Windows team has moved to git, which is a fascinating sign of the times.)
TFVC is being outphased. Microsoft doesn't want to openly say it but everything in MS' docs is pushing Git. When you have an on-prem TFS installation, the default version control for new projects is Git. Visual Studio Team Services doesn't allow to import anything into TFVC, only into Git. Visual Studio lists Git first, when you want to add version control. Visual Studio Code makes working with Git a lot easier than working with TFVC.
TFS as the development process management solution will live on as an on-prem service, but TFVC is unofficially feature-complete and in the maintenance phase.
Oh yes... i especially love it when my co-worker locks 10 000 files and goes on 2 week vacation... can't merge for days
I also love it how it detects changes on unchanged files ( they look at last modified timestamp) and you can't undo the unchanged unless you install TFPT and google for a bit for the command.
I also love it how when doing merges sometimes you have 10 000 conflicts even tho the files are unchanged :)
TFVC is bad and it should die... I'm glad they took up on git... now all i have to do is train my team on how to use git :)
I'll be really honest. This would lead me to start looking at alternatives for all of my projects very quickly.
After years of watching Microsoft gobble up and assimilate companies, I'd rather jump ship before they start the extinguish portion of the cycle. Mojang is starting to leave the extend part with updates that are pushed out early for the "bedrock" version of minecraft.
> I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, [...]
And for perfectly rational reasons, I would add.
Intel has followed Apple into the rabbit hole of style over substance. I know so many people who want to do neural networks and they want to buy a mac and sorry you can't do that because Apple picked the wrong horse in the GPU race and it might be a few more years before they refresh their models.
Back in 1984 Apple released the first microcomputer that came without a software development kit. Since then it has all been about the computer using you than the other way around, a proud tradition of bay area companies such as Google, Facebook, Palantir, etc.
...wow.
Ok, that's not relevant to anything else written in this thread.
I'd be interested to learn why there's the perspective that the LinkedIn acquisition hasn't gone well. I feel like most of the stories I've read about it have been pretty positive.
I am sure that some journalists interview PR people from Microsoft and some self-promoters who promote the idea of promoting themselves on LinkedIn and say it is great.
I think they've gone down the road of harvesting.
I don't know if anybody is left at LinkedIn rather than life coaches, scam artists, offshore development companies, self-promoters, "business development" people, salesmen who can't sell (maybe that is what "business development" means?), recruiters that can't recruit (ex. they have been contacting you for years because you once said something about Cold Fusion and they badly need somebody to move to Nome, Alaska but they never hire remotes...), people who seem to write 20 articles about data science a day that verge on word salad (you'd think if they knew that much they could write a better neural network to generate the text.) And people who are gullible enough to think that there is some value in sending somebody an InMail or using all of those search features they sell so you can do more refined searches of life coaches, self promoters, ...
Numerous design problems with how the forums work mean that good discussions get drowned out. The same fraudulent messages get spammed that were being spammed six years ago and they won't do, don't do, or can't do anything about it
LinkedIn has closed off most access to the API and you cannot get anything interesting out of it... except all of the email addresses of your contacts so if you do that "Lion" thing you will probably need to change your email address at some point. (I think many people don't know they get so much spam because they have a LinkedIn account.)
I am on the threshold of nuking my Facebook account now that I've disconnected all of the sites that I need to log in that use Facebook. I still haven't decided if I nuke my LinkedIn account or just delete 95% of my contacts.
Skype was horrible. But LinkedIn is doing very well afaik.
Guess they could always relaunch VSS as "GitHub for Business" at the same time then! :)
An acquisition would mean the inevitable split of support between the MS toolchain and the OS toolchain, which would eventually be left to die. Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS.
> Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS
I'm not sure that's true, but it is true that MS would have motivation to leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software.
At a conference years ago, a Microsoft rep told me over beers that almost everything his division did had the ultimate objective of selling more SQL Server licenses. That's why SQL Server is a required component of almost all MS enterprise software.
So you might for instance see a SQL Server backend option, and then "Github Enterprise" sold with that configuration.
> leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software.
This is pretty much business 101. You have loss leaders, that are solely designed to drive traffic to different products.
Considering how many Windows admins would prefer it that way, I wouldn't blame them. (Not that I agree)
> Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS.
This is the silliest thing I've read on HN in awhile.
Give it time. MS does what it has always done to competitors (even to MS internal products) that it acquires. Takes awhile sometimes and you younger kid will get to live through what others already have.
I'm probably older than you, but thanks for the condescension.
>>This is the silliest thing I've read on HN in awhile.
It appears that what goes around does, in fact, come around.
It's history, not condescension. Weird to take it so personally. If you are older than me, you already know the pattern, meaning you're being disingenuous (or deliberately ignorant) to dismiss it.
MS just want you using Azure and don't care whose toolchain you use. If they bought GitHub it would be entirely so they could get people _not_ using other MS products onto Azure. So there is no way they kill off the OS toolchain and turn it in to another VSTS.
If anyone has used VSTS or TFS knows this is a bad bad idea. They tend to make unnecessarily complicated user interfaces with poor usability.
I happen to like TFS, specially the triggers to prevent commits on broken unit tests.
I'm happy that Microsoft has gotten so on board with git recently and made contributions to the project, but this kind of consolidation still makes me nervous, for multiple reasons.
What contributions has MS made to git?
They made a post listing some of their performance improvements last year: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/01/11/microsoft...
Are people here really reasoning like "C# / .Net and VSCode are really great SO Microsoft acquiring GitHub would surely end well".
What is the connection between SOME of their newer dev tools being good (oh, just try the mess that is Visual Studio) and... well, anything else.
You believe that these well-liked tools/initiatives were random anomalies, born independently from and untouched by Microsoft's leadership?
GitLab here we come...
More like "gah, we're going to have to self-host git, aren't we"?
Or you know... just use gitlab.com...
I don't trust them to be compent at operating a large scale service after their insane meltdown february last year.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/01/gitlab_data_loss/
Unrelated to that incident, but I feel their web UI to be extremely slow lately. Working with PRs (or "merge requests" as GitLab calls them) and CI pipeline is a pain, you're looking at 1 second response times.
We're not happy with the merge request speed either. We're close to converting the merge request view to Vue, this should speed it up considerably.
To me it doesn't look like it's a front-end issue. I am mainly complaining about the HTTP response time. It seems extremely slow on both pipelines and merge requests, and Vue ain't gonna fix that I'm afraid.
I don't know if it's an optimisation issue with the software itself, or if it's just GitLab.com being overloaded..
Because we're loading everything in one go the database query time and rails rendering time adds up.
Yea totally, github is much more reliable.
https://blog.github.com/2010-11-15-today-s-outage/
Bitbucket Cloud & Bitbucket Pipelines. Serverless CI/CD... as in, no servers for you to self-host.
Gogs/Gitea are my current goto for doing this. I expect one or both of them will get a lot of influx if github gets acquired.
Gitlab will also see upticks, but I suspect it's a lot more than most people need/want to maintain.
I hope that a tragedy like MS acquiring GitHub does not happen, ever...
I can't understand why Github hasn't built out a clear path from repository hosting, to continuous integration, ending in low-friction renting of cloud instances.
I don't want Google or Amazon to buy them, and that almost leaves Azure.
It seems like something they could have done themselves a few years ago, though. Puzzling.
Considering that software powers most of the modern economy, it's pretty sad how small the market is for quality software development tools. Programmers get paid high six figures, but balk at paying for quality debugging tools. Visual Studio, despite being a strong debugger and exceptional piece of technology in its own right, is not a real revenue driver for MS, it's just an exceptionally sophisticated way to nudge programmers to Microsoft's libraries and platforms.
Github has generally been platform agnostic (except for git itself), and it would sadden me to see Github start to compromise those values and start favoring one platform or another. (One could easily see Github / Visual Studio plugins, enabled by default, with built-in subtle nudges towards the MS Cloud platform).
If github had to be sold, which tech company would be a better buyer than microsoft and able to afford a $2 billion acquisition?
Amazon?
They seem to handle acquisitions well. Zappos, Audible, Twitch...
Possibly Amazon. They tend to leave acquired companies alone to manage how they prefer, apart from Bezos micromanaging how to cut costs and restructure logistics, which is often a good thing. Plus Amazon (like Microsoft or Google) also has economy of scale opportunities for hosting GitHub on AWS.
I do believe Amazon would interfere less with what users like about GitHub than Microsoft would.
Apple. I know it's not Apple's style but imagine if Apple started expanding outside of it's bubble like Microsoft has. If they really went all in it would be amazing.
I would prefer if Apple would continue to focus on making my phone better. They really slipped up with their QA on recent iOS releases.
Yea but I don't think it's continued focus that will help here. Apple has continued it's modus operandi and quality has decreased like you mentioned. Granted, acquiring GitHub is most likely not the right fix, but I think something about Apple's particular way of operating is holding it back.
Apple has enough money that they could easily make your phone better and develop github and do eight other things.
I use mostly Apple products, for 25 years, but I would not want Apple to own GitHub.
Microsoft has always been a developer-tools company. They are many other things besides, and I have had some nasty experiences with their sales reps (who would say anything to close a deal), but I have always felt that at its core, Microsoft is a developer-driven organization.
Apple likes developers too. They taste like chicken. And a cloud-based developer institution would let Apple destroy two populations - cloud operations and developers - with one asteroid.
Apple would charge $100/yr and require Safari for access to Github. Updates will come once per year.
IPO.
GitLab must be psyched for the potential influx of defectors.
or fearing for the stability of their servers...
Not too keen on GitHub being acquired. If Microsoft wants to do something good here, they should give GitHub enough money to form a Foundation similar to Mozilla. That would be the best way GitHub could pursue its mission.
That also crossed my mind. But they have shareholders.
This is our chance to gain a GitHub+LinkedIn integration. Just imagine... your LinkedIn profile and endorsements will auto-populate based on commit & PR activity.
That sounds horrifying.
That pretty much already exists if it's easily identifiable that you are the same user on both services.
‘Please login to your LinkedIn account to view this project’
Don't really agree with most comments trashing this hypothetical deal, bringing up the Skype precedent.
Its been what, 2 years since the Linked-in and Xamarin acquisitions? Nothing seems to have changed. Microsoft just seems to know that the desktop is no longer the cash cow that it used to be, office still is but may not last long, so its a good idea to diversify its portfolio.
Satya is not Ballmer.
Only one mention of CodePlex[0] in the comments?
Microsoft had a "github" it could not compete and github took the mindshare.
Now it seems Microsoft want to buy that mindshare.
I wonder how many FOSS and other projects will jump ship once/if Microsoft takes over.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex
I foresee a great future... for Gogs [1], Gitea [2], Gitlab [3] and other Github-alternatives. I was a late and somewhat reluctant adopter of Github as I don't like the idea of centralising so much of the free software infrastructure and putting it in the hands of one company, even a supposedly 'friendly' company like Github. I mirror everything I do on Github to a local Gitea-instance as a backup and exit strategy for when Github becomes a liability. If these talks go through and Microsoft does take over the latter will become true and I'll remove my accounts there.
[1] https://gogs.io/
[2] https://gitea.io/
[3] https://gitlab.com/
I wonder how projects like Electron are figuring into the interest that Microsoft has in GitHub. How would Microsoft move forward with such a project if they bought GitHub? Would its continue to be based on Chromium? Would future versions of Office follow VSCode and be build as Electron apps?
I was in DevDiv at the time of the launch of VS Code (but on a different team): The pressure was on to ship a cross-platform editor ASAP to support the new cross-platform .NET infrastructure. This was very much an "IBM PC"-project with the Directors tasking a small team to get something done and to disregard the NIH culture. Atom was chosen as the platform because it was already close to what they needed with the right license. Heck, the rush to ship was so intense that they screwed up the name (I forget the story exactly, but "VS Code" was not the name the MSFT naming department came up with, but the name they initially chose turned out to be used elsewhere and they didn't have the time to come up with something trademarkable so they just sighed and shipped as "Visual Studio Code").
Anyway - I think the VS Code experience helped with Microsoft's institutional "fear" of pushing ahead with a JavaScript ecosystem elsewhere - I think the knock-on effects contributed towards the Office org's recent announcement to add JS as a first-class macro language in Excel, I just wish it was TypeScript instead.
Electron is save. VS Code needs it. Atom however does not look that good.
This has me wondering, what Microsoft wants GitHub for? It's not like they can't use it without owning it, and I doubt they want to improve it as it is. Probably they want control before integrating it with their products.
Maybe they just want something to buy with the $100B+ cash they are sitting on?
Microsoft has been investing in developer services for a number of years - they acquired hockeyapp (mac/ios crash analytics), and have a whole bunch of other tools under the azure brand https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/
It's almost worth re-asking the question as...what does Azure want Github for, to try and strip away thinking about MS's windows/office products. There could be some crossover between github's Atom efforts and VS Code, and MS already worked on projects like Git virtual filesystem (GVFS) for their own needs ( https://github.com/Microsoft/gvfs )
Don't they already support a bunch of scenarios like deploying from GitHub? It'd make sense in that way.
Visual Studio Team Services, although very capable, is nowhere near as popular as GitHub.
I imagine this move will lead to more integrations there... Kind of like what Microsoft did with Deis and their Kubernetes offerings.
GitHub do for developers what Microsoft want to do for the rest of business through SharePoint.
Maybe they could add Office 365 editing to GitHub and pitch it as the successor to SharePoint. Or try to integrate it with their other products in some kind of Frankenstein mess.
They seem to be doing much better with these things lately though. MS Teams is incredibly good. VSTS is pretty nice as well. I'm frankly unsure why they'd take on Github, other than better integration points into Azure services, CI/CD and other tooling for commercial/enterprise users.
DevOps and IaaS is growing so fast, I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet. This is absolutely about Azure DevOps.
They already have a bunch of tooling to make it easy for users on VSTS to ship their software to Azure, but VSTS users are probably 100% already in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Buying GitHub and then adding tooling to make shipping from GitHub to Azure easy (and the obvious choice) would help them push Azure more to companies not currently using other Microsoft products.
GitHub sales a product ms competes with.
They want to join the social networking data with linkedin and office 365, yammer, enterprise Skype, etc, etc.
They have a clear long-term strategy of owning professional social networks, both within and across companies.
That way they can sell you access to your professional network, and your employer access to info you don’t even realize exists about you, and also sell it insights into its own org structure.
GitHub would just be another piece of the puzzle.
Because much of the free software world uses it as a coordination place - it's a weak, undefended target. If they were to buy it and quickly shut it down, the free software world would be in a tailspin for quite awhile. Microsoft could use the delay to push for legislation across the world to force developers to have a Microsoft(Linkedin/Ripple enabled) license attached to their (Microsoft) global ID. Within a year or two it could be illegal, worldwide to possess non-Microsoft licensed crypto software, then eventually all software. Especially look for software relating to the boot process/BIOS related stuff - that's another weak point right now, but there are probably others.
If SendGrid and Twilio could IPO, then surely GitHub can. Keep incentives aligned and do that instead, please. If Microsoft acquired GH it would a non-neutral platform, and I would be off to Gitlab immediately.
.NET is great and the openness is great, I don't really see why so many people are up in arms about this. Microsoft is a large user of github. Maybe this will push you all to use gitlab ;)
I don't understand why all the bashing, there is no better time to cash in. Gitlab in few years time will make Github worth less.
Gitlab.com and self host GitLab offer the best of both worlds. Gitlab right now still isn't as good as Github, but it is good enough for many things. And we see improvement coming in every few months. Not to mention Microsoft will likely move the whole Github infrastructure to Azure.
HOT TAKE: The things that drove Skype to change from the Golden Age Of Skype were largely market-driven things like the rise of the smartphone that killed pretty much every other popular communications platform at the time (AIM is dead now, too) and there is no evidence that an independent Skype would have weathered the market shift any better than a Microsoft-owned Skype did.
Disagreed.
Skype worked perfectly for me on smartphone, and the few quirks could've been patched without screwing it up completely.
I feel like Skype was ahead of its time, it was essentially a cross-platform iMessage & FaceTime that was mainstream.
Had Microsoft not fucked it up we'd still be happily using it.
I'm mostly indifferent, but would like point out that MS has managed their dev products decently well. (At least the ones I use)
I don't care if Microsoft is the new Apple, or anything like that. I just don't want to see more consolidation.
It's ironic how Microsoft has embraced Git considering it was made for Linux's development.
Microsoft has been the largest contributor to Git for a while. Getting to a point where all of Windows is building out of Git repos has caused them to solve problems that Git has never faced previously.
For all the silly unicorn IPOs of companies which don’t necessarily have a clear product or revenue, GH seems like the type of company that could successfully go public and actually succeed. It would fend off potential suitors for a while too.
As much as I love GitHub, if Microsoft acquires it I might start looking for alternatives.
Sign the petition: https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-stop-microsoft-from-buyin...
I don't think anyone really understands what Github is. It's more like a spirit then a thing. I bet Microsoft is prepared to pay a lot for the goodwill, they don't care about the product/tech.
GitHub being bought buy Microsoft is like the opposite of what it represents. If Microsoft wants to pay for goodwill they should drop a big chunk of cash on forming a GitHub Foundation similar to Mozilla.
I understand most of the concern about Microsofty way.
However, basically I see two different era for MS. Before Satya and After Satya. So, I don't have any concern/worries in this acquisition.
If this goes through, it's going to impact users of Atom and VS Code - one of the two has no reason to survive. I wouldn't be surprised if the former is discontinued then.
That would be kind of awesome, but I don't know how the github culture would meld with a big corporation. It would be an interesting case study for other similar start ups.
Didn't github already deliberately kill their own culture a few years back with policy changes and a layer of middle management?
edit: This isn't snark. Didn't they legit cut a bunch of perks, refocus everyone's priorities, and hire some people to start cracking whips? Or was I reading the public accounts of that situation wrong? Got bad scuttlebutt?
I think you are saying that they shifted from the full holocracy ambition to one with a more traditional management element because it wasn't working as well as they wanted.
I hadn't heard that. That stands to reason. Business people actually detest that "flat organization" model. They really get off on hierarchy and power.
Aren't dev tools are going cloud. MS might have just bought a bunch of servers with nasty dependencies on Jenkins in the hopes it results in more deployments to Azure.
E3 -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Stems from at least the 1990's. The MS behavior as opposed to the term can be argued to pre-date that decade.
I'll just remind people who may think I'm being old, crotchety, and living in the past, that this has been a repeated pattern of theirs that has resurfaced so often and reliably as to become considered by many to be a core component of MS culture. Repeated including in the face of DoJ prosecution and monitoring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Almost nobody who even worked at Microsoft in 1996 still actually works at Microsoft. You are bringing up something said in one meeting from when floppy disks were still pretty important to the computing world.
I can't fathom a single statement from 1996 about a computer company that is still accurate today, and EEE falls into that category as well.
"postmaster@nsa.gov" is probably still true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Non-mobile link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Company culture is a thing, and like other cultures it doesn't require the original folks to keep it going once it has been established.
But with the latest news that MS is looking at buying GitHub demonstrates nothing has changed at MS.
Instead of helping and pushing the industry forward like Google does instead we have them hurting the industry. They buy GitHub and we will have a mess as FB, Google and the others that contribute to the greater good of the industry will have to go else where and we have a fragmentation mess. Google gave us map/reduce and K8s and so many incredible papers and a big one is VP8 and VP9 stopping the mpegla from trying to extort ridiculous license fees.
Or finding all the big security vulnerabilities like Shellshock, meltdown, Cloudbleed, Heartbleed Spectre and so many more and sharing and helping the entire industry.
I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.
E3 is no longer relevant under Nadella, arguably even before Balmer stepped down.
>E3 -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Doesn't apply to buying the competition.
This could be the best thing ever for GitLab. (see: Skype)
Not unless they bought red hat first and shipped Linux laptops unseating Lenovo. Money is now in the mega data cloud center not the desktop market.
LinkedIn won’t let you cancel your account if you’ve paid a year subscription. The option simply doesn’t exist and their support is oblivious
This feels a bit like MS wanting to buy Yahoo, Nokia, and aQuantive. It feels like Github is now resting on its laurels and has peaked.
If Microsoft buys github I will be pulling all my repositories, deleting my account, and finding any software that I use on github and quickly cloning it and importing it to some competing server(Probably gitlab)...and I would encourage everyone else to do the same.
edit In the meanwhile I would recommend filing an issue on every single project as you would normally file issues on, asking what their migration plan in the event of a Microsoft takeover is, before, not after this happens.
Time to spin up that Gitlab instance, I guess.
Can't we do something like a customer-buy-out and put Github into a foundation of some sort?
Microsoft should actually buy Slack.
Already tried to clone it with Microsoft Teams.
I've used Teams. Microsoft should really buy Slack :-)
Leave it alone! Github pricing is perfect for all incomes. They'll slap on a few features, create a tiered payment system and charge $20 for the first tier.
100% will take my code somewhere else if this acquisition goes through. Go acquire Atlassian if you want to "diversify" your portfolio. Go stick it up your Azure MS.
Trying to understand the cloud strategy here; does Github run on Azure, GCP or AWS?
I'd seriously consider migrating to bitbucket if this happens.
NO! GOD! PLEASE NO! [GIF]
Is there a truly decentralized peer to peer alternative to github or gitlab? And please no lectures about how git is inherently decentralized. Obviously there is something missing that causes us to rely on github etc.
So this is why they have closed Codeplex!
The price as stated seems lowball to me.
GitHub: the ale requires you to keep us open.
Microsoft:..
A better fit would be Docker. Totally unrelated but I can see that as a better fit with Azure rather than invest on the dev community around Github.
I’m bailing if Github gets Windowized.
Oh, oh. That doesn't sound good.
They're literally ruining my life. First Minecraft, now GitHub? Congratz MS. Now I hate you more.
God yes! Please oust the GH execs too, thatd be such a blessing for the product.
Nonononononono
GitHub: the sale requires you to keep us open.
Microsoft:..
Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/V7Oyy
well I’m canceling my sub, thanks for ruining Github MS. Gitlab here I come!
please no! :-(
Up next:
- Github user account migration/integration with outlook.com
- A much-internally-championed Github/Office/LinkedIn integration effort created by some sharp but inexperieced program manager fresh just out of Washington State, that happens to require Github project descriptions to be authored in .docx format, launched as an improvement from that primitive format made by a certain mac fanboy.
- An effort to migrate the Github infrastructure to Azure cloud on Win 10 that ties up 85% of all development resources for the next five years and ultimately fails.
For the last one: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736149.aspx
And that’s from when they weren’t allowed to use BSD or Linux internally and Windows Server was rudimentary. Microsoft would have no problem migrating Github to Azure quickly.
Well, that's a scary thought.
Hopefully it's just a negotiation tactic to get Google to buy them for more than their first offer.
Google is notorious for killing products too, though.
For me, much of the same rationale would apply
>Google is notorious for killing products too, though. For me, much of the same rationale would apply
Agreed. The best possible solution for making GitHub long term sustainable would be following the Mozilla model.
I mean the other option is to just not sell and if money is a problem adjust pricing. I find their plans to be incredibly cheap for what they offer so they definitely could have room to grow in that regard.
Please no. I spent months to find strategies to limit my google product usage between mails, search, phone, calendar, contacts, maps, streaming, dns, adsense, cdn and analytics. It's a struggle. They are everywhere. I really hope they don't eat github too.
Has Google ever killed an acquisition or product of Github's scale? Most products that come to mind were niche things like iGoogle, or things that got deprecated/integrated into other products, e.g. Buzz, Wave, Picasa
Google Reader is the product that seems to leave the most bitterness, but that too seems to have been relatively niche.
Google killed Google Code in 2016 and moved much of their code base to Github. Maybe they'll rebrand Github back to "Code", but outright killing it seems unlikely.
Github is a niche product. Average people do not use it at all, its utility value is entirely niche. The average person will never know what Github is or what it does. It's useful to less than 2% of the US population, and less than 0.5% of the global population.
They've killed / destroyed / butchered large acquisitions before, yes.
Metaweb / Freebase cost them a reported $200-$300 million.
Feedburner cost them $100 million.
Slide.com cost them $228 million.
Motorola was a $12 billion disaster. They might as well have killed it.
DailyDeal cost them $114 million.
Wildfire Interactive cost them $450 million.
There are a couple dozen more in the $30m to $100m range.
Google Reader
but I don't want to leave github. Please no.
I can't believe people are salivating over the idea of giving google more control over open source. Need to wake up to their style of evil I guess.
See https://code.google.com/archive/
Google buying GitHub over Microsoft would actually be arguably worse for GitHub.
If Google actually bought GitHub, I would be thinking twice about using it.
Same here. I don't use Google products, other than search.
If you want to get Google search results and not give them any personal info or create a search bubble, try startpage.com or ixquick.com (same company). They have built a privacy-focused search engine that rides on Google's results. I'm not affiliated, I just enjoy using it.
If you don't trust Startpage you can try DuckDuckGo with a !g modifier, it will search Google (mostly) anonymously for you.
You can use Google without logging in and with one of those browser addons that delete cookies when leaving a site.
They still create a search bubble based on your IP address and browser fingerprinting.
Well not with GDPR, no.
As far as I understand, the !g modifier doesn't search anonymously for you, it just redirects you to the google results page. It's useful when you know that ddg won't give you a result as good as google.
You can also use the !sp flag, that redirects you to the startpage result page, without passing through google at any time, so that's what you should use instead of !g.
Thanks for that, I rarely use DDG but I always assumed they sanitized the Google results.
Google and Facebook don't use Git. Microsoft really loves Git and GitHub.