I spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear.
With all that said, things have changed a lot over at GitHub over the past 2-3 years, so I can't say I'm all that surprised that this was the outcome. Restructures, scandals, and some crazy comments over the few years has led me to believe that GitHub probably isn't the same company that the development community embraced. For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft mess with GitHub then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years, it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service (i.e. GitLab).
This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
"Old" schoolers have and will likely have for ever that evil 90s vision of MS. However it is changing a bit in that people too. They still may be evil, but at least the look more modern (opensource, new technology, using/contributing to Linux etc).
However the important thing (for MS) here is new people. If you come into the scene now or in a few years you only get to know the "new" masked MS image. Yes, they are still doing dubious stuff but is all under the hoods, buried by layers of hype, cloud, linux and fireworks.
Rebranding some big stablished company with that kind of history is something that takes a long long time.
Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of it's heart, they want something of value from it. What is that, and is it compatible with what made Github useful?
I won't stick around to find out, my time is too valuable and the competition is strong. For me, Github doesn't really have any distinctive features except that is was the biggest, and so most convenient. I suspect most people and organizations will be in the same situation.
> Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of it's heart, they want something of value from it. What is that, and is it compatible with what made Github useful?
What is that? I think its ownership of the huge amount of computer programs (and not to mention the associated metadata of authors and their professional network). The editor and the client provide a continuous stream of samples ready to be drawn from the world.
I believe its in the owners best interest to keep this golden goose of continuously increasing source of computer programs in good health.
The thing that I didn’t understand at first was why did MS gave up codehub (Google had Code, FB never pushed phabricator that hard) only to acquire GitHub later?
Is that really the case, obtaining to own code? Depending on the Terms of Use, did GitHub receive a special, separate license that allows them to make use of code under separate permissions of what's otherwise libre-freely licensed or proprietary/closed/private? If so, wouldn't the acquisition allow to exit existing contracts? Sure, the metadata is exclusively on GitHub and moving will result in a loss of stars, followers, contacts, etc.
Not at all, they are supporting the model of TFS corporate deployments and generic (but embraced and extended) Git clients.
There's an increased chance of Microsoft starting to behave like they own Git, and trying to make it a part of their "platform" with proprietary extensions like their Git filesystem hack.
Companies that use github, both as teams on the main website and with the enterprise version, pay 9 dollars per month per user. If Microsoft can get it's enterprise customers to trust the product enough to pay that sort of a price this will be a very profitable acquisition for Microsoft. If anything, I don't think github would've ever been able to acquire enterprise customers had microsoft not made this acquisition.
You know wikipedia exists. Or people like me who will harp on on how privacy standards that are somehow acceptable now would be something inconceivable in 90's.
As one of those "old schoolers" I don't view MS as any less evil than they used to be.
But they aren't the only 800 pound gorilla in the room - open source, google, apple, amazon have all taken a big chunk out of what MS was.
What prevents MS (or any one who acquires GitHub) from pulling a sourceforge? Well nothing prevents them, and I can't name someone who wouldn't want to monetize it -- that latter fact is going to be what kills the product/project.
This is a furphy. GitHub is already monetized -- it is highly profitable, selling fee-paying plans to corporations. MS's major customer is corporations. Of course they're not going to do a SourceForge because this is a traditional acquisition where the purchaser has recognised that GitHub's current monetization ties in well with their existing business model, and they gain value in the acquisition from it building their reputation with business as the go-to place for corporate cloud. They have no interest in damaging the corporate value they gain by fiddling with the consumer and open source side.
I think I should have said sourceforge/skype - I don't think MS is going to detonate GitHub the same way sourceforge went.
But I also don't have a lot of confidence in them doing well by the community either... it could be as "harmless" as a move to "Microsoft logins" that kills it off.
Sources for highly profitable ? According to the linked article they were not and lost >60M in 2016. They could probably still optimise to make a profit, but seems like they were struggling a bit with making money.
Stop bashing Google without any proofs. They do respect privacy and don't share data you elect not to. In fact, their take out tool was released in 2009 or something, way before GRPR made others do it too.
Uhhhh your doing this backwards. Prove that google is protecting my privacy not the other way around.
The default state for people needs to be DISTRUST of corporations (and governments) that they do not have a direct financial relationship with (when you aren't giving them cash).
I believe that Google's theory is what mine would be in similar circumstances, why sell the data to a business when you can use that data to build a competing business.
That's part of the problem: we have no idea what Google is doing with our data, so we have no idea if they are respecting privacy - assuming there is even a definition for such a thing.
The only answer is to simply gather less data, or be more explicit about when you do. And Google isn't great at either.
One example that comes to mind is that Google Maps has started telling me when I've been somewhere before, like a restaurant. It's very useful information, but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way. Can advertisers target me based on this location history? I'm not sure. Does it affect how results are ordered on Maps? Probably. But I don't know.
Relatedly, Maps shows me when a location is likely to be popular vs unpopular. I have to assume that's based on the location history of everyone using Maps - seeing how long they spend in a place and at what time. But what percentage of Maps users are aware their information is being used in this way? I doubt the number is high.
Also, now I come to think of it, Google search itself. It shows different results sometimes when I'm logged in vs logged out, but it's not clear why. And I don't recall ever being asked if I wanted, say, my browsing history to influence future search results. It just does. Somehow.
> but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way.
Weird, I'm pretty sure with my new Android phone, upon booting it up for the first time, I had to opt in to location services and a little popup explained exactly what it was doing.
I'm on Android 8.0 with location services and history turned off. I'm also logged out from all Google services except Play (I want to update apps.) It works perfectly.
>It's very useful information, but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way.
You did.
It sounds like you want something different than transparency about when information is collected, but instead you want transparency about what information is used to give you a specific feature.
For example, you opted into location history a long time ago (likely), should Google again ask for your permission every time they add a new feature that takes advantage of your location history information? (assuming said features don't affect the privacy of your data)
Actually, if you’re in the EU then GDPR makes that explicit: consent for the use of collected data must be tied to granular functionality. You can’t now collect data and use it for indiscriminate purposes.
I think (keyword think) you have that a bit mixed up. additional functionality using the same data is fine. But you cannot collect data without a specific use case. "Future features" might be a legit use, but then people should be able to opt out.
I don’t believe you’re right (though I’m welcome to be proved wrong). Assuming the consent basis, GDPR requires that consent needs to be for a given set of data and a defined processing model. You can’t process the same data in a different way without getting new consent, and you can’t collect data indiscriminately. So saying “additional functionality using the same data is fine” is true if and only if your original consent was wide enough to include that additional processing, but consent needs to be “granular” at the same time. Tbh it’s all a bit up in the air at the moment until some case law happens. Also obviously if you’re using a different basis then none of this applies.
> instead you want transparency about what information is used to give you a specific feature
Not OP, but - sure, why not? It would be really nice to have that. Especially if it wasn't the meaningless kind of transparency, "we use your location data as well as past interests to provide this feature", but something concrete - "we use regular GPS/cellular/wifi location updates to determine places where you've stayed for longer and correlate that with your recent searches in Google, as well as visits to venue sites that use Google Analytics".
(Personally, I'd be fine with such concrete announcements popping up the first time you use the app after a new feature was added, and if a feature is something one might want to not use, I'd be happy with it being opt-out. Just don't surprise people with application suddenly doing new things by itself, without much prior warning.)
Because if we lived in that reality, you'd end up complaining about how Google was sending you unwanted marketing emails about new features multiple times per week, and I'd be arguing that they were emails discussing new privacy updates.
Not to say that no one would want that, but as someone who does, by way of working at Google, more or less get emails similar to the technical descriptions of newly released features you want, very few of them are relevant to me.
> you'd end up complaining about how Google was sending you unwanted marketing emails about new features multiple times per week
Maybe they'd combat the perception I have of Google - that they just do UI redesign every couple of months, which more often than not lose useful features than add anything of value.
You say you get lots of those e-mails internally; I'd love to know where Google is actually adding all those features - because it definitely doesn't seem to be Inbox, or GMail, or Google Maps.
> Relatedly, Maps shows me when a location is likely to be popular vs unpopular. I have to assume that's based on the location history of everyone using Maps
This is based on the location history of everyone using Android. Its the Google Location Services requests going back and forth all the time that tells them where people go.
I'm not convinced they are -- the models are entirely different. Google receives the vast bulk of its revenue from advertising based on mining what they know about you. Microsoft receives the vast bulk of its funding from companies using its systems and paying them to run them well.
MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.
> MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.
They're trying pretty damn hard with Windows 10, which by default collects pretty much every keystroke you make. That data in turn gets shared and sold to advertisers - see MS's own privacy page: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement
There is a YouTube update that's been pending on my Android for 1-1/2 years. I haven't agreed to it because YouTube decided that it needs access to my contacts. IMO, if Google needs to know who I communicate with in order to watch videos, they don't respect my privacy at all.
On the other hand, a Google product (YouTube) is asking for permission to access information already available to another Google product (Android). If Google had no respect for your privacy, they wouldn't even ask.
Respect for privacy is a continuum and Google isn't on either extreme. I'd even go so far as to say that different parts of Google have different stances on privacy. People who try to make them into a monolith with a single binary stance on the issue are lacking nuance.
I don't think it's an issue that deserves nuance because it's not unreasonable that they should behave as a monolith with regard to privacy. It should be a top-down corporate policy.
> But then again “the SV hipster development ecosystem”. Who is that exactly?
That was a reference made by user tomato.
But if you prefer my point of view, those that fill up SV coffees or live in other parts of the globe trying to replicate the SV culture and are naive to the point to give Apple and Google human attributes, while believing they are any different from a profit oriented corporation.
Debian developer here, speaking only for myself: while Debian doesn't like proprietary software any more than before, the change we've seen from MS has been dramatic.
MS now ships Debian for Azure through a collaboration with Debian and credativ, and also in the Windows Store running through the Windows Subsystem for Linux. They've hosted a Debian cloud sprint, sponsored DebConf, and engaged in good-faith substantive ways that don't only benefit their platforms. Of course, they care most about their platforms, but that's fine.
In the other direction, Debian does ship fully open source software (what Debian would call DFSG-free) with Microsoft as author.
Debian isn't playing favorites, of course, and is similarly working with Amazon and Google (among other partners of all sizes) in areas of shared interest.
Thanks to the work of projects like Debian, for some 20 years now people have the right and ability to run a computer in freedom, and there's little point for Microsoft to compete on the consumer/Desktop OS sector any more (compare to mobile, web, Apple, etc.). What do you think what they're competing over now? Imagine if Azure integration starts to appear in FLOSS, because it's an online/hosting service and the "Open Source" guys don't care much about SaaSS and don't favor the AGPL.
The main Azure integration in Debian is supporting use of Debian in and with Azure, just like they're supporting every other environment in which one might want to run the Universal Operating System (that's Debian's longstanding tagline). Including physical ones, with no plans to change that.
I agree it's important to be able to Debian in the environment of your choice. That includes Azure as well as self-hosted and small-hosting-company options.
This is in regards to one Microsoft product: Windows. Reality is, they're not focused on Windows anymore, but I do agree it would be nice if they took away all that telemetry nonsense and allowed people to have better control over updates. To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.
I'm still hoping Microsoft see the light on all the telemetry and forced update nonsense before the Windows 7 cut-off in a couple of years. The trouble is, I can't see it happening as long as Nadella is at the top, and I can't see that changing as long as the big enterprise customers who aren't subject to that kind of nonsense are propping up the share price.
> in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.
A few years ago I turned on my windows machine to see the dreaded upgrade. Being in a rush I went to another machine and the exact thing happened. I blew my top and replaced all windows with Ubuntu. I would have preferred Macs but I couldn't afford the Apple tax (high prices and not working on my existing HW).
> Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0.
That's nice for you, but if you use any non-open software or software not covered by the package repo then there's a fairly good chance you'll see downtime after an upgrade of your linux distro.
If you're talking about a major distro upgrade, say Jessie (8) to Stretch (9) in the Debian case, then yes, there's a fairly good chance at least some minor things will break, but that's a much bigger deal and presumably not something you'd ever expect to happen automatically.
To be clear, I was talking specifically about the unattended-upgrades package, which is primarily for automatic installation of things like security fixes. In my experience, this has been rock solid: it's never broken a distro package, nor any dependency that non-distro software we had installed was relying on.
Windows was completed with Windows 7. Everything after that is just churn. Consider for a minute that Windows doesn't need to be redone every 3 years anymore.
If you're on latest Ubuntu (or derivatives) since 16.04 at least you've been getting security track upgrades (through the default config of unattenfed-upgrades) forced on you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what you get default out of the box with Windows as well?
You can, it just isn't as simple as a menu option. Considering Linux's habit of requiring config file changes and obscure command line invocations to perform configuration it is hardly fair to judge in this case.
On Ubuntu you can install it on every computer in your house and still pay zero dollars and zero cents. LTS releases let you use the same core packages for the next 5 years.
Your OS can be configured to pull updates not only from official Canonical sources or those blessed by them but also any sources you please including your own. You can put up your own packages and use them just for you or promote them to all of planet earth. If you don't like a particular package or a particular version you can not update just that package although you might be unable to update others if they require the new package in question.
If you feel strongly about it you can fork and support old versions indefinately or take the package in your own direction.
Further you can even fork the entire ecosystem and not even call it Ubuntu anymore.
On Windows home you can't even decide not to update. You have to pay $99 per computer for that privilege and might have to pay again if you update say the motherboard. The windows store is only for apps that MS designates at its privilege and supposing you agree to give MS almost 1/3 of your revenue for a privilege it can revoke at its descretion at any time.
You can't fork Edge if you don't like how it works and if you could you wouldn't have the right to distribute such let alone create an alternative store/source usable by all for people to install/update such a creation.
You have pretty much misunderstood the entire point of open source software.
Indeed. I'm always a little surprised at how readily developers recommend VS Code, given the lack of privacy guarantees and Microsoft's recent track record on both telemetry and quietly overriding past user settings with updates.
This was absolutely my first thought too. I've developed for work over the last year on Windows. It's dark patterns to suck up data and ads now. There are ads on the login screen!
MS heavily respects privacy and mandates that every employee go through privacy and GDPR training every year. And remember, MS’s business is not rooted in exploiting user data to sell them ads. Replacing “they” in your sentence with Google or Facebook would be much more appropriate.
While partially true, there are a ton of small and medium size companies out there that are just starting to rewrite their legacy stacks, with many choosing .Net with MSSQL. Worst part is, these shops keep turning up at my local LinuxFest yearly, looking for new dev talent.
I doubt it, I think they are doing it because they’ve seen more and more of their enterprise migrate from TFS to git.
This is my opinion, but I think Microsoft tech is fairly terrible for open source and smaller projects, because .Net is a lot of complicated tooling you’ll never use outside of enterprise. At the same time they are rapidly becoming the “only” enterprise option rather quickly, and with that comes the question of why you’d chose AWS over Azure.
Sure visual studio has a free version, Windows now does Linux and .net Core is open but I see those moves as a way to make c# replace JAVA in schools not as a way to make open source love Microsoft.
Game development has used C# for quite a while, and with official support for Mono, and adoption of .NET in Unity [0], it's a viable choice. The language is constantly improving [1], and is doing so in the open, on GitHub no less [2]!
From what I saw as an intern at Microsoft a while back, there's way more of an engineering-led culture at Microsoft than people give it credit for, and to the extent there's a push to promote their own language and tooling, it's largely driven by a wholehearted belief (and challenge) that Microsoft tools are the right ones for the job, with initiatives being chosen to fulfill and expand that promise. And, more recently, what I hear is that Nadella's initiatives are genuinely promoting that ethos across the entire leadership structure. In that context, they make a lot of sense as a partner for Github.
No, they're totally reactive to everything. Why re-invent the wheel with NuGet if there's already software package repositories in the libre-free world for decades, but then not make it the main software distribution mechanism while allowing independent package signing and repository providers (to prevent Microsoft from gatekeeping the distribution channel), effectively eliminating viruses and the attached antivirus industry from the Windows OS? Why give out Internet Explorer gratis, but not the OS if it's that important for human communication? Why does Notepad only in 2018 get support for GNU/Linux line break \n and not in the many, many years before? Why can't Word export a valid XHTML file from a document in 2018, but VS never fails to generate valid XML? There are just thousands of examples like this that speak against the company having to do with engineering, it's more a law firm in my opinion. Let's not forget that it was their idea to claim that software is copyrightable in the same way like a novel is, with laws that are from the print era, and it made them an unbelievable amount of money and prevented the software field to enter a truly digital future. Humanity just lost several decades of progress because of this, and now GitHub, one of the few major innovations in the field, will go down the drain, too.
Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby, I can't see them wanting to switch things up from a tech perspective. GitHub is stable, and it's tech stack is capable of staying up despite some major DDoS attacks.
If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams, and to finally resolve the issues that stop Windows from being a first-class citizen in the Ruby world. If they can do this through both Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux then I think they'll be on to a winner. It's a capture of a much-loved service, and an opportunity to bring a mature set of tools into their domain.
I work for Microsoft, we run systems that are not built on MS technologies. There’s absolutely no push for migration. In my opinion, no-one will pressure GitHub to change their stack, it would be a suicide.
I was looking at draft.sh from the Azure open source team and the current (very early) version literally only works on Mac. The only install method listed is Homebrew.
Actually we have release assets for Mac, Windows, and Linux with support for 64-bit and ARM architectures. Someone from the community added Chocolatey support not too long ago. :)
Disclaimer: I am one of the core maintainers of Draft.
> Why is that? Why should people forget how evil MS was and still is?
I'm not asking for that, but making wild baseless predictions of how the service will go to shitter or how suddenly all private code will be ripped off and "I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!" is not part of a healthy discussion.
I do have some privacy concerns but they're no less than when Github was not owned by an enterprise software company; If anything I'd be more concerned about privacy if it were Google or Facebook making this acquisition.
People base their expectations on past performance. And for MS it hasn’t been stellar. But there is no need for speculation; we will wait and see.
The problem is deeper than that though. Unless you were developing an Editor or a Git hosting service, you were not in direct competition with GitHub. Suddenly a lot of startups will find their private code hosted by a direct competitor. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I was them.
The same people also host their deployment with some of these corporations, who doesn't use either of AWS, GCP or Azure? Do you also have the same concern that a direct competitor possibly has access to your deployed code, API keys and is also in direct control of your production environment?
Not that because it happens, it is nice; but at-least at this point the source code access concern is more of a conspiracy theory if anything.
Yes, major corporations have moved off of AWS for precisely this reason. (edit to clarify: They moved out of concern about a competitor hosting & having too much knowledge about their business.)
Exactly. GitHub Enterprise under MS rule would be an epic conflict of interest for many customers who currently use it because MS could/would compete with them.
While it's not a complete 1-1 mapping, I keep thinking of Stac Electronics disk compression lawsuit against MS when it comes to handling source code:
Gnome is open source though so Microsoft wouldn't need to buy the hosting provider to read it's source.
To be honest, even with regards to private repos, I can't see Microsoft reading the source code because that would be a massive law case waiting to happen. What I'm more concerned about is Microsoft trying to integrate more of their own suite into Github. I'm also concerned about the future of Atom; which I specifically chose over VSC because it wasn't managed by Microsoft.
I already self-host personal projects but that is only part of the story since I cannot (and should not) dictate what solutions other people use. A pretty significant proportion of open source projects I have contributed to have been Github hosted so even if I don't use it for personal projects I still will need to use it if I want to continue to contribute to those other projects.
Minecraft was going in the toilet slowly far before Microsoft acquired them, but the changes they made have not been for the better in my opinion. Xamarin was plainly bad before acquisition, and as far as I've been able to discern this hasn't changed.
I'm not really interested in being part of a "healthy discussion" with Microsoft. There are enough people telling Microsoft about all the things it is doing to make people dislike it.
It knows what these things are. If it wants to stop doing them, then I'm happy to use some of its products. Until then, I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!
> I'm not asking for that, but making wild baseless predictions of how the service will go to shitter or how suddenly all private code will be ripped off and "I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!" is not part of a healthy discussion.
But they're not baseless predictions, they're based on past information and it tells us it would be prudent to minimize reliance of Github sooner rather than later.
OK I'll avoid iterating the ludicrously long list of Microsoft acquisitions that immediately did go to shit. Often intentionally, like AutoRoute straight after purchase from Nextbase.
How long before they get bored of github then? Codeplex wasn't as good or popular as github, but did seem to have many valid reasons for existence if you were Windows focused. So they killed it.
Codeplex died because GitHub won. There was little point in keeping Codeplex around especially after MS decided to move their open source stuff to where the developers were, i.e. GitHub.
If the company that ships OS with preinstalled, hidden keyloggers (using that as a pars pro toto) acquires the platform I host my code on, that's not a basis on which to be concerned?
Are you referring to the issue where the crappily written driver had a keylogger to detect keyboard volume keys, etc, or something else?
If it's the first, that's not exactly Microsoft's fault, in the same way it's not exactly Mocrosoft's fault that if you buy a Dell it might come with McAfee preinstalled.
Although, it could be argued that if the driver was verified, perhaps they should extend their verified driver program to cover that instead of just crash protection. Then again, since the arguments here are centered around not trusting Microsoft with your source code, I can see why they may not require that...
No, I am talking about a literal keylogger actively installed on the OS. To their credit, after it surfaced they now provide a privacy option to "turn it off", but they still pretty much admit to spy on you every chance they get.
Because Microsoft was never that evil and they aren't evil today. It took me seeing the stuff Apple got away with the iPhone to see what a non-issue Microsoft 90s desktop hegemony was. The fear was overblown.
They were convicted of anti-competitive behavior, and that was after at least a decade of unprovable rumors and industry open-secret of anti-competitive behavior. How much more clear-cut of a case do you need?
But the users from 20 years ago aren't dead yet. It's difficult to get a widespread bad reputation in business, but once it's obtained, it needs an incredible amount of repairing and good-doing to get rid of it again, and it's not that Microsoft is doing any of it with their recent pseudo-openness approach, they just realized that OS lock-in doesn't work any more and that they have to massively invest in cloud data/services lock-in and the race for AI, by giving their OS/VS away gratis, to prevent a world of Java and web developers and Apple after loosing the entire mobile sector. Looks like people will fall for that lock-in/dependency again because they don't understand digital, and Microsoft can buy their way out of their previously miserable situation. Wonder who paid for that, probably all the companies with Microsoft licenses because of lock-in and market dominance.
All large global corporations are constantly involved in legal battles, because that's how conflicts are resolved in our society. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose and are convicted. Quite often they settle before they are convicted. That's not the difference between good and evil.
Microsoft took the view that they could bundle IE with Windows and that they could license Windows to PC manufacturers on an exclusive basis. A US court decided that given their market share they were not allowed to do that.
Google is in a similar bundling conflict now with the European Union. So far Google has lost and they may or may not ultimately lose before the European Court of Justice. Or they may settle before it comes to that.
In 2015 Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe were caught trying to keep wages down by agreeing not to poach each others' employees. They paid $415 million to settle that case.
Please look up [Company Name] litigation on Wikipedia and you will find countless cases of large companies being convicted for something or settling this or that case.
Is any of this evil? That is a question everyone has to answer for themselves in each particular case, because "evil" is a moral term. The simple fact of losing a legal battle does not qualify as evil according to my moral compass.
Unsavory and untrustworthy then, if the E word is too strong.
I'm not interested in doing business with any company that has the track record of acquiring and killing as many products as they have. I've personally lost useful tools to them on multiple occasions and I don't use MS software for anything more than I'm forced to on provided hw for my employment.
My one Win10 laptop experience was enough to tell me that MS is still untrustworthy when it comes to forcing behavior on users.
If my work situation ever shifts enough to allow a Linux machine, I'll happily never look back.
No. Software developers, doctors, post delivery personell, whatever, is supposed to do the best in their own field, and just because there are other sectors which are considerably worse doesn't mean that we should let ours ever fall to that level too. It's not difficult to see a dystopiant future in which software might help create the most horrible of all societies, and its reach could also be global.
I don't see how it relates to Github but sure, link me to someplace I can read up on it because a Google search of "Microsoft Linux patent racket" only led me to an obvious troll bait blog.
That was only 18 months ago at which time MS had harvested a cool $85 million form its Linux patent racket. God knows what the Linux Foundation were smoking when they accepted Microsoft's membership. Suse Linux is another victim of Microsoft's extortion. Worst is the patents remain unspecified, as far as I'm aware.
I don't want to sound dismissive but you've linked to a blog post from 2016, which in its entirety only mentions how much they make from the entire patent portfolio and a wild guess on how much they could be making from "Linux patent racket" and no other details on who they're pursuing or what the demands are/were.
> God knows what the Linux Foundation were smoking when they accepted Microsoft's membership
The Linux Foundation doesn't care about Linux. It's mostly a way for the CEO to get paid big sums, he uses a Mac on stage when talking about Linux. They sponsor a bunch of good projects and pay Linus and Greg, but they're not ideologically commuted to Linux, as long as MS pays the fees, in they go.
> We’re pleased to reach an agreement and to see continued recognition of the value of our patent portfolio, particularly as it relates to operating systems,
Nothing evil here, move along, lol. Fucking cockroaches. For a multi-billion OS giant you sure are afraid of something 'small' and produced by volunteers that gives users their freedom. What a pathetic display.
> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft"
OK, I respect the call for keeping an open mind. Always a good approach. But let's not forget all of the moves toward a friendlier Microsoft/Linux world looks suspiciously like "Embrace"
... which is exactly the problem. The issue is the tactic, not the company employing it. It’s just this company has a serious habit of employing those tactics, hence the distrust.
I'd like anyone in any business contemplating an Embrace, Extinguish strategy to know that it ends in people not trusting your company and being unwilling to work with your services.
I would like to know how much it is costing Microsoft to fix that damaged reputation so that other executives will know if they do this it will end up costing at least X amount.
Hmm... I would think that it will cost Microsoft a rethinking of their business strategy.
If their 'Embrace' looks like 'Yes we are compatible with...' and their 'Extend' like 'If you use our layer you can also do...' then people stay sceptical.
Instead their 'Embrace' should be 'How can we help you with your open source product?' and their 'Extend': 'Here are patches that fixes problems, improves performance and implement community wanted features.'
It seems companies like this always try to hold the door to 'Extinguish' open.
I really don't think reputational damage in this case came from adopting an embrace-and-extend strategy as such, but rather the monopolistic position they were in combined with specific tactics they used.
The Memo leak was just the tip of the iceberg. MS also lost multiple court cases about their anticompetitive behaviour (for example gov of US, Sun) in that era.
The typical implication of "Embrace" in these EEE uses is not 'figure out how to work in tandem with' but more 'how can we the amoeba surround and prepare to Extinguish this'.
Hence the justified caution and monitoring of a known extinguisher.
That might be the reason why many people dislike all businesses of Microsoft's size. I for one wouldn't be happy if Google or Amazon or Apple bought Github either.
I completely agree. The biggest issue here is that we are losing a neutral player as the top comment says. The tech world is that much more monopolistic without an independent GitHub.
But they don't really need to fix it. Sure, it'd be nice, but they're targeting developer machines and utilities with WSL, not a server replacement of Linux. Nobody would buy a Windows license just to serve from LAMP stacks on WSL over Azure or something. Speed requirements for dev machines are a little less stringent, and as long as they are hitting better-than-Docker numbers, they will still be providing value.
Developers that exclusively use MS stack are very similar to those exclusive to Delphi. MS and Delphi stacks are very specific in nature and very different from everything else out there. Developers stepping out of those feel very uncomfortable and unfamiliar, thus wanting to stay in. Even though the Delphi stack is very obviously dying, the resistance is great, and many people stay on the sinking ship. MS stack is live and well which gives a viable incentive to never even look over the fence. That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way".
Where does that put GH? How will it change, in what direction (to accommodate the MS stack)?
Delphi might be a small community compared to JVM or MS. Is Delphi dying?
I work in the M/Mumps space(healthcare), another small (almost invisible) but active community and it seems far from dying. I imagine Delphi is bigger.
I wonder how long the MS stack would last without the support of MS. Would the MS stack fare as well as the Ruby stack has without Microsoft’s massive investment in turning developers into sharecroppers? (Or salesforce, scala, unreal, php, erlang, etc.)
Personally, I wonder how ReactOS (www.reactos.org) will affect things when it finally gets to the point of being usable for general population end users.
Seems like a wild card entry, which could go any number of directions. :)
> That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way".
And unix developers complain endlessly about any dev environment that isn't identical to what they use. Powershell gets shit because it isn't bash/core-utils (even though it's better in just about every conceivable way), Windows API gets shit for not being posix (even though posix is a crappy API), etc.
How does this personally affect you such that you consider it your duty to disparage whole groups of developers for the choices that they make ?
Did it ever occur to you that people stick with certain environments because they make a lot of money using them ?
Your statement basically reads as "I can't believe that people/companies have the nerve to stick with a codebase that cost them thousands of dollars to create and has made them very successful over the last couple of decades..."
The name is burnt. They still are a company with business interests. While their interests might align today with the open source community this doesn't have to be so tomorrow and there is no resistance internally to burn these bridges they are building today.
I wasted many years using Windows, an OS that I gained nothing from using except memorizing UI patterns. This may be great for some, but I really developed as a computer person when I got OS X, which allowed me to use Unix without diving into Linux. The impact was huge. I still think sadly about the wasted years clicking around Windows.
Just the other day I was helping my mom with some C# code in VS, stepping through lines in the debugger. When I hit some library code I excpected to step into the library code, like in Java. Instead it force stepped over. Wouldn’t even let me see a decompile, like XCode shows you for code without available source. That’s microsoft for you. You get some binary libraries, docs that may or may not be crap, and Steve Balmer screaming “developers developers developers” while you bang your head trying to figure out some poorly documented library works. Microsoft relies on users’ ignorance, Stockholm syndrome, and the perception that Apple is more expensive. You get so much more from Apple, it’s incomparable.
That said this acquisition seems like a great fit and doesn’t trouble me at all. As much as I love it, GitHub is nothing special. Microsoft has little to ruin and a lot to improve. Seems like a solid vanity pickup for MSFT, and a good source of guiding vision for GH.
> I really would love to see how XCode is able to display anything for binary Objective-C libraries, beyond pure Assembly.
Indeed it only shows disassembly. I was frustrated that VS wouldn't even show me that. Others write that newer VS lets you enable the showing of assembly.
Anyway, I am spoiled by Java, where I can step into standard library code (which is in Java), can decompile to produce pretty nice Java source where the source is not available, and IntelliJ, which automatically downloads the source where it is publicly available. It's quite wonderful. But I am guessing you already know this, judging from your profile.
To me, not being beholden to documentation is an incredible freedom. The ability to just pop open the source to understand the tool you're working with is indispensable once you've experience that freedom. Microsoft developers don't have this ability, and having had it, it's hard to imagine being without.
You can see .NET bytecode since version .NET was in beta with ildasm, distributed with .NET SDK tooling.
ILSpy and Reflector are almost as old as .NET itself.
Visual Studio always had an Assembly view since version 1.0, and there is always WinDbg as alternative, including macro commands to dump .NET JIT information.
Sorry, but it looks like that you haven't properly explored Windows development.
That is all down to your config. If you go to "Tools \ options" , then in that dialog, expand the "Debugging" node and select "General", you can "Enable .Net Framework source stepping", and you can also tweak the way the debugger handles external code with "Enable just my code" and "step over properties and operators". There's loads more - by default it is really paired down.
> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft".
To be fair, Microsoft need to stop doing stuff that makes people dislike them. Microsoft aggressively court developers who don't use their platforms, but if you are a Microsoft partner or worse, a mere Windows user, you don't always feel so loved.
Are these only available in Home edition? I'm in pro edition and have ever seen any ads. I also use ClassicShell start menu so maybe that's why I never see it...
Ads are definitely present in Pro. Perhaps you're just not calling them ads. In the start menu you get "recommended apps", explorer pops up "recommendations" for OneDrive, and when you switch your default browser to Chrome it nags you that you should really give Edge a chance, to name a few things people are referring to when they talk about Windows 10 having ads.
Or you delete Cortana and completely break all of that bullshit. Though it has made it so a Windows 10 update will no longer apply, which is a frustrating side effect but one I am willing to live with.
They're present even in Enterprise versions. The worst part? Every time you upgrade you get all the garbage back: games, ads, etc.
I was stupid when testing W10 and didn't backup W7 so I was left with W10. My solution? Bought MBP's for my whole team, and buying more as we grow. I've been MS since ms-dos and walked thru all the versions since 95 (excluding Vista), but now I'm happy Apple guy. All it took was Win 10. :/ I'm kinda missing Win UI but OMG how much I hated W10...I felt so betreyed :(
Mod parent up.
I bought a Surface Pro thinking I should give Windows 10 Pro a chance with WSL on it. Even the “Pro” version comes with bubble gum jam games on it, ads, spyware / telemetry and the like. No way of removing it.
I wiped Windows 10 after a week and installed Ubuntu.
Off topic, but how is the experience with Ubuntu on the surface. I love the hardware and the pen of the surface pro, but Xubuntu has been my daily driver for a few years now, and I can't imagine going back to Windows.
My main requirement is for a good experience with the pen...
Pretty bad. I tried using Ubuntu on my Surface Laptop and gave up pretty much immediately. The problem is a lack of drivers. I couldn't get the keyboard working and the device would never "sleep", so I didn't even try seeing if a pen would work. The touchscreen was functional.
We didn't forget they force updated Win10 and all the integrated ads and spywares, after a terrible Win8 while everybody was happy with win 7.
We didn't forget that microsoft killed rare, nokia, skype and that currently outlook is becomming less and less usable everyday.
So yeah, VSCode, Excel, TypeScript, the Xbox and C# are good products. So what ?
Unless you suddently fire everybody from MS, change their raison de vivre, and reboot them, they are still Microsoft.
Attitude like yours is why crooked politicians get reelected. Why big companies can mess up with consummers and get away with it.
People say that you can't change the world. That you can't do anything about what's wrong. They feel helpless.
I'd start with stopping this habit of giving a free pass to all the entities with a disrespectful background just because they got better on some points. Or because they have a better PR.
Because they do. Half of the links I had on them were cleaned off. They are green washing them, cm by cm. Until all that remains is that they were the good guys.
> We didn't forget that our community was called a cancer
This is disingenuous. He was referring to the licensing model of certain open-source projects, where the introduction of a single line of code coming from an open source project would require the whole of the Windows stack to be open-source, effectively "contaminating" the rest of the stack. To this day this is still a problem to many companies and legal department must carefully review the licensing of the libraries used by their devs.
Yeah, this is so disingenuous, Balmer had really no other words to use. This was totally appropriate, and as a FOSS lover and somebody that was able to make half of my carreer thanks to those licences, I should not be offended. No matter how much of my free time I spend on projects protected by said licence.
Espacially since the economical model of microsoft is to lock you in by using softwares and formats that call for getting the entire stack with it, hence infecting your business. But it's ok because they make you pay for it.
And I note that you choose the most important points of all my comment to focus on.
I'm glad some people still defend them. It's good honest people take care of those innocent little guys.
That's a choice that the developers choose to make to enforce their wishes. It's supposed to be embraced by a capitalistic system, i.e. they choose to serve only the customers who abide by their terms. Free market!
I don't think MS, whose OS infects every PC on store shelves has any place to complain.
Upvoted you for going through the effort to put these points so eloquently together :)
However, it's not forbidden for MS to change their ways and public image. There is no danger anymore of depending too much on MS tech today. And there's the tactical argument of "the enemy of your enemy" if you know what I mean; eg. these days it's all about about your attention and invading your privacy (and MS also has no clean hands here). But still MS is mostly a software company with a predictable pattern, unlike darker forces able to influence public opinion to a degree not seen before, while MS shilling and astroturfing is easily spotted and amateurish by comparison.
The things I'm more concerned about when it comes to GitHub I've already posted in another story:
They could change the terms of service and essentially drive certain types of projects away. They could limit access to older builds and versions to non-paying customers. They could limit access to verified/signed builds. They could reserve certain rights to your software such as they did with npmjs.com. They could run ads, offer IT staff skill matching and promotions, FizzBuzz-like services, or other LinkedIn integrations. They could come up with clever schemes for offering commercial licensing for open source. They could go after the enterprise package mirrors and policy checkers market Artifactory et al are serving. Not saying they'll be doing that (MS isn't stupid), but given MS is selling mainly to enterprises, there are many creative ways they could make money of it.
Overall, however, I'm not too worried. In fact, I think GitHub has become too much of a monopoly (though I have absolutely nothing against them at all), and I'm always for more choice.
IE is abandoned, isn't it? Keep in mind that Microsoft bought Andreessens code from NCSA after Andreessen left to found Netscape, so Netscape was competing against a bad version of itself, made worse by Microsoft.
Well, at least you're right about code moving away from GitHub - spreading the code around to multiple services can at least in theory make it more resilient to any one service failure / takeover.
Skype is absolute junk...takes me 15 mins to get a call working each time.
Microsoft Teams/Planner is junk too.
I understand things are changing, but it still feels like they have weak product managers who don't care about the quality and polish of their products.
People hate Microsoft for "being Microsoft" BECAUSE of what Microsoft is, does and has done.
I'm sure you will find most people who voice those opinions have their own reasons, based on history, to be distrustful of Microsoft and the way this acquisition will be handled.
They cant just ask for forgiveness after all that they have done.
Action speaks louder than words. I don't care about Open Soruces or Paid or Free. Bring me better products! Bring me better services. Proof it to me that they care.
They are obviously doing a lot of things right under Nadella. But asking many to not hating them after 4 years of good and 20 to 40 years of bad may be is a little too much to ask for. They will have to do a lot more to wins us back.
Dislike the word "hate". It is more people that have been in the industry for a long time know what Microsoft has been all about for a very long time.
But finally we have a new culture in software. Where big tech give away crazy amounts of IP. Google gave away Map/Reduce and K8s and TF and so many papers. FB has given away so much also.
We finally had a single and neutral site which everyone uses.
So things were just fantastic and then the old guard just can't resist and messes it up. Now the big tech companies will have to move to a new site and a single place is no more.
Looks like they will move to GitLab which will just become the new GitHub and ironically way down the road MS will probably have to move their code to GitLab if it becomes the new place.
There are many, many developers, most developers?, that do not use any MS developement technology. Now without them wanting it MS has injected themselves and will cause a hassle. Either moving your repo to GitLab or now having to go to multiple places to find things. Or confusion if the repo is on Github or Gitlab. It is not a huge hassle but a hassle that was not necessary.
That is the thing. The new leaders in the tech world are all about moving the ENTIRE industry forward. But MS move here has slowed the industry as people have new work to deal with it.
BTW, do hope we can put to rest that MS has changed. Clearly they have not. I never really thought it as company cultures rarely change. But here is the nice black and white proof.
As soon as SQL Server isn’t an inescapable trap for your data, my impression of Microsoft will improve on the developer side.
Right now the idea of doing things that every other major Relational DB can do, like hook directly to ElasticSearch or feed live data into an outside system is crippled. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a business decision that negatively impacts my codebase.
There is a large difference in complexity here though, and Wunderlist need extra coding for O365 integration so it wasn't just redevelopment purely for a platform shift.
GitHub more complex than todo-list-on-steroids app so a platform change would not make any real sense. MS today may still have some of its old habits but they do seem to have purged a lot of the "not invented here" problem that caused much embarrassment when the first attempts to migrate HotMail over to MS technologies failed. It also has pretty good integration with relevant MS tools (VS & VS.code, etc.).
I expect to see them moving the base infrastructure over to Azure, but non-MS technologies are well enough supported on the platform so that won't require any notable changes to the main codebase of the product itself (though perhaps some rework of the deployment processes to make them more optimal for their new target network?). These days they care a lot more about what runs on Azure than what is written using .Net and even what runs on Windows, and are comfortable releasing their own code using other tech (VS.code being based on Electron being the first example that springs to mind). They'd prefer you used an MS stack from top to bottom of course, but they are more than happy for projects to use other components in/on Azure.
It'll be interesting to see how they would position it alongside TFS, as there is a lot of overlap between the two products. My guess is they'd keep pushing TFS for people who are completely MS shops and GH for people with more varied stacks.
As pointed out in another location I post: Electron was created at GitHub and they are its primary maintainer which may have had some bearing on the decision, and a wider effect as it could touch many other projects. Though as Electron is open source there is always the fork option if the community doesn't like the direction MS go with it.
Looks like their will be two sets of automatic posts on news of any project that used Electron: those bemoaning its use because it is Electron and those bemoaning its use because MS!
How many times did they try and publicly fail first? Two or three? Excellent validation for choosing FreeBSD and Apache for your 1999 startup. At least two announcements that it was "complete" turned out to be lies.
Years later the back end was still on FreeBSD and Solaris, but the front end was on Win 2000 using Windows Services for UNIX.
Microsoft bought one of my favorite pieces of cloud software from a few years ago Deis[1]. With that they also got Helm[2] with the purchase. They are doing GREAT with Helm and are going in a different direction that looks super cool as they mothball Deis called Draft[3]. They are moving away from the OS company they used to be and betting heavily on cloud technologies and I think this Github purchase makes sense. Github has been stagnate for years. MS is embracing open source in a way they haven't before, and I think they are doing so in a way that is going to surprise people.
In NO way am I a Microsoft fan boy. I've been windows free going on a decade. I run Linux Mint and OSX as my primary desktop environments. Apple is burning me hard, the way the computing world is going to change in the next couple years, cluster technology is going to be at it's core and we are going to see some very different things grow out of it. I'm as shocked as anyone to see MS play nice with linux and especially contribute how they have to Kubernetes; which I think is the largest open source project in the world right now?
What if MS dumped resources into world class CI tools to go with Github? What if they made a Github open source module and would let you federate your content? I could see this being a really interesting thing. They could also screw us all, but under their current management I think they are getting ready to be competitive in an emergent environment that can't exist without open source.
> What if they made a Github open source module and would let you federate your content?
Wow, that's optimistic! I'd be happy if they just keep it neutral.
Fact is all the big vendors publish and collaborate on github, this purchase threatens that ecosystem. And we are more likely to see a message of private code hosting sites, than a solid federation system for source control.
I don't disagree with you on the threat to our ecosystem, but I think Github has been treading water for a while. I'm really excited to see Gitlab step up, especially with the traction they are getting from the diaspora, but I don't know that they will. There are a ton of reasons people won't take Gitlab seriously as a replacement right now. I hope they find a way to take their tools and this new attention and produce what we all really want.
I think at this exact moment, there is a really interesting space that can be filled by a FOSS Github alternative. I think a new player might be better equipped to offer it. Maybe someone can build something off of Keybase's[1] git services.
I am sad to see an independent voice go, but I don't think Github has been able to stay competitive and IMO this could be a good thing. That remains to be seen, but regardless of Gitlab's ability or what MS might do, I think there is a vacuum left that I'm hoping we can fill as a community and I'll put my effort and dollar behind whatever shows up to do it.
Someone should ask Linus what he thinks about git federation. Maybe he can save us from ourselves again.
CNCF is an open source software foundation dedicated to making cloud native computing universal and sustainable. Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. Cloud native technologies enable software developers to build great products faster.
This deck looks very interesting, I don't mean to hijack this thread and make it an AMA, but I do have some questions for you.
- What does it mean to host my project with CNCF?
- Why was CNCF created?
- What do you consider the core services that CNCF offers?
- I have colleagues who work in the automotive industry, I know cluster technology and IoT are huge for them right now but also it's a strange place to operate. Since they have a small community compared to normal web services, what sort of value prop are you providing to them?
- Why should I look at CNCF for resources relating to my companies cloud services?
- Your company/product really does not appear to be geared towards developers, which I would think would be essential, can you show me a developer portal that tells me why I should depend on you for the information you appear to be aggregating?
To me, if it requires an explanation then an explanation would be best. I certainly don't care for explanations of things that don't require explanations.
There are several distinct developer ecosystems. Some people write C# and VB on .NET in Visual Studio on Windows machines for delivery to Windows Server enterprise networks. Some people write Java on Spring/J2EE in Eclipse for delivery to Java enterprise application servers. Some people write C++ in proprietary IDEs for delivery to proprietary embedded systems platforms. But the one I’m talking about is the one centered around Github, Kubernetes, Macs, and trendy open source tools like Go, Rust, React, etc. The “hipster” characterization is tongue in cheek. It would be insufficient to say “the developer ecosystem” because MS already has one of those, including its own VCS, Team Foundation Services.
Rust is an interesting one, because I think it bridges those last two - normally very separated - groups. Some of those who deliver software into embedded systems are excited about the possibility of a replacement to C++.
(disclaimer: am an embedded systems engineer and a Rust fanboy)
> Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating
Not sure what you mean here.
They've never specifically targeted non-Apple developers as a core constituency. It was mainly due to the fact that OSX was UNIX derived that the platform became popular at all.
That's kind of a broad statement. I see a lot of people using WSL, I even think it has become part of the standard software kit for new hires within PlayStation Network. I know its widely used among the employees who opted for the Windows laptop over a MacBook. Anecdotal, of course, but I think you're downplaying the spread of its use.
I have lived and worked in SV for a decade, and still don't know a single "Silicon Valley hipster" developing with WSL or VS Code.
I do know the power of analytics and control over prominent backend systems, and the allure of being "gatekeeper" with the power to extract value from integrations.
For sure! I've managed to get a good chunk of people I work/coauthor with to use it (and like it!), and I've observed an increasing number of my students using it as well (in classes on ML and numerical computing).
I used Sublime Text for the longest time; tried Atom but wasn't thrilled. After 2 days of using VS Code, I uninstalled Sublime Text. VS Code is an excellent tool.
> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
I can tell you from experience that that will never, ever happen.
The most likely outcome is that GitHub will slowly but surely start to bleed open source projects to alternatives like GitLab. And GitHub will continue to live on, like LinkedIn and Skype before it, but it will lose mind share and will no longer be the epicenter of open source development.
Linux subsystem for windows is garbage, it brings all the same issues with running a linux VM on windows with no more benefit than cygwin gave and who exactly is apple alienating? This sounds like opinion since apple profits are doing just fine and waking into any incubator will show you who the dominant player is. also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes
I also spent years working with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies. The reality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was still alive and well as late as 2011 when I mostly stopped dealing with them. Since that time they have definitely taken a new direction, with increasing adoption of Linux in particular, but I have trouble belieiving the corporate DNA has been so thoroughly overwritten in the last few years that this does not spell the imminent demise of Github as the broadly useful plarform that we know it as today.
Hmmm... Windows Subsystem for Linux... the 1998 Microsoft-vs-Linux report... hmmmm.
While I'm currently picturing a pacman trying to eat a dot a bit bigger than it expected, I do wonder what kind of hilarity Microsoft have planned for, presumably, 5-10 years from now (I'd presume they're in the Embrace/Extend period if my conspiracy theory is right).
[Small edit: currently at -1; interesting | Edit 2: Now at -4! Anybody care to actually comment? I'm interested in why people disagree!]
[Update since edit period has expired: back at -1 again - adding this because I think it's interesting, also first edit was after about 20min, 2nd edit was after an hour, this edit is after ~2h | Update 2 after ~1hr; parent is at 2, this is at 0]
In the interest of providing data, here is at least a single reply. Though I haven't voted, by my criteria your comment leans more to downvote than upvote. My reasons:
1. It adds little to nothing to the discussion. You raise two items with no commentary but "hmmmm", then offer a metaphor and an admitted conspiracy theory - neither of which you explain in depth nor draw interesting conclusions from.
2. There is inherent ridiculousness (almost to the point of trolling) in connecting a 20-year old report (1998) to a modern initiative, particularly considering the massive industry, technical, and organizational changes between those two events. Implying that one leads to another as part of a 30-year strategy to consume/extinguish Linux assumes a level of long-term planning and, frankly, managerial competency that is almost unheard of in today's public companies.
3. Assuming I can even understand your poorly constructed point, I still disagree with it (see #1 and #2) and, more importantly, think you fundamentally misunderstand the landscape in which Microsoft now competes. In a world increasingly accessed by mobile devices, MS has no mobile presence. In an OS landscape increasingly disintermediated by the browser, MS has little significant browser presence. They have oriented their entire organization around Azure (its biggest revenue growth area) and cross-platform applications deliverable in the browser and on 3rd party mobile OSes. They reorganized and, for the first time, no longer have a Windows division. Thinking they're in the middle of some Machiavellian scheme to take back an increasingly irrelevant OS dominance position by extinguishing Linux (and failing because Linux is too big?) completely misses the point that Linux's size wasn't the cause of Microsoft's inability to extinguish it, it was these other countervailing industry forces. And to imply that they've somehow failed also ignores the fact that MSFT's market capitalization has had a nearly identical growth to GOOG and AAPL over the past two years while they've made this transition.
As they say on Food Network, for those reasons we had to chop you.
3: I hugely appreciate you taking the time to reply. This is incredibly helpful, I now see the ridiculousness of my half-thought-through point.
2: The reason I connected current activity with long-ago activity was based on sentiments I read that Microsoft were still behaving in some of the ways they used to. But a 20 year stretch is kind of pushing it, particularly in the tech industry.
Except now they have billion dollar data centers they need your servers on and don't care if you use their software as long as they turn a profit from the hosting. Bill G is probably kicking himself for not renting servers decades ago.
"Decades"? Bandwidth requirements and difficulty of virtualization essentially precluded enterprise cloud hosting much more than one decade ago. Virtualization was essentially impractical or mainframe only until Intel added VT-x. Two decades ago most Internet users were on AOL dialup. And anyways, Azure is #2 behind AWS, so it's not like they're doing badly.
And it went out of beta not quite a decade ago (October 2008). Whether you count it 2003 or 2006 or 2008, however, I still wouldn't call it "decades" which is what I was objecting to.
Microsoft is one of Linux Foundation biggest donors, which means they have leverage over them. They are invited to discuss new Linux developments, products, etc...
A lot of the sponsors of the Linux Foundation have tried very hard to make sure that Linux's copyleft is not enforced. VMWare is one recent example. They exerted their influence by defunding the Software Freedon Conservancy. I consider this a net negative.
On the other hand, most Linux devs do not want to ever take anyone to court for copyleft violations. While I agree that it's very reasonable to almost never take anyone to court for a copyleft violation, it still needs to be a weapon of last resort.
You don't need prayers to ensure you can continue to run your software. It's unrealistic Linux can ever change to a different license than GPL2. Note, however, that this hasn't stopped Linux from being used as giant spyware (Android) and being overtaken by a single entity (RedHat) slowly eroding it (Systemd, Docker).
If you're concerned, I'd recommend basing your software on POSIX and make it also run on the BSDs, rather than just Linux, and in particular avoiding Linuxisms such as Docker and Systemd which you'll find are poorly designed anyway.
Their "corporate DNA" was established when the desktop was supreme and they could steer the direction of the industry based on thier Windows dominance.
Times are different, mobile is more important, cloud hosting is a real thing and technology changes. They had to evolve or die. Saying you can't trust MS in 2018 based on the way the world was years ago is like saying that Netflix could only ship DVDs to people's houses, Amazon can't be trusted to do cloud hosting because they only sell books, and that a minor niche computer maker should never be trusted to sell phones.
> Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.
Exactly. Unless all the leaders who flourished under the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" regime have been fired, that attitude is still in their blood. And especially with leadership roles, I doubt that those people didn't manage to adapt and stay employed, because those are exactly the type who can adapt to appear to play nice. Whether in sheep's clothing or any other animal, I'm sure there are plenty of wolves still at MicroSoft.
TBC, I am not MicroSoft is evil, or that everyone working there is. They do world-class CompSci research, and I am a very happy Visual Studio, VSC and TypeScript user. But it's a company with thousands of people, and I doubt that they have completely reformed.
I would be disheartened by any major software firm buying github. The temptation is simply too great for any company with interests in software development to leverage their control over the world's largest open-source community to advantage their own products and services.
If there's one thing which is predictable about corporate behavior, it is that they will act in their own best interest. Publicly traded companies are legally required to do so.
Also equating trust with product offerings is a false equivalency here: saying Amazon can't be trusted as a hosting provider because they were known as an online retailer is a lot different than saying Microsoft cannot be trusted because they have a long track-record of anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.
I guess it depends what side of Microsoft we get working with GitHub, whether it's the friendly outreach side alongside the .NET Foundation, or whether it's the internal software team that want to integrate GitHub into internal tooling and start moving their platform onto theirs.
My dream scenario is the former, where Microsoft provide leadership to a company that's still reeling from its own scandals, and use GitHub as a platform for promoting open-source, rather than as a way of mining their access to the open-source world to benefit their own tooling.
"Dream" is the right word here. The idea that a major software firm would buy the worlds largest repository of and community around open source software with the sole intention of "providing leadership" seems pretty unlikely.
It's along the same lines as saying an oil executive would make a good candidate as the EPA chief because they "understand pollution".
Is it? I imagine VSS and their cloud source control offering (don’t remember the name) probably aren’t doing all that well in the face of GitHub.
They want to be a player in that game, so they’ll transition off they are old product which isn’t that popular onto a new one they purchased that has all the mind share.
As long as they don’t screw it up, and recent Microsoft seems to me like a company that won’t, it will benefit them. And perhaps it will benefit the user some to do have a company with deep pockets behind it.
> Torvalds turned over maintenance on 26 July 2005 to Junio Hamano, a major contributor to the project.[25] Hamano was responsible for the 1.0 release on 21 December 2005, and remains the project's maintainer.[26]
I'm guessing Torvalds still has a lot of control if push came to shove, so we can assume git is executively controlled by Torvalds and Hamano.
Not many people use git without Github though, whether it's Github proper or a local installation of Github Enterprise. It's pretty tough to do code reviews without it. There are tools out there to do it, but Github is the standard.
AFAIK, I don't think anyone seriously used VSS inside Microsoft, but heard that long time ago they forked perforce in customized way... A bit like google.
Yes, I used that internal Source Depot (based on Perforce I think, or at least something old and convoluted) when I worked on Windows Phone 7 back in 2010, it was not fun. There were a few teams within Microsoft at the time using the visual studio team system source control but I don’t believe it was common, as a lot of the error reporting (watson) had plug-ins for the proprietary Source Depot.
Why was it not fun? I had no trouble with sourcedepot when I was there.
I think git and decentralized source control are great, but I get a little suspicious of people saying tooling is "not fun" simply because it isn't their favorite or most familiar.
That’s fair, I’m probably being too harsh on it. It was my first job out of college so my first time interacting with professional-scale source control. I don’t remember specifically what I didn’t like about it, I think mostly that it was slow and a bit unintuitive, but I can’t say with any conviction that it was actually a bad system. I do remember there being a general sense on my team that people wanted to move off of it and onto something more modern, so perhaps I just internalized that.
Hah, our team is a bit of split - half of us know perforce well, the other half git, then almost all other developers are perforce driven (game company with several studios).
I like it, and really love that they added web interface (review, overall view of changes, etc.).
P4 is very easy to get started, all you need is to learn several things, and tools underneath can easily be changed, learned to do this for you. Then it's easy to comprehend changes, since all CL's are monotonically increasing, so once gets perception when a CL is announced whether it affects him, or her, etc.
And the elephant in the room is the really, really huge files: psd, tiff, max, maya (ma/mb) models, fbx, zip, iso, exe installs, etc.
There are some peculiarities, like text files handling and conversion (e.g. \r\n <-> \n).
Then some useful (but controversial) features: locking (per extension), or manually per file.
Having all your projects from different teams in one place, but each team/project can customize a view to its own work (a bit opposite of what google is doing with their mono-repo, but unlike g4 there ain't option to sync only what you want, and have the rest off the network).
Any idea how they could possibly make GitHub profitable? It seems more likely that they want to attach the Microsoft name to GitHub to build up positive sentiment among the open source community. Something like keeping GitHub alive without wrecking it could cause some people to hate Microsoft a little bit less.
This. They own where the code is lands, and will try to build the best, most streamlined CI system straight to profitable Azure deployments. Probably cheapest too, if they update agreements to get a slice of the deployment pie if people do want to deploy to AWS or GCE.
'Extinguish' might be right, but Amazon is the target here and holding off Google in second place. Other cloud providers will have to race to the bottom if they are not already there.
How profitable is Visual Studio? Visual Studio Code?
Microsoft wants people to develop for Windows, because with no apps you have Windows Phone. If what you want to use runs on Windows, Windows is what you purchase (or in a few years probably subscribe to along with Office 365 and OneDrive). A lot of that subscription model already exists on the Enterprise side of Windows, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see it expand - "Windows as a Service" has been a topic of discussion for years now.
- It gives then 'streetcred' in the OSS communities using GitHub. This goodwill is valuable.
- It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office. All major players host code there, likely a lot of them in private repos too. Microsoft has a large trackrecord of 'me too' products (i.e. the ones released after the original from another company is successful) and corporate espionage isn't something that's just happening in the movies. This too could make things very profitable
- Developer relations across private repos could increase the value of linkedin profiles which in turn could make that more valuable.
But that's about what I could come up with. I seriously don't understand why one would spent $2B on github if it hosts your OSS stuff. Also, to make sure VSTS become more successful with an integration doesn't make sense to me: GH isn't the most profitable service out there and was losing money. Hell it might even go belly up sooner or later and VSTS would look to be a better alternative.
I’m willing to believe this, but what’s it based on? It seems like they have so many customers. What’s the free/public-to-paid/private traffic that would have made them sustainable?
Source? I thought the story was that Github was profitable from day 1 in 2008?
How did they become unprofitable? Their expenses are servers and people. It seems that there are an enormous number of companies paying for private repos and that should more than cover their costs.
I put all my cooking recipes and links in a free repo yesterday, published with pages. History of changes, fast, reliable, mobile-friendly. Owns. PR me a recipe man!
The timing is suspect, because Google has been pushing Cloud Source Repositories as a private Git repository recently [1]. So, GitHub will most likely be part of Azure portfolio. Developers might be fickle, but they are fully locked into their respective cloud platforms in the recent years.
> For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms.
Maybe not now, but what about after the next reorganization or the next CEO? If it's no longer in MS' interests to keep a relationship with this audience somewhere down the road, why would they leave them alone?
For Github there was always uncertainty; if MS didn't take over, investors would've, or another (less capable) competitor (like I dunno, Yahoo?). I'm confident in MS keeping github running smoothly and moving forward.
Skype wasn't ruined because they attempted to merge it into their other platforms. Skype was just flat out ruined with bloat, horribly inefficient code, turning it into a spying tool and not listening to their vocal users. Everyone was rioting after every update and it just got worse. To add insult to injury the last major update they have tried turning it into Snapchat. Their incompetence knows no bounds. If you think the same middle managers that ruined Skype aren't there anymore, you don't know how big companies like Microsoft work.
I wonder if pre-acquisition Skype was one of the hardest software the Windows team had to deal with. For example, at one point they used SYSENTER directly to make system calls!
It's why I'm surprised at the timing, since GitHub has had its own issues over the past few years, with a founder and other staff members leaving over harassment, and some questionable comments coming from members of their new team. I've felt for a while that GitHub had peaked, and that we weren't far away from seeing it push towards breaking the product to satisfy investors that want a return.
With an acquisition, most of this becomes amplified, based on how Microsoft treat GitHub. IMO, leaving them alone to do their own thing could be just as bad as being too controlling. I'd like to see someone like Scott Hanselman, a well-liked developer in the development community be given the opportunity to sit in GitHub and to use Microsoft's resources to improve the open-source community.
Kallithea doesn't support SVN, only RhodeCode does which Kallithea forked. SVN support amongst many other security fixes and features were added at a later stage into RhodeCode.
On Kallithea activity and release is better than rhodecode and truly open source under software conservancy. Kallithea do support svn and it has moved on, with turbogears 2 support and now the theme is also modern based on bootstrap.
I created RhodeCode, and know for sure Kallithea does not support SVN.
- RhodeCode is based on newer and more modern than turgobears2 framework, called Pyramid.
- RhodeCode had 20 releases since 2017, Kallithea had two.
- RhodeCode fixed many security issues that Kallithea didn't, not to mention dozen of features that RhodeCode has but Kallithea doesn't, e.g pull requests updates, integrations framework
It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
It’s not just about efficiency, it’s about responsibility. I love decentralization when I can avoid dealing with BigCo, I hate it when I’m responsible for fighting spam, ensuring my services stay up, not getting hacked, and so on. All of these tasks are a requirement as soon as collaboration is in the picture.
I disagree. The popularity of GitHub amongst the programming community means that ease of use / convenience is more important than the notion of “decentralization”. Otherwise, people would already be setting up their servers for hosting git repos.
That's really what I meant by efficiency. Ease of use increases that for businesses, that's the only reason they really care about ease of use of products they want to buy.
Good point. It's not too crazy to have people behind major open-source efforts get their own VPS's and run Phabricator or Gitlab. With a universal login akin to OAuth maybe it's doable.
That's insane, not only do developers and maintainers devote a huge part of their life to major open-source efforts, now they are expected to spend more time and money setting up, admining, and securing their own private servers? That's a great way to destroy Open Source projects. Very few people would be able/willing to put that much effort into it.
I could envision pre-configured vps images maintained in the open by volunteers to make it more practical. They could have unattended-upgrades configured for major patching and the community could help migrate between major LTS releases.
It isn't ideal but it might be doable at least for some projects. Maybe devops people want new ways to contribute to open source too!
How is running a bit of infrastructure so lethal? Most of my libre projects aren't on Github, and running your own Git server isn't terribly difficult.
Running your own git server is far from impossible. But you have to take into account various items.
1) the cost of the server, you don't need a powerful one, a 5 or 10$ a month box is more than enough, but it constitute a barrier for some, not necessarily because they can't afford it, but because they don't think their projects is worth it.
2) You have to maintain it properly, applying security fixes, having backups and maybe some basic monitoring. It's not high and complex maintenance, but it's far from a fire and forget thing.
3) Contribution from external sources becomes harder, you generally don't have basic "fork" and PR buttons in the simpler hosting git options, and if you opt for something like gitlab or gogs, external contributors as to register in your instance.
4) Github is really convenient if you are searching for open source tools that does a specific task in a specific language. Having various self hosted git servers makes it harder to discover new tools.
I do run my own Gogs instance which mirrors my github repositories, it's not heavy maintenance, but it's not exactly nothing. And I'm pretty sure nobody, except bots, knows it exists.
Not sure if this is an age-gap or participation-gap here but that's EXACTLY what we did before Github came along. My foray into open source started in '99 and it wasn't until 2010? that we had good centralized alternatives to switch to. Hell, jQuery was on a hosted version of Trac until just recently. And yes, we spent time on it. A great deal more than "very few" did the same and were involved and passionate about it.
Not all of us. I have been writing open source since approx. 1998, and I remember hosting my code on sourceforge, and announcing on freshmeat. There was also a few other central repositories, and some major projects having their own CVS and later Subversion repositories. Later came Google Code that I used too, circa 2004 or 2005. But I clearly remember people, myself included, looking for a code repository they could use for their source code.
I think the network effect is too great to ignore. I would guess the number of potential contributors you get just by using GitHub, where many people have an account and know the workflow/UI, is bigger than any other place.
5 years from now when GitLab is acquired by Google we'll have to migrate again.
But how do you transport your issues and CI integration and deployment? The googlecode to github transport was already a desaster.
Code is easy, it's the rest which has the value.
Issue importing rarely works. It needs a lot of related changes all over, which cannot be automated.
I edit my CI scripts almost daily, until the workflow is acceptable.
I try all the others constantly, but it's a headache and needs weeks of time until it works good enough. Github only hosts the results and releases, but still.
Just last week I spent again a full day to get the encrypted auth working for github deployment from some random new CI.
My CI's do work together with connected hooks, e.g. if appveyor and travis passes, merge to master, then appveyor deploys the binaries to github, then the release is published, which sets a tag, which triggers travis to make distcheck and deploy to the very same release on github.
On github I have static pages with custom domain names for free.
On github I can host releases and dailies for free.
Someone needs to pay for it. Better a big company which backs this.
I'm a bit sceptical with Microsoft as I'm sceptical with Google. You can never trust PM's in big companies. But so far I give them the benefit of doubt, they clearly love github (unlike google which didn't love code.google), and we'll all see.
Which Gitlab? The software is less important than the ecosystem. Git is the major component, but Github/Gitlab are about usefully centralizing it. Gitlab is still a centralized service, even if there are N instances of centralization.
In other words, I don't know how much use it is to fork Gitlab if the community around it is dispersed. Git is already based around decentralization, and I don't see how running my own instance of Gitlab makes it any less disruptive when the most popular instance of Gitlab is disbanded.
Or export you projects to someone else running GitLab. All the functionality to run a forge in GitLab is open source and export/import is open source as well.
Basically Cydia is an apt manager for jailbroken iOS devices and while Cydia itself is open-source, the tools required to get tweak injection (Mobile Substrate) are not, making Cydia itself useless for newer jailbreaks released. Making Cydia not only a monopoly but centralizing the tools required to make it useful at all.
If you want to have a main canonical state of the "maintained" repo, that is mutable, similar to what we currently have with Github, a blockchain would be one way to achieve that.
Then you are still missing a way to discover what the "one canonical state" of a repository is. There could be hundreds of different signed branches and versions of the repository the maintainer worked on at one point, with most of them being abandoned work.
Let's ignore for a moment the utility of Github issues, etc. and focus on why Github repos are convenient just for the code.
- You find the repo either via link or some other discovery mechanism like Google
- You do a small sanity check to see if the repo is the one you actually wanted
- You clone the repo and start using it from the default branch that was set by the maintainer -> DONE
Achieving a similar flow is not possible if you just fling out signed commits into the world. Sure, there are also different ways on how you can publish the "one canonical state", but as soon as multiple maintainers and contributors get involved, a blockchain will look more and more like a fitting solution.
This. As with so many things, laziness has driven developers to be using Github as single point of truth. And it is cringeworthy to see how few developers actually know what git is and that Github is just a company monetizing opensource software. About time everyone got a wakeup call.
To be fair, github provides a lot of value-add on top of plain git. Having UI for access control and integration with issue tracking and CI tools gives you a lot that you would not get out of the box with git.
That said, I have always been uneasy with one central player hosting a huge percentage of open source projects.
Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity.
The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been banging the centralization drum for a while. His take is the sheer scale of the internet imbues tremendous value to any centralized service that can organize it (e.g. what Google does for web pages or Facebook does for your friends).
If this is the case then the internet may end up more centralized than previous forms of media and communication. I hope that's wrong, but it seems to be happening right in front of us.
He created it to be “stra-tee-ka-ry” (after George W. Bush’s infamous ‘stragegery’) but no one ever pronounced it right. Over time, he admitted that “stra-tech-uh-ry” was better anyway because the site covers technology.
I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.
The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.
That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.
I saw someone post on Twitter saying they were tired of being their own sysadmin.
It's true - I could set up my own mail server, my own Git hosting etc etc, but why would I? I'd rather just pay Fastmail for email and GitHub for some private repos.
For the same reason that you don't opt for a dictator even though it is more convenient than democracy (until it isn't, at which point there is little you can do about it).
Also, you could also instead pay people to develop easier solutions for self-hosting. Or you could buy a service from a smaller hosting provider. There is more than the extremes of "google is email" and "I have to hand-carve my mail server".
So you are suggesting it is a moral obligation to choose a smaller provider, even if the largest provider is better?
Centralization happens because someone ends up doing it better than everyone else, and so everyone chooses to use that provider and they become the dominant force.
I get the need for diversity, but as an individual, I am going to choose the best provider, even if they are the biggest one.
> So you are suggesting it is a moral obligation to choose a smaller provider, even if the largest provider is better?
Maybe, but the world really is too complex to break it down to such a simple question, it obviously is a tradeoff with many more factors to consider.
> Centralization happens because someone ends up doing it better than everyone else, and so everyone chooses to use that provider and they become the dominant force.
Well, but does it? I mean, no doubt such cases do exist, sure, but if you really look into how companies do become dominant, that is only one of many factors, and sometimes not even a necessary one.
> I get the need for diversity, but as an individual, I am going to choose the best provider, even if they are the biggest one.
Well, but how do you evaluate what "the best provider" is?
You might be comparing functionality, say. Or price. Or speed. Or any other property of the product as you could now choose to use it. And obviously all of those are important things to consider.
But my suggestion isn't that you should follow some abstract moral teaching because some ideology says that this is the right way, and the only right way. My point is that it may even be in our very own interest to choose a solution that is inferior in terms of current functionality/price/speed/whatever because there are long-term costs attached to the superior solution that actually make it more expensive, all things considered, than using the inferior solution now. So, arguably, the currently technically inferior option with a lower total cost would actually the better solution.
To maybe make it more practical, but without any claim to being realistic, the numbers are obviously just made up: Let's assume that using Gmail saves you 10 minutes every day vs. using Thunderbird. Now, Gmail is privately owned, so if everyone chose to use Gmail, they would effectively have the monopoly over email. At that point, they have every incentive to add proprietary functionality for the sole purpose of making interoperability difficult. Which could prevent a new competitor from entering the market what would invent a new email workflow that would save you a further 10 minutes every day. Now, does choosing Gmail actually save you time overall? And is Gmail the better product if using Thunderbird now would lead to you being able to save 20 minutes a days a few years down the road?
This isn't about some sort of diversity for diversity's sake, this is about which of those options actually is in our very own long-term interest, and monopolies have a strong tendency to be very much not in the interest of the customer.
So, really, if anything, I would suggest that there is a moral obligation to watch out for people/organizations accumulating too much power and to prevent them from obtaining it if the long-term damage that that concentration of power can do is worse than the short-term benefits obtained from using their offerings.
> Well, but how do you evaluate what "the best provider" is?
Well, in the case of GH vs. GL. Existence for one (GH actually existed before GL and was usable since the start), not having to self-host anything for second, everyone using it for third.
> this is about which of those options actually is in our very own long-term interest
Based on your own example, if I have previously used TB for a year and then migrate to the new product that saves me twenty minutes the sum is ten minutes saved and a lot of nerves lost due to slowness before.
If I had used gmail during that time it's going to take the same amount of time I've already used it for the benefit to zero out, if I kept using it until TB became good and then migrate I've only won.
As an user I already get a lot of bad UX, I do not want more voluntarily.
> if I kept using it until TB became good and then migrate I've only won.
You are assuming that you have that option. Once a monopoly is established, you don't have that option anymore. Also, while you support one solution, you decrease the chances of other solutions succeeding. If you pay licence fees to Microsoft instead of buying Redhat boxes, that has an impact on whether Redhat is better a year from now.
> So you are suggesting it is a moral obligation to choose a smaller provider, even if the largest provider is better?
Not moral but, I’ve noticed that things all seems to be tied to a pendulum that swings back a forth. Pushing in the opposite direction is required to attempt a balance.
Why is the larger one better? i use email mainly over IMAP and can't see the better in using Gmail. Yes, you should prefer smaller email provider. We live in the cyberpunk world now, corporations are the ones with power.
Have you tried mailcow? I find it strikes a pretty good balance between running your own mailserver while not getting overwhelmed with details.
It runs in containers and provides a webserver, webmail, caldav, spam filter, updater... I have made an ansible role that will back up to a Borg repository every hour as well as restoring the latest backup upon installation if you need inspiration: https://galaxy.ansible.com/coaxial/mailcow/
If you use your own domain name, you can set mailcow to sync with your Gmail account so you have all your emails in mailcow and then pull the plug on Gmail without losing anything. I find it runs pretty well for me on a server with only 2gb of ram.
If you are on Windows, the equivalent is smartermail. For a fee it also supports ActiveSync, which simplifies client configuration and gives pseudo-push.
I'm my own sysadmin (for personal email, small HTTP server, an OpenVPN and a few other minor services for personal use) and while it did take me a non-negligible amount of time to get things running smoothly it now only requires a few minutes of attention every other week to apply security updates and make sure my backups are running smoothly. In exchange for that I have total control over my data and basically unlimited customization potential. I'm definitely not planning on stopping that.
I do use Github regularly however, but it's because of the "social network" aspect. If you want to interact with many open source projects it has to be on github nowadays. The network effect is strong.
I want to make that switch, but am rather intimidated by my inexperience in that domain. Are there any guides or tutorials you've used that you'd recommend?
Not a single tutorial comes to mind but you generally find a wealth of resources and tutorials online about setting up anything you might need.
Always start by setting up a strict firewall and then whitelist cautiously anything you need as you set up the rest. Don't bother with SELinux. Be very careful with your Postfix (or if you're masochistic, sendmail) config as it's rather (needlessly IMHO) intricate and it's easy to end up with a configuration that appears to work but is extremely broken. In particular if you end up configuring an open relay by mistake spammers are going to have a lot of fun with your server but you'll end up blacklisted everywhere.
My "stack" is nginx for web, postfix + dovecot + spamassassin for email (+ roundcube when I wanted a webmail). Postfix was by far the trickiest to configure, although if you find a good tutorial online and can spare a couple of hours to understand how it all works it's not too bad.
I have similar setup but use Exim instead of Postfix. And I am still glad I host my own services. Yes, it took time but it will work as I want it forever. Only lazy people prefer ready-made cloud services - yes, it's convenient - but it's more costly, you lose control over your data and they are constantly redesigning and reinventing something. You never know when they sell the business or increase prices, ban or limit you.
Congratulations, you can configure your own mail server. You're already one in a million. Out of that group, maybe one in a hundred can do it nearly as securely as one of the big services. This is the reason why people use the big centralised services, and also the reason smaller ones don't survive: email is ridiculously over-complicated. You won't convince anyone it isn't by explaining that you managed to DIY in under a week.
Fortunately, rolling your own git isn't nearly as hard, and the percentage of people who could run a node compared to total users is larger. Hell, every person using git also has a fully-functional, secure and standard self-hosting stack already installed. Getting a GitHub-like web interface is similarly easy. This fundamentally reduces the risk of centralising, which conversely means that people don't have any qualms about using GitHub, since they can leave at any time. (Less true of issues, PRs, community, but hey.)
In either case, centralising has large benefits: one for handling complexity, one for giving you a community.
When you want decentralisation, it's because you don't want a single entity controlling what the ecosystem becomes. The circumstances where this is true are typically big utility-like things, where we care more about guaranteeing that water and electricity exist than the top end of providers' profits. Email is like this. You would never build your own power station, just like these days it would be bordering on negligent to use anything except Office365/GSuite/etc as your corporate email host. Lots of jurisdictions will create highly regulated marketplaces so you don't get Enron-California-style anti-competition. When things get that bad in Gmail-land, let us know.
[Edit: I was pretty snarky just there, but not at you! It was in general, I swear.]
I got tired of managing all that software so I just moved to containers. The Docker Hub has pretty much all I need, and if it doesn't, it's much easier to get it working than spinning a new VM or trying to install it together with a bunch of other software and keep them all up to date.
Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab. One to add their GPG key, one to add the upstream repo, and one to apt-get install the package. I bet there’s a curl | bash script to do all three as “one step”.
If you’re going to complain about something, at least pick something legit like managing backups or server uptime. The install itself couldn’t be simpler.
100% agreed. Maintaining a self hosted web service is a demanding task. It's not about updating to get some new features right when they're out - it's about security, and it's a real pain. The installation can get messed, so what? You're not using the tool yet. You can get a new VM. But when you're updating the machine the holds your code (heck, even GitLab.com had their issues with updates!), or the machine that holds your mail service - things get scary. Installation is not at all the issue.
The approach in taking to self hosted services is that if it's down for an hour or even a couple of days it's fine since I'm the main user.
For disaster recovery, I put everything in ansible playbooks and roles. The role also takes care of setting up hourly backups (with Borg) and will import the latest backup when setting up the service. Because backups are separate, I can delete the last couple of backups if they've been compromised.
It's obviously not as resilient as using the centralized equivalent, but it feels like a decent trade off.
Not very, some things I run on small 5 or 10$ digitalocean droplets, other things on my home "server' which is an i5 4th gen with 8gb ram. The borg server is rsync.net
> The approach in taking to self hosted services is that if it's down for an hour or even a couple of days it's fine since I'm the main user.
Well, maybe, depends on what you're depending on that service for. However, we were talking about large scale centralization v decentralization. If you took everything currently on GitHub and moved it to a bunch of different self-hosted servers, you would have a problem. Many _do_ depend on what's there on GH.
Even if it's not critical, it really sucks to want something and not be able to get it for 2 days because Jim went on vacation and his server crashed.
> For disaster recovery, I put everything in ansible playbooks and roles. The role also takes care of setting up hourly backups (with Borg) and will import the latest backup when setting up the service. Because backups are separate, I can delete the last couple of backups if they've been compromised.
> It's obviously not as resilient as using the centralized equivalent, but it feels like a decent trade off.
The issue isn't that it cannot be done, it's that centralized services mean _I_ don't have to worry about it. I don't want to be a server admin; I just want to store my code in source control.
I do the same but use Restic for incremental backups. The problem is people have minds washed by corporate marketing. Unfortunatelly they think they need multi-datacenter high availabilty, machine learning and big data DBs where only minority people really need it. :(
And this is all assuming the person has the chance to do so, especially younger people can't really self-host or seriously lack the skill, programming alone is hard for them.
Have you tried Gitea [0]? It's incredibly easy to setup, and if you run it on Debian you can setup Unattended Upgrades [1] once then you pretty much never have to worry about it again.
Decentralized doesn't mean you have to host everything yourself, there are many other companies to pay to host things outside your server. You don't want everything hanging centralized on your hardware anyway, if your server dies, everything is down.
That's true, except it is not common for a server to "die" every second day. It is not a problem to have uptimes in years. But due to updates it is reasonable to have a few minute downtime every few months. If you require 100% high availability (which only handful of people and companies really need) then you can set up a cluser on Kubernetes/Docker.
Maybe we can eventually achieve something like decentralized ownership of centralized web resources.
While not quite decentralized ownership, Wikipedia is at least a non-profit that everyone contributes donations to. Where's the Wikipedia for code? Where's the non-profit donation-based social network?
If centralisation only occurs due to government enforcement, then how did government itself come into existence? It's the purest example of centralisation, after all. There must be something that incentivised centralisation even in the absence of government.
> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,
It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.
In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.
For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.
I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms.
There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook.
Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.
> But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
You can loose control of your domain too. And if someone else snatches it up they could even read your newly incoming email. I'm willing to bet when gmail bans an account, they don't recycle it.
Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again.
I'd love to see GitHub (and GitLab) offer a custom domain name option which would proxy HTTPS and SSH clones via a company's custom domain (e.g. code.example.com) to GitHub's hosting. That way, if a company needs to move away from GitHub (or GitHub goes away), developer's references to some company's code is not stuck pointing to some stale github.com domain.
Hosting such a proxy (and the repos) takes infrastructure, time, and experience to secure and make available, so from a user's perspective it's great if a company does this as a service as long as you provide the domain.
Yeah, I wanted to say exactly this. There's a different between specialisation in a market that still provides competition and consumer liquidity, and monopolistic centralisation (even when the monopolist is effectively benign).
It's like there's a middle-ground between everyone building their own automobile, and there being only a single car manufacturer on the planet. So long as have you have a few players who are genuinely competing, and you have the option to switch between them without paying an excessive penalty, then it's a good thing that a certain subset of people are working hard on building better cars than you ever could tinkering away in your garage (although you should still be allowed to do that, if you so desire).
What this requires is for governments to provide a framework of standardisation, access-to-data, data-transferability, and antitrust enforcement that allows a healthy competitive environment to emerge and persist, without either allowing a monopoly (or a cartel) to evolve, or overburdening everyone with regulation.
It's a difficult balancing act, even in more traditional industries, and anyone who presents a too simplistic "more regulation!" or "less regulation!" answer to it isn't being honest. Tech presents additional challenges because it's newer, and because it's evolving rapidly. I think it will take many more decades for the necessary level of technical understanding to metastasise through policy-making and civil administration realms until you get effective control of tech markets, although laws like GDPR are an interesting start.
> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it.
Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful.
What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization.
I think that's quite a stretch, the reasons for decentralized version control (practical use) are far different than a decentralized internet (humanitarianism).
Well, centralisation also has a huge number of benefits, so it's not really a surprise.
The more important thing is to be in a position that makes it harder to be locked-in to a centralised provider. Fortunately Git makes that relatively easy – I could switch all of my work to Gitlab or Bitbucket with relatively little work.
There's more obviously a problem where Github is being used for issue tracking, PRs, and the general open-source community. I'm sure there will be a few scripts available to make migrating issues etc. to another provider relatively painless, since there's no great distributed solution for this at the moment. That just leaves the community aspect, which is going to be the hard bit…
Totally agree. For me decentralized means desktop clients or own cloud. Own cloud is more expensive to maintain. Desktop app are more expensive to develop and maintain too.
Humans* aren't built for decentralization. We can only keep so many unique names in our head a time, only so many connections. I don't have any papers to link to on this, but I think it's safe to say that's how things are - if not we wouldn't have created cities, national identities, and of course, newsgroups, message boards, centralized package managers and distributions, and yes, source code repositories.
There is something nice about knowing, with a high degree of certainty, that any given open source project (or any thing) is in one of a few places, and if I don't know where that is I can ask for help to find those places by their names.
That's mixing up a whole lot of concepts. Centralization is about power.
Cities generally have very little centralization. Almost no interactions in a city go through a central entity, similarly for countries. Concentration is something different than centralization.
Newsgroups have very little centralization. Everyone reads and writes through different servers, and you can trivially switch servers without any impact on who you can communicate with. Agreeing on names and federation is something different than centralization.
...
There is absolutely no need to have software development happen on one proprietary platform in order to be able to search for software project in one centralized location. What you need for that is a search engine. Or even multiple competing search engines that can all index the same set of software projects.
Just because cities, countries, and newsgroups allow lots of different entities to participate doesn't mean they aren't centralizing. The strong incentives to place like with like result in forums with topics, subforums with subtopics. Districts become heterogeneous and we get things like Chinatown or the Castro District.
And these agglomerations of like with like occur spontaneously at pretty much every scale. You're quite literally missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, like likes to be around like, and systems that allow people to find people who are like them or who meet some of their needs are really useful, and you can call that phenomenon of "bringing people who want to interact together" "centralization". But noone ever argued aganst that.
When people talk about "centralization" in this context, they speak about power structures. A centralized power structure is when power is concentrated in the hands of a few. The fact that there are other forms of "centralization" is completely besides the point. If anything, the point is that you can often have those other forms of (useful) centralization without the centralization of power. Newsgroups, for example, obviously centralize discussion, in that they bring people who share an interest together in one (virtual) place. But they don't centralize power, because the technical implementation makes it so that no one party can easily control the communication on all of usenet.
Noone argues that we shouldn't have systems that allow us to interface with the world in a central location. This is all about avoiding concentration of power.
Your original argument is like saying that we should put all websites on the platform of a new company, say WebHub, because you want to have one place to search for websites. It's ultimately a non-sequitur: Millions of companies independently host websites on this planet, but obviously you don't visit millions of websites and ask the search function on each one of them your question of the day. You simply use one of a number of search engines, whichever one you prefer for your own needs, and no matter which search engine you choose to use, you will be searching pretty much the exact same set of websites. There is simply no need to centralize the power to control what can be published on the web or how the web works with one hosting company in order to have one central location that you can use to navtigate it all.
You don't need centralization of power in order to have centralization of access.
> You don't need centralization of power in order to have centralization of access.
It isn't necessary, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks. You seem to be arguing that I'm saying this is ideal. It's not, but it does seem to be the structure most people arrive at naturally.
> It isn't necessary, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks. You seem to be arguing that I'm saying this is ideal. It's not,
In other words: It could be even worse? Your point being?
Monarchy isn't necessary to govern a country, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks.
Does that make monarchy a good idea? Does that make democracy a bad idea? Does that mean that people have considered the advantages of democracy? Does that mean people are even aware of democracy? Does that mean anything?
> but it does seem to be the structure most people arrive at naturally.
Centralization of power? Well, if you mean by that that people who want to have power often are good at finding ways to dupe people into various forms of dependency, then I guess so? Again, your point being?
Many humans are apparently not, but I had a much easier time navigating (and contributing to!) projects when each of them had their own website with integrated scm links etc.
GitHub is a grey mass, project branding is lost, the tracker is chaotic for large projects.
It's just Sourceforge, better executed but with the same disadvantages.
If Git/Github is the epitome of the developer's centralised experience, then I full heartedly welcome that.
As others have mentioned, there's certainly advantages to centralised systems like Github's network graph, issues, etc. But at the end of the day, everyone on GitHub still cares a whole lot more about the code, and due to the very nature of the protocol that's something that'll always be able to be taken elsewhere. It's not like "if they announce shut down you can export your data", there's a very high lightlyhood you have already done that and you have the full repo on your local machine.
I feel like Github is the best possible compromise - centralised network and features that's built on a decentralised protocol and easily able to be taken elsewhere.
You can easily migrate your repo to a different service, so having lots of developers rely on GitHub isn't really a big deal. Many large projects have GitHub mirrors.
I'd say the biggest issue is that Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases. Compare that to Fossil [0], which lets you bundle up everything into a single file. If there was better built-in support you could migrate everything more easily to self-hosted alternatives like Gitea [1]. Regardless, it's possible to migrate manually, even if it's a bit more work.
I'm glad to see Fossil mentioned here. Yet the real problem is not in the technical aspects and possibilities of project hosting migration, it's the dependence of the majority of open-source developers on GitHub's centralized social network.
Hopefully if this turns GitHub evil, other social networks can be leveraged to assist in a population migration. Like, someone posting a link on Twitter to wherever the repo will exist in the future.
This makes me wonder how hard it is to securely host a git server on my own. I'll start googling but I bet the answer is gonna be "hard."
The only hard part is securing your server, since setting up a remote git server only requires two things:
1. Running git.
2. Providing SSH access.
But even securing the server is not necessarily difficult, depending on the level of risk acceptable for your purposes.
Put another way, reasonable security is not too hard and AWS makes reasonable security fairly easy. Even self-hosted *nix servers can be pretty secure. However to seriously harden a service against skilled and determined attackers requires an experienced team and even that may not be enough.
Pagure (https://pagure.io/pagure) combines a simple Git hosting forge with SIT-style issue tracking. On top of the code itself in Git, Pagure also uses Git for managing issues. So you can even use Git to comment on things. :)
Also, for those interested, Pagure lets you live a JS-free life too. ;)
I've been using it for several months on pagure.io, and it's my preferred Git-based hosting for my private stuff locally.
At my level of understanding it, the main difference between Pague and SIT is that SIT's story is more about decentralization (and SIT also provides its core to other potential applications beyond software development niche)
> Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases
I feel like a lot of these features could be handled with git-notes[1]. For example git-appraise[2] uses the git-notes feature for a code review system:
Somewhere around 2009-2012 there was also a lot of experimenting going on with distributed issue tracking, such as with Bugs Everywhere [0] (and like 3 or 4 others I tried some time ago that I can't find now).
That said, it seems like there was a resurgence - I found two, git-issue [1] and git-dit [2], that have both had activity this year. And git-dit has shown up on here at least once before, as well [3].
Part of the challenge is that for issue tracking to really work for non-trivial projects is that there needs to be some web interface that allows newcomers to report issues without first obtaining commit access to the main repository. If some of the solutions can get this bit of functionality then they stand a chance of doing some really awesome things (I'd love to be able to work on and update issues while totally offline).
Right now they do still unfortunately come off as toy examples once you get to the point where their distributed nature would normally come in handy. It's a shame that the interest in the problem died down a few years back around the time you noted.
Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of git-notes before! That's really cool. I'd previously wondered why there wasn't something like this available; it looks like I just wasn't aware of its existence. I definitely agree that you could implement many powerful features using this.
Now I'm wondering if someone has implement a release tracker using git-notes. After you tag the release you could build / generate the output assets (e.g. binaries), upload them to some remotes (e.g. S3, GitHub, your server), and add a note with the release info plus some links.
I've already thought up a couple ideas for things that could be built on top of git-notes.
Point being, the data can and should live within the repo like gh-pages has been doing for a while. Not about those tools being integrated to official git tooling.
>Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
Absolutely no chance, and I'm fine with that. Sorry, but I don't feel like spinning up a slhit server and managing all that goes along with it. I just want my code hosted somewhere that others can access. These meta issues are just noise and don't bother me (or 95%+ of the people using GH) one bit.
Decentralization is a wonderful idea. It brings with it benefits that are technical, architectural, and social. Yet is also carries with it its own set of costs and risks.
Bluntly, I doubt this will shock the world of software development into being less centralized. The practical benefits of centralization are, apparently, too large to be readily overcome.
(shameless plug) I recently built a tool (SIT, https://sit.fyi) that has decentralizes issue tracking and similar workflows, giving full days ownership and independence of storage and transport. Can be (and actively being) used with Git, or other SCMs.
It doesn't rely on servers (it's striving to be a "true serverless" application) so server patches are perhaps taken care of with this :)
Split-brain is the "normal mode" of operations for SIT -- it's a decentralized tooling so it expects something to not be available to you until it has been received by you -- at that point it is sitting in its entirety on your computer and you don't need an internet connection.
Abusive users -- depends on a scenario and "gatekeeping" checks -- known/vouched for GPG keys can be used to enforce some policies. Admittedly, this being a new tool, this angle hasn't been worked on extensively (if at all) -- but the way SIT is architectured is to potentially allow for all kinds of scenarios thanks to its flexibility and simplicity.
I could thank you for your time, for your effort, for humoring me. Etc. etc. etc.
I'll cut to the chase.
Your answer is basically "You have to do extra work". Which is the wrong answer when trying to replace tools whose major selling is reducing the amount of maintenance work I have to do. This response, unfortunately, commits the basic error of trying to solve a social problem with a technological solution. I don't want to take on the work of guarding the gates. I don't want to guard against potential abuse. I want these things done for me, so I can focus on the parts I care about.
The ability to put in work to monitor abuse and access control in a decentralized manner is not a significant improvement over the ability to do so in a centralized manner.
Oh, and if it interacts with other computers at all then I have to worry about server maintenance. A machine is only truly serverless in isolation. Which would make your tool interesting, but potentially less than maximally useful.
There's a known issue with older Firefox. Once the site is updated to the new version, this issue should be gone. Let me know if the problem persists for you on any other browsers! Thank you!
I think we all trusted github because of git: we know that worst case was that github disappeared overnight, erasing all repositories, and in that case we all would still have distributed backups to restart it.
So we had limited trust in the centralized missions we gave it: communications, issues, pull requests.
I am sure that as soon as a good tool allows to do that in a decentralized fashion, we will switch to it.
> In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub
Nearly all. I never got into the swing of it - always expecting a thing like this to happen sooner or later. Honestly, I shall not be sad if the world starts beating a path to somewhere else now.
And there it is. "Git" "hub" could be considered an oxymoron. The adoption of this proprietary closed-source veneer over git by FOSS developers has always been ironical to the point of farcical. Now the other shoe has dropped.
This is a completely smart purchase on Microsoft's part. I can't imagine more synergy between two companies:
- Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players (Google has been a great contender for this position since 2010).
- Microsoft has moved most of their open source projects to Github.
- Microsoft is a major contributor to Git, including massive infrastructure projects to make it possible to host the NT kernel on Git.
- Microsoft has tried to do open source git hosting in the past (Codeplex?) but it never succeeded. Also: Microsoft partnered with Github when they shut down to migrate Codeplex projects to Github.
- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.
- Github are the champions behind the electron project, with a lot of institutional knowledge about that technology + native web apps/PWAs in general. Microsoft is making a huge push toward writing UWP apps as PWAs.
Time will tell how they handle this merger. They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin, Mojang come to mind) and others horribly (Skype, Yammer, Nokia).
It has allowed LinkedIn to remain free for one customer base (professional networks) while expanding sales and recruiting tools (navigator) without compromising user information (InMail rather than your private email unless you've opted as such).
I think that the biggest loser is going to be IBM clearcase. Especially in government/defense work the developers want to use git, but can’t get it because of lack of security reviews. I can guarantee you that Microsoft sales people are already calling every software group manager at all the defense contractors.
Clearcase is a much more advanced tool than git. It is designed to do radically different things from the mere patch relationship management that git performs in its ultra glorified ways.
The most interesting to me specifically is the ability to define working copies through filter scripts. As far as I understand it, this is an alternative to branching. You can mix and match different components/alternative modules (e.g. different HALs or device drivers for different HW platforms) into sets of products without running afoul of the typical limitations of branches. However, Clearcase is just too expensive for us to even try it out seriously.
Any software precludes security reviews in defense work. My group wanted mediawiki to run an internal wiki behind the firewall and it took 18 months to pass and my boss had about a dozen meetings and countless emails. There are cases where a developer had to write code in word because he couldn’t get a text editor (allegedly I didn’t actually witness it). When your network is constantly under state sponsored attack these precautions aren’t pointless. But it takes a company like Microsoft or IBM to be able to work with security reviews and get them through quickly.
Well, clearcase is a horrible monster and it would benefit just about everyone on Earth if it dies.
How many drivers on the road would be less likely to cut someone off or road rage if they didn't have to deal with ClearCase again? I'm sure that number is greater than zero.
I'm only being partially facetious. ClearCase truly is the worst.
I was only an intern when I worked on clearcase so I don’t have a lot of personal experience. But the level of hatred my colleagues showed towards it left an impression.
Atom is open source though isn't it? So I'm sure it won't ever disappear. I wouldn't want to move to VS Code though. I use a Mac and have heard good things about it, but I'm sure it will always be a second class citizen.
VS Code is actually nearly identical on all platforms just like Atom. I find Atom generally has more available plugins, but VS Code can’t be beat for TypeScript imo.
They can't "depreciate" an OSS project just because it's hosted on a platform they own. Atom will live on one way or another, and it was never exactly tied at the hip with GitHub anyway.
This "synergy" seems to be pretty one-sided. Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users? That's kind of the problem with this acquisition, which is why few Github users are excited for it.
It also doesn't feel like Microsoft understands developers or even end users consistently. VSCode is a nice editor, but not the only one. The MSDN docs and site is awful. Azure is okay, but Windows 10 is somehow more annoying than macOS.
Meanwhile Github is in a tricky position, because for most people there's nothing but "community" keeping them on it. Github has some decent features, but nothing so great it would stop me from using their competitors. And they don't even have a CEO to provide the vision. The only thing in their favour is inertia.
Probably only avaolable though MSDN , I would guess. When MSDN is extemded to cover Linux as well (not so far fetched with the Linux support in Windows and Visual Studio) this move would also make sense in a weird Microsoft kind of way.
Hosting is cheap, resources involved would be insignificant.
It's more about having too many people working on non-core products that don't deliver value. Gitlab seems to be doing fine and has built a full-featured CI system in the same time Github has only managed to add a basic project board and include commit messages in search.
Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories, I thought that was devdiv trying to migrate their code back to MS land. Wonder if that's what sparked the conversations.
> Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories
Is this public knowledge? They shutdown their public repos service a while back and I had a manager at Microsoft admit that getting public repo traction was insanely hard. GitHub literally has a strangle hold on the public repos space.
What? Microsoft is the biggest developer advocate? Apple gives X Code away for free and made Swift an open source, platform agnostic product among many other things.
Microsoft's revenue split for the Windows Store is an identical 30%[0] (in most cases). There is, of course, the benefit of not having to pay any annual registration fees on Microsoft's platform.
Negative. They just announced that developers will receive 95% of revenue for non-games when customers purchase via a deep link, or 85% when its purchased through a discovery mechanism Microsoft provides [1]. Going into affect later this year.
That's good to know. This only applies to what Microsoft calls "consumer non-gaming apps", however. Games and presumably what Microsoft considers professional apps are still subject to the existing fee structure.
That was absolutely true when VS went by the "Express" moniker, but not today's "Community" edition. The difference between the paid (Pro) and free (Community) version is just licensing^. The Pro also comes with an MSDN subscription. MS is really going after the open source market, they've realized they were losing the future and embraced Linux/MacOS. FWIW, I use both Xcode and VS.
^and some "CodeLense" feature that I've never used.
Xcode is the successor to Project Builder, the development environment for NeXT. It is written in Objective-C and AppKit.
Xcode was designed for writing Mac apps, why would anyone want to write Mac apps on a PC, when they'd need a Mac to test them anyway?
It's only after the iPhone that the question of a port to other platforms has arisen. But that would be a huge task equivalent to a full rewrite. Even Apple doesn't have the resources to pull that off smoothly.
I'm starting to get really frustrated with Atom and it pegging my CPUs at 100%. I honestly don't see VSCode as that much better considering they're both bloated electron apps.
I've started going back to Sublime, and found I missed some of the really helpful tools in Atom.
I think the entire atom/vscode thing is going to be really curious should this acquisition go through. I'm going to guess they're going to keep running both teams; or really they'll probably keep running Github as it is.
I switched to VSCode from MacVim. Up until I saw VSCode, I thought all electron apps were as bad as slack. I'm happy to report I've not experienced sluggishness from VSCode at all.
I would put money on it if the merger goes through. There's very little reason for both to exist, and VSCode is absolutely a superior project. Atom has its advantages, but most of them could easily be manifested by collaborating with the Atom team and bringing those features in.
I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github.
the history of Microsoft is the reason why we all reacting this way. But encouraged by the move they made lately coming into Linux, even though other players have forced their hand
I'd recommend running your own FossilSCM server. It supports full code repo, wiki, bugtracking, and more. And it's free software to boot.
I'm looking to see if it's feasible to write a github->fossil layer to make it easy for programmers to dump to local. Right now, Git is easy to dump... but those issues and wiki support isnt dumpable yet..
Unfortunately, that misses the bulk of user communications. Those bug reports and issues are also tremendously important. And since they link back to commits, its essential to obtain that history as well and maintain the appropriate link between the 2.
Else, changes were made for "reasons", and those justifications are effectively lost.
This was the main reason I started developing https://sit.fyi. It allows you to carry issues, discussions, patches as files (for example, in a git repo) in a decentralized way and has a tool that allows to import from GitHub
It wouldn't be seamless. But it wouldn't be difficult for a competitor to create a "competitor import" feature that moved over most of it in a few clicks.
It doesn't solve the number one issue: External references to your project will all still point to github.com since that's where the project homepage (aka README.md) is.
If GitHub does get sold to MS and I end up moving to GitLab, I'll probably push one last commit to the GitHub repo adding a header saying the project has moved, with a link to the GitLab repo. It's not perfect, but it wouldn't be too bad.
Until MSFT/GitHub does what Sourceforge.net did - taking over project sites from projects which moved away and adding malware (adware/spyware) into those ;)
(I believe with all critique on Microsoft they aren't as bad, but want to exemplarize the risk)
It might just be cleaner to close the github repo and when other projects find a 404 where it used to be, they'll have to use super detective skills (i.e. Google it) to find the project's new home. And if they can't find it that way, then nothing of value was lost. (Yes, yes, I know it's more nuanced than that, but if you wanted permanence, you'd be hosting on your own domain, right?)
I expect Google could be convinced to accept certain files or metadata in a README as equivalent to a 301 permanent redirect, meaning searches will remain effective. That would account for a lot, especially if Chrome begins to honour it.
Personal data is extremely broad and is any data that can be identified to an individual. If my photos are Facebook are personal data, then so is my code on GitHub (even if some people are professional photographers or programmers).
Still one step too much making it harder to migrate. Should've been a directory in a repo, default to `wiki` or whatever and configurable to something else.
Agreed on both points. The shift will bring a lot of opportunity to build a more decentralized repo base. I think something like (Keybase)[http://keybase.io] might be interesting.
How profitable would they be if they didn’t pursue “growth at all costs” and built GitHub with a small and focused team like Stack Overflow or WhatsApp?
As a startup, worrying about competition from Microsoft hasn't been a big deal for almost a decade. I would be more worried about Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
Probably because its fairly low-risk. I have ~270 Github repos. About a year ago I made a ~5 line Python script that added Gitlab as another origin to each repo. I still use (used) Gitlab as my main host, I'm a paying customer - but for me to flick over to Gitlab is a one-liner.
I'm all for FOSS (Git webgui) solutions, but they were absolutely not competitive until recently. Even now, with less trust, the social effect and the lack of need of maintenance and setup is attractive.
Well, Google recently also purchased Kaggle, another major open-source repository for code. It hasn't really changed anything for now, but Microsoft's purchase will be in the same vein. I think that Microsoft's contribution to the open-source community in the last few years kind of makes sense for why they are purchasing it, just like Google purchased Kaggle because of their contribution to ML.
Your dream of “neutral” VCS is misfounded. Websites like GitHub are massive bandwidth and storage hogs and needs huge cash burn just for dev ops. Unfortunately they can’t be reasonably profitable as well because revenue sources are rather tiny. This means every vcs company out there offering free for all plan is bound to be sold or go bankrupt.
For GitHub I would have wished Google bought them because there is huge synergy both ways. With Microsoft, eventually some CVP there will realize that there is no profitability and they will leave it to rot.
This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.
That gives the acquisition a very different perspective.
What if MS is really buying Electron? It’s something they’ve been using a lot in all their recent products, and it’s a key technology in the contemporary development landscape. Making it more Windows-friendly would definitely help them.
At least historically Windows used different parts of UNIX. i.e. they used BSD's TCP/IP stack for quite some time. Also used "UNIX services for Windows" and recently added the Windows subsystem for Linux.
That doesn't make Electron _a part_ of Atom. If I build my application on top of Linux, my application is not _a part_ of Linux.
Electron is its own application framework, that Atom builds itself on top of. Electron is not a text editor framework, no more than QT or Cocoa is.
It is _very_ fair to say VSCode is using Electron - heavily, in fact! But saying VSCode is using part of Atom is just not true, and implies VSCode is building atop the Atom editor, which it does not.
In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.
RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing.
I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.
(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)
That's true, and I want to add that usually it's the company's fault for not guiding the project into the hands of the community (be it intentionally or because of incompetence).
Rust is a great example of a "company's project" that reached (or is reaching) a nice spot in autonomy.
Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.
I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.
Atom is really just a testbed for electron, where the real technology lies. If you can make an editor that programmers love using electron you can make pretty much anything else (excluding games).
HTML5 and Canvas do work on Electron after all. :) I feel there was some post on HN about a game released under Electron to which the reaction was "I didn't know it was made with Electron!" not a month ago.
Edit:
Also Atom wasn't a testbed for Electron. Electron WAS MADE for Atom afaik. They only opened up Electron after Atom was out for a while, it'd be the other way around if what you're saying is the case. I think Microsoft is already heavily invested in Electron. If anything they will provide even more resources towards Electron itself.
They could probably also merge the two somehow. The one thing I like more about Atom (even though I don't use it anymore) is editing the editor settings gives you a UI instead of just a JSON file which I don't mind, but it's kind of uneeded to me to have to work harder just to check all my editor settings.
True, but Windows users would find it odd if an app didn't suck. It has to match the overall Windows experience.
Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.
I find the file exporers on linux a huge joke, and Finder on OSX is too simple for me.
On Windows I have found XYplorer [1] to be extremly powerful. Its not OSS and its not free, but I happily paid for it once I discovered it. The project is like 20 years old. I have looked for a free replacement for years and always ignored it, which was a mistake.
XYplorer is very well maintained, 0% CPU cost, 1% RAM cost, highly-configurable, has very nice features. Someone really put some thoughts into the UI and UX. I really like the Ghost filter. Ctrl+P is great. Oh and it remembers all opened tree views after restart, so your workspace is exactly the same after a reboot.
Now, on a more serious note, I think the way IE3's News and Mail Explorer extension dealt with custom views for filesystems was nothing short of brilliant. I wish we had something like that for Gnome now.
Were it a consumer product I'd agree. But this is a developer tool and MS have been doing fairly well in that regard the last few years with azure and vscode.
Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.
I dunno, as an Azure user, they've launched good products like Azure Insights, that were really good, which they deprecated or merged with PowerBI etc... that totally tanked them.
Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).
"because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities"...what are you talking about? They are a company with a purpose to make money. And when I think about some of the other possible buyers, I am fine with Microsoft.
The GP means they were neutral with respect to the tech giants' ecosystems. They didn't favor Amazon or Microsoft or Google's tech. Consider that Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had GitHub organizations and hosted code there. That's what they're talking about
yeah, I'm curious if those other big companies will now move their repos off of GitHub because of this. I guess these two will be the ones to watch: https://github.com/googlehttps://github.com/apple
It sucks. We had as you said a neutral site everyone used. Now the big guys will move their code. Hopefully we will get a new common GitHub that is neutral and they will use. Sounds like it might be gitlab.
Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.
Do you think Gitlab will stay independent? They’re burning money. They’ll in all likelihood be acquired in the coming decade as well.
Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.
Hopefully. The problem is the site has to be neutral. Might end up we just have the big tech companies like Google host their own which sucks but you can't blame them.
Right now looks like GitLab will just become the new GitHub.
We were just so lucky we had basically a single site with GitHub and now that will not be true any longer. We really did not have a single site for very long.
Really just wish this news was not true. But I am sure MS just could not resist.
What bothers me is I really like how the newer tech companies are all about moving the entire industry forward while helping themselves.
So Google shared Map/Reduce, K8s, TF and open source just about everything. They spend tons of money finding all the vulnerabilities and then tell their competitors when they have a problem and even help mitigate. They do it all for free and expect nothing from the companies. What Google did for Cloudflare for example with Cloudbleed is how I love it being.
I am old and remember the old days. But as MS has become less relevant those old ways have been dying.
But then it is like MS sticking in their head in the fun of the new way and mess it up. They should just do their own thing and leave the new culture alone.
I'm sure they'll try to 'Microsoft' it. They could never keep their hands off any UI in any product, no matter if it works or not, and especially lately, leaving a rather spectacular trail of destruction in their wake.
I remember reading that they employ some muppet to check that nobody uses "hate language" and their naive "check all words in text files against this list" spotted the word "retard" as in "fire retardant" and locked the project. Appealing for common sense, or even escalating the problem to someone with a functional grasp of English didn't succeed.
You don't remember when the co-founder had to step down over harassment issues? This was all over HN a few years ago. A female developer claimed she sexually harassed and discriminated against and the company then conspired to push her with the founders' wife (not an employee) leading the charge. That guy is a billionaire now.
I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why?
Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software.
Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle that:
Did i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn’t changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.
Skype UI was changed dramatically for virtually no obvious reason and resulted in the usage of skype to be way more annoying for basically no good reason. They then rebranded Lync to be called Skype for Business which is a giant mess because like so many microsoft enterprise products it uses some strange scheme to connect to either a web-based server or to an enterprise server that invariably is not setup correctly and never works reliably. So they basically bought skype which everybody loved and turned it into something that a huge amount of people don't like now due to UI changes and created a second version of Skype that basically barely works and many people are forced to use at work..
We are forced to use Skype for Business at my job, and let me tell you, I have never seen a POS like that. Calls drop out for no reason, UI is unintuitive with all kinds of weird dropdowns and buttons, slow to start and just a pain to use in general. I wish we could use Slack calls instead...
I'm counting down the days until Teams has fully integrated all of the Skype for Business features so that they can finally shut the POS down. It is, indeed, the absolute worst.
I use it in my job as well. I agree it is pretty terrible but it is miles better than Microsoft Communicator which is what we used pre Skype for Business.
In addition to everything you said, and I would also add:
- Microsoft turned Skype into spyware. Before Microsoft, Skype used encrypted peer-to-peer connections which I'm confident had excellent cryptography given how much it annoyed some governments that Skype couldn't be bugged or monitored.
- Microsoft provides no way to delete chats, voicemails, and video messages, although they give the ridiculous option of "hiding" old conversations as if that's a reasonable substitute for deletion. At this point, it wouldn't be greatly surprising if they record and save all voice calls.
There's inertia in people and companies abandoning Skype because everybody knows it and everyone has it (or had it). But the thing that really preserves Skype is that it can connect from any device to device, including landlines, and it can do all of audio, video, and text.
A Skype-killer product needs (a) to run on all major platforms so you can communicate with someone regardless of whether they are on Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, or iOS, and (b) the ability to make connections to landline phones, (c) do all of audio, video, and text chat, (d) be reliable and trustworthy. That would be the Skype killer.
LinkedIn? The network everyone loved to hate? I don't think anything has changed in that regard, if anything, Microsoft are probably 1% more trustworthy compared to the super-shady LinkedIn management of old.
Microsoft is opening LinkedIn up to other tools while completely maintaining their goal of not sharing your data (Iframe integrations so no data is shared). They're expanding capability without selling out users
One could argue that both Atlassian and Github were to some extent successful, because they kept the open source competitors away by giving out free licenses to open source projects.
With these free options available, people in community were less interested in putting effort to free (as in speech) alternatives for these closed source products.
That's assuming people here care deeply about open source and it's philosophy. It's probably fair to say that most people on HN care a lot more about how building the next Atlassian or GitHub and conveniently being able to use OSS for that than about those philosophical values.
> Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software's practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear. Other supporters flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since then, and they make the same association.
> The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. Most discussion of “open source” pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success
I love open source, but it doesn't mean I think absolutely everything must be open source... the most important part here _is_ (git), github was (omg I'm already speaking past tense) a decent platform sprinkling some nice simple collaboration on top and convenience, it's not vital, and it's replaceable (so we have choice), and for a long time it was the best there was.
People are disappointed because many of us don't trust or like MS and want nothing to do with them, people complain about Google removing their "do no evil" clause, Microsoft basically has a fucking "do evil" clause but they will always tell you the opposite, they are probably even being sincere, it's just not true though.
As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better.
I don't use any microsoft tools (and I _hate_ all windows after 7), so Microsoft integrating with GitHub has no appeal to me.
I think the best case scenario for me personally is that nothing changes. None of the github changes in the past few years have added anything noticeable for me (not sure if others agree, be interested to know). And the best case scenario being "nothing changes" is pretty damning. I know it's overwrought, but Skype was perfect, and 2010s-Microsoft fucked them up. And if we're seriouslyhaving the best case scenario be "nothing changes", that's bad.
And it also just seems part of the bullshit mindset of startups being about the exit, and not about making a new, sustainable company.
GitHub didn't need to do this, but they did, to justify their reportedly insane burn rate. Microsoft still won't let them get away with that, they'll just take the heat for the inevitable layoffs.
Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ?
If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet.
As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.
They don’t index forks. Cloning a fork just to search through it locally is always fun. Very annoying when a fork becomes the de facto project because it’s the one being maintained.
I’m not even talking forks. I’m talking largish projects hosted on GitHub (100k+ loc). The actual results will contain less than half the results you’d see with grep, and even then the indexed content may even be out of date. This is exacerbated even more when database migrations are kept in source control, with older migrations archived, and the only search results you get for eg a stored proc search will be a version of the sp from 6 months ago.
That would be really great.
To improve looking through new repos at least a litte bit I like the browser plugin [Octotree](https://github.com/buunguyen/octotree), it adds a tree view of the code and eases jumping between files.
It is shockingly bad. The fact that you can't code search in a fork blows my mind. How have they not fixed this basic, important feature after so many years? What could possibly make it more difficult than a few person-months of effort?
Maybe avoiding the costs associated with keeping the indexes available for every fork? I believe they use elastic search so maybe someone with more experience with that can comment.
SourceGraph tries to fix it, and the experience of searching, jump-to-definition and generally getting to grips with a codebase is way better there IMO. They also have browser plugins with integration to GitHub. I recommend you to check it out.
Sourcegraph CEO here. Glad you like Sourcegraph! Regardless of what happens with GitHub and Microsoft, we agree that developers need great code search.
Sourcegraph CEO here. There was always a toggle for that feature, but it was too hard to find. It is now off by default and you can enable it in the browser extension settings. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I hope we get another chance to give you an awesome code search experience.
That doesn't make sense. Ruin the feature to potentially help someone who made a mistake with security? Why wouldnt they just run the search to find keys themselves and remove them from search results.
As one of my pet projects, I'm trying to resurrect Google's Code Search (a fast search indexer that supports regular expressions).
It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.
It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.
Search seems to be surprisingly bad at a lot of companies. I don't know about github but reddits search is so bad it cannot even find something when you type it character for character.
I'm super curious to what all these companies are using for search because they are so atrocious that tend to not even work in a basic substring search solution.
Exactly. I can’t search my own tweets on Twitter. Facebook doesn’t know how to rank people when I do people search there. Search is terrible across the internet except Google.
Sure, MS visual code is open but as a few players get more and more power we all become subject to their whims and not them to ours.
MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment, or will it’s data be useful to MS for those ads?
What sort of integrations can we expect to see with other MS products that encourage a more closed ecosystem?
This may all seem alarmist but with so many companies having so much power this sort of behavior get through unchecked.
The only recourse people suggest is “well then don’t use it” but what options do employees have when higher ups mandate technologies? What about most users who just go with the wind and just let these snowballing large companies skate by? It all makes me very sad...
Definitely, investors don't give you money just for kicks, they want a payday. It shapes the community... people who take that money get a head start, crowd out competition. Everyone needs to grow huge, get bought, or die.
What could change this? People refusing money? Some encouragement to stay mid sized? Wonder if that will ever happen...
doesn’t matter what you do. there will always be a competitor that takes the money and kills you. If not, the big companies themselves will fund their own projects with 100x your budget
The problem is that virtually all startup wants an exit. They have employees sitting on stock options for years while forgoing their market rate. They have investors wanting 10X return. This would work out for insanely profitable businesses like Google but for the rest they have built huge expectations on business models tha t are unworkable so buyout by a sucker is the only viable outcome for them. Coincidentally Microsoft has recently decided to become that sucker with LinkedIn and now GitHub.
GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft.
I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I’ve had paid private account since forever).
GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
If anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.
> I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is?
I imagine most HN readers are paying customers either directly or indirectly(their company/startup).
As a private customer, I wouldn’t object to an increase in the price if that meant they stay independent. If they get acquired by MS I am definitely stopping my subscription.
And therefore I will vote with my $$$ and stay on GitHub until there is a real reason to do otherwise (and at that point enjoy the benefits of standards like git).
Alas, like several others have pointed out, this doesn’t scale to GitHubs other services like GH Pages, or their Wiki, issue tracker, etc.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
So you largely have the same problems GitHub had. I’ve seen you say this exact same thing multiple times in the past day, but what exactly is different?
EDIT: When I say “seen the same thing said multiple times” I’m referring to multiple linkages of the relevant page in the handbook by others, and in the CEO’s own recent blog post about the acquisition.
Out of topic, but how often do you have the ear of CEO: sytse, one specific wish for Gitlab that I have: please enable 'one-click' automatic LetsEncryptNow certificate creation for GitLab Pages with custom domain names (just like GitHub is doing it today) instead of me having to go out of my way to go get a X.509 from a CA for my TLS/SSL enabled site[1].
Heck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.
If Microsoft decides to make GitHub free for all, this can honestly have a devastating affect on GitLab and Bitbucket. I really think Microsoft is a lot more interested in:
If you have more than 5 contributors, you can probably afford to spend $5/user/month If that isn't the case, then GitLab/Gogs/Gitea/etc. is probably the better route to go.
Gitlab also lets you register private gitlab-runners on gitlab.com, which is a killer feature for running CI on setups that aren't plain docker-in-the-cloud (such as integration-testing apps that require resources on our LAN, or macOS/iOS builds with private keychain items that is much easier to configure on a local Mac). (A side bonus is that you don't even have to pay for any CI "minutes")
If you ever get something for free, remember something somewhere is subsidizing it. Whether that's the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced, VC funding (which will eventually run out), or your data is sold.
Wow. On the one hand I'm impressed with the openness (almost - what does purpose='unclassified' mean?), as well as the option to elect which cookie category I agree to. On the other hand... my, that's a lot of tracking!
> But many smaller projects/components are volunteer-only.
Someone is paying for it with their spare time. Spare time doesn't last forever.
If you're not paying for something, you should see it either as a temporary shortcut that eventually needs a more sustainable fix, or something you don't care about if it disappears.
While I understand, and kinda agree, the idea that Volunteer only projects are not susceptible longer term and your implication that commercial products are more sustainable over a long term is provably false
Many many many many many commercial software projects, that people paid money for, are killed every single year.. Many other volunteer only projects last for decades, some of which have been critical to the very foundation of the web.
So no "if you are not paying for you should see it as a temporary shortcut" is a completely false statement
It's subsidized by those volunteers' time. Time that could otherwise be spent on other things.
Granted, there's nothing nefarious about this, but there isn't anything necessarily nefarious about the fact that anything you get for free is being paid for somewhere else. Just potentially nefarious, if you don't know what's paying for it.
I can't speak for Gitlab, but offering free Bitbucket should easily pay for itself as introduction to the Atlassian ecosystem.
Our experience went like this: We got Bitbucket for out project for the good free private repos (and a few other reasons). When it came to choosing a ticket system, being on Bitbucket made choosing Jira a no-brainer (one of the best ticket systems, good integration with Bitbucket, familiar interface). Then we needed a better wiki for internal documentation, so we naturally went with Confluence.
So getting free Bitbucket heavily influenced our decision to buy two other products from the same company, and we are about to buy into their CI system (Bitbucket Pipelines, not the other one). We don't regret any of those choices, but they might have looked different if we were on Github.
...the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced,...
That doesn't follow. If the paid accounts are selling, then they must be priced appropriately relative to their competition and the value they provide. The cost doesn't factor into it - and free accounts are just a marketing cost, like putting up a billboard.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
I expect it'll happen to Gitlab at some point, but the beauty of self-hosted is that I can cut ties with the organization and continue using their software anyway because it's entirely running on my machine.
Which, incidentally, is just one reason I usually strongly prefer self-hosted options over SaaS. You're not signing a pact to become beholden to the business whims of a third party.
But in more ways than just the users. If you want tu use most of the popular integrations, the often github-only. Things like TravisCI are suddenly what makes me open a new project on GH rather than GL.
I switched jobs and went from Github to Bitbucket about 6 months ago. I've found bitbucket to be consistently and noticeably slower than github both in its web UI and in pushes/pulls, with more downtime. You pay for those private repos one way or another.
I too felt this pain. UI feels "heavy" in comparison to Github.
There are obvious, simple updates that could be made to the UI to fix significant pain points. This one [1] brought me much pain every time I installed a new package via yarn.
I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
LinkedIn is excellent as it is; its a utility to keep your CV updated and connect with professionals. We don't want FB-like functionality here, thank god.
It's a shit platform for that. Users who are attempting to read these "groundbreaking insights" are subjected to a deluge of tracking code and other malicious behavior. There are plenty of excellent platform for people to share ideas, LinkedIn is absolutely not one of them.
LinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.
I've heard claims that Skype is no longer peer to peer but runs on msft networks/infrastructure and performance has suffered. Can anyone confirm or shed any more light on that?
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
Agreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
Me too. I'm waiting for the official transaction to be done and i'm preparing a plan b in case i have to migrate everything.
More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
Isn't that one of the strengths of Git? The whole decentralization means that it is ridiculously simply to take the whole shebang and migrate to another service or even just self host on a cheap VPS.
Yes but with services like Issues and Wiki built into GitHub and Gitlab ... If you made use of the extra services by the Platform Provider, then you possibly have alot of non-trivial project dependencies to move around ... like your Issue history for the project.
Yes but you still have configurations and docs referencing the repo to change. Then find a mean to alert all interested persons. And then write a script to migrate the issues.
It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
I would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
It does bug me that they pollute search results with login-required resources. Search engines should treat that as abuse, or at the very least default to freely available resources, otherwise they just become a menu without prices.
>At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
True in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.
I could make the same concern for a bunch of other companies who were to buy GitHub. Indeed, my main concern with GitHub being bought by anyone is the uncertainty of its future, and the fact that it no longer will be 'neutral' ground, so to speak.
It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
"Consider what happened to LinkedIn" Where are you going with this? LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%. Only good things have happened at LinkedIn (I'm an employee) since the MSFT acquisition. If LinkedIn is not doing something, then it sure will consider doing it now, with the vast resources it has available to it now.
"LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%."
I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh.
Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve.
"with the vast resources it has available to it now"
This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
Perhaps modifying code is out of the question, but consider how many juicy credentials / private keys etc must be tucked away in all those private repos...
A hash collision in git lets you show somebody one change, then substitute it for a different change (with the same hash) in a version others see that appears (to the first person) to be the same code.
This is a very narrow opportunity. It is _probably_ viable for a very powerful adversary (such as the NSA) to successfully trick someone working with binary blobs, like firmware for a black box. You can imagine a developer who (unusually) assiduously checks the firmware they're provided to see that it works as intended, then uploads a new version to github, and the NSA trap is sprung, they substitute a modification with the same hash but different firmware that, perhaps, causes your billion dollar spy satellite to point its cameras at the sun, destroying it.
But if the developer is less assiduous this was all pointless, just send the "burn spy sat" firmware to the original developer and lie.
Or if the spy camera owners decide not to take this mysterious last-minute update, or they try it on their ground-based prototype first to check it works... bzzt, your hugely expensive SHA-1 trick was a waste of time.
Yes, SHA-1 is broken. Nobody should use it for anything new, and things that already use it should have been migrating already _before_ the official announcement from Google et al. But, Merkle-Damgard hashes have done this before, and will do it again, and so we know how this goes. You get a collision but don't get anything else, critically you don't get second-pre-image.
This means, the NSA doesn't gain a way to substitute other stuff in a repo. They can only _collide_ their own things, by carefully choosing the inputs. So a plan where you just replace the _real_ firmware can't work.
Also, the nature of this MD attacks smashes up the input state, which for git will usually be source code. A mysterious anonymous contributor is surprising enough, but when their proposed patch adds dozens of bytes of what seems to be binary noise, you know something is up. That's why my example attack above involved firmware, where this might be less suspicious.
So yes, Git should have transitioned off SHA-1, and a window of opportunity for bad guys does exist, but it's not the sort of gaping window you imagine.
I had a pretty similar experience with skype. I lost access to my connected email account and was essentially locked out of my account forever - repeated emails to support were met with silence, alas! Then I connected my facebook account to use skype instead... then they discontinued support for that. Now it's got to a point where attempting to create a new account on the OSX desktop version just shows an error screen every time, so I'm stuck unable to use skype forever. I've moved on to other, better solutions, naturally :)
GitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
If Github does die out will be a slow and painful one. Skype was more of a radical change to the core technology. Of course anything is possible. I'm guessing many companies paying for Github's enterprise products are more concerned about the implications of Microsoft owning the company that hosts their proprietary code.
If Microsoft does to github what they did to Skype, pushes will go into the wrong repo without authentication for no reason just like Skype had contacts and messages jump from one account to another for no reason. Pretty much everything they touch software wise is a disaster. I wonder if there will be ads or how exactly they will fuck it up, but I know for sure they will. Gitlab is fairly equivalent in features and much better in their pricing and plans anyway so I expect a lot of projects to move.
Microsoft is big, with different divisions you can consider what it did with consumer apps, but you'd be better off considering what it has done with developer tools.
There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
Exactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace [0] app Pull Reminders [1] and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
GitLab has always demanded too much faith from its users.
First with CI, it was the all-or-nothing approach where you couldn't use GitLab CI with any other provider. Lately they have tried to fix this but it was a half-hearted development after a lot of complaints.
Lately with their DevOps approach, it's exactly how you've said.
I don't have trust in GitLab leadership and their product feels way too bloated.
This is a sad day for Open Source and software in general. What makes Github great is that its a neutral place where anyone can host their code. Now that its owned by a Big Corporation, the values that Github has built will be abandoned in favor of making money for the corporation.
So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.
To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."
Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!
This seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub’s biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub).
You see, whether or not it’s justified, some projects invariably will leave GitHub simply because it’s Microsoft. And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where most projects exist. And really, GitHub isn’t perfect: projects overlook a lot of minor imperfections in GitHub’s actual product because there are so many projects on GitHub and the usefulness of the networking outweighs the warts here and there.
They don't call them "exits" for nothing - once a company is acquired, you have exited the market and no longer care about the future of the company, except insofar as it affects your payout at acquisition time.
There will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.
This is pretty conflicting. Github is nice on its own, but business wise they haven’t been profitable, so sooner or later some change had to happen. In my experience, Github is great for public code storage and small private projects (easy to manage developers that already have github accounts), but it does become pretty expensive and I don’t necessarily think the ROI is worth it compared to a self-hosted solution. For opensource and personal portfolios, the “network effect” or first mover advantage sort of set the stage for github’s popularity over gitlab, but for a paid enterprise solution I think gitlab does a better job and offers more value per dollar. Partially what sucks is having to have separate github/gitlab accounts/repositories since that’s now 2 things to manage. I’ve tried codecommit and bitbucket as well, but those were kinda meh (in my opinion).
Typically when “the Microsoft touch” is added it’s for the worse, so the expectations bar is pretty low. But who knows. I can definitely see them leveraging github to further go after AWS by giving Azure a leg up over codecommit. VSCode has also been pretty good, if they add in the “social integrations” of github to VSCode that also competes against Cloud9 on AWS. Right now AWS is solidly winning the cloud race, but if this puts price/service competitive pressure on amazon I won’t complain.
I also wonder what will happen with all the code and personal data from github. I really don’t want to have to make a microsoft account to access github. As long as the switching costs from github to a viable alternative (right now gitlab) remain low, I would not have a problem with jumping ship.
I stopped trusting them when they stole the intellectual property of numerous small companies years before the _NSAKEY debacle. I know, I know, Bill Gates is supposed to be some kind of good guy now (malaria, etc.) but I can't think of any good reason to trust any robber baron, based on the past histories of robber barons. Even Andrew Carnegie was an asshole in the final analysis.
Microsoft is basically the corporate version of the ship of Theseus at this point. The have a lot of questionable stuff in their history, but the leadership and the culture at large has shifted drastically since those days. At a certain point it is worth reevaluating one's opinions and question whether it is still worth hanging on to those old grudges.
I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
Yeah, I am not saying I would trust any other big competitor more than Microsoft.
However, I am still not convinced that Microsoft really changed as much as many people like to believe. I think it is obvious that they lost the fight against open-standards in many domains. Linux on Smartphones would be one example. Now they have two options, either to embrace these technologies or lose market. The question is: How genuine is their enthusiasm and are they really acting in the interest of open-standards? Do they still have strategies to hurt open alternatives to their own products in the long run?
I think the shift from a traditional sales focus to one on subscriptions and "The Cloud" is a pretty monumental change. Losing traditional sales markets like selling phones really hastened that change. I don't think you're looking for proof that they're genuinely enthusiastic, because imo desperation is the rawest form of genuine enthusiasm. It's whether or not they're altruistic in this particular field, and that has yet to be seen.
I don't think you have to be altruistic to have genuine enthusiasm -- some companies have fantastic plans to support open-source as well as their business plans. But I agree with the first point you are making.
I think it is naive to believe than any company that is beholden to investors would choose altruism over profit. Most corporate altruism is just marketing.
I don't think Microsoft is any more altruistic now, they just have adjusted their corporate strategy to recognize that supporting openness is good for business. That is enough for me.
> google gets praised for blatantly awful abuses of power
Do you have some examples of that? The first things that come to mind are AMP and related announcements, which were not received particularly positively here on HN.
Except all the key players of this strategy are gone and Microsoft has embraced (full stop) open source as much as any major corporation in recent years.
But don't let actual evidence stop your pitchforks.
I see that Microsoft is not a corporation that is evil by design and that they are doing exciting stuff as well -- I don't hate them.
However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?
So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).
This may just be paranoia but if I were competing with Microsoft on something that I'd have private code for hosted on GitHub, I'd be pretty worried right now.
I think if Microsoft are even slightly shown to have used this to spy on its competitors, it'll be the end of the company as we know it, and people will go to jail.
Just for example, among the EU's criticisms of Microsoft were some of the documented (as in civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars documented) abuses of some of its notable customers like IBM and Intel.[0]
"Oh, but that was way back in the 80s and 90s, and different people run the company now. They're more mature and responsible these days." This is the only argument I've been offered when pointing out Microsoft's very shady history. It doesn't suffice.
> among the EU's criticisms of Microsoft were some of the documented abuses of some of its notable customers like IBM and Intel
Scanning that, I don't see any mention that this was in any way due to corporate espionage, or weaponizing the customer relationship -- could you point me directly to that part?
Microsoft doesn't have the time or resources to give a fuck about yours or other's shitty private repos. Besides, if they really wanted to compete, they would just utilise their massive engineering team to extinguish the competition.
Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty frontend.
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
Actually my real point was: scratch an itch and find you have lice living off you. No, err that's not it.
It is genuinely nice to see hard work pay off. Github have seriously put their back into it to create an environment that a lot of people feel comfortable with. I sincerely hope that MS do not fuck it up and wish them both all the best.
We still have git itself - that has never changed. That is the power of open source software.
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
Linus invented git because Linux needed a new code repo thingie. He was only focused on one project - Linux. He released git as GPL. GitHub n Co are value add sites with fees for services and are more than welcome to use GPL software for obvious reasons.
The way GitHub is developed (remote) and culture, this is pretty much death of GitHub and if most developers leave it will become a mess quite quickly.
That's extremely doubtful. First, having to login to different Gitlab instances is terrible UX. Second, you cannot easily reference another instance's issues. Hosted Gitlab is also unreliable and slow and comes with no publicly mentioned SLO of any kind.
I'd be surprised to see any big projects going away from GitHub in the coming years, unless Microsoft actually manages to tarnish the GitHub brand in a meaningful way.
The typical tinfoil head probably never trusted GitHub anyways, whether they're owned by Microsoft or not.
Just when it looked like GitHub was "sustainable" through revenue ... greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") and they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! :-(
Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? I would buy a few (thousand) shares ...
Who else would buy stock/shares if they remained independent?
> greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble")
That's their job. They put hundreds of millions of dollars into GitHub 3 (Series B) or 6 (Series A) years ago, and their sustainable business relies on selling those investments for a profit.
> "a DPO is attractive to small companies and companies with an established and loyal client base. A DPO is also known as direct placement."
GitHub has the "established and loyal client base" with many millions in recurring revenue.
GitHub's principal VCs, Sequoia and A16z can both afford to wait for a return. everyone could sell in the "DPO" so VCs could liquidate if they needed cash ...
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github
This point exactly. To me the move is a clear symptom that GitHub leadership has lost touch with the original vision/philosophy that made the platform popular in the first place.
If this goes through Microsoft basically gets access to all the private proprietary code of so many companies. I would have never expected Github founders to even entertain the notion. I guess times change.
The Skype buy was seven years ago, and it was a pretty user hostile piece of software before that.
Post Balmer we've seen a more open (in the transparent, consultative, community sensitive sense) attitude, with genuine contributions to free software.
People also seem to be citing LinkedIn as an example, but that doesn't feel like it got any more unpleasant since the buyout.
Hey, GitLab, if you want to push a big migration from GitHub, inundate the GitHub design team with requests for a ribbon UI on github.com and to move the subscription system to Office 365.
I am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way.
Another issue:
Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository.
Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I still will be moving away right now.
I simply have little trust in MS. They did improve in some areas, but not enough to gain overall trust. They are still not on the same page with many FOSS efforts.
Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
Looking at Windows 10, with stuff like telemetry that's impossible to disable completely and hidden behind every dark pattern imaginable, or ads in Start menu?
Eh. Windows today might be more Microsoft than ever, but the rest of the org is spending lots of effort creating cross platform developer tools that's preparing Microsoft to remain relevant in a world that doesn't involve Windows PCs.
True, they went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either.
Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
Microsoft screwed up Skype by trying to “make it more Microsoft” whereas LinkedIn is being left to operate as before (tough MSFT is using the data for something). My guess is that GitHub will continue as before with the main change being that MSDN subscribers will likely get private GitHub repos as part of their package.
Now MSFT just needs something along the lines of Jira to replace the dog’s breakfast that is VSTS Agile project management tooling. I don’t suppose the folks in Redmond are looking to acquire Atlassian next...?
You dont pay 2 Billion, and leave it untouched, they see an earnings potential in the company given the right management and shareholders expect ROI that is higher then the average market return
Most of the discussio here is just centered around Microsofts goodwill and trustworthiness, mostly ignoring that MS wouldn't make this investment without a solid plan and path to profitability.
That doesn't have to be bad per se, I guess there are a lot of options like integrating Github well with Azure and providing alternatives to AWS CodeCommit / pipelines, ...
Although I completely agree with you, pointing at LinkedIn as a success story is kind of weird.
Microsoft's new future is to be a cross-platform vendor for developers. I see absolutely zero incompatibility between Github and Microsoft and a need to shut it down. I think the Satya's Microsoft is smart enough not to ruin it.
It's good that there is such an alternative as GitLab, because there is a slight but still not unsignificant risk that MS will not do the right thing. I think they will though since they are power users of their own product. I'm hoping they know this space.
Not surprising. Microsoft has made a big deal of partnering with GitHub, showing off how well their Azure-based CI/CD products and services integrate with code hosted at GitHub. Not to mention that .NET Core and many companion libraries are hosted at GitHub, not on VSTS.
I am really sick of monopoly and centralization of internet. For last few years many of important projects changed hosting to GitHub... Now this? We have alternatives, and good ones (one may argue much better than GitHub), but where is all of this going?
And Microsoft going around devouring open-source community. To some extent we are the responsible ones. But on the other hand I am getting really tired of this. Then people ask me why I use Emacs... it's free and immortal as of now...
I hope this encourages people to fight vendor lock-in a bit and move to self-hosted git portals. With SaaS there is always the danger of acquisitions and degradation of service. The solution is open software, self hosted and portable. Git itself is absurdly easy to self host, but self-hosted alternatives to github deserve more attention, both in terms of use and development effort.
I worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.
I'm not sure what exactly you're reacting to, but a lot of us absolutely do not want to self-host our github repos. Because it's work, because we don't need it, because we like using github/gitlab/other as a "marketplace"
1. Electricity cost
2. Need for constant electricity
3. Internet cost
4. Need for constant Internet access
5. Cost of hardware
6. Heat generated by the running hardware
7. Noise generated by the running hardware
8. Space occupied by the hardware
9. Need to update and maintain hardware/software
10. Worse discoverability for your repos
11. ISP asking questions
12. Government asking questions
13. Police asking questions
Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
Not everyone will need to self-host, it is still possible to host your projects at someone else's instance. If you live in a place where $1 is a lot of money (where is this by the way?) you could either share a server with others who each chip in their $0.10 or just find an open instance somewhere. There are plenty of organisations which host services like these, Github is the best-known but by no means the only alternative.
Gitlab, no. Gogs [1] or Gitea [2], no problem. I run Gitea on an Intel SS4200 (2.4 GHz Pentium E2200, 2 GB, 8 TB JBOD), it hardly causes a blip on this rather anaemic system. The process generally takes up around 35 MB (RSS), it talks to a PostgreSQL database server on the same box. You would not want to run a service the size of Github on this but for a personal repository it is more than enough. If your projects get so popular that they outgrow the hardware or VPS just move to a higher tier.
A lot of these would be problems anywhere. Reliability/uptime of electricity/internet is problematic everywhere, although noise/heat I don't see why it would really be much of a problem anywhere.
If you self-host you will probably never get outside contributions. For most people it isn't worth taking the time to figure out whatever system you use. I'd like to see a federated system like GNUsocial/Mastodon for git. I've thought about trying to make such a system but I don't know much about federation.
Absolutely, and this has been the case for many years. Microsoft has contributed to open source heavily for a long time, but it won't stop a lot of people that have been burned in the past from not trusting Microsoft.
It's worth noting that the same goes for Apple. They have tons of closed source stuff, but they also make huge contributions to the open source world. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have LLVM or Clang as they exist today. WebKit is another big one.
What different purposes? They're both text editors / lightweight IDEs focusing on plugin extensibility built on top of Electron. They're literally the same thing.
And there are many who would say a sedan and a crossover are basically the same thing, but the devil is in the details.
Atom is extensible to a fault. A plugin can do just about everything and anything. FFS tabs are actually a plugin! While that means that performance will suffer, many (myself included) use Atom because of that insane freedom that plugins have to do what they need to do.
VSCode on the other hand is much more "if you want to do X, use this API". It's much more controlled, much more opinionated about how things "should" be done using VSCode as a platform.
From 30,000 ft, they are the same. But their goals and details differ, and I always prefer more choice rather than less.
I use neither, and I can see that the two take fairly different approaches, but why would you say they're build for different purposes. I don't think it's clear why a single org (though very far apart) has two approaches for a code text editor.
Atom has a whole team under Github. If they're both run by Microsoft, that seems like a clear cost-cutting measure; why develop two vastly similar electron-based code editors when you could just move that team + all of the interesting tech into VSCode?
I used to be a big fan of Atom in the beginning, but there’s nothing Atom does that VS Code does not do better. I wouldn’t see a purpose in merging the two, but I could see them killing Atom.
I agree on the VSTS front, but a lot of people use Atom and I can see many of them being put off by being forced onto VS Code.
Lately, based on comments made while promoting .NET Core, it sounds like Microsoft don't want to consolidate tooling, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Atom and VS Code co-exist as entirely separate entities/teams.
I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot of individual developers are biting at that price.
I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.
It's a convenience thing for me. As a hobbyist solo dev it'd be nice to have a place to work on code across different devices in private and then open it up when I feel the code is mature enough and the time is right to put it out there under an open source license.
Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.
I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:
- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.
- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.
- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.
- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.
The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
VSTS does a lot of things that GitHub does not. VSTS takes the workflow roles of Jenkins, GitHub, Jira, and has a few additional features that I don't know what open-source equivilant exists for (staged production, push to cloud - maybe done as Jenkins plugins?). It's highly unlikely VSTS will be shut down, especially in favor of a project which does very few things that VSTS does.
Microsoft being an owner here doesn't bother me that much.
The Azure integrations are inevitable. I guess we'll see if Microsoft has learned that strong-armed vendor lock-in makes people not like them. At this point, I am more glad they were acquired by Microsoft than Amazon. Still - there is still so much Microsoft ill-will, that this will take away the aura of 'software purity' from the GitHub.
Microsoft, please be a kind steward... I don't want to waste time migrating.
Putting aside my general dislike for Microsoft for a moment, I still believe this is bad for the tech industry.
It was great having a neutral player running the site, I don't think anyone should own them. GitHub would be best as a nonprofit, though unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen.
Imagine if CNN for example bought Twitter, would other news companies use Twitter still? Probably not.
Will Google, Amazon etc. move their code elsewhere? Maybe. But we will no longer have a centralised git repo, whether that's a good or bad thing.
GitLab have already said they're having 10x the amount of normal traffic migrating GitHub repos to them.
Will employers now ask to see your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket profiles?
I consider this a huge waste of money on Microsoft's part.
Why did they create and then shutter codeplex in the first place? Why can't we have multiple competing platforms (Google Code, Github, Codeplex, Sourceforge, bitbucket, etc.)?
If I were Microsoft I'd rather invest a smaller amount of money (it surely is much cheaper than acquiring Github!) into making Codeplex the best platform.
And then I'd just do a traditional way of forcing people a bit: Why did Microsoft put their software on Github, a competitor? Why not force people a little bit into your ecosystem? Why give up the fight for winner takes it all every single time??? If I were Microsoft I were a bit more proud to use Codeplex, Windows phones, Windows instead of Mac, etc...
Why shutter MSN messenger for Skype? Why making apps for iphone first before Windows phone? Why does Microsoft not simply fund their projects (Windows Mobile had a head start and was abandoned, tablet PCs were already there with XP) and try to compete and create an ecosystem full of solutions working together?
Of course it's kind of nice to see Microsoft embracing github and being more open etc. But where's the fight? Why give up all the time?
Why letting codeplex die when all we need is a bit competititon.
If you're thinking of moving off GitHub, one thing that I have heard about that might help you is you can ask GitHub to mirror repos, the way https://github.com/moodle/moodle looks -- note it says:
moodle/moodle
mirrored from git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
That way any URLs to your GitHub repo should carry on working. People can even clone and pull this repo. That may ease migration, especially if some tools assume code is on GitHub and don't allow you to specify the full URL to the repo.
Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reasons, now no tech company who hosts its codebase on GitHub would want to continue doing that if its MSFT-owned.
It's already happening: https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632
> Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reason
My former employer, a major e-commerce player in Europe and a direct competitor of Amazon, had basically their entire infrastucture on AWS. You might want to reconsider your definition of “no”.
My guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.
Does it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit.
Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
Hop, that's one thing less to do tomorrow! ... of course it was just a matter of time before it happened, github have stood on the other side of the mirror for a long time now, they just happend to have kept that not-for-profit/garage-built-startup image for some time, kinda like twitter. Or reddit and even y combinator. And yet people comment stuff like "let's switch to {gitlab,bitbucket,gogs}". We need to understand that making a self-hostable floss clone of a service that has been designed for a monopoly captive market is not gonna change anything durably. Build something based on small friend-to-friend networks. Something that doesn't need to be big to suceed. That will slowly change the way people think about collaborative tools and get people out of the "giant ad-based ex-startup owned; `free' (as in beer) to use; hosted service" mental model. Please stop building services and start sharing collaborative tools with your peers.
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace app (https://pullreminders.com) and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
But that Microsoft has changed, I see the most what people are complaining about is telemetry that is send, for following up on their biggest product. But all companies do this ( eg. https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not-just-you-clicking-... ), also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this.
Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too, because I think they have more to lose if they fail with GitHub then when they succeed (with more integration for visualstudio.com probably)
Being evil is a natural state for any large corporation. Trying to be not evil is always either fake or temporary. Microsoft cannot change, until it is split into hundreds of companies. Neither can Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple.
> I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
And because of how Microsoft was in the 2000s, and the 2010s. Ballmer was after the 90s. Did they ever stop suing Android manufacturers for using FAT, or open up exFAT after managing to get it as part of the SDXC standard?
> also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this
...Yeah, Ubuntu did that. Not Debian. Not Fedora. Not Arch. Not Gentoo. Even RHEL barely phones home enough to check its license and get updates. And in Ubuntu, the single Linux distro to have done this, you could toggle it off in 5 minutes and it would actually respect your choice, rather than "accidentally" resetting to the most invasive set of options every other update after you spend hours hunting the latest set of registry hacks that make it better.
> Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too
I agree that they want to show that they've changed. I even agree that the current ecosystem is forcing them to change some. I also expect them to pull something the moment they think they can get away with it.
I wonder what the reaction would have been with Apple being the acquirer. Microsoft still receives lots of hate, sometimes justified, but often just baseless. On the other hand, whenever Apple fucks devs (or users) over, they're just "protecting users" or "making business decisions". I feel there's a strong bias in the dev community.
Apple being the acquirer wouldn't change the potential conflicts of interest or the trend towards monopolization, which is what a lot of people are upset about. Animosity toward large corporations isn't unique to Microsoft.
I bet the reaction would have been largely the same; a megacorp monopoly is a megacorp monopoly.
That being said, Apple did make a few nice moves lately -- e.g., open-sourcing FoundationDB (when was the last time Microsoft opened up anything it acquired?).
If github ends up running completely on Azure infrastructure; how likely will microsoft's competitor's be to host large projects there.
that said, I'm not sure the impact will be too negative if google or _______'s open source being on some other git-based system if it includes decent github / gitlab like collab tools.
...And in the comments, a thousand developers suddenly realize GitHub is a plain old business rather than some kind of core infrastructure service altruistically provided by Free Software Elves and their Infinite Bandwidth Rainbow.
My dissenting opinion is that this is good. I am not a Windows user and only peripherally use their services however ironically I believe Microsoft is now the challenger if monopolies:
- Bing is one of the only english search engines with a big userbase; provides a google alternative. I like ddg but it isnt mainstream yet.
- Provides alternative to gmail and enterprise services
- a big 3 cloud provider, competes with AWS and GC. Likely why this github acq makes sense
- runs linkedin to keep fb in competition
There are a lot of examples where they drop the ball, but they are surprisingly the challenger in a lot of new markets providing an alt to the leader/incumbent
People unwilling to pay for a service they think is important for their work, yet lose their shit when the the said service does what is best for them. That is, to be sustainable.
AFAIK, GH charges for private repos and yet they are not-profitable. Gitlab offers free private repos, how will the story end differently?
Oh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube).
Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.
I was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)
You didn't use Youtube before it was acquired? I vividly remember finding a lot of cool videos and music that I couldn't otherwise have found. Now once you watch a few garbage videos it's all Youtube autosuggests to you. Also if you start exploring videos they'll probably be mostly around the same what you've already seen and not diverge too much from what's popular. Anything novel and out-of-ordinary is pushed to the bottom in most cases.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is different but the freshness of it is gone. I don't expect anymore to find anything super-interesting and the same old stuff that I've already watched is being suggested to me again and again.
Videos get demonetised for questionable or non reasons
Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time).
Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything.
Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today).
Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site.
Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant.
Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them.
YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections.
And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.
Most of these features (and problems) appeared after YT was acquired, but demonetization and account problems (including wholesale blocking) seem specific to Google, so I agree.
According to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.
I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.
I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.
I talked to a VP from MSFT last year. He asked how MSFT could do a better job appealing to the open source community and start up community. I said just keep doing what you are doing. It is going to take time for those of us that were around during the Balmer days to be willing to believe that MSTF has turned a corner. I think that they are on the right path, but I certainly don't judge anyone who is skeptical about the future of github. I've been on gitlab since 2011 so it don't make much difference to me.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion around here but I see nothing but positives in this announcement.
This move towards a "good" Microsoft has been going on for a decade, ASP.NET MVC was released as Open Source in 2009. Seeing where they're going with .NET core, VSCode and TypeScript makes me pretty confident they will be good stewards of the site.
Microsoft had their own open source hosting solution Codeplex but closed it and migrated all their stuff to GitHub so they could be where the community was. That was a bold move and I think demonstrates how they see the community now. This isn't the Microsoft of the 90's.
GitHub is great but it's not profitable and I'm sure there are lots of improvements they could make with a bit of a cash injection.
On the flip side if Microsoft stuff it up or there is an exodus from Microsoft because people hate Microsoft, that's not such a bad thing either.
There are great alternatives out there, it's not the same landscape as when GitHub launched, everyone's learnt from GitHub, GitHub's biggest feature is the network effect. Everyone has an account and it's super low friction to contribute there. If we can break that a bit and everyone has an account at 2 or 3 places I think we might see some great innovation as competitors try to differentiate themselves.
Every business that built their service around the GitHub ecosystem will get massively screwed. They should immediately start to integrate as many GitHub competitors as possible or Microsoft will just eat them within the next months. GitHub always wanted to concentrate on the code hosting, not the CI/CD, code quality, code analysis, etc parts but Microsoft will soon start to extend GitHub to support Azure's services directly.
GitHub was never conceived as a charity. But this didn't stop people to put half of the world's open source code centrally on this one platform. Now they are crying/worried because this platform is being sold. Can't really understand your point, guys. That is the way it often goes with commercial enterprises. It's quite an irony that free/open source makes this platform so financially interesting to buy.
I use it for work like everybody else here, but being so comfortable and happy with it, I paid $7/month for a few private repos which maybe used $.02/month in their resources. Just a shame companies and the developers paying for it wasn't enough
GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it?
So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.
Point taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA:
"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."
But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."
> and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github
Linux isn't hosted on github, it's hosted on their own cgit instance: https://git.kernel.org/
There was a short period of time, back in 2011, when kernel.org went down for some time (from late August: https://lwn.net/Articles/457142/ to early October: https://lwn.net/Articles/461465/), so Linux was temporarily hosted on github. After that, the repository on github was kept as a mirror of the official kernel.org repository, but it's a one-way flow.
Some years ago I wrote "The Github Threat" https://carlchenet.com/the-github-threat/ and I'll be delighted to update the conclusion with this quite predictable and logical outcome.
Personally, I think this is great news given the investment Microsoft has made in hosting their open source projects on GitHub. I'm heavily invested in the Microsoft stack so I'm kind of excited to see where they take this.
Also, I'm excited because I'm in the middle of launching a product that aims to build people in to Git experts, or at the bare minimum build up your comfort level with Git to make you productive.
I'd love for you to check it out. This open source version is kind of the basis for my upcoming commercial project.
And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google.
Nokia too, although it didn’t affect people directly, as opposed to the series of ultrabad decisions on Skype. Acquisitions aren’t always successful with Microsoft.
Funny enough, I don't feel that way about Skype anymore. Yeah, Microsoft destroyed it, but, on the other hand, why did I even use it? Right, because there was nothing else back then, and Skype was "good enough". And everyone else was using it. Even though, honestly, it always was some buggy proprietary piece of shit, dragging all that legacy of the Delphi era into 201x. If anything, it may be even good it's not so dominant anymore, even though we still don't have anything decent to completely replace it.
Incorrect. Nagged, yes, but my Windows 7 machine that runs my Primera 4102 DVD duplicator still runs Windows 7 and will for as long as I own it. And it wasn't that hard to find the "don't nag me about upgrading ever again" option on Windows 7.
How is "I was able to tell my machine to stop nagging me and not upgrade to Windows 10" rewriting history? I'll take the kudos that I have way-above-average skills with Windows if you want to bestow that on me, but I know of no cases not-involving confused users hitting something they should not have where a machine was upgraded without any user interaction at all. By all means: send me links to such stories if you have them and I will concede the point to you.
Microsoft being (possibly) the biggest 'partner' of the NSA is one of the worst aspects of this acquisition and underrepresented in these discussions here.
Check the recent history of computing. They willingly botched many good standardization efforts and devalued many by throwing their industry weight around - all in the name of self-interest.
And oh, their software sucks. Sometimes it's kinda bizarre even how much their software sucks, bad engineering abound.
Have you tried updating Windows 7 recently?
They took over the world of computers and made people believe that computers suck and are boring, which they do when they run Windows.
They brainwashed so many corporations and governments to use their stupid solutions for every problem and plague tech people with incredible headache in the process.
It's even worse in the "developing" world, where every single comapny is like: "Oracle! Microsoft! Oracle! Microsoft!". You will never know till you experience it.
I am forced to use Windows for gaming, and let me tell you what Microsoft has done to me lately.
- Forced updates are a travesty. I should be able to delay or ignore updates indefinitely as I own my computer.
- I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program, despite having no need of one. I can only temporarily pause Windows Defender's real-time checks before they'll helpfully turn it back on for me. This results in a loss of gaming performance.
- Turning off their spying telemetry is essentially impossible and will helpfully turn itself back on.
- They hold some good games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows (Halo Master Chief Collection) since they don't take gaming seriously on PC.
- Every once in a while, they become dedicated to PC gaming again which simply means they will use their power to force something awful onto the community, like the Windows Xbox Game Bar, Games for Windows Live, etc. in their quest to make my gaming PC into an Xbox.
- UWP is trash and greatly restricts what the user can do with their game, such as mods or fan patches to fix bugs developers ignore.
- The Windows Store is horrible in and of itself and is full of even more low quality software. Instead of releasing their games on Steam, Origin, GOG, or even UPlay, they force them into this dumpster fire.
- They install Candy Crush and other drivel by default on a fresh copy of Windows, and sometimes it magically reappears.
Just because Microsoft has put on the "I'm changed!" act recently by releasing some FOSS and donating some money does not mean they have actually stopped being a negative influence.
Yes, thank you. People are quick to point out the Microsoft hasn't done anything detrimental to society, forget that their software is such a mess. We're too focused on judging companies based on whether employees get paternity leave, an offhand remark by a CEO, or recent scandals, that we're forgetting about the quality of software we're installing on our computers. When I saw a bunch of spammy games like March of Empires and Candy Crush installed with my Windows 10 Pro, I thought I got a bad copy -- instead it was truly just part of their operating system. They force their terrible antivirus (which keeps quarantining files I'm working on, when I'm working with low-level .exe patching) and forced updates and reboots. I wish there was a way to have Windows that's just an operating system.
You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to block your machine's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do this.
> They hold some games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows...
Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don't follow.
> UWP is trash...
This is true. UWP tries to be many things, like a single container for desktop, tablet, and (Windows) mobile apps. In the end it mostly fails.
> I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program.
Uh, dude: I run Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines and none of them FORCE me to use antivirus. They nag about it for a while but those alerts and nags can be disabled.
> You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to block your machine's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do this.
That's not disabling Windows Update, that's hacking name resolution to prevent the connection itself. That's like saying you can disable Windows Update by not connecting to the internet.
And I'm not even confident that the host file solution will last forever, in future you might have to do it from the router level instead.
> Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don't follow.
If you play PC games you are effectively forced to use the Windows ecosystem. Several of my favorite games are available on macOS/Linux, but it's like watching movies. You might watch Blazing Saddles and Evil Dead 2 on a regular basis, but you're also going to want some variety in there as well.
What the GP is saying though is that Microsoft is holding game franchises as XBox exclusives to try to slow their marketshare bleed. They are taking franchises that were formerly present (if delayed) on Windows such as Halo and using them to sell XBoxes.
I couldn't agree more. What a pain. GitHub good bye, hello GitLab (I already am on Bitbucket).
Currently, Microsoft is blocking an open source mod of the Halo Online engine, called ElDewrito. It's an incredibly fun to play mod but now development has been halted because of legal action. I hate Microsoft for all the things you mentioned.
I'm with you on this one: Win10 is a travesty and is literally forcing me (and the organisation I work for) to switch to Linux distro. Cannot have Pro editions randomly install Candy Crush and reset privacy settings at Microsoft's leisure. No.
Completely agree. But windows and devdiv are two completely different beasts these days. In think the people at devdiv seem fantastic and the tools they have done recently are great (.NET core, VS code, GitVFS, ...).
Microsoft may not have changed completely but part of it has
I don't use any product from Microsoft. I understand Microsoft is for-profit, but there's no way they can get a single dime from me, and I don't want to become a second-class citizen. That's why I would be leaving.
- LinkedIn
- Skype
- Lies around Windows 10 semi-forced upgrade
- Nokia
- The hell that is Office365
- Vermeer
- Groove
- Rare
- Visio
- Hotmail
- FASA
- Firefly
I don't mind their strategy from a business perspective, but from a human perspective I mind they have crushed the goodness out of so many companies they have acquired. It's analogous to the chinese cultural revolution, or if some 3rd rate florentine artist got to buy out Botticelli et al. just as they got started. I know this is not only Microsoft (Cisco, Google et al.) but MS are not innocent and don't deserve to have their slate wiped clean (yet)
Ask yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github?
I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github!
Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, it might be too late for github now, but I will myself conduct a review of the free services that I use regularly and reconsider pitching in, since I value independent businesses.
EDIT: looks like my experience may be atypical, that’s good!
Just for anecdata, would you include where you live as part of your replies? In my case it’s central europe.
My company (SAP) has a GitHub Enterprise installation that, given the number of active users, is going to be a very pleasant revenue stream for GitHub.
I’ve paid for private repos on my personal GitHub account for years, and many of the companies I work for/with have paid organization accounts for GitHub, since the integrations and access control / management is really slick vs. setting it up internally. I can see many of these orgs (and myself) determining it’s worth the effort to move to GitLab / self-hosted depending on what Microsoft does.
I know several small, medium, large companies paying github to keep their repos private. Also, github offers on-premises installation of their product.
Another sample of one: I pay for a personal account, although I don’t really have any projects that couldn’t be public, and my company pays for company account.
I may be in the minority. I’ve had a change of heart over the last 5 years or so towards Microsoft. They’ve changed a lot of the practices that used to make me not like them. They’ve embraced open source a lot more than in the past and have clamped down a lot on the anti competitive practices they used for decades. I also have a good friend that works there and I’ve seen how the sausage is made from the inside a bit. They treat their employees really well and from what I’ve experienced they’re a good company to work for.
I don’t have a hard opinion on this acquisition for the OSS community, but it will be good for the employees and I’m hopeful that not much will change with Github as a service and somethings may even get better. Time will tell of course.
Can you imagine how this story would have gone over on Slashdot in 1998? Microsoft was the Borg, Linux was the nerd's favorite OS and Google was a benevolent and powerful new search engine. How the tables have turned...
Great news ! Maybe now people will understand why github was the wrong was to do things.
Using a designed to be decentralized development tool and flocking all in one place, centralizing free software development on proprietary centralized platform is the epitome of not doing things the way they should.
Hopefully people will catch the difference between opensource which microsoft is surfing on in a PR effort to regain prestige and free software which is a nemesis of microsoft.
Now let's see projects scramble to find another centralized place to migrate to in order to keep doing things wrong, and see which ones do not care enough to even do this.
But what would be the alternative then? I mean, GH serves as the de facto opensource social network, it allows private and public collaboration and integrates with many tools creating a web of transparency and free flow of knowledge.
How do we make a similar or comparable service that is decentralized yet transparent and instantly accesible to millions of people across the globe?
So it's time to move on, is gitlab up for the job? or bitbucket? or everyone should run a gitea/gogs container on their $5 vps?
While I use vscode sometimes for web hacking, I use geany/vim for anything else, other than that, I have nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever, and yes, I run linux as my desktop for the last 15+ years.
Money talks, Microsoft is embracing OSS because it's defeated by OSS, it never liked OSS, and it does all these moves just because it has no better options.
And, who knows,it might be the modern Trojan to ruin us all when time comes, I have no doubts on this when I recall how hostile MS has been to OSS.
I don't mind this, as long as the side of Microsoft which has been on GitHub so far as the side of Microsoft who ends up dealing with GitHub in the future.
But this will definitely end the concept of GitHub as a single-source place to find code. Microsoft's competitors will likely move their code, at the least, and of course, the crowd who will never trust Microsoft will leave as well, regardless of how well they manage it.
All-in-all, I don't think that's a bad thing for anyone: Software shouldn't all come from one site, and the industry was becoming far too centralized around GitHub.
We've been lamenting the github-centralization of open-source for years now, this might be the wake-up call people have been waiting for. Rightly so. Gitlab ops people might be in for a treat tonight.
Any plans to make backups/archives before Microsoft takes over? There is an enormous volume of useful open source code from individual authors on Github. A pleasing respite from the world of team-developed commercial software. It is difficult to imagine Github could remain the number distribution channel for individual authors of non-commercial code when it is run under the auspices of a large, proprietary enterprise and consumer software company.
Since its inception, I have been using simple tcp/http clients and text-only browsers to download and browse source code from stable Github urls, as I did throughout the 90's with Freshmeat, Sourceforge, etc. To its credit, Github has always been very accessible.
What are the chances this kind of accessibilty will continue to be possible if Github is being administered by Microsoft.
Direct downloads of small, source code files, many with no licensing restrictions, no sign-ups, no web browser required, no hassle... Microsoft has never managed anything like that. Microsoft has always done the opposite. Indirect downloads of large collections of binaries, often coupled with installers, licensing restrictions, usually requiring some sign-up or click-through agreement, and today, possibly with telemetry.
I hope I am wrong to be concerned about this takeover. Will Github continue to be the respository service of choice amongst authors of free source code? Perhaps some will pull out and move their code elsewhere.
IMO, Microsoft will most likely take a hands-off approach. They would not want some people's frights to be realized, and they would appreciate developers being okay with their acquisition.
I was really hoping GitHub would focus on a IPO vs. acquisition. I honestly think we would be saying the same things about Google/Apple if they had decided to swoop in and make a deal here (so none of what I say is directed specifically at Microsoft).
I think the general consensus is that we want a new, independent org, that genuinely cares about OSS but has the mind to create/maintain a sustainable business model and ensure the long-term success of an OSS platforms is extremely important (and now we'll look to Gitlab and others for that).
Microsoft will, no doubt, have their fingers all over this platform in short order. It's what they're paying for; and it's an extremely smart move (EXTREMELY). Some of GitHubs product offerings have competitors within the Microsoft ecosystem already, which may spell bad times for those long-term. Atom directly competes with VSCode and it simply doesn't make sense to continue development of two, independent, IDEs. Electron utilizes Chromium under the hood, and I'd be hard pressed to thunk Microsoft wouldn't want to try and inject Edge/Chakra into that platform somehow.
It makes good business sense to consolidate efforts once a company is acquired. I give it, at most, 12-18 months before you start seeing major changes to both of those platforms that reflect Microsofts own interests.
To everyone switching to GitLab or considering it: Theres a feature on GitLab where you can import all your GitHub repos in on go. Or you can do it one by one if you want.
Based on the way Microsoft has been “punishing” their on-prem customers since they started pushing O365 this has me a bit concerned about the fate of GitHub Enterprise.
I can't believe Microsoft isn't aware an exodus (at some level) will occur and Github will no longer be what it is if they buy it.
But apparently they don't care. Demonstrating they have not changed as so many claim but are still the same old M$.
I'll be closing my account as soon as this is official. As for clients who decide to stay, sorry, I won't be able to help them as I won't have a Github account. But I will walk them through moving if they like.
It looks like you’re trying to issue a Pull Request! Would you like to use Visual Studio Azure Github for Windows 2000, Enterprise Edition with Skype & Linkedin Integration?
As [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.
If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.
Smart and inevitable, to secure dominance in the talent vertical. I remember walking into an org where none of the engineers or UX folks had Linkedin accounts. They didn't need it to land in a healthy workplace w/ a decent salary. They were active on GitHub instead, had Angellist profiles. One of them mentioned LI's InMail tool drove him away. Another said he can network just fine with Meetup and twitter.
I'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice...
As for me, I also dislike Github being owned by Microsoft. Big conflict of interest. Microsoft core business is closed-source software.
But, it's not wrong to give Microsoft a chance to cultivate Github. Yes, Microsoft have a long track record of being disproportion with open source products. This is also true with other companies.
Good thing to point out is, there are alternatives.
"The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work."
Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?
Microsoft's own hosted platform Visual Studio Team Services is nuetral. It supports hosted and on prem build and deployment agents for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are easy to use plug ins for building and deploying on both Azure and AWS. You can use Github now for hosted git repositories in VSTS and still use Microsoft's other build and release tools.
Thier Wiki is Markdown based and they have a very visible link that lets you pull down your entire Wiki using git clone.
They also have free private repos, 40 hours of hosted builds, up to five users for free, project management features that are at least as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) as the other project management tools - again free for up to five users. You can also host your own private Nuget, NPM, and Maven feeds for free.
For non open source projects, you can't beat the value. Additional users over 5 are $5 a month.
By "neutral" people mean politically neutral (as in no affiliation with anybody). There is a big chance Google will start using their own hosting platform again for all their code. Same with other Microsoft competitors.
That's not how big companies work. Netflix hosts all of it's infrastructure on AWS and competes with Amazon Prime Video. Google pays Apple $2 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS and Apple hosts part of iCloud on Google Cloud Platform.
Microsoft and Google work together on Angular and Typescript.
Apple buys components from Samsung while at the same time suing them.
The Fire TV stick competes with the AppleTV but Amazon Prime is available on iOS devices - including the Wpple TV3 that doesn't have an App Store.
Who do you trust more not to abandon git hosting? A Microsoft owned GutHub or any replacement that Google conned up with?
What is Github's reason for this? I'm looking for some salient reason why they'd sell their company. Is it investor pressure or founder apathy, or ...? It seems to me like creating and running a product as admired as Github is a bigger prize than just cash in the game of life?
“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though, it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.”
If somebody of the size of GitHub can't manage to stay a standalone company it's a pretty sad state of affairs. We really need more players in this industry. It's becoming more and more a monoculture (not sure what the term is for a few players that together pretty much have monopoly. Oligopoly?)
I'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft to begin with, but I definitely see a reason to be wary about this. I don't really want any Microsoft integration into GitHub, and really the best case would be for them to not change much with the site at all, although I don't see this being the case.
My fear in this is that MS may require MS passport or whatever it is called ID system to log in to GitHub, with their really unreasonable 16 character max password length restrictions.In general MS websites are poor in usability, and littered with marketing copy, difficult to find useful information.
Does this remind anyone else of the back to the future movie where Biff is the free worlds leader and just a pompous asshat with the power to keep being a pompous asshat?
Having watched Microsoft over the years steal ideas from smaller companies (not purchase them then bastardize and part them out mind you), but actually steal their ideas and make them standard in their operating system.
Some examples are CDR/CDRW now standard after small companies in the late 90's developing the standard.
The bastardized implementation of Active Directory after Novell's Netware platform and the later implementations of OpenLDAP and the standards that were spurned.
What about the MIT Kerberos authentication mechanisms after Microsofts MsCHAPv2, MsCHAP & NTLM roll your own crypto schemes were found easily crackable and exploitable?
I can go on but actually have to do some work today...
I read about this as a hypothetical a few days, but it really moved to done deal quicker than I expected.
I started to look for alternatives to host private repos and found that Amazon CodeCommit has a plan that's even much better than the GitHub plans. Does anybody have experience on how well this works?
I’ve got a couple of code commit repos for various purposes, and it’s high friction. Uploading a large repo with a plain git push will likely fail. The user management is way more complicated and enterprisey than github. It does work, but it feels awkward.
I think instead of moving everything to one new (central hosted) silo like GitLab.com, we should move to self hosted git instances, with some GitHub like web interface to do remote comments/pull requests (e.g. gitea/gogs with some simple modifications).
There probably won't be (m)any noticeable changes for the open source and devs running personal private repos and possibly the same for GitHub team plans. However, I'd bet Microsoft will plan on a sunset timetable for TFS and push their licensing and sales machine toward GitHub for Enterprise. I'm glad my group isn't on GitHub for Enterprise because after seeing this news I'd be looking to migrate away ASAP. I can envision the the potential for their draconian licensing lock-in and TOS language spawning a nightmare for teams that are running GH Enterprise. These GH enterprise installations will likely be required to purchase MSDN licenses.
Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? I use both and there is barely any overlap in features. GitHub is only code storage + a rudimentary issue manager. There is very little release management, test management, CI/CD etc.
If anything I’d expect them to integrate better and of course integrate more with Azure (e.g one-click setup of build/test on azure from any Github project)
Agreed. I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting.
VSTS is awesome, and quite feature-packed. Maybe Microsoft will use GitHub specifically for repo hosting, while offering VSTS as an CI/CD/ALM platform.
> I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting.
I didn't say that the "simple" choice for repo hosting would go away... My point was that if you need GitHub Enterprise, you get it only with the biggest MSDN subscription and end up with a bunch of things either you don't need or don't want and having to agree to licensing that's MS/MSDN specific.
Admittedly I've been away from TFS for a number of years, however, it seems that GitHub Enterprise is a natural fit product wise for revenue stream via licensing thru MSDN to get organizations onboard with GitHub that weren't before. If they were to sunset TFS and provide a migration path, it would end up giving them significant licensing dollars.
The more important point I was trying to make is that orgs that are now on GitHub Enterprise would need to subscribe to MSDN enterprise licenses for a bunch of things that aren't relevant and get locked into TOS that they hadn't been previously.
Regardless of sunsetting TFS/VSTS, I think that Github Enterprise will be only available through a MSDN enterprise/premium license or whatever that is now in 2018.
Superficially it seems there is some overlap, but github’s issue tracking for example is very simple (assuming enterprise is the same, I haven’t seen it).
VSTS supports the JIRA level of features like complex workflows, hierarchical issues, scrum/kanban boards (including hierarchical sub teams with differing sprint dates), burndowns and hundreds of other charts.
I would love to see all that ported to github, but it just wouldn’t be GitHub any more then.
To me they seem like VS and VS code. One is a big fat enterprisey thing and one is lighter. The enterprise version of GitHub doesn’t seem so focused on enterprise processes as VSTS is, but rather on enterprise infrastructure things (auth stuff, cloud integration stuff...).
This is the "extend" phase, in case anyone is keeping track. The embrace was "MS loves Linux!", switching Windows to use git, and putting tons of near random libraries and projects on github publically (vscode, chakracore, etc).
I just love how anyone that cards had been actively avoiding walled garden proprietary services like this and were using gitlab, phabticator, etc for years saying this or anything similar (could have just been github starting to sell user data themselves) but only when big evil MS comes along to put the reality in peoples faces that you don't bet your software infrastructure on some proprietary non interoperable web service.
For people looking for alternatives, I've started to write code forge tools in Salut à Toi (on top of XMPP).
It's decentralized, already working (tickets and merge requests), based on standards, and written in a popular language (python), help would be more than welcome!
It is also agnostic of the tools, I'm using it with Mercurial, but Git implementation will of course follow.
I'm kind of happy with this happening as it seems to me that this can cause the VCS hosting arena to diversify a little bit. The "monopoly" of github always worried me as a huge freaky single point of failure.
Well, let's say I wouldn't switch away from github at once (I have a paid account with private repos and all), but consider the Skype precedent: from a mostly working native application, now it's an Electron abomination that takes 100% CPU and is a lot harder to use than the previous versions. But it has social networking!
It's very likely they will "improve" github in the same way. I don't think they dare to make the site explicitly not work on anything but IE, but I expect subtle incompatibilities to pile up over time...
IMO, I think Microsoft will take a hands off approach, they don't want some of people's fears to be realized, and they really would want a friendly attitude towards their acquisition.
The negativity in here is crazy. It‘s not even official yet everyone already seems to know that Microsoft will destroy Github.
Microsoft tried really hard to improve their relationship with developers in the last couple of years and they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again.
I can understand the scepticism and that people dislike the fact that Github is not independant anymore, but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
Are they still trying to extort "licensing fees" from Android device manufacturers? Have they apologized for ever doing that and promised never to do that again? Until that, I won't even consider it. Fuck Microsoft. They're horrible and their recent attempt to go back to the "embrace" part of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deserves absolutely zero good will.
I hate when people accuse others of negativity when manifestly negative thing happen.
"Hey, stop punching me in the face!"
"Why are you being negative?"
There are very good reasons people aren't happy about this. Microsoft's track record for one. And the loss of independence of major repo source for another. Not being happy about this isn't being "negative". It's entirely understandable.
> they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again
The old MS — and I'm not trying to comment on how different or similar the current MS is to the old one — did indeed spend a lot of money to screw developers and the developer community, including developers who bought into the MS stack.
> but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
I don't think many people are worried MS will ruin GitHub, per se. I think what most people are worried about is that MS will change GitHub enough to inject MS-specific stuff in there.
GitHub is the website 90% of the packages I use are hosted on. All our company code and hundreds of hours are invested into whats hosted on it. I would hate to see this change...
This might be a stupid question, I did Cmd+F to search if it had already been asked and answered and it hasn't, so it might actually be stupid.
I'm guessing it's very illegal (IANAL) and that it's not the intention of Microsoft (IANACEO), but what are the ramifications relating to IP (GitHub's customer's IP, rather than the GitHub's IP) - has Microsoft essentially bought access to a massive stash of IP/trade secrets in the form of private repositories?
I'm wondering this too - private repos might be a goldmine of intellectual property, which businesses assumed would stay "private", i.e., not in the hands of companies like Microsoft.
Not judging if this is a good or bad thing but in general it's annoying to be dependent on a single company. While git is decentralized, github's social platform features are centralized and lock users to github. I would love to see more solutions that allows users to migrate freely between platforms without losing their social contacts. See https://fejoa.org for more information.
Centralized and proprietary unfortunately are two key attributes to Github. That fits the old school MS bill. But it also fits the new “we have changed hype”.
It’s most unfortunate, because git made decentralized revision control popular.
My future Tooling bets are on sustainable open source.
Good for MS, though. It’s a smart move for them. And Github has been struggling for years, anyway. Scandals, new structure, more hierarchy. It’s probably easier to pick up now than three years ago.
Guys. Enough with the FUD please. I myself don’t even believe I’m saying this but clearly Satya Nadella != Steve Ballmer. Dude has seen the light and is trying to put the company on the right path.
Every time they do something good all the tinfoil hats come out. Give them a chance. They’ve turned over a new leaf. And until and unless we see otherwise we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt.
What Microsoft acquisition has been a "success"? Because there are quite a lot that got worse under MS. They have a long track record and it'l take years before they can begin to counter all the stuff they've done.
Would have rather seen an investment or partnership in github than a purchase. Recognizing the desire for github to stay neutral but supporting it to continue would have been a much better received move and done far more to build up reputation.
We will have to start migrating our software there into a more neutral platform.
I don't like the consolidation in Software in which there are only 5-6 huge players. It means politics and private interest of the conglomerate take precedence over everything else, like competence, and freedom.
Those oligopolies can just send their lawyers against competition or just buy them to stop the threat.
I wonder how Microsoft can manage to commercialize all the projects on GitHub. Maybe by providing an universal installer that works through the Windows Store. Maybe by adding a few mandatory patches to each project that improve compatibility. Maybe by making a much improved version of Git with a proper GUI interface. The possibilities are endless!
Perhaps there is a market for a really simple Git based issue tracker, which doesn’t require Ruby. This acquisition feels like Freshmeat / SourceForge v2; the hardcore OSS enthusiasts will begin their exodus.
Is there an argument for actually building simple issues management into Git itself with a simple API for pull requests?
Netlify is great! I also found them via HN at some point and use them for a couple customer projects. Totally moving my personal stuff to them too now.
Funnily enough a friend of mine and I migrated some of our projects over to GitLab right before this original story broke. It’s really unfortunate though that this will probably go through since GitHub was/is really the staple site for social programming and project management, something that GitLab is certainly lacking.
"Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class." [A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark, 022]
Big five representatives of the vectorialist class are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple.
feel like if any of the other companies made this acquisition less people would care. It’s just trendy and good for your hacker creds to oppose microsoft as people did in the 90s. No one is crying about AWS hosting all applications.
If it's true, I'm cancelling my paid account immediately. A monopolist tried and found guilty of monopolization shouldn't own the company where many of their future competitors have their private repositories, it's frankly rather disturbing they think it's a good idea.
If this is true, it is really sad news. Remembering what Microsoft did with Skype, turning it from one of the most usable communication platforms to a pile of unusable crap, I can't help but wonder if it's time to prepare a migration strategy right now.
What specific user-affecting changes would the new overlords make that suck for developers? I don't doubt that there are good answers to this. They could treat it like a cash cow and just start charging more for less, but I mean functional changes.
Of all the big players who could have acquired GitHub, I'm most glad that it's MSFT. Their open source initiatives of late have been fantastic, and they really get developers. Visual Studio is a 10/10 IDE. Congrats GH and co :)
If anyone could stay independent, it should have been them. If it weren't Microsoft but someone else, it would be almost the same to me. There are so much things they could do to improve the experience and make it more profitable.
Color me naive but it can't be that bad, maybe they will surprise the FOSS community by opensourcing the NT kernel. Satya has said it is a possibility. And he is probably the only CEO who has been friendly toward FOSS.
I’m sure they paid a good chunk of change but this looks like more of a soft landing than an acqusition. Even the language: “Microsoft agreed to acquire” dampens the enthusiasm. I wonder how this worked out for investors.
I wonder what this will mean for VSTS? That has it's own public/private git repositories. Though they're more 'enterprise integrated ci/cd' than github's 'portfolio'
I don't think the big loss here is GitHub-the-software, but this short sweet period in time where everyone, from Microsoft to Apple, had their source code on the same platform. I doubt that e.g. Swift would have moved to GitHub if it had already been owned by Microsoft.
Agreed. Having GitHub be the place for OSS code has definitely been beneficial and convenient. That being said, I don't feel like it would be the end of the world if some of the projects moved to competing platforms.
If is true, this is one of the saddest news I've heard in the last 5 years. Please Github don't allow this. Look of what crap Skype became to be... look at what crap LinkedIn became to be...
I really like Microsoft, but this is a TERRIBLE idea for GitHub. Some rich bastard needs buy GitHub and then make it community owned. Why is GitHub a for-profit? It should be considered a utility.
Interesting that you say this. If the price was 3x what it was (for both individuals and organizations), I feel both parties would still find it valuable enough.
I am so happy to see this moving forward. Microsoft will provide the proper management to drive innovation again in GH. Start by creating a replacement for the astronomically priced Travis
Used to seeing these kind of reactions on HN. Saw this during FB React licensing issue. Angry Engineers moving to Vue or whatever was non-react, only to move back to usual in few weeks.
I surely become tired of becoming the product for someone else's overly inflated bottom line after having an option to feel it is "safe" to be a part of a community...
Microsoft got me using IDE's it was a nice cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good .... likely they will turn it into shit like everything else.
I wonder if instead Apple had acquired GH and today morning introduce laptops with 32 GB RAM, discreet GPU and fully tinkerable laptops for geeks to recapture losing mindshare.
Microsoft had codeplex which was older than github. They are probably going to spend 4 or 5 billion buying Github. They most likely write down the value a few years later.
So a lot of people mention GitLab as an alternative. Would anyone with experience with that platform care to chime in and list some pros & cons compared to Github?
I like that is also has CI/CD and other features, and that you can host it yourself (also for free). I do keep hearing about database issues on their hosted version though.
In general: haven't had problems with it, am cheaper than hosted GitHub, cheaper and works better than (self-)hosted Atlassian software.
GitLab appears to be the default choice for migration for many people... I wonder though if this might prompt some folks to go old-skool and move back to SourceForge?
I'm hoping this puts the times of people with political agendas stearing the GitHub message well behind us. They weren't really neutral anymore when the CEO stepped asside and they got the business guy to take over...
I suspect MS is aware of the delicate situation in regards to alienation the user base. If this goes through I expect them to address this directly and with perhaps some creativity.
As a bonus Microsoft did some great work scaling git for the Windows codebase. That and other great engineering efforts making there way into GitHub could be great for the community.
I also think that Microsoft is very aware of this situation. They should already work on the communication part of this. And if true that maybe Nat Friedman will take over, they will handle it the right way. He has shipped his Mono team and the later Xamarin stack through four companies with success and stability for the product and the team.
Good. I don't understand the hundreds of comments invested in a company that provides one of the most fungible services around, with the weakest features and no profitability. The only other option for them was dying a slow death on the public markets if they did an IPO.
There are dozens of git hosting companies, including GitLab, BitBucket, Microsoft's own VSTS, repos by all the major clouds, and many others. Microsoft has every incentive to not screw this up but even if they did, so what? Nothing happens. Switch to something else and you're all set.
I wonder as well. If linkedin is any indication, Microsoft hasn’t affected their engineering culture really at all yet. In fact linkedin still routinely poaches Microsoft engineers and used slack and google drive and bluejeans instead of skype. If anything linkedin has gone on a massive hiring spree on Microsoft’s dime.
I'm not one to praise Microsoft without reason - I've worked the last 2 decades with their tech.
However, I don't see this as a negative thing. Provided they don't trash it like most of their acquisitions - and bear in mind they sort of depend on github themselves.
I feel this will prevent github from going like sourceforge now that someone with deep pockets can support it.
They have a lot of PR to lose if they screw this one up. Generally, migration is a only few git commands away.
sourceforge, github...these platforms have their moments but are almost always superseded by something else that is more of the moment and useful.I can't see this msft move, which has been in the works for what feels like years, will help github to stay in the position it's been in for the last 3 years or so...
The chinese government tried to force Github to censor shadowsocks and the NY times repository. But back then it would have to block the whole site with other resourceful content.
My guess is that when Github is with Microsoft, the communist party in China has far more leverage as Microsoft has to follow Chinese laws, e.g., for selling Windows (even a special government-version), and bc China is an important market. I hope I'm wrong.
Microsoft built its business by selling software products. If they had meddled with Fortune 500 companies running their business-critical information on top of Windows, Microsoft wouldn't be here now. There are situations to be wary of MS, but I don't think this is one.
In Europe there are real worries about state-driven industrial espionage.
We shouldn't be worried that our developers coding habits will get connected with linked-in and fed into the surveillance state (which MS is big part of)?
Microsoft is not gonna give a fuck about your shitty little repos or anyones for that matter. What makes you think they are gonna put time and effort into mining people's code?
A shitty free browser developers still have to deal with today because enterprises refuse to fix their garbage in-house software..I'm not bitter at all.
Petitions don't pay bills; GitHub is bleeding money. The solution is not signatures, but for developers to start paying for all the free hosting GitHub has given them. The open-source community itself is strapped for cash, so this is an excellent time for all the users of that open-source software (especially companies) to start chipping in for hosting and development costs. However, the cynical side of me says that ain't going to happen. :/
That was my original idea but if the deal is already closed it is too late. I've been paying for years even though I never needed it only to support Github's amazing work. And now this :/
I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Someone explain the extreme feeling
of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
There is not a single Microsoft product/tool/service I like. Including the ones they aquired. So I expect them to turn GitHub into something I don't like too.
Everyone says on here that VSCode is way faster than Atom but I've found the opposite every time I've tried, Atom opens faster and feels slicker when editing, especially multiline. I'm also not a fan of the VS UI and its icon.
What does Github have to do with free software? It's a closed-source, non-free SaaS. Free software repos can (mostly) relocate to any other hoster as they wish.
Microsoft has a history of taking the open source philosophy out of their products. Github is one of the few large, commercially successful platforms that have not only embraced, but built their entire platform around those fundamental values.
It's not a surprise we feel unease, and to hope that Microsoft is actually going in a direction that aligns with those values, instead of simply twisting them for it's own continued success - that's being a bit naive.
We'll all see what happens, but honestly, I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
There are plenty of examples that stick to the core philosophy of open source software and open ideas, but there are rarely examples that manage to become extremely successful and maintain that success without drowning in the confusion created through their own influence.
> I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
An example that comes to mind is Wikipedia. Maybe the lesson here is that if you fear this happening, don't come to rely on services that are not setup as non-profits.
I think it's a balance. Non-profits have their own problems, individuals aren't fiscally organized and instead, have their incentives tied directly to the service. These incentives are philosophical ideals, therefore, not invariant (continuously being used and tested against the system they exist in), therefore, not equivalent (unified) across all participating minds. So there can be confusion there as well. Competition due to ego can cloud clarity, and this impedes the finding and actualizing simple solutions.
Same problems still in a for profit enterprise, just shifted across whatever the base values are. Life will never be perfect.
What a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do things?
Millions of developers are shooting for the moon, while of course only few succeed, but VCs are laughing all the way to the bank because they spread their risks.
Again: So? I think people focus too much on the "VCs are getting rich" part while overlooking "the world is creating thousands of things that wouldn't otherwise exist" part.
If you imagine what the world would be like without any incentive to create, it would be a very different place.
There's nothing wrong with it per se, except the image of "becoming wealthy like a king" isn't realistic, and the ones profiting from this image are the VCs.
The GitHub founders likely did quite well. They were completely bootstrapped until they took a $100M Series A from a16z in 2012 (5 years after founding), and then took a $250M Series B valuing them at $2B from a16z, Sequoia, etc. in 2015. Figure that they gave up 12.5% in the Series B and 30% in the Series A with a 1x liquidation preference, and that they sold for $4-5B to Microsoft (it's unlikely the VCs would allow a sale that didn't at least double valuation since 2015). The three founders then split ~60% of the roughly $5B, for a cool billion dollars each.
Do you mean that Github shareholders will benefit from users that are hosting their projects on Github? Isn't "content is king" true for all platforms?
Because Microsoft wrecks almost everything it touches lately, including its own sacred-cow products like Windows itself, in an effort to force it to serve the company’s interests over those of its (paying!) customers?
Xamarin has improved, they've improved how git handles large repos, typescript is extremely stable...
I mean, on the consumer end they're definitely kind of failing, with the notable exception of minecraft being supported far more than any other game. Seems more like people are still stuck in the Ballmer state of mind - even Windows itself had to practically perform a 180 thanks to Ballmer's obsession with low powered tablets.
100% disagree there. microsoft has a bunch of amazing software -- vscode, visual studio, azure cloud is actually quite good, sqlserver actually runs on linux (and it's a good db!).
microsoft under satya is a great company and doesn't even compare to the ballmer days.
>microsoft under satya is a great company and doesn't even compare to the ballmer days.
I think everyone here would agree with that assessment. But ultimately Microsoft is not a neutral party, and this news will cause a massive fracture in the open source community. This is the death of what GitHub was.
And yet, pure open-source / community initiatives don't seem to have the strong centralized control that appears to be needed to make good, user-focused software. Alterantives?
(I wonder if projects that reach a certain size shouldn't basically be nationalized. Private enterprise is great at innovating, not so good at maintaining w/o slipping into bullshit exploitation / ruining what was good in the first place. Obviously you'd have to be careful to do this in a way that still left enough of a payoff to not discourage new private enterprises.)
Do they really get more wealthy than the greatest kings who ever lived in history? I can name a few Roman emperors (kings all but in name, ironic as I'm being pedantic) who had a whole lot more money, respective of their peers and the times. Same with a lot of European monarchs, historically and in the present day.
Well, the difference is the users had and have the choice which kingdom, if any, to inhabit or build. If Github goes the way of Microsoft something of value will be lost, namely the relatively open - as far as any centralised resource can be open - culture of a non-affiliated source repository. The actual functionality which Github offers is by no means unique and can be achieved in many different ways.
To be honest I don't think Github, or any other centralised resource, is the way to go. Now that Github may fall on the list of locations to host your projects it is worth thinking about alternatives to this centralised system. Self-hosted gogs, gitea or gitlab is probably the easiest option right now, I've had a gogs/gitea instance running for a few years which mirrors my activities at Github and can be used as a substitute at short notice. These mirrors are not complete though, I currently do not mirror the issue tracker nor the wiki. I guess I better start doing this as well to really have a turn-key Github alternative for when the time comes for us to part ways.
Today, there is far more connection between contribution to society and personal wealth than in the past. If you have good ideas about how to make this connection stronger, share them in a blog, research paper, book, talk. If you have nothing to contribute, then don't complain and enjoy the improvements that happened over the past centuries.
I've been giving the concept of distributed ownership some thought. None of it's concrete and I certainly don't currently possess the wealth of knowledge or experience necessary to make it work or form it into something less abstract.
At anyrate the thoughts are along the lines of distributing shares of a company either eveningly to everyone or depending on how much an individual contributes will be returned with some increase in shares. Anyone participating in any form of company is at least immediately given some share. For example if you helped produce something that the company sells you're given some ownership. However additionally shares of ownership can be attained by directly buying the product that has been produced.
Idealisticly the goal is a company, or companies, where every one benefits from the interactions/transactions and not a small number of individuals that have direct incentives to consolidate more.
I was using gitlab anyway. But it's significant that Microsoft is taking another step towards destroying open source and the community around it (while making it look like they are embracing it, of course).
Wait a minute. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so it has prime access to recruitment. It now also owns GitHub, where it can run anything they want to find the best programmers. I don’t know what Microsoft plans to do, but those are good wats to find all kinds of talent.
I wonder now that Microsoft controls LinkedIn and Github what kind of synergies can form between the two to better serve recruiters looking for software developers.
It just seems odd that a company that threatens to sue companies for using Linux, unless they pay their patent licensing extortion royalties, may control GitHub.
Good! Getting rid of Atom for Visual Studio Code should make things a lot better (and allow them to free up some staff). And if they eliminate they head of "community" that makes public repository owners have to tiptoe around any sensitive snowflake's sensibilities, that will fix most of the remaining problems.
I am a [full-time open source developer](https://github.com/ahmadawais) working as a core developer of WordPress contributed to every single major version for the last couple of years.
I am also well versed in JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem and have a deep interest in DevOps, Cloud, and the new serverless tech. I care very deeply about Developer Experience and most of my open source work is related to dev-tooling.
Now that you know this about me, it's easier for you understand why I am writing this post, and maybe why I think my opinion matters. Below is a copy-paste from the Twitter thread that I created on this topic:
1️⃣ @Microsoft is about to acquire @GitHub. A lot of folks are skeptical. But I have a different view. Many of you know I am building a course on VSCode.pro for that, I've seen firsthand, how 🆚@Code repo is one of the best #OpenSource repos out there
2️⃣— Once I created a GitHub issue at 🆚@Code repo for markdown and I was impressed by how vscodebot auto-assigned @MattBierner (who works on Markdown of VSCode) to the issue and then @tonybrix from MarkedJS helped me out. It was best GitHub automation WITH results ever!
3️⃣— Don't "@" me coz I know about @Microsoft's history with #OpenSource. I am a full-time open sourcerer and I can't sit here quiet instead of supporting what looks like the new @Microsoft — @SatyaNadella's moving the company from @Windows dependant to in-house @Linux dev
4️⃣— Every other day I find/meet people working at @Microsoft using Linux/Mac based devices — even bought by the company for them. Guess what? 1,000 MSFT Employees pushing open source code on GitHub. This is a BIG 🆕 change. Taking it lightly in 2018 would be tomfoolery.
5️⃣— I've been most inspired by teams behind 🆚@Code (@auchenberg ) and @Azure — I think that @JeffSand has built an incredible team of @AzureAdvocates folks like @ashleymcnamara @sarah_edo @jawache @burkeholland @simona_cotin @_clarkio @John_Papa @holtbt @film_girl @TommyLee
6️⃣—I'm a big fan of "Dev Experience" (DX) that's why I pay $200 for a font I use in 🆚Code & have built s of #OpenSource dev-tooling github.com/ahmadawais—Teams at @Azure are doing a lot to make DX better for the cloud → @AzureFunctions + @Code integration is impressive!
7️⃣— GitHub's been struggling to find a new CEO for a year. What if?
It's my primary code hosting company. It's helped me go full-time open source with the support from awesome dev community/companies. Safe to say that @GitHub has made #OpenSource better
8️⃣— @Microsoft has done a lot for #OpenSource in the last 4 years with @SatyaNadella.
🆚 @Code's love.
@Linux Subsystem on @Windows.
Draft.sh for @kubernetesio didn't have a Windows version and still offers @MacHomebrew as the go-to way of installing it!
9️⃣—@GitHub is not exactly a cash-cow. @Microsoft has put money where their mouth is — out of 1.5 Million organizations on GitHub MSFT has most GitHub contributors to its repos, it's the biggest company with over 1000 employees contributing code to GitHub →proof of good faith!
— I think @Microsoft is changing for good. The intent here's to connect with developers and not offend them by disrupting a good company. MSFT won't change a lot but this acquisition might make GitHub a lot better. Also, MSFT will jump into ROR. It's high time for #OpenSource.
What are your thoughts on this whole thing?!
Peace! ️
Can the old CEO be sued for 'breach of trust'?
At least they must have to give prior notice before any of our sensitive data (trusted to github) falls into the hands of MS (untrustworthy)?
Guys and girls, I really don’t get this. It’s 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content?
Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.)
Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon’s store, Google’s search engine, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s social network ... don’t you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers?
Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we’re upset. Oh no, what’s the new owner going to do?
With a network that no one controls, we wouldn’t worry about that.
We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It’s a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to “the cloud” ie some servers owned by someone else.
Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.
We don't use Github to host Git repos alone. We use it as a tool for collaboration - to track bugs, host some documentation, do code reviews, track workflow and so on. And, most of all, we use it for discoverability. It's easy to find things on Github.
> Why did we stop at DNS?
A lot of companies host their domain servers on AWS because Route 53 makes it convenient.
A real successor to Github would allow all the extras around Git, but in a federated way. We'd deploy a server for our projects, different addresses for our repos and all members of this federation would agree on an API and share data with each other.
It's doable, but, unless it's easier than other options, it won't fly.
Reading through replies to this and especially about "the death of free software" makes me ask, "Was software ever free?"
From my perspective, any software that has made it to production use ended up supported by some large for-profit corporation.
Java<-Oracle
Linux<-multiple distro's with paid-for enterprise support
And IBM and other companies hiring developers to work on "free software".
Without the support of corporations, most software just dies.
So Github is losing money and can't figure out a model to become profitable. They could start charging for all repositories. They could go public, but then they're beholden to some small set of investment groups.
Microsoft, under Nadella, has been about as pro-open source as you can get.
The only change I expect from Microsoft re: Github is that they will very likely bake DevOps into their tools (Code/Visual Studio) and their cloud (Azure) so that developers can be more productive.
The illusion of free software has always been just that. An illusion.
This isn't even about free software... github is closed. It's SaaS. It just became a defacto standard interface, a sort of facebook for git. git is free and will stay that way.
I spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear.
With all that said, things have changed a lot over at GitHub over the past 2-3 years, so I can't say I'm all that surprised that this was the outcome. Restructures, scandals, and some crazy comments over the few years has led me to believe that GitHub probably isn't the same company that the development community embraced. For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft mess with GitHub then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years, it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service (i.e. GitLab).
This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
Yeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.
Can't speak for everyone but that won't happen personally until they start respecting privacy.
And my update settings.
I understand the need for security, but updates shouldn't break my computer either.
I think it is a long term goal.
"Old" schoolers have and will likely have for ever that evil 90s vision of MS. However it is changing a bit in that people too. They still may be evil, but at least the look more modern (opensource, new technology, using/contributing to Linux etc).
However the important thing (for MS) here is new people. If you come into the scene now or in a few years you only get to know the "new" masked MS image. Yes, they are still doing dubious stuff but is all under the hoods, buried by layers of hype, cloud, linux and fireworks.
Rebranding some big stablished company with that kind of history is something that takes a long long time.
Or even more old school that remembers the original MS that put BASIC on my Commodore.
Or bundling GW-BASIC with MS-DOS. That might be the reason I got into software.
Remember QBASIC.EXE, too?
Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of it's heart, they want something of value from it. What is that, and is it compatible with what made Github useful?
I won't stick around to find out, my time is too valuable and the competition is strong. For me, Github doesn't really have any distinctive features except that is was the biggest, and so most convenient. I suspect most people and organizations will be in the same situation.
>I suspect most people and organizations will be in the same situation.
I suspect the vast majority of people won't be bothered to move their stuff unless MS pulls a Skype.
I think that's right, and I don't think it will be a problem to move since Git is distributed by nature.
>Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of its heart, they want something of value from it. What is that
If they bundle the pro version of github with office 365 - just like with Teams, the 365 bundle becomes even more compelling for organizations.
And hopefully kill SharePoint?
We can only hope.
> Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of it's heart, they want something of value from it. What is that, and is it compatible with what made Github useful?
What is that? I think its ownership of the huge amount of computer programs (and not to mention the associated metadata of authors and their professional network). The editor and the client provide a continuous stream of samples ready to be drawn from the world.
I believe its in the owners best interest to keep this golden goose of continuously increasing source of computer programs in good health.
The thing that I didn’t understand at first was why did MS gave up codehub (Google had Code, FB never pushed phabricator that hard) only to acquire GitHub later?
Is that really the case, obtaining to own code? Depending on the Terms of Use, did GitHub receive a special, separate license that allows them to make use of code under separate permissions of what's otherwise libre-freely licensed or proprietary/closed/private? If so, wouldn't the acquisition allow to exit existing contracts? Sure, the metadata is exclusively on GitHub and moving will result in a loss of stars, followers, contacts, etc.
Maybe they want to finally put a bullet through the skull of the zombie that is Team Foundation Server.
Not at all, they are supporting the model of TFS corporate deployments and generic (but embraced and extended) Git clients.
There's an increased chance of Microsoft starting to behave like they own Git, and trying to make it a part of their "platform" with proprietary extensions like their Git filesystem hack.
Companies that use github, both as teams on the main website and with the enterprise version, pay 9 dollars per month per user. If Microsoft can get it's enterprise customers to trust the product enough to pay that sort of a price this will be a very profitable acquisition for Microsoft. If anything, I don't think github would've ever been able to acquire enterprise customers had microsoft not made this acquisition.
> you only get to know
You know wikipedia exists. Or people like me who will harp on on how privacy standards that are somehow acceptable now would be something inconceivable in 90's.
As one of those "old schoolers" I don't view MS as any less evil than they used to be.
But they aren't the only 800 pound gorilla in the room - open source, google, apple, amazon have all taken a big chunk out of what MS was.
What prevents MS (or any one who acquires GitHub) from pulling a sourceforge? Well nothing prevents them, and I can't name someone who wouldn't want to monetize it -- that latter fact is going to be what kills the product/project.
This is a furphy. GitHub is already monetized -- it is highly profitable, selling fee-paying plans to corporations. MS's major customer is corporations. Of course they're not going to do a SourceForge because this is a traditional acquisition where the purchaser has recognised that GitHub's current monetization ties in well with their existing business model, and they gain value in the acquisition from it building their reputation with business as the go-to place for corporate cloud. They have no interest in damaging the corporate value they gain by fiddling with the consumer and open source side.
I think I should have said sourceforge/skype - I don't think MS is going to detonate GitHub the same way sourceforge went.
But I also don't have a lot of confidence in them doing well by the community either... it could be as "harmless" as a move to "Microsoft logins" that kills it off.
Sources for highly profitable ? According to the linked article they were not and lost >60M in 2016. They could probably still optimise to make a profit, but seems like they were struggling a bit with making money.
Hmm, looks like that's changed. Back in 2012, they were reported as "profitable nearly the entire way" in their history. https://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-...
and more recently there've been articles on their revenues hitting 100m. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run...
but it sounds like their costs have outgrown their earnings.
I stand corrected.
One click deploy to Azure and AD integration is very compelling for businesses as well.
Yes, all I'm saying is: _some_ people; and only a _little bit_.
Some old schoolers did not have any issue using Windows and related Microsoft tech.
The Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem does not have a problem with how Google respects privacy.
Please, don't talk as you are spokesperson for anyone but yourself.
Stop bashing Google without any proofs. They do respect privacy and don't share data you elect not to. In fact, their take out tool was released in 2009 or something, way before GRPR made others do it too.
So they don't share data with the government? Tell us more.
Uhhhh your doing this backwards. Prove that google is protecting my privacy not the other way around.
The default state for people needs to be DISTRUST of corporations (and governments) that they do not have a direct financial relationship with (when you aren't giving them cash).
I don't think that much of this holds water but it exists and the picture isn't one of "were standing up to defend your privacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...
I believe that Google's theory is what mine would be in similar circumstances, why sell the data to a business when you can use that data to build a competing business.
That's part of the problem: we have no idea what Google is doing with our data, so we have no idea if they are respecting privacy - assuming there is even a definition for such a thing.
The only answer is to simply gather less data, or be more explicit about when you do. And Google isn't great at either.
In what ways is Google but explicit about what they collect?
One example that comes to mind is that Google Maps has started telling me when I've been somewhere before, like a restaurant. It's very useful information, but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way. Can advertisers target me based on this location history? I'm not sure. Does it affect how results are ordered on Maps? Probably. But I don't know.
Relatedly, Maps shows me when a location is likely to be popular vs unpopular. I have to assume that's based on the location history of everyone using Maps - seeing how long they spend in a place and at what time. But what percentage of Maps users are aware their information is being used in this way? I doubt the number is high.
Also, now I come to think of it, Google search itself. It shows different results sometimes when I'm logged in vs logged out, but it's not clear why. And I don't recall ever being asked if I wanted, say, my browsing history to influence future search results. It just does. Somehow.
> but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way.
Weird, I'm pretty sure with my new Android phone, upon booting it up for the first time, I had to opt in to location services and a little popup explained exactly what it was doing.
I'm on Android 8.0 with location services and history turned off. I'm also logged out from all Google services except Play (I want to update apps.) It works perfectly.
>It's very useful information, but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way.
You did.
It sounds like you want something different than transparency about when information is collected, but instead you want transparency about what information is used to give you a specific feature.
For example, you opted into location history a long time ago (likely), should Google again ask for your permission every time they add a new feature that takes advantage of your location history information? (assuming said features don't affect the privacy of your data)
That seems like a very strange onus.
Actually, if you’re in the EU then GDPR makes that explicit: consent for the use of collected data must be tied to granular functionality. You can’t now collect data and use it for indiscriminate purposes.
I think (keyword think) you have that a bit mixed up. additional functionality using the same data is fine. But you cannot collect data without a specific use case. "Future features" might be a legit use, but then people should be able to opt out.
I don’t believe you’re right (though I’m welcome to be proved wrong). Assuming the consent basis, GDPR requires that consent needs to be for a given set of data and a defined processing model. You can’t process the same data in a different way without getting new consent, and you can’t collect data indiscriminately. So saying “additional functionality using the same data is fine” is true if and only if your original consent was wide enough to include that additional processing, but consent needs to be “granular” at the same time. Tbh it’s all a bit up in the air at the moment until some case law happens. Also obviously if you’re using a different basis then none of this applies.
> instead you want transparency about what information is used to give you a specific feature
Not OP, but - sure, why not? It would be really nice to have that. Especially if it wasn't the meaningless kind of transparency, "we use your location data as well as past interests to provide this feature", but something concrete - "we use regular GPS/cellular/wifi location updates to determine places where you've stayed for longer and correlate that with your recent searches in Google, as well as visits to venue sites that use Google Analytics".
(Personally, I'd be fine with such concrete announcements popping up the first time you use the app after a new feature was added, and if a feature is something one might want to not use, I'd be happy with it being opt-out. Just don't surprise people with application suddenly doing new things by itself, without much prior warning.)
>Not OP, but - sure, why not?
Because if we lived in that reality, you'd end up complaining about how Google was sending you unwanted marketing emails about new features multiple times per week, and I'd be arguing that they were emails discussing new privacy updates.
Not to say that no one would want that, but as someone who does, by way of working at Google, more or less get emails similar to the technical descriptions of newly released features you want, very few of them are relevant to me.
> you'd end up complaining about how Google was sending you unwanted marketing emails about new features multiple times per week
Maybe they'd combat the perception I have of Google - that they just do UI redesign every couple of months, which more often than not lose useful features than add anything of value.
You say you get lots of those e-mails internally; I'd love to know where Google is actually adding all those features - because it definitely doesn't seem to be Inbox, or GMail, or Google Maps.
> Relatedly, Maps shows me when a location is likely to be popular vs unpopular. I have to assume that's based on the location history of everyone using Maps
This is based on the location history of everyone using Android. Its the Google Location Services requests going back and forth all the time that tells them where people go.
It's insidious how Google has redefined "privacy" from "what's yours is yours" to "what's yours is ours, as long as we don't share it."
Microsoft is moving fast along the same path.
I'm not convinced they are -- the models are entirely different. Google receives the vast bulk of its revenue from advertising based on mining what they know about you. Microsoft receives the vast bulk of its funding from companies using its systems and paying them to run them well.
MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.
[Replying to sibling comment]
> MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.
They're trying pretty damn hard with Windows 10, which by default collects pretty much every keystroke you make. That data in turn gets shared and sold to advertisers - see MS's own privacy page: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement
There is a YouTube update that's been pending on my Android for 1-1/2 years. I haven't agreed to it because YouTube decided that it needs access to my contacts. IMO, if Google needs to know who I communicate with in order to watch videos, they don't respect my privacy at all.
On the other hand, a Google product (YouTube) is asking for permission to access information already available to another Google product (Android). If Google had no respect for your privacy, they wouldn't even ask.
Respect for privacy is a continuum and Google isn't on either extreme. I'd even go so far as to say that different parts of Google have different stances on privacy. People who try to make them into a monolith with a single binary stance on the issue are lacking nuance.
I don't think it's an issue that deserves nuance because it's not unreasonable that they should behave as a monolith with regard to privacy. It should be a top-down corporate policy.
I stopped using official Youtube long ago. I recommend SkyTube and NewPipe. They are awesome!
What a spectacular example of faulty generalization and false dilemma.
> The Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem does not have a problem with how Google respects privacy.
I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
But then again “the SV hipster development ecosystem”. Who is that exactly?
> But then again “the SV hipster development ecosystem”. Who is that exactly?
That was a reference made by user tomato.
But if you prefer my point of view, those that fill up SV coffees or live in other parts of the globe trying to replicate the SV culture and are naive to the point to give Apple and Google human attributes, while believing they are any different from a profit oriented corporation.
The ggp claim was re: the open source community.
Debian developer here, speaking only for myself: while Debian doesn't like proprietary software any more than before, the change we've seen from MS has been dramatic.
MS now ships Debian for Azure through a collaboration with Debian and credativ, and also in the Windows Store running through the Windows Subsystem for Linux. They've hosted a Debian cloud sprint, sponsored DebConf, and engaged in good-faith substantive ways that don't only benefit their platforms. Of course, they care most about their platforms, but that's fine.
In the other direction, Debian does ship fully open source software (what Debian would call DFSG-free) with Microsoft as author.
Debian isn't playing favorites, of course, and is similarly working with Amazon and Google (among other partners of all sizes) in areas of shared interest.
Yes, that’s great but doesn’t excuse their surveillance tech and recent consumer hostile behaviors as described over these threads.
I agree. Doesn't excuse it at all, but may be of more relevance than that in predicting how they'll handle GitHub.
Thanks to the work of projects like Debian, for some 20 years now people have the right and ability to run a computer in freedom, and there's little point for Microsoft to compete on the consumer/Desktop OS sector any more (compare to mobile, web, Apple, etc.). What do you think what they're competing over now? Imagine if Azure integration starts to appear in FLOSS, because it's an online/hosting service and the "Open Source" guys don't care much about SaaSS and don't favor the AGPL.
The main Azure integration in Debian is supporting use of Debian in and with Azure, just like they're supporting every other environment in which one might want to run the Universal Operating System (that's Debian's longstanding tagline). Including physical ones, with no plans to change that.
I agree it's important to be able to Debian in the environment of your choice. That includes Azure as well as self-hosted and small-hosting-company options.
This is in regards to one Microsoft product: Windows. Reality is, they're not focused on Windows anymore, but I do agree it would be nice if they took away all that telemetry nonsense and allowed people to have better control over updates. To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.
I'm still hoping Microsoft see the light on all the telemetry and forced update nonsense before the Windows 7 cut-off in a couple of years. The trouble is, I can't see it happening as long as Nadella is at the top, and I can't see that changing as long as the big enterprise customers who aren't subject to that kind of nonsense are propping up the share price.
> in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.
A few years ago I turned on my windows machine to see the dreaded upgrade. Being in a rush I went to another machine and the exact thing happened. I blew my top and replaced all windows with Ubuntu. I would have preferred Macs but I couldn't afford the Apple tax (high prices and not working on my existing HW).
> Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0.
That's nice for you, but if you use any non-open software or software not covered by the package repo then there's a fairly good chance you'll see downtime after an upgrade of your linux distro.
If you're talking about a major distro upgrade, say Jessie (8) to Stretch (9) in the Debian case, then yes, there's a fairly good chance at least some minor things will break, but that's a much bigger deal and presumably not something you'd ever expect to happen automatically.
To be clear, I was talking specifically about the unattended-upgrades package, which is primarily for automatic installation of things like security fixes. In my experience, this has been rock solid: it's never broken a distro package, nor any dependency that non-distro software we had installed was relying on.
Windows was completed with Windows 7. Everything after that is just churn. Consider for a minute that Windows doesn't need to be redone every 3 years anymore.
I’d concur from a user interface perspective it really peaked at Windows 7.
Windows 10 is almost usable with a keyboard and mouse. It’s much better than 8 was.
It feels good, if you can set your own low-points, to redefine when you will peak next.
If you're on latest Ubuntu (or derivatives) since 16.04 at least you've been getting security track upgrades (through the default config of unattenfed-upgrades) forced on you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what you get default out of the box with Windows as well?
how are they forced? you can turn them off
can't with Windows 10
You can, it just isn't as simple as a menu option. Considering Linux's habit of requiring config file changes and obscure command line invocations to perform configuration it is hardly fair to judge in this case.
On Ubuntu you can install it on every computer in your house and still pay zero dollars and zero cents. LTS releases let you use the same core packages for the next 5 years.
Your OS can be configured to pull updates not only from official Canonical sources or those blessed by them but also any sources you please including your own. You can put up your own packages and use them just for you or promote them to all of planet earth. If you don't like a particular package or a particular version you can not update just that package although you might be unable to update others if they require the new package in question.
If you feel strongly about it you can fork and support old versions indefinately or take the package in your own direction.
Further you can even fork the entire ecosystem and not even call it Ubuntu anymore.
On Windows home you can't even decide not to update. You have to pay $99 per computer for that privilege and might have to pay again if you update say the motherboard. The windows store is only for apps that MS designates at its privilege and supposing you agree to give MS almost 1/3 of your revenue for a privilege it can revoke at its descretion at any time.
You can't fork Edge if you don't like how it works and if you could you wouldn't have the right to distribute such let alone create an alternative store/source usable by all for people to install/update such a creation.
You have pretty much misunderstood the entire point of open source software.
Best of all, feel entitled to voice the opinion about what developers should focus on, being angry when they don't, without paying anything back.
>You have pretty much misunderstood the entire point of open source software.
What? That's a stretch of a comment from saying both the Ubuntu and Windows behaviour of updates is the same out of the box.
How software is managed is fundamental to the ecosystem.
Indeed. I'm always a little surprised at how readily developers recommend VS Code, given the lack of privacy guarantees and Microsoft's recent track record on both telemetry and quietly overriding past user settings with updates.
This was absolutely my first thought too. I've developed for work over the last year on Windows. It's dark patterns to suck up data and ads now. There are ads on the login screen!
MS heavily respects privacy and mandates that every employee go through privacy and GDPR training every year. And remember, MS’s business is not rooted in exploiting user data to sell them ads. Replacing “they” in your sentence with Google or Facebook would be much more appropriate.
Uninformed post of the year, with a side order of whataboutism, congrats. Who said i trust G or FB?
I think that this is real "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" and they know it will bring them good times.
The web dev part, anyway. Microsoft still has a long hill to climb to be in the graces of nearly any kind of native dev.
While partially true, there are a ton of small and medium size companies out there that are just starting to rewrite their legacy stacks, with many choosing .Net with MSSQL. Worst part is, these shops keep turning up at my local LinuxFest yearly, looking for new dev talent.
What mirror universe do you live in where Windows doesn't have a huge amount of 3rd party native applications?
Microsoft had their chance, and they worked hard to show us what they're made of. We learned the lesson, and they don't get another chance.
I doubt it, I think they are doing it because they’ve seen more and more of their enterprise migrate from TFS to git.
This is my opinion, but I think Microsoft tech is fairly terrible for open source and smaller projects, because .Net is a lot of complicated tooling you’ll never use outside of enterprise. At the same time they are rapidly becoming the “only” enterprise option rather quickly, and with that comes the question of why you’d chose AWS over Azure.
Sure visual studio has a free version, Windows now does Linux and .net Core is open but I see those moves as a way to make c# replace JAVA in schools not as a way to make open source love Microsoft.
Game development has used C# for quite a while, and with official support for Mono, and adoption of .NET in Unity [0], it's a viable choice. The language is constantly improving [1], and is doing so in the open, on GitHub no less [2]!
From what I saw as an intern at Microsoft a while back, there's way more of an engineering-led culture at Microsoft than people give it credit for, and to the extent there's a push to promote their own language and tooling, it's largely driven by a wholehearted belief (and challenge) that Microsoft tools are the right ones for the job, with initiatives being chosen to fulfill and expand that promise. And, more recently, what I hear is that Nadella's initiatives are genuinely promoting that ethos across the entire leadership structure. In that context, they make a lot of sense as a partner for Github.
[0] https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/28/updated-scripting-runti...
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csh...
[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vbteam/2015/01/10/were-movi...
No, they're totally reactive to everything. Why re-invent the wheel with NuGet if there's already software package repositories in the libre-free world for decades, but then not make it the main software distribution mechanism while allowing independent package signing and repository providers (to prevent Microsoft from gatekeeping the distribution channel), effectively eliminating viruses and the attached antivirus industry from the Windows OS? Why give out Internet Explorer gratis, but not the OS if it's that important for human communication? Why does Notepad only in 2018 get support for GNU/Linux line break \n and not in the many, many years before? Why can't Word export a valid XHTML file from a document in 2018, but VS never fails to generate valid XML? There are just thousands of examples like this that speak against the company having to do with engineering, it's more a law firm in my opinion. Let's not forget that it was their idea to claim that software is copyrightable in the same way like a novel is, with laws that are from the print era, and it made them an unbelievable amount of money and prevented the software field to enter a truly digital future. Humanity just lost several decades of progress because of this, and now GitHub, one of the few major innovations in the field, will go down the drain, too.
I don't think Microsoft even uses the same deck of cards as FOSS people.
This was largely my thought behind the move.
Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby, I can't see them wanting to switch things up from a tech perspective. GitHub is stable, and it's tech stack is capable of staying up despite some major DDoS attacks.
If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams, and to finally resolve the issues that stop Windows from being a first-class citizen in the Ruby world. If they can do this through both Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux then I think they'll be on to a winner. It's a capture of a much-loved service, and an opportunity to bring a mature set of tools into their domain.
I work for Microsoft, we run systems that are not built on MS technologies. There’s absolutely no push for migration. In my opinion, no-one will pressure GitHub to change their stack, it would be a suicide.
Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion.
I was looking at draft.sh from the Azure open source team and the current (very early) version literally only works on Mac. The only install method listed is Homebrew.
Actually we have release assets for Mac, Windows, and Linux with support for 64-bit and ARM architectures. Someone from the community added Chocolatey support not too long ago. :)
Disclaimer: I am one of the core maintainers of Draft.
Oh, nice! Please update your docs. Releasing code is worthless if no one knows how to get it.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm currently going through the docs and re-vamping them as we speak in https://github.com/Azure/draft/pull/770. For now https://github.com/Azure/draft/blob/master/docs/quickstart.m... is the canonical list of options to install Draft.
Awesome thanks. Would you recommend WSL for my dockering on Win 10 or stick to Powershell.
Do what tickles your fancy.
Aside from Wunderlist, who was acquired and running on AWS, and had to switch to Azure and rewrite a bunch of their code to become ToDo.
The scale of products you're talking about are vastly different.
Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft".
> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft"
Why is that? Why should people forget how evil MS was and still is?
> Why is that? Why should people forget how evil MS was and still is?
I'm not asking for that, but making wild baseless predictions of how the service will go to shitter or how suddenly all private code will be ripped off and "I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!" is not part of a healthy discussion.
I do have some privacy concerns but they're no less than when Github was not owned by an enterprise software company; If anything I'd be more concerned about privacy if it were Google or Facebook making this acquisition.
People base their expectations on past performance. And for MS it hasn’t been stellar. But there is no need for speculation; we will wait and see.
The problem is deeper than that though. Unless you were developing an Editor or a Git hosting service, you were not in direct competition with GitHub. Suddenly a lot of startups will find their private code hosted by a direct competitor. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I was them.
The same people also host their deployment with some of these corporations, who doesn't use either of AWS, GCP or Azure? Do you also have the same concern that a direct competitor possibly has access to your deployed code, API keys and is also in direct control of your production environment?
Not that because it happens, it is nice; but at-least at this point the source code access concern is more of a conspiracy theory if anything.
Yes, major corporations have moved off of AWS for precisely this reason. (edit to clarify: They moved out of concern about a competitor hosting & having too much knowledge about their business.)
I'm not personally concerned but some big companies definitely are https://www.retaildive.com/news/report-target-opts-out-of-am...
Exactly. GitHub Enterprise under MS rule would be an epic conflict of interest for many customers who currently use it because MS could/would compete with them.
While it's not a complete 1-1 mapping, I keep thinking of Stac Electronics disk compression lawsuit against MS when it comes to handling source code:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
Which makes see the wisdom of Gnome choosing Gitlab.
Gnome is open source though so Microsoft wouldn't need to buy the hosting provider to read it's source.
To be honest, even with regards to private repos, I can't see Microsoft reading the source code because that would be a massive law case waiting to happen. What I'm more concerned about is Microsoft trying to integrate more of their own suite into Github. I'm also concerned about the future of Atom; which I specifically chose over VSC because it wasn't managed by Microsoft.
If you have issues with that, then only self-hosting can save you.
I already self-host personal projects but that is only part of the story since I cannot (and should not) dictate what solutions other people use. A pretty significant proportion of open source projects I have contributed to have been Github hosted so even if I don't use it for personal projects I still will need to use it if I want to continue to contribute to those other projects.
Do you have examples of Microsoft acquiring technology that was beloved and embraced by it's community and making it better?
MGS did right by Bungie/Halo circa XBox; though Halo hadn't yet been released, and it's initial fanbase were all Marathon fans.
Xamarin, Minecraft. They are as capable of the best as of the worst.
Minecraft was going in the toilet slowly far before Microsoft acquired them, but the changes they made have not been for the better in my opinion. Xamarin was plainly bad before acquisition, and as far as I've been able to discern this hasn't changed.
it's still bad.
I'm not really interested in being part of a "healthy discussion" with Microsoft. There are enough people telling Microsoft about all the things it is doing to make people dislike it.
It knows what these things are. If it wants to stop doing them, then I'm happy to use some of its products. Until then, I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!
> I'm not asking for that, but making wild baseless predictions of how the service will go to shitter or how suddenly all private code will be ripped off and "I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!" is not part of a healthy discussion.
But they're not baseless predictions, they're based on past information and it tells us it would be prudent to minimize reliance of Github sooner rather than later.
OK I'll avoid iterating the ludicrously long list of Microsoft acquisitions that immediately did go to shit. Often intentionally, like AutoRoute straight after purchase from Nextbase.
All I need do to have concern about this acquisition is look to last year. https://archive.codeplex.com/
How long before they get bored of github then? Codeplex wasn't as good or popular as github, but did seem to have many valid reasons for existence if you were Windows focused. So they killed it.
Codeplex died because GitHub won. There was little point in keeping Codeplex around especially after MS decided to move their open source stuff to where the developers were, i.e. GitHub.
> baseless
If the company that ships OS with preinstalled, hidden keyloggers (using that as a pars pro toto) acquires the platform I host my code on, that's not a basis on which to be concerned?
Are you referring to the issue where the crappily written driver had a keylogger to detect keyboard volume keys, etc, or something else?
If it's the first, that's not exactly Microsoft's fault, in the same way it's not exactly Mocrosoft's fault that if you buy a Dell it might come with McAfee preinstalled.
Although, it could be argued that if the driver was verified, perhaps they should extend their verified driver program to cover that instead of just crash protection. Then again, since the arguments here are centered around not trusting Microsoft with your source code, I can see why they may not require that...
No, I am talking about a literal keylogger actively installed on the OS. To their credit, after it surfaced they now provide a privacy option to "turn it off", but they still pretty much admit to spy on you every chance they get.
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10-speech-inking...
After what they did to Skype, such predictions are hardly baseless.
Because Microsoft was never that evil and they aren't evil today. It took me seeing the stuff Apple got away with the iPhone to see what a non-issue Microsoft 90s desktop hegemony was. The fear was overblown.
They were convicted of anti-competitive behavior, and that was after at least a decade of unprovable rumors and industry open-secret of anti-competitive behavior. How much more clear-cut of a case do you need?
More than 20 years ago; The entire leadership has changed since.
Also, not getting convicted isn’t a very high bar.
But the users from 20 years ago aren't dead yet. It's difficult to get a widespread bad reputation in business, but once it's obtained, it needs an incredible amount of repairing and good-doing to get rid of it again, and it's not that Microsoft is doing any of it with their recent pseudo-openness approach, they just realized that OS lock-in doesn't work any more and that they have to massively invest in cloud data/services lock-in and the race for AI, by giving their OS/VS away gratis, to prevent a world of Java and web developers and Apple after loosing the entire mobile sector. Looks like people will fall for that lock-in/dependency again because they don't understand digital, and Microsoft can buy their way out of their previously miserable situation. Wonder who paid for that, probably all the companies with Microsoft licenses because of lock-in and market dominance.
Evil is not a legal term though.
All large global corporations are constantly involved in legal battles, because that's how conflicts are resolved in our society. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose and are convicted. Quite often they settle before they are convicted. That's not the difference between good and evil.
Microsoft took the view that they could bundle IE with Windows and that they could license Windows to PC manufacturers on an exclusive basis. A US court decided that given their market share they were not allowed to do that.
Google is in a similar bundling conflict now with the European Union. So far Google has lost and they may or may not ultimately lose before the European Court of Justice. Or they may settle before it comes to that.
In 2015 Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe were caught trying to keep wages down by agreeing not to poach each others' employees. They paid $415 million to settle that case.
Please look up [Company Name] litigation on Wikipedia and you will find countless cases of large companies being convicted for something or settling this or that case.
Is any of this evil? That is a question everyone has to answer for themselves in each particular case, because "evil" is a moral term. The simple fact of losing a legal battle does not qualify as evil according to my moral compass.
Unsavory and untrustworthy then, if the E word is too strong.
I'm not interested in doing business with any company that has the track record of acquiring and killing as many products as they have. I've personally lost useful tools to them on multiple occasions and I don't use MS software for anything more than I'm forced to on provided hw for my employment.
My one Win10 laptop experience was enough to tell me that MS is still untrustworthy when it comes to forcing behavior on users.
If my work situation ever shifts enough to allow a Linux machine, I'll happily never look back.
Not being the worst of the bunch doesn't mean you're good.
Telemetry and ads in an OS you paid for, which supposedly targets the “Pro” market. That’s not evil?
> Why is that?
Because this isn't slashdot.
Don't forget how evil Github is!
I agree... GH is evil
The call is not to forget - I didn’t see that from the comment.
However knee jerk responses are today out of line with MSFTs behavior and actual ability.
Simply they are anti-objective and inefficient in discussing current reality.
Evil are the companies that pollute rivers, sponsor wars, have work conditions on borderline slavery, agree to work with dictatorship governments....
No. Software developers, doctors, post delivery personell, whatever, is supposed to do the best in their own field, and just because there are other sectors which are considerably worse doesn't mean that we should let ours ever fall to that level too. It's not difficult to see a dystopiant future in which software might help create the most horrible of all societies, and its reach could also be global.
Read-up on MS's ongoing Linux patent racket and you might change your tune.
I don't see how it relates to Github but sure, link me to someplace I can read up on it because a Google search of "Microsoft Linux patent racket" only led me to an obvious troll bait blog.
Microsoft milks Casio for using Linux: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/signs_deal_with_cas...
And there are many more companies they've sued for using Linux.
https://meshedinsights.com/2016/11/22/microsoft-linux-patent...
That was only 18 months ago at which time MS had harvested a cool $85 million form its Linux patent racket. God knows what the Linux Foundation were smoking when they accepted Microsoft's membership. Suse Linux is another victim of Microsoft's extortion. Worst is the patents remain unspecified, as far as I'm aware.
I don't want to sound dismissive but you've linked to a blog post from 2016, which in its entirety only mentions how much they make from the entire patent portfolio and a wild guess on how much they could be making from "Linux patent racket" and no other details on who they're pursuing or what the demands are/were.
> God knows what the Linux Foundation were smoking when they accepted Microsoft's membership
The Linux Foundation doesn't care about Linux. It's mostly a way for the CEO to get paid big sums, he uses a Mac on stage when talking about Linux. They sponsor a bunch of good projects and pay Linus and Greg, but they're not ideologically commuted to Linux, as long as MS pays the fees, in they go.
Can't reply to the child comment so replying here:
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/signs_deal_with_cas...
You just look at that shit. Look:
> We’re pleased to reach an agreement and to see continued recognition of the value of our patent portfolio, particularly as it relates to operating systems,
Nothing evil here, move along, lol. Fucking cockroaches. For a multi-billion OS giant you sure are afraid of something 'small' and produced by volunteers that gives users their freedom. What a pathetic display.
> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft"
OK, I respect the call for keeping an open mind. Always a good approach. But let's not forget all of the moves toward a friendlier Microsoft/Linux world looks suspiciously like "Embrace"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
I for one am willing to keep an open mind, but will be following these types of developments closely.
I hope to be proven wrong.
Then EVERY single other business of its size has a strategy that looks like "Embrace". The only difference is that Microsoft had a memo leak.
... which is exactly the problem. The issue is the tactic, not the company employing it. It’s just this company has a serious habit of employing those tactics, hence the distrust.
I'd like anyone in any business contemplating an Embrace, Extinguish strategy to know that it ends in people not trusting your company and being unwilling to work with your services.
I would like to know how much it is costing Microsoft to fix that damaged reputation so that other executives will know if they do this it will end up costing at least X amount.
Hmm... I would think that it will cost Microsoft a rethinking of their business strategy.
If their 'Embrace' looks like 'Yes we are compatible with...' and their 'Extend' like 'If you use our layer you can also do...' then people stay sceptical.
Instead their 'Embrace' should be 'How can we help you with your open source product?' and their 'Extend': 'Here are patches that fixes problems, improves performance and implement community wanted features.'
It seems companies like this always try to hold the door to 'Extinguish' open.
I really don't think reputational damage in this case came from adopting an embrace-and-extend strategy as such, but rather the monopolistic position they were in combined with specific tactics they used.
The Memo leak was just the tip of the iceberg. MS also lost multiple court cases about their anticompetitive behaviour (for example gov of US, Sun) in that era.
Did you forget the Extend, Extinguish parts of the strategy, or are you just paraphrasing EEE to make it sound somewhat ok?
Pretty sure he means that just seeing symptoms of Embrace is not enough to sound the alarm that it's going to be extended and extinguished.
After all, what's the point of building software, if it's never embraced, aka, used?
The typical implication of "Embrace" in these EEE uses is not 'figure out how to work in tandem with' but more 'how can we the amoeba surround and prepare to Extinguish this'.
Hence the justified caution and monitoring of a known extinguisher.
That might be the reason why many people dislike all businesses of Microsoft's size. I for one wouldn't be happy if Google or Amazon or Apple bought Github either.
I completely agree. The biggest issue here is that we are losing a neutral player as the top comment says. The tech world is that much more monopolistic without an independent GitHub.
> But let's not forget all of the moves toward a friendlier Microsoft/Linux world looks suspiciously like "Embrace"
“Embrace” is happening everywhere these days. Don’t sound the alarm until you see Extend.
Wsl is getting scarily close to Linux performance in benchmarks and improving fast. I don't see extend being too far away...
WSL has horrible horrible IO performance. It's really not going anywhere until they fix it, and the fix won't be easy
But they don't really need to fix it. Sure, it'd be nice, but they're targeting developer machines and utilities with WSL, not a server replacement of Linux. Nobody would buy a Windows license just to serve from LAMP stacks on WSL over Azure or something. Speed requirements for dev machines are a little less stringent, and as long as they are hitting better-than-Docker numbers, they will still be providing value.
Sidenote: looks like I/O performance is really not that bad in most cases already, and sometimes even faster than Linux distros like Ubuntu: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wsl-febr...
It runs on Windows and can interop with Windows applications, that's already an extension by itself.
Developers that exclusively use MS stack are very similar to those exclusive to Delphi. MS and Delphi stacks are very specific in nature and very different from everything else out there. Developers stepping out of those feel very uncomfortable and unfamiliar, thus wanting to stay in. Even though the Delphi stack is very obviously dying, the resistance is great, and many people stay on the sinking ship. MS stack is live and well which gives a viable incentive to never even look over the fence. That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way". Where does that put GH? How will it change, in what direction (to accommodate the MS stack)?
Delphi might be a small community compared to JVM or MS. Is Delphi dying?
I work in the M/Mumps space(healthcare), another small (almost invisible) but active community and it seems far from dying. I imagine Delphi is bigger.
I wonder how long the MS stack would last without the support of MS. Would the MS stack fare as well as the Ruby stack has without Microsoft’s massive investment in turning developers into sharecroppers? (Or salesforce, scala, unreal, php, erlang, etc.)
Personally, I wonder how ReactOS (www.reactos.org) will affect things when it finally gets to the point of being usable for general population end users.
Seems like a wild card entry, which could go any number of directions. :)
> That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way".
And unix developers complain endlessly about any dev environment that isn't identical to what they use. Powershell gets shit because it isn't bash/core-utils (even though it's better in just about every conceivable way), Windows API gets shit for not being posix (even though posix is a crappy API), etc.
How does this personally affect you such that you consider it your duty to disparage whole groups of developers for the choices that they make ?
Did it ever occur to you that people stick with certain environments because they make a lot of money using them ?
Your statement basically reads as "I can't believe that people/companies have the nerve to stick with a codebase that cost them thousands of dollars to create and has made them very successful over the last couple of decades..."
I am sure no one in the company has changed since that memo leaked in 1996...
What about the people who hate Apple just because `Apple`?
(or any other form of "brand envy" against other companies, for that matter.)
> What about the people who hate Apple just because `Apple`?
Yeah, sure. I'm totally on that but this isn't a thread about Apple, is it?
Blatant what-about-ism.
The funny thing is that Google is 20x as evil, and the fanboys still love them
Oh please, very few people actually like Google.
The name is burnt. They still are a company with business interests. While their interests might align today with the open source community this doesn't have to be so tomorrow and there is no resistance internally to burn these bridges they are building today.
I wasted many years using Windows, an OS that I gained nothing from using except memorizing UI patterns. This may be great for some, but I really developed as a computer person when I got OS X, which allowed me to use Unix without diving into Linux. The impact was huge. I still think sadly about the wasted years clicking around Windows.
Just the other day I was helping my mom with some C# code in VS, stepping through lines in the debugger. When I hit some library code I excpected to step into the library code, like in Java. Instead it force stepped over. Wouldn’t even let me see a decompile, like XCode shows you for code without available source. That’s microsoft for you. You get some binary libraries, docs that may or may not be crap, and Steve Balmer screaming “developers developers developers” while you bang your head trying to figure out some poorly documented library works. Microsoft relies on users’ ignorance, Stockholm syndrome, and the perception that Apple is more expensive. You get so much more from Apple, it’s incomparable.
That said this acquisition seems like a great fit and doesn’t trouble me at all. As much as I love it, GitHub is nothing special. Microsoft has little to ruin and a lot to improve. Seems like a solid vanity pickup for MSFT, and a good source of guiding vision for GH.
I really would love to see how XCode is able to display anything for binary Objective-C libraries, beyond pure Assembly.
If you want pure Assembly in binary libraries in C++ and C#, Visual Studio can also display them, one just needs to select the right options.
> I really would love to see how XCode is able to display anything for binary Objective-C libraries, beyond pure Assembly.
Indeed it only shows disassembly. I was frustrated that VS wouldn't even show me that. Others write that newer VS lets you enable the showing of assembly.
Anyway, I am spoiled by Java, where I can step into standard library code (which is in Java), can decompile to produce pretty nice Java source where the source is not available, and IntelliJ, which automatically downloads the source where it is publicly available. It's quite wonderful. But I am guessing you already know this, judging from your profile.
To me, not being beholden to documentation is an incredible freedom. The ability to just pop open the source to understand the tool you're working with is indispensable once you've experience that freedom. Microsoft developers don't have this ability, and having had it, it's hard to imagine being without.
You can see .NET bytecode since version .NET was in beta with ildasm, distributed with .NET SDK tooling.
ILSpy and Reflector are almost as old as .NET itself.
Visual Studio always had an Assembly view since version 1.0, and there is always WinDbg as alternative, including macro commands to dump .NET JIT information.
Sorry, but it looks like that you haven't properly explored Windows development.
Oh I definitely make no claim to having explored Windows development.
Only plus point you made for XCode was de compiled sources which is already available in vs. I think people like to rant about ms stuff.
Visual Studio 2017 15.6 shipped a new feature called "Navigate to Decompiled Sources" in March.
That is all down to your config. If you go to "Tools \ options" , then in that dialog, expand the "Debugging" node and select "General", you can "Enable .Net Framework source stepping", and you can also tweak the way the debugger handles external code with "Enable just my code" and "step over properties and operators". There's loads more - by default it is really paired down.
Haloween documents, and literally the twenty years they've been trying to destroy free software.
Not to mention . . :
https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505
Tl;dr, Microsoft ignored his license, attributed nothing, and copied his program directory-by-directory.
Fuck Microsoft. Trust them with email, not your software.
> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft".
To be fair, Microsoft need to stop doing stuff that makes people dislike them. Microsoft aggressively court developers who don't use their platforms, but if you are a Microsoft partner or worse, a mere Windows user, you don't always feel so loved.
Case in point: ads in Windows 10.
Are these only available in Home edition? I'm in pro edition and have ever seen any ads. I also use ClassicShell start menu so maybe that's why I never see it...
Ads are definitely present in Pro. Perhaps you're just not calling them ads. In the start menu you get "recommended apps", explorer pops up "recommendations" for OneDrive, and when you switch your default browser to Chrome it nags you that you should really give Edge a chance, to name a few things people are referring to when they talk about Windows 10 having ads.
Fortunately, there's free third party software that fix a lot of Microsoft's bullshit: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10.
Or you delete Cortana and completely break all of that bullshit. Though it has made it so a Windows 10 update will no longer apply, which is a frustrating side effect but one I am willing to live with.
They're present even in Enterprise versions. The worst part? Every time you upgrade you get all the garbage back: games, ads, etc.
I was stupid when testing W10 and didn't backup W7 so I was left with W10. My solution? Bought MBP's for my whole team, and buying more as we grow. I've been MS since ms-dos and walked thru all the versions since 95 (excluding Vista), but now I'm happy Apple guy. All it took was Win 10. :/ I'm kinda missing Win UI but OMG how much I hated W10...I felt so betreyed :(
Mod parent up. I bought a Surface Pro thinking I should give Windows 10 Pro a chance with WSL on it. Even the “Pro” version comes with bubble gum jam games on it, ads, spyware / telemetry and the like. No way of removing it. I wiped Windows 10 after a week and installed Ubuntu.
Off topic, but how is the experience with Ubuntu on the surface. I love the hardware and the pen of the surface pro, but Xubuntu has been my daily driver for a few years now, and I can't imagine going back to Windows.
My main requirement is for a good experience with the pen...
Pretty bad. I tried using Ubuntu on my Surface Laptop and gave up pretty much immediately. The problem is a lack of drivers. I couldn't get the keyboard working and the device would never "sleep", so I didn't even try seeing if a pen would work. The touchscreen was functional.
Not even a viable option.
Shame really since the techn isn't bad these days.
I actually was never anti-Microsoft but I must say that the aggressive, user-hostile moves they made with Windows 10 seriously irked me.
Well, you may love to forget, but a lot of us don't.
We didn't forget that our community was called a cancer (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...)
We didn't forget that microsoft is one of the biggest pattent troll in the world (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=... or http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/27/microsoft-has-received-five...).
We didn't forget than they litterally corrupted officials to capture markets (https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrawrage/2013/03/20/micro... and https://www.tomshardware.fr/articles/pots-de-vin-microsoft,1...)
We didn't forget monopolistic practices (https://www.networkworld.com/article/2221165/microsoft-subne... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...)
We didn't forget the lies (http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/2096/) and sabotage (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009051922175320).
We didn't forget they aided dictators (https://www.salon.com/2011/09/06/wikileaks_microsoft_tunisia) or destroyed products you bought remotly (http://sebsauvage.net/rhaa/?2010/01/06/13/21/41-microsoft-pe...).
We didn't forget they force updated Win10 and all the integrated ads and spywares, after a terrible Win8 while everybody was happy with win 7.
We didn't forget that microsoft killed rare, nokia, skype and that currently outlook is becomming less and less usable everyday.
So yeah, VSCode, Excel, TypeScript, the Xbox and C# are good products. So what ?
Unless you suddently fire everybody from MS, change their raison de vivre, and reboot them, they are still Microsoft.
Attitude like yours is why crooked politicians get reelected. Why big companies can mess up with consummers and get away with it.
People say that you can't change the world. That you can't do anything about what's wrong. They feel helpless.
I'd start with stopping this habit of giving a free pass to all the entities with a disrespectful background just because they got better on some points. Or because they have a better PR.
Because they do. Half of the links I had on them were cleaned off. They are green washing them, cm by cm. Until all that remains is that they were the good guys.
> We didn't forget that our community was called a cancer
This is disingenuous. He was referring to the licensing model of certain open-source projects, where the introduction of a single line of code coming from an open source project would require the whole of the Windows stack to be open-source, effectively "contaminating" the rest of the stack. To this day this is still a problem to many companies and legal department must carefully review the licensing of the libraries used by their devs.
Yeah, this is so disingenuous, Balmer had really no other words to use. This was totally appropriate, and as a FOSS lover and somebody that was able to make half of my carreer thanks to those licences, I should not be offended. No matter how much of my free time I spend on projects protected by said licence.
Espacially since the economical model of microsoft is to lock you in by using softwares and formats that call for getting the entire stack with it, hence infecting your business. But it's ok because they make you pay for it.
And I note that you choose the most important points of all my comment to focus on.
I'm glad some people still defend them. It's good honest people take care of those innocent little guys.
That's a choice that the developers choose to make to enforce their wishes. It's supposed to be embraced by a capitalistic system, i.e. they choose to serve only the customers who abide by their terms. Free market!
I don't think MS, whose OS infects every PC on store shelves has any place to complain.
Upvoted you for going through the effort to put these points so eloquently together :)
However, it's not forbidden for MS to change their ways and public image. There is no danger anymore of depending too much on MS tech today. And there's the tactical argument of "the enemy of your enemy" if you know what I mean; eg. these days it's all about about your attention and invading your privacy (and MS also has no clean hands here). But still MS is mostly a software company with a predictable pattern, unlike darker forces able to influence public opinion to a degree not seen before, while MS shilling and astroturfing is easily spotted and amateurish by comparison.
The things I'm more concerned about when it comes to GitHub I've already posted in another story:
They could change the terms of service and essentially drive certain types of projects away. They could limit access to older builds and versions to non-paying customers. They could limit access to verified/signed builds. They could reserve certain rights to your software such as they did with npmjs.com. They could run ads, offer IT staff skill matching and promotions, FizzBuzz-like services, or other LinkedIn integrations. They could come up with clever schemes for offering commercial licensing for open source. They could go after the enterprise package mirrors and policy checkers market Artifactory et al are serving. Not saying they'll be doing that (MS isn't stupid), but given MS is selling mainly to enterprises, there are many creative ways they could make money of it.
Overall, however, I'm not too worried. In fact, I think GitHub has become too much of a monopoly (though I have absolutely nothing against them at all), and I'm always for more choice.
> And there's the tactical argument of "the enemy of your enemy
I agree on this one. After all, IE is now in great shape because of the competition.
IE is abandoned, isn't it? Keep in mind that Microsoft bought Andreessens code from NCSA after Andreessen left to found Netscape, so Netscape was competing against a bad version of itself, made worse by Microsoft.
Edge is just a commercial IE alias. It's still IE, just like Firefox is still Firebird, a XUL based browser.
Hold on. GitHub has become too much of a monopoly? And this is somehow fixed by being acquired by Microsoft?
Yes because at least MS's competitors will take their code elsewhere, and F/OSS will hate to depend on MS services, no matter what.
Well, at least you're right about code moving away from GitHub - spreading the code around to multiple services can at least in theory make it more resilient to any one service failure / takeover.
Microsoft need to stop creating sub-par products.
Skype is absolute junk...takes me 15 mins to get a call working each time.
Microsoft Teams/Planner is junk too.
I understand things are changing, but it still feels like they have weak product managers who don't care about the quality and polish of their products.
People hate Microsoft for "being Microsoft" BECAUSE of what Microsoft is, does and has done.
I'm sure you will find most people who voice those opinions have their own reasons, based on history, to be distrustful of Microsoft and the way this acquisition will be handled.
They cant just ask for forgiveness after all that they have done.
Action speaks louder than words. I don't care about Open Soruces or Paid or Free. Bring me better products! Bring me better services. Proof it to me that they care.
They are obviously doing a lot of things right under Nadella. But asking many to not hating them after 4 years of good and 20 to 40 years of bad may be is a little too much to ask for. They will have to do a lot more to wins us back.
Dislike the word "hate". It is more people that have been in the industry for a long time know what Microsoft has been all about for a very long time.
But finally we have a new culture in software. Where big tech give away crazy amounts of IP. Google gave away Map/Reduce and K8s and TF and so many papers. FB has given away so much also.
We finally had a single and neutral site which everyone uses.
So things were just fantastic and then the old guard just can't resist and messes it up. Now the big tech companies will have to move to a new site and a single place is no more.
Looks like they will move to GitLab which will just become the new GitHub and ironically way down the road MS will probably have to move their code to GitLab if it becomes the new place.
There are many, many developers, most developers?, that do not use any MS developement technology. Now without them wanting it MS has injected themselves and will cause a hassle. Either moving your repo to GitLab or now having to go to multiple places to find things. Or confusion if the repo is on Github or Gitlab. It is not a huge hassle but a hassle that was not necessary.
That is the thing. The new leaders in the tech world are all about moving the ENTIRE industry forward. But MS move here has slowed the industry as people have new work to deal with it.
BTW, do hope we can put to rest that MS has changed. Clearly they have not. I never really thought it as company cultures rarely change. But here is the nice black and white proof.
As soon as SQL Server isn’t an inescapable trap for your data, my impression of Microsoft will improve on the developer side.
Right now the idea of doing things that every other major Relational DB can do, like hook directly to ElasticSearch or feed live data into an outside system is crippled. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a business decision that negatively impacts my codebase.
It’s very different when it’s a direct competitor, especially one you’re paying $ to every month. CEOs hate funding their competitors.
There is a large difference in complexity here though, and Wunderlist need extra coding for O365 integration so it wasn't just redevelopment purely for a platform shift.
GitHub more complex than todo-list-on-steroids app so a platform change would not make any real sense. MS today may still have some of its old habits but they do seem to have purged a lot of the "not invented here" problem that caused much embarrassment when the first attempts to migrate HotMail over to MS technologies failed. It also has pretty good integration with relevant MS tools (VS & VS.code, etc.).
I expect to see them moving the base infrastructure over to Azure, but non-MS technologies are well enough supported on the platform so that won't require any notable changes to the main codebase of the product itself (though perhaps some rework of the deployment processes to make them more optimal for their new target network?). These days they care a lot more about what runs on Azure than what is written using .Net and even what runs on Windows, and are comfortable releasing their own code using other tech (VS.code being based on Electron being the first example that springs to mind). They'd prefer you used an MS stack from top to bottom of course, but they are more than happy for projects to use other components in/on Azure.
It'll be interesting to see how they would position it alongside TFS, as there is a lot of overlap between the two products. My guess is they'd keep pushing TFS for people who are completely MS shops and GH for people with more varied stacks.
> VS.code being based on Electron
(self reply as it is too late to edit)
As pointed out in another location I post: Electron was created at GitHub and they are its primary maintainer which may have had some bearing on the decision, and a wider effect as it could touch many other projects. Though as Electron is open source there is always the fork option if the community doesn't like the direction MS go with it.
Looks like their will be two sets of automatic posts on news of any project that used Electron: those bemoaning its use because it is Electron and those bemoaning its use because MS!
Reminder: That didn't stop them from converting HoTMail over to NT/Exchange.
How many times did they try and publicly fail first? Two or three? Excellent validation for choosing FreeBSD and Apache for your 1999 startup. At least two announcements that it was "complete" turned out to be lies.
Years later the back end was still on FreeBSD and Solaris, but the front end was on Win 2000 using Windows Services for UNIX.
Twenty years ago!
It took them about 20 years to do so also.
Microsoft bought one of my favorite pieces of cloud software from a few years ago Deis[1]. With that they also got Helm[2] with the purchase. They are doing GREAT with Helm and are going in a different direction that looks super cool as they mothball Deis called Draft[3]. They are moving away from the OS company they used to be and betting heavily on cloud technologies and I think this Github purchase makes sense. Github has been stagnate for years. MS is embracing open source in a way they haven't before, and I think they are doing so in a way that is going to surprise people.
In NO way am I a Microsoft fan boy. I've been windows free going on a decade. I run Linux Mint and OSX as my primary desktop environments. Apple is burning me hard, the way the computing world is going to change in the next couple years, cluster technology is going to be at it's core and we are going to see some very different things grow out of it. I'm as shocked as anyone to see MS play nice with linux and especially contribute how they have to Kubernetes; which I think is the largest open source project in the world right now?
What if MS dumped resources into world class CI tools to go with Github? What if they made a Github open source module and would let you federate your content? I could see this being a really interesting thing. They could also screw us all, but under their current management I think they are getting ready to be competitive in an emergent environment that can't exist without open source.
[1] https://deis.com [2] https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/ [3] https://github.com/Azure/draft
> What if they made a Github open source module and would let you federate your content?
Wow, that's optimistic! I'd be happy if they just keep it neutral.
Fact is all the big vendors publish and collaborate on github, this purchase threatens that ecosystem. And we are more likely to see a message of private code hosting sites, than a solid federation system for source control.
I don't disagree with you on the threat to our ecosystem, but I think Github has been treading water for a while. I'm really excited to see Gitlab step up, especially with the traction they are getting from the diaspora, but I don't know that they will. There are a ton of reasons people won't take Gitlab seriously as a replacement right now. I hope they find a way to take their tools and this new attention and produce what we all really want.
I think at this exact moment, there is a really interesting space that can be filled by a FOSS Github alternative. I think a new player might be better equipped to offer it. Maybe someone can build something off of Keybase's[1] git services.
I am sad to see an independent voice go, but I don't think Github has been able to stay competitive and IMO this could be a good thing. That remains to be seen, but regardless of Gitlab's ability or what MS might do, I think there is a vacuum left that I'm hoping we can fill as a community and I'll put my effort and dollar behind whatever shows up to do it.
Someone should ask Linus what he thinks about git federation. Maybe he can save us from ourselves again.
[1] https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone
Helm was contributed to CNCF last week: https://landscape.cncf.io/cncf=hosted,graduated,incubating,s...
Draft (which started with Deis and is continuing with Azure) continues to get active development: https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=appli...
I don't know how I haven't seen CNCF before, but can you give me (and anyone else who might not know) a brief summary of what they do?
Their page makes it clear that I should know, but doesn't give me an obvious place to click to get a clue.
EDIT:
Found some markety things here.
https://www.cncf.io/
------
What is CNCF?
CNCF is an open source software foundation dedicated to making cloud native computing universal and sustainable. Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. Cloud native technologies enable software developers to build great products faster.
I'm the executive director of CNCF and would be happy to answer any follow-up questions. Here's a good overview deck:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BoxFeENJcINgHbKfygXp...
Oh! Well then, nice to meet you!
This deck looks very interesting, I don't mean to hijack this thread and make it an AMA, but I do have some questions for you.
- What does it mean to host my project with CNCF?
- Why was CNCF created?
- What do you consider the core services that CNCF offers?
- I have colleagues who work in the automotive industry, I know cluster technology and IoT are huge for them right now but also it's a strange place to operate. Since they have a small community compared to normal web services, what sort of value prop are you providing to them?
- Why should I look at CNCF for resources relating to my companies cloud services?
- Your company/product really does not appear to be geared towards developers, which I would think would be essential, can you show me a developer portal that tells me why I should depend on you for the information you appear to be aggregating?
Halfway down https://www.cncf.io/projects/ has the best overview of why you should host your project with CNCF and the services we provide.
In the automotive industry, I would recommend our sister organization, Automotive Grade Linux. https://www.automotivelinux.org/
The first question I asked was really important. I think y'all are selling snake oil. Your responses here confirm that for me.
I personally will be avoiding your organization like the plague.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFeVfwDvTyM
> Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby
And for that matter, GitLab as well :-)
Can you elaborate on what the Silicon Valley "hipster development ecosystem" is?
If it requires an explanation, don't explain.
To me, if it requires an explanation then an explanation would be best. I certainly don't care for explanations of things that don't require explanations.
Guess I'm not gonna ask why you created an account just to say that
There are several distinct developer ecosystems. Some people write C# and VB on .NET in Visual Studio on Windows machines for delivery to Windows Server enterprise networks. Some people write Java on Spring/J2EE in Eclipse for delivery to Java enterprise application servers. Some people write C++ in proprietary IDEs for delivery to proprietary embedded systems platforms. But the one I’m talking about is the one centered around Github, Kubernetes, Macs, and trendy open source tools like Go, Rust, React, etc. The “hipster” characterization is tongue in cheek. It would be insufficient to say “the developer ecosystem” because MS already has one of those, including its own VCS, Team Foundation Services.
Rust is an interesting one, because I think it bridges those last two - normally very separated - groups. Some of those who deliver software into embedded systems are excited about the possibility of a replacement to C++.
(disclaimer: am an embedded systems engineer and a Rust fanboy)
> Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating
Not sure what you mean here.
They've never specifically targeted non-Apple developers as a core constituency. It was mainly due to the fact that OSX was UNIX derived that the platform became popular at all.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221777 and marked it off-topic.
May I ask why? It seems germane to the rest of the thread speculating on what Microsoft might be doing with this acquisition.
Whoops, that was a mistake on my part. Sorry!
It's fixed now. Thanks for responding so politely.
> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux
Interix/SFU/SUA has always existed. WSL is just the latest iteration of it. And nobody uses it now just like nobody used it before
That's kind of a broad statement. I see a lot of people using WSL, I even think it has become part of the standard software kit for new hires within PlayStation Network. I know its widely used among the employees who opted for the Windows laptop over a MacBook. Anecdotal, of course, but I think you're downplaying the spread of its use.
I have lived and worked in SV for a decade, and still don't know a single "Silicon Valley hipster" developing with WSL or VS Code.
I do know the power of analytics and control over prominent backend systems, and the allure of being "gatekeeper" with the power to extract value from integrations.
> VS Code
you don't know anyone using vs code?
in all the circles I know, it's the new de-facto goto for text editing heavier than notepad.
I'm running it on Ubuntu and like it much better than pycharm for python development.
I think it got popular fast in the JS-heavy communities.
For sure! I've managed to get a good chunk of people I work/coauthor with to use it (and like it!), and I've observed an increasing number of my students using it as well (in classes on ML and numerical computing).
I used Sublime Text for the longest time; tried Atom but wasn't thrilled. After 2 days of using VS Code, I uninstalled Sublime Text. VS Code is an excellent tool.
It is a shame though, because Sublime Text was/Is a great editor, but it's really tough to out compete a dedicated team of paid developers.
No, I don't.
Vim, Sublime, Atom, Eclipse-based IDE...
Not once have I met anyone using VS code on any platform.
> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
I can tell you from experience that that will never, ever happen.
The most likely outcome is that GitHub will slowly but surely start to bleed open source projects to alternatives like GitLab. And GitHub will continue to live on, like LinkedIn and Skype before it, but it will lose mind share and will no longer be the epicenter of open source development.
Remember SourceForge? Yeah, that's right.
Linux subsystem for windows is garbage, it brings all the same issues with running a linux VM on windows with no more benefit than cygwin gave and who exactly is apple alienating? This sounds like opinion since apple profits are doing just fine and waking into any incubator will show you who the dominant player is. also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes
> Linux subsystem for windows is garbage, it brings all the same issues with running a linux VM on windows with no more benefit than cygwin gave
> also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes
This sounds like opinions ;)
It makes that Gitlab graph https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/forrester-ci-wave... even more interesting.
I also spent years working with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies. The reality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was still alive and well as late as 2011 when I mostly stopped dealing with them. Since that time they have definitely taken a new direction, with increasing adoption of Linux in particular, but I have trouble belieiving the corporate DNA has been so thoroughly overwritten in the last few years that this does not spell the imminent demise of Github as the broadly useful plarform that we know it as today.
This, I was trying to think of the right way to state this. Looks like I’ll be looking for alternatives.
> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Hmmm... Windows Subsystem for Linux... the 1998 Microsoft-vs-Linux report... hmmmm.
While I'm currently picturing a pacman trying to eat a dot a bit bigger than it expected, I do wonder what kind of hilarity Microsoft have planned for, presumably, 5-10 years from now (I'd presume they're in the Embrace/Extend period if my conspiracy theory is right).
[Small edit: currently at -1; interesting | Edit 2: Now at -4! Anybody care to actually comment? I'm interested in why people disagree!]
[Update since edit period has expired: back at -1 again - adding this because I think it's interesting, also first edit was after about 20min, 2nd edit was after an hour, this edit is after ~2h | Update 2 after ~1hr; parent is at 2, this is at 0]
In the interest of providing data, here is at least a single reply. Though I haven't voted, by my criteria your comment leans more to downvote than upvote. My reasons:
1. It adds little to nothing to the discussion. You raise two items with no commentary but "hmmmm", then offer a metaphor and an admitted conspiracy theory - neither of which you explain in depth nor draw interesting conclusions from.
2. There is inherent ridiculousness (almost to the point of trolling) in connecting a 20-year old report (1998) to a modern initiative, particularly considering the massive industry, technical, and organizational changes between those two events. Implying that one leads to another as part of a 30-year strategy to consume/extinguish Linux assumes a level of long-term planning and, frankly, managerial competency that is almost unheard of in today's public companies.
3. Assuming I can even understand your poorly constructed point, I still disagree with it (see #1 and #2) and, more importantly, think you fundamentally misunderstand the landscape in which Microsoft now competes. In a world increasingly accessed by mobile devices, MS has no mobile presence. In an OS landscape increasingly disintermediated by the browser, MS has little significant browser presence. They have oriented their entire organization around Azure (its biggest revenue growth area) and cross-platform applications deliverable in the browser and on 3rd party mobile OSes. They reorganized and, for the first time, no longer have a Windows division. Thinking they're in the middle of some Machiavellian scheme to take back an increasingly irrelevant OS dominance position by extinguishing Linux (and failing because Linux is too big?) completely misses the point that Linux's size wasn't the cause of Microsoft's inability to extinguish it, it was these other countervailing industry forces. And to imply that they've somehow failed also ignores the fact that MSFT's market capitalization has had a nearly identical growth to GOOG and AAPL over the past two years while they've made this transition.
As they say on Food Network, for those reasons we had to chop you.
3: I hugely appreciate you taking the time to reply. This is incredibly helpful, I now see the ridiculousness of my half-thought-through point.
2: The reason I connected current activity with long-ago activity was based on sentiments I read that Microsoft were still behaving in some of the ways they used to. But a 20 year stretch is kind of pushing it, particularly in the tech industry.
1: Fair point.
Thanks for the feedback.
Except now they have billion dollar data centers they need your servers on and don't care if you use their software as long as they turn a profit from the hosting. Bill G is probably kicking himself for not renting servers decades ago.
"Decades"? Bandwidth requirements and difficulty of virtualization essentially precluded enterprise cloud hosting much more than one decade ago. Virtualization was essentially impractical or mainframe only until Intel added VT-x. Two decades ago most Internet users were on AOL dialup. And anyways, Azure is #2 behind AWS, so it's not like they're doing badly.
EC2 was released over a decade ago. And Microsoft could’ve done it way easier than Amazon.
And it went out of beta not quite a decade ago (October 2008). Whether you count it 2003 or 2006 or 2008, however, I still wouldn't call it "decades" which is what I was objecting to.
“Decades” referred to how long MS has had the opportunity.
Microsoft is one of Linux Foundation biggest donors, which means they have leverage over them. They are invited to discuss new Linux developments, products, etc...
Is that bad? Do we not want Microsoft involved with Linux? They are the #2 cloud provider.
Seems like a conflict of interest to me.
A lot of the sponsors of the Linux Foundation have tried very hard to make sure that Linux's copyleft is not enforced. VMWare is one recent example. They exerted their influence by defunding the Software Freedon Conservancy. I consider this a net negative.
On the other hand, most Linux devs do not want to ever take anyone to court for copyleft violations. While I agree that it's very reasonable to almost never take anyone to court for a copyleft violation, it still needs to be a weapon of last resort.
The day Linux goes MIT/X11 is the day it's gone. Lord help us if they ever succeed.
Linux can't change its license without getting permission from the (tens of) thousands of people who contributed to it, or throwing out their code.
You don't need prayers to ensure you can continue to run your software. It's unrealistic Linux can ever change to a different license than GPL2. Note, however, that this hasn't stopped Linux from being used as giant spyware (Android) and being overtaken by a single entity (RedHat) slowly eroding it (Systemd, Docker).
If you're concerned, I'd recommend basing your software on POSIX and make it also run on the BSDs, rather than just Linux, and in particular avoiding Linuxisms such as Docker and Systemd which you'll find are poorly designed anyway.
Their "corporate DNA" was established when the desktop was supreme and they could steer the direction of the industry based on thier Windows dominance.
Times are different, mobile is more important, cloud hosting is a real thing and technology changes. They had to evolve or die. Saying you can't trust MS in 2018 based on the way the world was years ago is like saying that Netflix could only ship DVDs to people's houses, Amazon can't be trusted to do cloud hosting because they only sell books, and that a minor niche computer maker should never be trusted to sell phones.
Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.
“I can’t hurt you now, I have these handcuffs on” doesn’t mean you can full trust someone who hit you.
(All that aside, I have notice what does appear to be real cultural change at MS)
> Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.
Exactly. Unless all the leaders who flourished under the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" regime have been fired, that attitude is still in their blood. And especially with leadership roles, I doubt that those people didn't manage to adapt and stay employed, because those are exactly the type who can adapt to appear to play nice. Whether in sheep's clothing or any other animal, I'm sure there are plenty of wolves still at MicroSoft.
TBC, I am not MicroSoft is evil, or that everyone working there is. They do world-class CompSci research, and I am a very happy Visual Studio, VSC and TypeScript user. But it's a company with thousands of people, and I doubt that they have completely reformed.
I would be disheartened by any major software firm buying github. The temptation is simply too great for any company with interests in software development to leverage their control over the world's largest open-source community to advantage their own products and services.
If there's one thing which is predictable about corporate behavior, it is that they will act in their own best interest. Publicly traded companies are legally required to do so.
Also equating trust with product offerings is a false equivalency here: saying Amazon can't be trusted as a hosting provider because they were known as an online retailer is a lot different than saying Microsoft cannot be trusted because they have a long track-record of anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.
I guess it depends what side of Microsoft we get working with GitHub, whether it's the friendly outreach side alongside the .NET Foundation, or whether it's the internal software team that want to integrate GitHub into internal tooling and start moving their platform onto theirs.
My dream scenario is the former, where Microsoft provide leadership to a company that's still reeling from its own scandals, and use GitHub as a platform for promoting open-source, rather than as a way of mining their access to the open-source world to benefit their own tooling.
"Dream" is the right word here. The idea that a major software firm would buy the worlds largest repository of and community around open source software with the sole intention of "providing leadership" seems pretty unlikely.
It's along the same lines as saying an oil executive would make a good candidate as the EPA chief because they "understand pollution".
I completely agree with your comment. As much as I love Microsoft, this is a weird development.
It’s like if Google bought Mozilla and Firefox became just another Google browser.
Is it? I imagine VSS and their cloud source control offering (don’t remember the name) probably aren’t doing all that well in the face of GitHub.
They want to be a player in that game, so they’ll transition off they are old product which isn’t that popular onto a new one they purchased that has all the mind share.
As long as they don’t screw it up, and recent Microsoft seems to me like a company that won’t, it will benefit them. And perhaps it will benefit the user some to do have a company with deep pockets behind it.
Microsoft adopt git as their main source control, even in internal projects.
Makes sense they try to control the future of the tool they use in so meny projects.
Git != GitHub, fyi.
I want Mercurial and Subversion in GitHub.
Why not just use a service that supports them?
Use RhodeCode then - but it is a self-hosted solution.
Github don't control git --
> Torvalds turned over maintenance on 26 July 2005 to Junio Hamano, a major contributor to the project.[25] Hamano was responsible for the 1.0 release on 21 December 2005, and remains the project's maintainer.[26]
I'm guessing Torvalds still has a lot of control if push came to shove, so we can assume git is executively controlled by Torvalds and Hamano.
Github does own a vast share of the git-related developer mindshare tho, which is probably more valuable to Microsoft.
Not many people use git without Github though, whether it's Github proper or a local installation of Github Enterprise. It's pretty tough to do code reviews without it. There are tools out there to do it, but Github is the standard.
AFAIK, I don't think anyone seriously used VSS inside Microsoft, but heard that long time ago they forked perforce in customized way... A bit like google.
Yes, I used that internal Source Depot (based on Perforce I think, or at least something old and convoluted) when I worked on Windows Phone 7 back in 2010, it was not fun. There were a few teams within Microsoft at the time using the visual studio team system source control but I don’t believe it was common, as a lot of the error reporting (watson) had plug-ins for the proprietary Source Depot.
Why was it not fun? I had no trouble with sourcedepot when I was there.
I think git and decentralized source control are great, but I get a little suspicious of people saying tooling is "not fun" simply because it isn't their favorite or most familiar.
That’s fair, I’m probably being too harsh on it. It was my first job out of college so my first time interacting with professional-scale source control. I don’t remember specifically what I didn’t like about it, I think mostly that it was slow and a bit unintuitive, but I can’t say with any conviction that it was actually a bad system. I do remember there being a general sense on my team that people wanted to move off of it and onto something more modern, so perhaps I just internalized that.
Ugh, Perforce. That was painful. Perhaps it’s time to see what’s next in source control systems, ie bzr.
Hah, our team is a bit of split - half of us know perforce well, the other half git, then almost all other developers are perforce driven (game company with several studios).
I like it, and really love that they added web interface (review, overall view of changes, etc.).
P4 is very easy to get started, all you need is to learn several things, and tools underneath can easily be changed, learned to do this for you. Then it's easy to comprehend changes, since all CL's are monotonically increasing, so once gets perception when a CL is announced whether it affects him, or her, etc.
And the elephant in the room is the really, really huge files: psd, tiff, max, maya (ma/mb) models, fbx, zip, iso, exe installs, etc.
There are some peculiarities, like text files handling and conversion (e.g. \r\n <-> \n).
Then some useful (but controversial) features: locking (per extension), or manually per file.
Having all your projects from different teams in one place, but each team/project can customize a view to its own work (a bit opposite of what google is doing with their mono-repo, but unlike g4 there ain't option to sync only what you want, and have the rest off the network).
What isn't commonly known is that GitHub was never profitable and was getting closer and closer to insolvency every day.
Microsoft rescued them.
Any idea how they could possibly make GitHub profitable? It seems more likely that they want to attach the Microsoft name to GitHub to build up positive sentiment among the open source community. Something like keeping GitHub alive without wrecking it could cause some people to hate Microsoft a little bit less.
They will operate them as a loss leader to Azure.
This. They own where the code is lands, and will try to build the best, most streamlined CI system straight to profitable Azure deployments. Probably cheapest too, if they update agreements to get a slice of the deployment pie if people do want to deploy to AWS or GCE.
'Extinguish' might be right, but Amazon is the target here and holding off Google in second place. Other cloud providers will have to race to the bottom if they are not already there.
Last I checked, AWS is in first place by a wide margin, followed by Azure and then IBM in third. Google is trailing all of them at the moment.
How profitable is Visual Studio? Visual Studio Code?
Microsoft wants people to develop for Windows, because with no apps you have Windows Phone. If what you want to use runs on Windows, Windows is what you purchase (or in a few years probably subscribe to along with Office 365 and OneDrive). A lot of that subscription model already exists on the Enterprise side of Windows, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see it expand - "Windows as a Service" has been a topic of discussion for years now.
- It gives then 'streetcred' in the OSS communities using GitHub. This goodwill is valuable.
- It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office. All major players host code there, likely a lot of them in private repos too. Microsoft has a large trackrecord of 'me too' products (i.e. the ones released after the original from another company is successful) and corporate espionage isn't something that's just happening in the movies. This too could make things very profitable
- Developer relations across private repos could increase the value of linkedin profiles which in turn could make that more valuable.
But that's about what I could come up with. I seriously don't understand why one would spent $2B on github if it hosts your OSS stuff. Also, to make sure VSTS become more successful with an integration doesn't make sense to me: GH isn't the most profitable service out there and was losing money. Hell it might even go belly up sooner or later and VSTS would look to be a better alternative.
> It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.
That sounds incredibly unlikely if not borderline ridiculous.
>It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.
Allows logically, not legally though I'd expect.
I imagine, in my paranoia, the first thing MS will do is change the T&Cs.
I’m willing to believe this, but what’s it based on? It seems like they have so many customers. What’s the free/public-to-paid/private traffic that would have made them sustainable?
Source? I thought the story was that Github was profitable from day 1 in 2008?
How did they become unprofitable? Their expenses are servers and people. It seems that there are an enormous number of companies paying for private repos and that should more than cover their costs.
They were profitable in 2008, but by 2016 they were running at a loss.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is...
I'm guessing it was from corporate mismanagement, overbalooned salaries for initial employees, and probably hiring too quickly to meet demand.
And probably to some extent people treating it more and more as a free hosting platform for all types of content.
I put all my cooking recipes and links in a free repo yesterday, published with pages. History of changes, fast, reliable, mobile-friendly. Owns. PR me a recipe man!
The timing is suspect, because Google has been pushing Cloud Source Repositories as a private Git repository recently [1]. So, GitHub will most likely be part of Azure portfolio. Developers might be fickle, but they are fully locked into their respective cloud platforms in the recent years.
[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Cloud-Source-Re...
> For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms.
Maybe not now, but what about after the next reorganization or the next CEO? If it's no longer in MS' interests to keep a relationship with this audience somewhere down the road, why would they leave them alone?
This is the uncertainty people are afraid of.
For Github there was always uncertainty; if MS didn't take over, investors would've, or another (less capable) competitor (like I dunno, Yahoo?). I'm confident in MS keeping github running smoothly and moving forward.
Skype wasn't ruined because they attempted to merge it into their other platforms. Skype was just flat out ruined with bloat, horribly inefficient code, turning it into a spying tool and not listening to their vocal users. Everyone was rioting after every update and it just got worse. To add insult to injury the last major update they have tried turning it into Snapchat. Their incompetence knows no bounds. If you think the same middle managers that ruined Skype aren't there anymore, you don't know how big companies like Microsoft work.
The client was mismanaged, but forcing the backend onto their abysmal Lync stack did ruin reliability as well as privacy.
I wonder if pre-acquisition Skype was one of the hardest software the Windows team had to deal with. For example, at one point they used SYSENTER directly to make system calls!
Do you have a source for this? I enjoy reading about horrible software.
Source? Skype was always quite cross platform imho.
For SYSENTER: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1710
Another example: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=27
This is just what is public.
Of course they will mess with it. Just slowly so developers dont leave. This is Microsoft. Read up on their tactics. It works.
It's why I'm surprised at the timing, since GitHub has had its own issues over the past few years, with a founder and other staff members leaving over harassment, and some questionable comments coming from members of their new team. I've felt for a while that GitHub had peaked, and that we weren't far away from seeing it push towards breaking the product to satisfy investors that want a return.
With an acquisition, most of this becomes amplified, based on how Microsoft treat GitHub. IMO, leaving them alone to do their own thing could be just as bad as being too controlling. I'd like to see someone like Scott Hanselman, a well-liked developer in the development community be given the opportunity to sit in GitHub and to use Microsoft's resources to improve the open-source community.
Try https://kallithea-scm.org/ supporting not just git but also hg and svn.
Kallithea doesn't support SVN, only RhodeCode does which Kallithea forked. SVN support amongst many other security fixes and features were added at a later stage into RhodeCode.
On Kallithea activity and release is better than rhodecode and truly open source under software conservancy. Kallithea do support svn and it has moved on, with turbogears 2 support and now the theme is also modern based on bootstrap.
I created RhodeCode, and know for sure Kallithea does not support SVN.
- RhodeCode is based on newer and more modern than turgobears2 framework, called Pyramid.
- RhodeCode had 20 releases since 2017, Kallithea had two.
- RhodeCode fixed many security issues that Kallithea didn't, not to mention dozen of features that RhodeCode has but Kallithea doesn't, e.g pull requests updates, integrations framework
How is that a better activity and release?
It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
The whole world's demanding it. No one really knows how to do it efficiently, it seems.
It’s not just about efficiency, it’s about responsibility. I love decentralization when I can avoid dealing with BigCo, I hate it when I’m responsible for fighting spam, ensuring my services stay up, not getting hacked, and so on. All of these tasks are a requirement as soon as collaboration is in the picture.
You've got a point there. I'm just so sick of all this. The Internet's a great thing, but it just seems to be going downhill with corporate interests.
I disagree. The popularity of GitHub amongst the programming community means that ease of use / convenience is more important than the notion of “decentralization”. Otherwise, people would already be setting up their servers for hosting git repos.
That's really what I meant by efficiency. Ease of use increases that for businesses, that's the only reason they really care about ease of use of products they want to buy.
Good point. It's not too crazy to have people behind major open-source efforts get their own VPS's and run Phabricator or Gitlab. With a universal login akin to OAuth maybe it's doable.
That's insane, not only do developers and maintainers devote a huge part of their life to major open-source efforts, now they are expected to spend more time and money setting up, admining, and securing their own private servers? That's a great way to destroy Open Source projects. Very few people would be able/willing to put that much effort into it.
I could envision pre-configured vps images maintained in the open by volunteers to make it more practical. They could have unattended-upgrades configured for major patching and the community could help migrate between major LTS releases.
It isn't ideal but it might be doable at least for some projects. Maybe devops people want new ways to contribute to open source too!
Isn't Gitlab pretty much that already?
How is running a bit of infrastructure so lethal? Most of my libre projects aren't on Github, and running your own Git server isn't terribly difficult.
Running your own git server is far from impossible. But you have to take into account various items.
1) the cost of the server, you don't need a powerful one, a 5 or 10$ a month box is more than enough, but it constitute a barrier for some, not necessarily because they can't afford it, but because they don't think their projects is worth it.
2) You have to maintain it properly, applying security fixes, having backups and maybe some basic monitoring. It's not high and complex maintenance, but it's far from a fire and forget thing.
3) Contribution from external sources becomes harder, you generally don't have basic "fork" and PR buttons in the simpler hosting git options, and if you opt for something like gitlab or gogs, external contributors as to register in your instance.
4) Github is really convenient if you are searching for open source tools that does a specific task in a specific language. Having various self hosted git servers makes it harder to discover new tools.
I do run my own Gogs instance which mirrors my github repositories, it's not heavy maintenance, but it's not exactly nothing. And I'm pretty sure nobody, except bots, knows it exists.
Not sure if this is an age-gap or participation-gap here but that's EXACTLY what we did before Github came along. My foray into open source started in '99 and it wasn't until 2010? that we had good centralized alternatives to switch to. Hell, jQuery was on a hosted version of Trac until just recently. And yes, we spent time on it. A great deal more than "very few" did the same and were involved and passionate about it.
Why do you think open source is so much more accessible and popular today?
You're absolutely right! That's exactly what open source developers used to do. In some cases, still do.
Is it perhaps possible that there are non-trivial advantages to the ecosystem that's grown up around GitHub?
I know I've written and released code that would have stayed closed-source forever if I had to manage my own listserv, wiki, and CVS around it.
Right - and before VPSs, running a server for an open-source project often meant having to have real metal in a data centre somewhere, too!
Funny you say that, as 1999 was the year that SourceForge was launched.
Back in the day that was the centralised site that people used to host code, mailing-lists, issues, and etc.
Not all of us. I have been writing open source since approx. 1998, and I remember hosting my code on sourceforge, and announcing on freshmeat. There was also a few other central repositories, and some major projects having their own CVS and later Subversion repositories. Later came Google Code that I used too, circa 2004 or 2005. But I clearly remember people, myself included, looking for a code repository they could use for their source code.
I think the network effect is too great to ignore. I would guess the number of potential contributors you get just by using GitHub, where many people have an account and know the workflow/UI, is bigger than any other place.
5 years from now when GitLab is acquired by Google we'll have to migrate again.
At least Gitlab can be forked in case of disaster. You can't do it for Github.
Well you don't need to. You can use gitlab or gitea.
But how do you transport your issues and CI integration and deployment? The googlecode to github transport was already a desaster. Code is easy, it's the rest which has the value.
https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/#list-issues then reimport it with whatever your target system provides.
Edit your CI scripts. Your CI should not be dependent on Github to work, besides maybe pulling code from it. But then it's just a simple change.
Issue importing rarely works. It needs a lot of related changes all over, which cannot be automated.
I edit my CI scripts almost daily, until the workflow is acceptable. I try all the others constantly, but it's a headache and needs weeks of time until it works good enough. Github only hosts the results and releases, but still.
Just last week I spent again a full day to get the encrypted auth working for github deployment from some random new CI. My CI's do work together with connected hooks, e.g. if appveyor and travis passes, merge to master, then appveyor deploys the binaries to github, then the release is published, which sets a tag, which triggers travis to make distcheck and deploy to the very same release on github.
On github I have static pages with custom domain names for free. On github I can host releases and dailies for free. Someone needs to pay for it. Better a big company which backs this.
I'm a bit sceptical with Microsoft as I'm sceptical with Google. You can never trust PM's in big companies. But so far I give them the benefit of doubt, they clearly love github (unlike google which didn't love code.google), and we'll all see.
Which Gitlab? The software is less important than the ecosystem. Git is the major component, but Github/Gitlab are about usefully centralizing it. Gitlab is still a centralized service, even if there are N instances of centralization.
In other words, I don't know how much use it is to fork Gitlab if the community around it is dispersed. Git is already based around decentralization, and I don't see how running my own instance of Gitlab makes it any less disruptive when the most popular instance of Gitlab is disbanded.
Hmm, if there are N instances of centralization, that is still more decentralized than N=1 instances.
Or export you projects to someone else running GitLab. All the functionality to run a forge in GitLab is open source and export/import is open source as well.
Same can be said of Android, but most simply people don't.
Tremendous point.
> Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
People say this every time stuff like this happens, and yet people never learn :/.
> Talks about a decentralized environment
Keeps his tools related to Cydia closed-source...
What's the story with that?
Basically Cydia is an apt manager for jailbroken iOS devices and while Cydia itself is open-source, the tools required to get tweak injection (Mobile Substrate) are not, making Cydia itself useless for newer jailbreaks released. Making Cydia not only a monopoly but centralizing the tools required to make it useful at all.
Where is the Github on Blockchain project?
https://github.com/cryptix/git-remote-ipfs
Ha!
How long does it take to clone linux.git from there?
Better: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/igis && https://github.com/magik6k/git-remote-ipld
Git?
Why would a blockchain be necessary, (as opposed to a simpler distributed storage mechanism for git repos)?
If you want to have a main canonical state of the "maintained" repo, that is mutable, similar to what we currently have with Github, a blockchain would be one way to achieve that.
Usually you can sign your work in a cryptographically verifiable way https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work
Then you are still missing a way to discover what the "one canonical state" of a repository is. There could be hundreds of different signed branches and versions of the repository the maintainer worked on at one point, with most of them being abandoned work.
Let's ignore for a moment the utility of Github issues, etc. and focus on why Github repos are convenient just for the code.
- You find the repo either via link or some other discovery mechanism like Google
- You do a small sanity check to see if the repo is the one you actually wanted
- You clone the repo and start using it from the default branch that was set by the maintainer -> DONE
Achieving a similar flow is not possible if you just fling out signed commits into the world. Sure, there are also different ways on how you can publish the "one canonical state", but as soon as multiple maintainers and contributors get involved, a blockchain will look more and more like a fitting solution.
Not sure I understand - doesn't git provide all the functionality you need anyway?
http://oscoin.io/ a team in Berlin is working on it for some time.
https://github.com/axic/mango
This. As with so many things, laziness has driven developers to be using Github as single point of truth. And it is cringeworthy to see how few developers actually know what git is and that Github is just a company monetizing opensource software. About time everyone got a wakeup call.
To be fair, github provides a lot of value-add on top of plain git. Having UI for access control and integration with issue tracking and CI tools gives you a lot that you would not get out of the box with git.
That said, I have always been uneasy with one central player hosting a huge percentage of open source projects.
Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity.
The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been banging the centralization drum for a while. His take is the sheer scale of the internet imbues tremendous value to any centralized service that can organize it (e.g. what Google does for web pages or Facebook does for your friends).
If this is the case then the internet may end up more centralized than previous forms of media and communication. I hope that's wrong, but it seems to be happening right in front of us.
So that's how Stratechery is spelled! I have been listening to Exponent for a while and failed to find the site on Google.
How is it meant to be said aloud? I've always wondered.
"struh-TEK-uh-ree".
He created it to be “stra-tee-ka-ry” (after George W. Bush’s infamous ‘stragegery’) but no one ever pronounced it right. Over time, he admitted that “stra-tech-uh-ry” was better anyway because the site covers technology.
Hmm, of those, if I could specify "pick one of these 20 DNS resolvers at random for each query" I might...
Sorry, tangential thought, I agree with your main point, and the others are much tougher.
I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.
The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.
That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.
I saw someone post on Twitter saying they were tired of being their own sysadmin.
It's true - I could set up my own mail server, my own Git hosting etc etc, but why would I? I'd rather just pay Fastmail for email and GitHub for some private repos.
Decentralized =! inconvenience
Except that, 99% of the time, it does.
For the same reason that you don't opt for a dictator even though it is more convenient than democracy (until it isn't, at which point there is little you can do about it).
Also, you could also instead pay people to develop easier solutions for self-hosting. Or you could buy a service from a smaller hosting provider. There is more than the extremes of "google is email" and "I have to hand-carve my mail server".
So you are suggesting it is a moral obligation to choose a smaller provider, even if the largest provider is better?
Centralization happens because someone ends up doing it better than everyone else, and so everyone chooses to use that provider and they become the dominant force.
I get the need for diversity, but as an individual, I am going to choose the best provider, even if they are the biggest one.
> So you are suggesting it is a moral obligation to choose a smaller provider, even if the largest provider is better?
Maybe, but the world really is too complex to break it down to such a simple question, it obviously is a tradeoff with many more factors to consider.
> Centralization happens because someone ends up doing it better than everyone else, and so everyone chooses to use that provider and they become the dominant force.
Well, but does it? I mean, no doubt such cases do exist, sure, but if you really look into how companies do become dominant, that is only one of many factors, and sometimes not even a necessary one.
> I get the need for diversity, but as an individual, I am going to choose the best provider, even if they are the biggest one.
Well, but how do you evaluate what "the best provider" is?
You might be comparing functionality, say. Or price. Or speed. Or any other property of the product as you could now choose to use it. And obviously all of those are important things to consider.
But my suggestion isn't that you should follow some abstract moral teaching because some ideology says that this is the right way, and the only right way. My point is that it may even be in our very own interest to choose a solution that is inferior in terms of current functionality/price/speed/whatever because there are long-term costs attached to the superior solution that actually make it more expensive, all things considered, than using the inferior solution now. So, arguably, the currently technically inferior option with a lower total cost would actually the better solution.
To maybe make it more practical, but without any claim to being realistic, the numbers are obviously just made up: Let's assume that using Gmail saves you 10 minutes every day vs. using Thunderbird. Now, Gmail is privately owned, so if everyone chose to use Gmail, they would effectively have the monopoly over email. At that point, they have every incentive to add proprietary functionality for the sole purpose of making interoperability difficult. Which could prevent a new competitor from entering the market what would invent a new email workflow that would save you a further 10 minutes every day. Now, does choosing Gmail actually save you time overall? And is Gmail the better product if using Thunderbird now would lead to you being able to save 20 minutes a days a few years down the road?
This isn't about some sort of diversity for diversity's sake, this is about which of those options actually is in our very own long-term interest, and monopolies have a strong tendency to be very much not in the interest of the customer.
So, really, if anything, I would suggest that there is a moral obligation to watch out for people/organizations accumulating too much power and to prevent them from obtaining it if the long-term damage that that concentration of power can do is worse than the short-term benefits obtained from using their offerings.
> Well, but how do you evaluate what "the best provider" is?
Well, in the case of GH vs. GL. Existence for one (GH actually existed before GL and was usable since the start), not having to self-host anything for second, everyone using it for third.
> this is about which of those options actually is in our very own long-term interest
Based on your own example, if I have previously used TB for a year and then migrate to the new product that saves me twenty minutes the sum is ten minutes saved and a lot of nerves lost due to slowness before.
If I had used gmail during that time it's going to take the same amount of time I've already used it for the benefit to zero out, if I kept using it until TB became good and then migrate I've only won.
As an user I already get a lot of bad UX, I do not want more voluntarily.
> if I kept using it until TB became good and then migrate I've only won.
You are assuming that you have that option. Once a monopoly is established, you don't have that option anymore. Also, while you support one solution, you decrease the chances of other solutions succeeding. If you pay licence fees to Microsoft instead of buying Redhat boxes, that has an impact on whether Redhat is better a year from now.
> So you are suggesting it is a moral obligation to choose a smaller provider, even if the largest provider is better?
Not moral but, I’ve noticed that things all seems to be tied to a pendulum that swings back a forth. Pushing in the opposite direction is required to attempt a balance.
Why is the larger one better? i use email mainly over IMAP and can't see the better in using Gmail. Yes, you should prefer smaller email provider. We live in the cyberpunk world now, corporations are the ones with power.
Have you tried mailcow? I find it strikes a pretty good balance between running your own mailserver while not getting overwhelmed with details.
It runs in containers and provides a webserver, webmail, caldav, spam filter, updater... I have made an ansible role that will back up to a Borg repository every hour as well as restoring the latest backup upon installation if you need inspiration: https://galaxy.ansible.com/coaxial/mailcow/
If you use your own domain name, you can set mailcow to sync with your Gmail account so you have all your emails in mailcow and then pull the plug on Gmail without losing anything. I find it runs pretty well for me on a server with only 2gb of ram.
If you are on Windows, the equivalent is smartermail. For a fee it also supports ActiveSync, which simplifies client configuration and gives pseudo-push.
I'm my own sysadmin (for personal email, small HTTP server, an OpenVPN and a few other minor services for personal use) and while it did take me a non-negligible amount of time to get things running smoothly it now only requires a few minutes of attention every other week to apply security updates and make sure my backups are running smoothly. In exchange for that I have total control over my data and basically unlimited customization potential. I'm definitely not planning on stopping that.
I do use Github regularly however, but it's because of the "social network" aspect. If you want to interact with many open source projects it has to be on github nowadays. The network effect is strong.
I want to make that switch, but am rather intimidated by my inexperience in that domain. Are there any guides or tutorials you've used that you'd recommend?
Not a single tutorial comes to mind but you generally find a wealth of resources and tutorials online about setting up anything you might need.
Always start by setting up a strict firewall and then whitelist cautiously anything you need as you set up the rest. Don't bother with SELinux. Be very careful with your Postfix (or if you're masochistic, sendmail) config as it's rather (needlessly IMHO) intricate and it's easy to end up with a configuration that appears to work but is extremely broken. In particular if you end up configuring an open relay by mistake spammers are going to have a lot of fun with your server but you'll end up blacklisted everywhere.
My "stack" is nginx for web, postfix + dovecot + spamassassin for email (+ roundcube when I wanted a webmail). Postfix was by far the trickiest to configure, although if you find a good tutorial online and can spare a couple of hours to understand how it all works it's not too bad.
I have similar setup but use Exim instead of Postfix. And I am still glad I host my own services. Yes, it took time but it will work as I want it forever. Only lazy people prefer ready-made cloud services - yes, it's convenient - but it's more costly, you lose control over your data and they are constantly redesigning and reinventing something. You never know when they sell the business or increase prices, ban or limit you.
Congratulations, you can configure your own mail server. You're already one in a million. Out of that group, maybe one in a hundred can do it nearly as securely as one of the big services. This is the reason why people use the big centralised services, and also the reason smaller ones don't survive: email is ridiculously over-complicated. You won't convince anyone it isn't by explaining that you managed to DIY in under a week.
Fortunately, rolling your own git isn't nearly as hard, and the percentage of people who could run a node compared to total users is larger. Hell, every person using git also has a fully-functional, secure and standard self-hosting stack already installed. Getting a GitHub-like web interface is similarly easy. This fundamentally reduces the risk of centralising, which conversely means that people don't have any qualms about using GitHub, since they can leave at any time. (Less true of issues, PRs, community, but hey.)
In either case, centralising has large benefits: one for handling complexity, one for giving you a community.
When you want decentralisation, it's because you don't want a single entity controlling what the ecosystem becomes. The circumstances where this is true are typically big utility-like things, where we care more about guaranteeing that water and electricity exist than the top end of providers' profits. Email is like this. You would never build your own power station, just like these days it would be bordering on negligent to use anything except Office365/GSuite/etc as your corporate email host. Lots of jurisdictions will create highly regulated marketplaces so you don't get Enron-California-style anti-competition. When things get that bad in Gmail-land, let us know.
[Edit: I was pretty snarky just there, but not at you! It was in general, I swear.]
I got tired of managing all that software so I just moved to containers. The Docker Hub has pretty much all I need, and if it doesn't, it's much easier to get it working than spinning a new VM or trying to install it together with a bunch of other software and keep them all up to date.
We package GitLab with Omnibus - it makes the installation experience a breeze. See https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/ for more info.
We also offer a hosted service (GitLab.com), if that's more convenient.
Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab. One to add their GPG key, one to add the upstream repo, and one to apt-get install the package. I bet there’s a curl | bash script to do all three as “one step”.
If you’re going to complain about something, at least pick something legit like managing backups or server uptime. The install itself couldn’t be simpler.
>Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab
As if installing gitlab was the last step in setting up a highly available and disaster safe git server.
100% agreed. Maintaining a self hosted web service is a demanding task. It's not about updating to get some new features right when they're out - it's about security, and it's a real pain. The installation can get messed, so what? You're not using the tool yet. You can get a new VM. But when you're updating the machine the holds your code (heck, even GitLab.com had their issues with updates!), or the machine that holds your mail service - things get scary. Installation is not at all the issue.
The approach in taking to self hosted services is that if it's down for an hour or even a couple of days it's fine since I'm the main user.
For disaster recovery, I put everything in ansible playbooks and roles. The role also takes care of setting up hourly backups (with Borg) and will import the latest backup when setting up the service. Because backups are separate, I can delete the last couple of backups if they've been compromised.
It's obviously not as resilient as using the centralized equivalent, but it feels like a decent trade off.
Still iterating so discussions welcome.
How beefy is your machine?
Not very, some things I run on small 5 or 10$ digitalocean droplets, other things on my home "server' which is an i5 4th gen with 8gb ram. The borg server is rsync.net
> The approach in taking to self hosted services is that if it's down for an hour or even a couple of days it's fine since I'm the main user.
Well, maybe, depends on what you're depending on that service for. However, we were talking about large scale centralization v decentralization. If you took everything currently on GitHub and moved it to a bunch of different self-hosted servers, you would have a problem. Many _do_ depend on what's there on GH.
Even if it's not critical, it really sucks to want something and not be able to get it for 2 days because Jim went on vacation and his server crashed.
> For disaster recovery, I put everything in ansible playbooks and roles. The role also takes care of setting up hourly backups (with Borg) and will import the latest backup when setting up the service. Because backups are separate, I can delete the last couple of backups if they've been compromised.
> It's obviously not as resilient as using the centralized equivalent, but it feels like a decent trade off.
The issue isn't that it cannot be done, it's that centralized services mean _I_ don't have to worry about it. I don't want to be a server admin; I just want to store my code in source control.
I do the same but use Restic for incremental backups. The problem is people have minds washed by corporate marketing. Unfortunatelly they think they need multi-datacenter high availabilty, machine learning and big data DBs where only minority people really need it. :(
And this is all assuming the person has the chance to do so, especially younger people can't really self-host or seriously lack the skill, programming alone is hard for them.
>>Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab
It was not always that way, they have made huge improvements on the install path over the last couple of years.
for the one step curl | bash glory:
curl -s https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitl... | sudo bash
For EE:
curl -s https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitl... | sudo bash
Have you tried Gitea [0]? It's incredibly easy to setup, and if you run it on Debian you can setup Unattended Upgrades [1] once then you pretty much never have to worry about it again.
[0] https://docs.gitea.io/en-US/
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
Decentralized doesn't mean you have to host everything yourself, there are many other companies to pay to host things outside your server. You don't want everything hanging centralized on your hardware anyway, if your server dies, everything is down.
That's true, except it is not common for a server to "die" every second day. It is not a problem to have uptimes in years. But due to updates it is reasonable to have a few minute downtime every few months. If you require 100% high availability (which only handful of people and companies really need) then you can set up a cluser on Kubernetes/Docker.
Maybe we can eventually achieve something like decentralized ownership of centralized web resources.
While not quite decentralized ownership, Wikipedia is at least a non-profit that everyone contributes donations to. Where's the Wikipedia for code? Where's the non-profit donation-based social network?
> Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization
How so? Centralization is merely enforced by the government and incentivized by the system it exists in.
Many humans are social creatures and like to congregate.
If centralisation only occurs due to government enforcement, then how did government itself come into existence? It's the purest example of centralisation, after all. There must be something that incentivised centralisation even in the absence of government.
> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,
It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.
In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.
For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.
I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms.
There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook.
Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.
> But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
You can loose control of your domain too. And if someone else snatches it up they could even read your newly incoming email. I'm willing to bet when gmail bans an account, they don't recycle it.
I'd love to see GitHub (and GitLab) offer a custom domain name option which would proxy HTTPS and SSH clones via a company's custom domain (e.g. code.example.com) to GitHub's hosting. That way, if a company needs to move away from GitHub (or GitHub goes away), developer's references to some company's code is not stuck pointing to some stale github.com domain.
Hosting such a proxy (and the repos) takes infrastructure, time, and experience to secure and make available, so from a user's perspective it's great if a company does this as a service as long as you provide the domain.
Has there ever been a plan for Git to support looking up SRV records? This would solve your problem without proxies.
Good point. I'll have to look through some git docs/source and forums to see if it's been discussed.
I do quite like the idea of using DNS instead of standing up proxies.
Yeah, I wanted to say exactly this. There's a different between specialisation in a market that still provides competition and consumer liquidity, and monopolistic centralisation (even when the monopolist is effectively benign).
It's like there's a middle-ground between everyone building their own automobile, and there being only a single car manufacturer on the planet. So long as have you have a few players who are genuinely competing, and you have the option to switch between them without paying an excessive penalty, then it's a good thing that a certain subset of people are working hard on building better cars than you ever could tinkering away in your garage (although you should still be allowed to do that, if you so desire).
What this requires is for governments to provide a framework of standardisation, access-to-data, data-transferability, and antitrust enforcement that allows a healthy competitive environment to emerge and persist, without either allowing a monopoly (or a cartel) to evolve, or overburdening everyone with regulation.
It's a difficult balancing act, even in more traditional industries, and anyone who presents a too simplistic "more regulation!" or "less regulation!" answer to it isn't being honest. Tech presents additional challenges because it's newer, and because it's evolving rapidly. I think it will take many more decades for the necessary level of technical understanding to metastasise through policy-making and civil administration realms until you get effective control of tech markets, although laws like GDPR are an interesting start.
> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it.
Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful.
What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
The decentralization advantage of Git over prior VCSes is technical, not political. You could always stand up a competing SVN instance.
I think that's quite a stretch, the reasons for decentralized version control (practical use) are far different than a decentralized internet (humanitarianism).
Well, centralisation also has a huge number of benefits, so it's not really a surprise.
The more important thing is to be in a position that makes it harder to be locked-in to a centralised provider. Fortunately Git makes that relatively easy – I could switch all of my work to Gitlab or Bitbucket with relatively little work.
There's more obviously a problem where Github is being used for issue tracking, PRs, and the general open-source community. I'm sure there will be a few scripts available to make migrating issues etc. to another provider relatively painless, since there's no great distributed solution for this at the moment. That just leaves the community aspect, which is going to be the hard bit…
Indeed. It would be awesome if GitLab could make use of ActivityPub to create such decentralized network (à la Mastodon)...
This is currently being investigated: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517
Totally agree. For me decentralized means desktop clients or own cloud. Own cloud is more expensive to maintain. Desktop app are more expensive to develop and maintain too.
Humans* aren't built for decentralization. We can only keep so many unique names in our head a time, only so many connections. I don't have any papers to link to on this, but I think it's safe to say that's how things are - if not we wouldn't have created cities, national identities, and of course, newsgroups, message boards, centralized package managers and distributions, and yes, source code repositories.
There is something nice about knowing, with a high degree of certainty, that any given open source project (or any thing) is in one of a few places, and if I don't know where that is I can ask for help to find those places by their names.
That's mixing up a whole lot of concepts. Centralization is about power.
Cities generally have very little centralization. Almost no interactions in a city go through a central entity, similarly for countries. Concentration is something different than centralization.
Newsgroups have very little centralization. Everyone reads and writes through different servers, and you can trivially switch servers without any impact on who you can communicate with. Agreeing on names and federation is something different than centralization.
...
There is absolutely no need to have software development happen on one proprietary platform in order to be able to search for software project in one centralized location. What you need for that is a search engine. Or even multiple competing search engines that can all index the same set of software projects.
Just because cities, countries, and newsgroups allow lots of different entities to participate doesn't mean they aren't centralizing. The strong incentives to place like with like result in forums with topics, subforums with subtopics. Districts become heterogeneous and we get things like Chinatown or the Castro District.
And these agglomerations of like with like occur spontaneously at pretty much every scale. You're quite literally missing the forest for the trees.
What is your point?
Yes, like likes to be around like, and systems that allow people to find people who are like them or who meet some of their needs are really useful, and you can call that phenomenon of "bringing people who want to interact together" "centralization". But noone ever argued aganst that.
When people talk about "centralization" in this context, they speak about power structures. A centralized power structure is when power is concentrated in the hands of a few. The fact that there are other forms of "centralization" is completely besides the point. If anything, the point is that you can often have those other forms of (useful) centralization without the centralization of power. Newsgroups, for example, obviously centralize discussion, in that they bring people who share an interest together in one (virtual) place. But they don't centralize power, because the technical implementation makes it so that no one party can easily control the communication on all of usenet.
Noone argues that we shouldn't have systems that allow us to interface with the world in a central location. This is all about avoiding concentration of power.
Your original argument is like saying that we should put all websites on the platform of a new company, say WebHub, because you want to have one place to search for websites. It's ultimately a non-sequitur: Millions of companies independently host websites on this planet, but obviously you don't visit millions of websites and ask the search function on each one of them your question of the day. You simply use one of a number of search engines, whichever one you prefer for your own needs, and no matter which search engine you choose to use, you will be searching pretty much the exact same set of websites. There is simply no need to centralize the power to control what can be published on the web or how the web works with one hosting company in order to have one central location that you can use to navtigate it all.
You don't need centralization of power in order to have centralization of access.
> You don't need centralization of power in order to have centralization of access.
It isn't necessary, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks. You seem to be arguing that I'm saying this is ideal. It's not, but it does seem to be the structure most people arrive at naturally.
> It isn't necessary, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks. You seem to be arguing that I'm saying this is ideal. It's not,
In other words: It could be even worse? Your point being?
Monarchy isn't necessary to govern a country, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks.
Does that make monarchy a good idea? Does that make democracy a bad idea? Does that mean that people have considered the advantages of democracy? Does that mean people are even aware of democracy? Does that mean anything?
> but it does seem to be the structure most people arrive at naturally.
Centralization of power? Well, if you mean by that that people who want to have power often are good at finding ways to dupe people into various forms of dependency, then I guess so? Again, your point being?
Many humans are apparently not, but I had a much easier time navigating (and contributing to!) projects when each of them had their own website with integrated scm links etc.
GitHub is a grey mass, project branding is lost, the tracker is chaotic for large projects.
It's just Sourceforge, better executed but with the same disadvantages.
If Git/Github is the epitome of the developer's centralised experience, then I full heartedly welcome that.
As others have mentioned, there's certainly advantages to centralised systems like Github's network graph, issues, etc. But at the end of the day, everyone on GitHub still cares a whole lot more about the code, and due to the very nature of the protocol that's something that'll always be able to be taken elsewhere. It's not like "if they announce shut down you can export your data", there's a very high lightlyhood you have already done that and you have the full repo on your local machine.
I feel like Github is the best possible compromise - centralised network and features that's built on a decentralised protocol and easily able to be taken elsewhere.
You can easily migrate your repo to a different service, so having lots of developers rely on GitHub isn't really a big deal. Many large projects have GitHub mirrors.
I'd say the biggest issue is that Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases. Compare that to Fossil [0], which lets you bundle up everything into a single file. If there was better built-in support you could migrate everything more easily to self-hosted alternatives like Gitea [1]. Regardless, it's possible to migrate manually, even if it's a bit more work.
[0] https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi...
[1] https://gitea.io/en-US/
I'm glad to see Fossil mentioned here. Yet the real problem is not in the technical aspects and possibilities of project hosting migration, it's the dependence of the majority of open-source developers on GitHub's centralized social network.
Hopefully if this turns GitHub evil, other social networks can be leveraged to assist in a population migration. Like, someone posting a link on Twitter to wherever the repo will exist in the future.
This makes me wonder how hard it is to securely host a git server on my own. I'll start googling but I bet the answer is gonna be "hard."
The only hard part is securing your server, since setting up a remote git server only requires two things:
1. Running git.
2. Providing SSH access.
But even securing the server is not necessarily difficult, depending on the level of risk acceptable for your purposes.
Put another way, reasonable security is not too hard and AWS makes reasonable security fairly easy. Even self-hosted *nix servers can be pretty secure. However to seriously harden a service against skilled and determined attackers requires an experienced team and even that may not be enough.
What social network? The stars and follows? Does anyone actually care about them? Why? I've never seen the point.
forks, pull requests and review comments
Not much of a network effect, there. You go where the code base you want to participate in is.
It's harder to find contributors for a project that is not hosted on GitHub.
They’re a decent measure of the reputation and stability of a project. I also use the stars to bookmark my projects for later.
The developer identities that link developer activity across all projects, the network of forks.
Is someone doing this for the entire website?
Give it 7-10 years before it is riddled with advertisements or has a subscription fee for 'premium' downloads.
I’m glad to see Gitea commented here. I’ve been using Gitea at work for about 3 months now and really enjoy it.
With tools like SIT (https://sit.fyi) you can keep your issues and patches inside of the Git (or other SCM) repository.
Pagure (https://pagure.io/pagure) combines a simple Git hosting forge with SIT-style issue tracking. On top of the code itself in Git, Pagure also uses Git for managing issues. So you can even use Git to comment on things. :)
Also, for those interested, Pagure lets you live a JS-free life too. ;)
I've been using it for several months on pagure.io, and it's my preferred Git-based hosting for my private stuff locally.
EDIT: GitHub repo importer: https://pagure.io/pagure-importer
Yes, Pagure is also a great project!
At my level of understanding it, the main difference between Pague and SIT is that SIT's story is more about decentralization (and SIT also provides its core to other potential applications beyond software development niche)
> Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases
I feel like a lot of these features could be handled with git-notes[1]. For example git-appraise[2] uses the git-notes feature for a code review system:
[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes
[2]https://github.com/google/git-appraise
Somewhere around 2009-2012 there was also a lot of experimenting going on with distributed issue tracking, such as with Bugs Everywhere [0] (and like 3 or 4 others I tried some time ago that I can't find now).
That said, it seems like there was a resurgence - I found two, git-issue [1] and git-dit [2], that have both had activity this year. And git-dit has shown up on here at least once before, as well [3].
[0] https://github.com/aaiyer/bugseverywhere
[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue
[2] https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13732598
Part of the challenge is that for issue tracking to really work for non-trivial projects is that there needs to be some web interface that allows newcomers to report issues without first obtaining commit access to the main repository. If some of the solutions can get this bit of functionality then they stand a chance of doing some really awesome things (I'd love to be able to work on and update issues while totally offline).
Right now they do still unfortunately come off as toy examples once you get to the point where their distributed nature would normally come in handy. It's a shame that the interest in the problem died down a few years back around the time you noted.
Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of git-notes before! That's really cool. I'd previously wondered why there wasn't something like this available; it looks like I just wasn't aware of its existence. I definitely agree that you could implement many powerful features using this.
Now I'm wondering if someone has implement a release tracker using git-notes. After you tag the release you could build / generate the output assets (e.g. binaries), upload them to some remotes (e.g. S3, GitHub, your server), and add a note with the release info plus some links.
I've already thought up a couple ideas for things that could be built on top of git-notes.
I wouldn’t want git to have built in wiki’s, bug trackers etc. I think it’s better to have separate tools.
Point being, the data can and should live within the repo like gh-pages has been doing for a while. Not about those tools being integrated to official git tooling.
> I think it’s better to have separate tools.
The amount of people using GitHub shows otherwise.
Unless I misunderstand the need you describe, git can in fact bundle in at least two single-file formats.
Can it bundle "issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases"?
>Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
Absolutely no chance, and I'm fine with that. Sorry, but I don't feel like spinning up a slhit server and managing all that goes along with it. I just want my code hosted somewhere that others can access. These meta issues are just noise and don't bother me (or 95%+ of the people using GH) one bit.
Decentralization is a wonderful idea. It brings with it benefits that are technical, architectural, and social. Yet is also carries with it its own set of costs and risks.
Bluntly, I doubt this will shock the world of software development into being less centralized. The practical benefits of centralization are, apparently, too large to be readily overcome.
(shameless plug) I recently built a tool (SIT, https://sit.fyi) that has decentralizes issue tracking and similar workflows, giving full days ownership and independence of storage and transport. Can be (and actively being) used with Git, or other SCMs.
Very nice! Looks cool.
What does your tool offer to make sure I never have to deal with abusive users, server patches, or a split-brain scenario?
It doesn't rely on servers (it's striving to be a "true serverless" application) so server patches are perhaps taken care of with this :)
Split-brain is the "normal mode" of operations for SIT -- it's a decentralized tooling so it expects something to not be available to you until it has been received by you -- at that point it is sitting in its entirety on your computer and you don't need an internet connection.
Abusive users -- depends on a scenario and "gatekeeping" checks -- known/vouched for GPG keys can be used to enforce some policies. Admittedly, this being a new tool, this angle hasn't been worked on extensively (if at all) -- but the way SIT is architectured is to potentially allow for all kinds of scenarios thanks to its flexibility and simplicity.
I could thank you for your time, for your effort, for humoring me. Etc. etc. etc.
I'll cut to the chase.
Your answer is basically "You have to do extra work". Which is the wrong answer when trying to replace tools whose major selling is reducing the amount of maintenance work I have to do. This response, unfortunately, commits the basic error of trying to solve a social problem with a technological solution. I don't want to take on the work of guarding the gates. I don't want to guard against potential abuse. I want these things done for me, so I can focus on the parts I care about.
The ability to put in work to monitor abuse and access control in a decentralized manner is not a significant improvement over the ability to do so in a centralized manner.
Oh, and if it interacts with other computers at all then I have to worry about server maintenance. A machine is only truly serverless in isolation. Which would make your tool interesting, but potentially less than maximally useful.
Thanks for the feedback!
All I'm getting is a blank page, it seems to be 404ing on https://sit.fyi/bower_components/webcomponentsjs/webcomponen...
There's a known issue with older Firefox. Once the site is updated to the new version, this issue should be gone. Let me know if the problem persists for you on any other browsers! Thank you!
I think we all trusted github because of git: we know that worst case was that github disappeared overnight, erasing all repositories, and in that case we all would still have distributed backups to restart it.
So we had limited trust in the centralized missions we gave it: communications, issues, pull requests.
I am sure that as soon as a good tool allows to do that in a decentralized fashion, we will switch to it.
> In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub
Nearly all. I never got into the swing of it - always expecting a thing like this to happen sooner or later. Honestly, I shall not be sad if the world starts beating a path to somewhere else now.
Saw this on another post related to gitlab proposal for federation support. That would bring us closer to a much nicer ecosystem
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517
Most ISPs don't let you forward ports, so decentralization is difficult for most people.
Most people also don't have a server running constantly, so a centralized service is convenient.
And there it is. "Git" "hub" could be considered an oxymoron. The adoption of this proprietary closed-source veneer over git by FOSS developers has always been ironical to the point of farcical. Now the other shoe has dropped.
> Git was built to be decentralized in the first place
Git was built to track changes and resolve collisions, if I get it right.
This is why GH is popular it's vakue is in supporting a central hub for oss projects
This is a completely smart purchase on Microsoft's part. I can't imagine more synergy between two companies:
- Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players (Google has been a great contender for this position since 2010).
- Microsoft has moved most of their open source projects to Github.
- Microsoft is a major contributor to Git, including massive infrastructure projects to make it possible to host the NT kernel on Git.
- Microsoft has tried to do open source git hosting in the past (Codeplex?) but it never succeeded. Also: Microsoft partnered with Github when they shut down to migrate Codeplex projects to Github.
- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.
- Github are the champions behind the electron project, with a lot of institutional knowledge about that technology + native web apps/PWAs in general. Microsoft is making a huge push toward writing UWP apps as PWAs.
Time will tell how they handle this merger. They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin, Mojang come to mind) and others horribly (Skype, Yammer, Nokia).
> Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players
That just means that none of the major tech players have been doing a whole lot in this regard.
I miss the comprehensive programming docs from MSDN.
How has the LinkedIn acquisition benefited LinkedIn users or Microsoft users?
It has allowed LinkedIn to remain free for one customer base (professional networks) while expanding sales and recruiting tools (navigator) without compromising user information (InMail rather than your private email unless you've opted as such).
Well, there haven't been any more password leaks...
I think that the biggest loser is going to be IBM clearcase. Especially in government/defense work the developers want to use git, but can’t get it because of lack of security reviews. I can guarantee you that Microsoft sales people are already calling every software group manager at all the defense contractors.
Can you elaborate on this? Why does using git preclude security reviews?
Clearcase is a much more advanced tool than git. It is designed to do radically different things from the mere patch relationship management that git performs in its ultra glorified ways.
What are the best capabilities of ClearCase?
The most interesting to me specifically is the ability to define working copies through filter scripts. As far as I understand it, this is an alternative to branching. You can mix and match different components/alternative modules (e.g. different HALs or device drivers for different HW platforms) into sets of products without running afoul of the typical limitations of branches. However, Clearcase is just too expensive for us to even try it out seriously.
Any software precludes security reviews in defense work. My group wanted mediawiki to run an internal wiki behind the firewall and it took 18 months to pass and my boss had about a dozen meetings and countless emails. There are cases where a developer had to write code in word because he couldn’t get a text editor (allegedly I didn’t actually witness it). When your network is constantly under state sponsored attack these precautions aren’t pointless. But it takes a company like Microsoft or IBM to be able to work with security reviews and get them through quickly.
Well, clearcase is a horrible monster and it would benefit just about everyone on Earth if it dies.
How many drivers on the road would be less likely to cut someone off or road rage if they didn't have to deal with ClearCase again? I'm sure that number is greater than zero.
I'm only being partially facetious. ClearCase truly is the worst.
I was only an intern when I worked on clearcase so I don’t have a lot of personal experience. But the level of hatred my colleagues showed towards it left an impression.
I had forgotten about the Atom and VS Code angle of this. I wonder if MS will deprecate Atom in favor of VS Code now...
Forgot about that too.
Atom is open source though isn't it? So I'm sure it won't ever disappear. I wouldn't want to move to VS Code though. I use a Mac and have heard good things about it, but I'm sure it will always be a second class citizen.
VS Code is actually nearly identical on all platforms just like Atom. I find Atom generally has more available plugins, but VS Code can’t be beat for TypeScript imo.
VS Code is ridiculously good, far better than Atom in all areas. I moved from Atom to VS Code on the Mac ~1.5 years ago and have never looked back.
They can't "depreciate" an OSS project just because it's hosted on a platform they own. Atom will live on one way or another, and it was never exactly tied at the hip with GitHub anyway.
Well, they can stop paying people to work on it and divorce GitHub from it entirely. I’m sure it would still available and worked on though.
This "synergy" seems to be pretty one-sided. Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users? That's kind of the problem with this acquisition, which is why few Github users are excited for it.
It also doesn't feel like Microsoft understands developers or even end users consistently. VSCode is a nice editor, but not the only one. The MSDN docs and site is awful. Azure is okay, but Windows 10 is somehow more annoying than macOS.
Meanwhile Github is in a tricky position, because for most people there's nothing but "community" keeping them on it. Github has some decent features, but nothing so great it would stop me from using their competitors. And they don't even have a CEO to provide the vision. The only thing in their favour is inertia.
GitHub subscriptions included in msdn?
I was thinking part of Office 365 - collaborative dev tools are the missing piece for most businesses.
There wouldn't be a major need for Jira, GitLab, etc for the most part.
I don't know why this is downvoted.
I've worked at two major companies which both used MS Office/Skype for everything and a selfhosted gitlab for code repo.
If the MS package provided git, I'm sure we would be using that instead.
Probably only avaolable though MSDN , I would guess. When MSDN is extemded to cover Linux as well (not so far fetched with the Linux support in Windows and Visual Studio) this move would also make sense in a weird Microsoft kind of way.
You answered it yourself. Github gets money to stay alive, and resources and leadership to actually start building again.
Is Github actually hurting for money? It has to be sitting athwart one of the most reliable rivers of gold amongst the independents.
Github loses 66mm on 98mm in revenue. They're hurting pretty bad.
Is it right to assume that this is because so much of their hosting is for free, open source projects?
And if so, then were open source to move toward GitLab with their even more permissive policies, how could they avoid the same fate?
I haven't seen all of their balance sheet but I'd guess most of their overhead is in salary, not in hosting.
Hosting is cheap, resources involved would be insignificant.
It's more about having too many people working on non-core products that don't deliver value. Gitlab seems to be doing fine and has built a full-featured CI system in the same time Github has only managed to add a basic project board and include commit messages in search.
Forgot to mention previously but GitLab is already on the same fate, waiting for an acquisition or IPO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234167
Well, Github execs could do the responsible thing and cut costs. But that sounds hard, and like it would require effort, so here we go. It's sad.
> Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users?
I would say the one that keeps Github alive. That's a pretty major one.
Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories, I thought that was devdiv trying to migrate their code back to MS land. Wonder if that's what sparked the conversations.
> Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories
Is this public knowledge? They shutdown their public repos service a while back and I had a manager at Microsoft admit that getting public repo traction was insanely hard. GitHub literally has a strangle hold on the public repos space.
This is their blog post on it
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/04/27/vsts-publ...
Thanks for the link. Purchasing GitHub, if true, can certainly complicate things.
What? Microsoft is the biggest developer advocate? Apple gives X Code away for free and made Swift an open source, platform agnostic product among many other things.
And it also charges you 100$ a year plus half of what you earn on their app store.
*30%
Microsoft's revenue split for the Windows Store is an identical 30%[0] (in most cases). There is, of course, the benefit of not having to pay any annual registration fees on Microsoft's platform.
[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/windows/agreements/ap...
Negative. They just announced that developers will receive 95% of revenue for non-games when customers purchase via a deep link, or 85% when its purchased through a discovery mechanism Microsoft provides [1]. Going into affect later this year.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/05/07/a-new-micr...
That's good to know. This only applies to what Microsoft calls "consumer non-gaming apps", however. Games and presumably what Microsoft considers professional apps are still subject to the existing fee structure.
For the time being, my comment stands.
That’s only for access to their store. Microsoft is much the same when it comes to the Windows store.
If you want to write apps for macOS and distribute them yourself you can do so with no cost.
VS community is free, as is SQL Express. Net Core is also open source and platform agnostic.
X Code is not a watered down version of something else. It’s the full application Apple uses themselves.
That was absolutely true when VS went by the "Express" moniker, but not today's "Community" edition. The difference between the paid (Pro) and free (Community) version is just licensing^. The Pro also comes with an MSDN subscription. MS is really going after the open source market, they've realized they were losing the future and embraced Linux/MacOS. FWIW, I use both Xcode and VS.
^and some "CodeLense" feature that I've never used.
http://www.visualstudioresources.com/2017/07/09/differences-...
> gives X Code away for free
Free with the purchase of Apple hardware. Not exactly "free," is it?
VS Code works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.
Nobody gives hardware for free.
> Nobody gives hardware for free.
Correct. And Apple artificially requires that you have a Mac to develop software for Mac or iOS.
Not even Microsoft does that. I can compile for Windows on any platform.
So, are complaining about the economical factor or an ideological one?
Xcode is the successor to Project Builder, the development environment for NeXT. It is written in Objective-C and AppKit.
Xcode was designed for writing Mac apps, why would anyone want to write Mac apps on a PC, when they'd need a Mac to test them anyway?
It's only after the iPhone that the question of a port to other platforms has arisen. But that would be a huge task equivalent to a full rewrite. Even Apple doesn't have the resources to pull that off smoothly.
> why would anyone want to write Mac apps on a PC, when they'd need a Mac to test them anyway?
There are many reasons. I was going to list a few, but ehh. If you want to know you can probably ask Google or StackOverflow.
That’s an interesting point about Atom and VS Code. Do you think we’ll likely see Atom die in favor of VS Code?
I'm starting to get really frustrated with Atom and it pegging my CPUs at 100%. I honestly don't see VSCode as that much better considering they're both bloated electron apps.
I've started going back to Sublime, and found I missed some of the really helpful tools in Atom.
I think the entire atom/vscode thing is going to be really curious should this acquisition go through. I'm going to guess they're going to keep running both teams; or really they'll probably keep running Github as it is.
I switched to VSCode from MacVim. Up until I saw VSCode, I thought all electron apps were as bad as slack. I'm happy to report I've not experienced sluggishness from VSCode at all.
I would put money on it if the merger goes through. There's very little reason for both to exist, and VSCode is absolutely a superior project. Atom has its advantages, but most of them could easily be manifested by collaborating with the Atom team and bringing those features in.
Atom is already dying imo. And if for a reason even a 5 year old can appreciate : it's simply too slow.
>- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.
Yes, I'm sure one company will support both editors in the long term.
I also see GitHub profile playing well with LinkedIn profile. I've been asked to share my GitHub profile several times during interviews.
> They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin,
what? linkedin became garbage, it's worse facebook with more ads and stupid emails not related to anything I do.
I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github.
Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.
the history of Microsoft is the reason why we all reacting this way. But encouraged by the move they made lately coming into Linux, even though other players have forced their hand
Microsoft has slain giants before. They will try to do it again. No one is too big to fail.
Except HSBC.
Yes, particularly because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
As far as I can tell, today's MS is very aware of the brand problem they created for themselves and have been working hard to fix it.
A recent changelog episode addresses this exact issue:https://changelog.com/podcast/298#transcript-78
I would be as worried if it was AWS or Google.
Github should remain a neutral ground in my opinion.
It already was Google. Remember Google Code?
No, Google code was a failed attempt at a code hosting service from Google.
They failed to make it attractive to other developers.
I don't remember the name, but MS tried for a year or two to create another competing hosting platform if I recall correctly, and they also failed.
You are probably thinking of Codeplex: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex
Codeplex
> I would be as worried if it was AWS or Google.
Good. Need more people like you.
Only way to disrupt monopoly is to use something else. I am going to migrate all my projects from GitHub. Be an example you want the world to be.
I'd recommend running your own FossilSCM server. It supports full code repo, wiki, bugtracking, and more. And it's free software to boot.
I'm looking to see if it's feasible to write a github->fossil layer to make it easy for programmers to dump to local. Right now, Git is easy to dump... but those issues and wiki support isnt dumpable yet..
if you mean dump from GH the wiki is a separate git repo. just clone <our_project>.wiki.git instead of <our_project>.git
Unfortunately, that misses the bulk of user communications. Those bug reports and issues are also tremendously important. And since they link back to commits, its essential to obtain that history as well and maintain the appropriate link between the 2.
Else, changes were made for "reasons", and those justifications are effectively lost.
This was the main reason I started developing https://sit.fyi. It allows you to carry issues, discussions, patches as files (for example, in a git repo) in a decentralized way and has a tool that allows to import from GitHub
If there are other things to use, it isn't much of a monopoly.
I could see developers ditching GitHub with the acquisition for a perceived conflict of interest. It's really easy to change your remote.
I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.
Changing the remote doesn't migrate anything in the issue tracker, merge requests, webhooks, pages or wiki
It wouldn't be seamless. But it wouldn't be difficult for a competitor to create a "competitor import" feature that moved over most of it in a few clicks.
It's possible, but I think it's a stretch to say it "wouldn't be difficult."
Migrating from GitHub to GitLab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI
this adresses some of the issues.
It doesn't solve the number one issue: External references to your project will all still point to github.com since that's where the project homepage (aka README.md) is.
If GitHub does get sold to MS and I end up moving to GitLab, I'll probably push one last commit to the GitHub repo adding a header saying the project has moved, with a link to the GitLab repo. It's not perfect, but it wouldn't be too bad.
Until MSFT/GitHub does what Sourceforge.net did - taking over project sites from projects which moved away and adding malware (adware/spyware) into those ;)
(I believe with all critique on Microsoft they aren't as bad, but want to exemplarize the risk)
This would be a great way for them to accelerate migration away from Github.
It might just be cleaner to close the github repo and when other projects find a 404 where it used to be, they'll have to use super detective skills (i.e. Google it) to find the project's new home. And if they can't find it that way, then nothing of value was lost. (Yes, yes, I know it's more nuanced than that, but if you wanted permanence, you'd be hosting on your own domain, right?)
Actually, the #1 issue is that everyone can easily file an issue/contribute in other ways at Github without having to create another account to do so.
You can sign in with your Github account to gitlab.com.
I expect Google could be convinced to accept certain files or metadata in a README as equivalent to a 301 permanent redirect, meaning searches will remain effective. That would account for a lot, especially if Chrome begins to honour it.
I seem to remember that under the GDPR, vendors have to make data exportable. I wonder if people could use that for GitHub issues and the Wiki.
GitHub pages is super easy to move except for getting users to know the new domain.
The GDPR only applies to personal data, which won't be most of the content on GitHub.
Anyway, there are APIs which one can use to export issues.
Personal data is extremely broad and is any data that can be identified to an individual. If my photos are Facebook are personal data, then so is my code on GitHub (even if some people are professional photographers or programmers).
This is also why I put my documentation in markdown files in the repo instead of using the Github wiki. I knew it would save me hassle later.
Wikis on Github are cloneable as normal repos: just use project.wiki.git instead of project.git in the clone URL.
Still one step too much making it harder to migrate. Should've been a directory in a repo, default to `wiki` or whatever and configurable to something else.
that leads to problems with access control, though.
This means everybody linking to your docs will link to GitHub, thus you have a hard time moving ;)
As opposed to linking to GP's GitHub Wiki?
Agreed on both points. The shift will bring a lot of opportunity to build a more decentralized repo base. I think something like (Keybase)[http://keybase.io] might be interesting.
They weren't profitable. So the problem perhaps is these cool free tools that some people rely on just don't have a clear way to make money.
How profitable would they be if they didn’t pursue “growth at all costs” and built GitHub with a small and focused team like Stack Overflow or WhatsApp?
As a startup, worrying about competition from Microsoft hasn't been a big deal for almost a decade. I would be more worried about Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
> monopolization
Conglomeration, unless you hated github before which I wouldn't object too.
I agree with you anyway.
Why did the F/OSS community put all their eggs in one basket? Hell a lot of big companies did also. I wonder how they're going to react to this?
Exactly. Code.google.com even provided links for porting repos to GH. Will Google revive it's own code repository in light of this move?
Probably because its fairly low-risk. I have ~270 Github repos. About a year ago I made a ~5 line Python script that added Gitlab as another origin to each repo. I still use (used) Gitlab as my main host, I'm a paying customer - but for me to flick over to Gitlab is a one-liner.
Simple answer: GitHub is good to use
I'm all for FOSS (Git webgui) solutions, but they were absolutely not competitive until recently. Even now, with less trust, the social effect and the lack of need of maintenance and setup is attractive.
Why is it important? What are you relying on? It's just git. Dozens of other services that do the same thing, many that arent losing money every year.
Well, Google recently also purchased Kaggle, another major open-source repository for code. It hasn't really changed anything for now, but Microsoft's purchase will be in the same vein. I think that Microsoft's contribution to the open-source community in the last few years kind of makes sense for why they are purchasing it, just like Google purchased Kaggle because of their contribution to ML.
Your dream of “neutral” VCS is misfounded. Websites like GitHub are massive bandwidth and storage hogs and needs huge cash burn just for dev ops. Unfortunately they can’t be reasonably profitable as well because revenue sources are rather tiny. This means every vcs company out there offering free for all plan is bound to be sold or go bankrupt.
For GitHub I would have wished Google bought them because there is huge synergy both ways. With Microsoft, eventually some CVP there will realize that there is no profitability and they will leave it to rot.
This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.
> I hope they don't discontinue Atom
Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...
I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)
It’s not. They are both web-based but otherwise unrelated.
No, not at all. The only common component (I think) is Electron (Atom shell).
VSCode is built on top of the same framework as Atom, Electron, which was previously called Atom-shell.
It's worth noting that the core contributors to Electron are Github employees.
That gives the acquisition a very different perspective.
What if MS is really buying Electron? It’s something they’ve been using a lot in all their recent products, and it’s a key technology in the contemporary development landscape. Making it more Windows-friendly would definitely help them.
Improving Electron can be done far cheaper and easier than acquiring a company.
The only thing GitHub has that Microsoft can't easily get on their own is the user base. That's what this acquisition will be about.
But controlling a leading platform so completely isn't cheap.
They can also ensure the next electronconf isn't cancelled. Everyone wins!
No, it's not a fork. They both run on Electron, so they share a common runtime environment, but they share no editor code.
Wasn't Electron created for Atom? If so, VSCode is at least using a part of Atom.
I mean, by that argument Windows uses Unix because C was written for Unix.
At least historically Windows used different parts of UNIX. i.e. they used BSD's TCP/IP stack for quite some time. Also used "UNIX services for Windows" and recently added the Windows subsystem for Linux.
That doesn't make Electron _a part_ of Atom. If I build my application on top of Linux, my application is not _a part_ of Linux.
Electron is its own application framework, that Atom builds itself on top of. Electron is not a text editor framework, no more than QT or Cocoa is.
It is _very_ fair to say VSCode is using Electron - heavily, in fact! But saying VSCode is using part of Atom is just not true, and implies VSCode is building atop the Atom editor, which it does not.
Well, answering myself... Looks like it uses the Electron Shell project which was part of Atom
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...
Atom is open source though. One company can not decide to kill it.
https://github.com/atom/atom
Someone has to maintain it.
In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.
RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing. I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.
(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)
That's true, and I want to add that usually it's the company's fault for not guiding the project into the hands of the community (be it intentionally or because of incompetence). Rust is a great example of a "company's project" that reached (or is reaching) a nice spot in autonomy.
I agree but I think Github and Atom are special cases.
A light IDE is not rocket science and this project is known (and loved) by many open source developers.
It's not going very well for RethinkDB, sadly: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6659
Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.
I think it already is tbh.
I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.
Atom is really just a testbed for electron, where the real technology lies. If you can make an editor that programmers love using electron you can make pretty much anything else (excluding games).
Why not games?
https://electronjs.org/apps?category=games
HTML5 and Canvas do work on Electron after all. :) I feel there was some post on HN about a game released under Electron to which the reaction was "I didn't know it was made with Electron!" not a month ago.
Edit:
Also Atom wasn't a testbed for Electron. Electron WAS MADE for Atom afaik. They only opened up Electron after Atom was out for a while, it'd be the other way around if what you're saying is the case. I think Microsoft is already heavily invested in Electron. If anything they will provide even more resources towards Electron itself.
sad. Atom has much better usable UI. I get constantly lost in VSCode menu and (strange enough) it is very difficult to startup a browser in it.
They could probably also merge the two somehow. The one thing I like more about Atom (even though I don't use it anymore) is editing the editor settings gives you a UI instead of just a JSON file which I don't mind, but it's kind of uneeded to me to have to work harder just to check all my editor settings.
If it’s any consolation, Apple Music is terrible on iOS and MacOS as well.
True, but Windows users would find it odd if an app didn't suck. It has to match the overall Windows experience.
Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.
What. Windows apps are far from sucking. There is still no OSS match for Windows Explorer.
OS X and every major Linux DE have tabbed file explorers, Windows still doesn't. I've never even heard of a third-party file explorer for any OS.
Never missed them.
Total Commander for example.
I find the file exporers on linux a huge joke, and Finder on OSX is too simple for me.
On Windows I have found XYplorer [1] to be extremly powerful. Its not OSS and its not free, but I happily paid for it once I discovered it. The project is like 20 years old. I have looked for a free replacement for years and always ignored it, which was a mistake.
XYplorer is very well maintained, 0% CPU cost, 1% RAM cost, highly-configurable, has very nice features. Someone really put some thoughts into the UI and UX. I really like the Ghost filter. Ctrl+P is great. Oh and it remembers all opened tree views after restart, so your workspace is exactly the same after a reboot.
[1] https://www.xyplorer.com/
Some people missed your sarcasm.
Now, on a more serious note, I think the way IE3's News and Mail Explorer extension dealt with custom views for filesystems was nothing short of brilliant. I wish we had something like that for Gnome now.
The "Windows sucks" meme (if you can call it that) is outdated for like 15 years.
We'll eventually see what happened to Skype happen to GitHub. Not sure how it will manifest itself, but the bloat will find its way in somehow.
Were it a consumer product I'd agree. But this is a developer tool and MS have been doing fairly well in that regard the last few years with azure and vscode.
Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.
I dunno, as an Azure user, they've launched good products like Azure Insights, that were really good, which they deprecated or merged with PowerBI etc... that totally tanked them.
So I'm not super hopeful.
> I hope they don't discontinue Atom
Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).
How many build from source as opposed to downloading binaries from atom.io?
Someone can just make `libreatom` and start distributing binaries. The MIT license is nice like that.
"because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities"...what are you talking about? They are a company with a purpose to make money. And when I think about some of the other possible buyers, I am fine with Microsoft.
The GP means they were neutral with respect to the tech giants' ecosystems. They didn't favor Amazon or Microsoft or Google's tech. Consider that Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had GitHub organizations and hosted code there. That's what they're talking about
yeah, I'm curious if those other big companies will now move their repos off of GitHub because of this. I guess these two will be the ones to watch: https://github.com/google https://github.com/apple
It sucks. We had as you said a neutral site everyone used. Now the big guys will move their code. Hopefully we will get a new common GitHub that is neutral and they will use. Sounds like it might be gitlab.
Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.
Do you think Gitlab will stay independent? They’re burning money. They’ll in all likelihood be acquired in the coming decade as well.
Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.
Hopefully. The problem is the site has to be neutral. Might end up we just have the big tech companies like Google host their own which sucks but you can't blame them.
Right now looks like GitLab will just become the new GitHub.
We were just so lucky we had basically a single site with GitHub and now that will not be true any longer. We really did not have a single site for very long.
Really just wish this news was not true. But I am sure MS just could not resist.
What bothers me is I really like how the newer tech companies are all about moving the entire industry forward while helping themselves.
So Google shared Map/Reduce, K8s, TF and open source just about everything. They spend tons of money finding all the vulnerabilities and then tell their competitors when they have a problem and even help mitigate. They do it all for free and expect nothing from the companies. What Google did for Cloudflare for example with Cloudbleed is how I love it being.
I am old and remember the old days. But as MS has become less relevant those old ways have been dying.
But then it is like MS sticking in their head in the fun of the new way and mess it up. They should just do their own thing and leave the new culture alone.
I'm sure they'll try to 'Microsoft' it. They could never keep their hands off any UI in any product, no matter if it works or not, and especially lately, leaving a rather spectacular trail of destruction in their wake.
LinkedIn still feels like it's old self to me. Not that that really matters one way another to me.
Just after acquisition, Linkedin started systematically shutting down available API resources, and removing CRM support. Microsoft reigns in eventually. source:https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/linkedin-state-of-crm-2014/
redacted: i mistook the acquisition date
MSFT announced the acquisition of LNKD in June 2016. Your article is from March 2014.
That link says March 2014. LinkedIn was a public independent company for all of 2014.
GitHub has had more ethics fails in the past few years than MS.
Care to elaborate?
I remember reading that they employ some muppet to check that nobody uses "hate language" and their naive "check all words in text files against this list" spotted the word "retard" as in "fire retardant" and locked the project. Appealing for common sense, or even escalating the problem to someone with a functional grasp of English didn't succeed.
You don't remember when the co-founder had to step down over harassment issues? This was all over HN a few years ago. A female developer claimed she sexually harassed and discriminated against and the company then conspired to push her with the founders' wife (not an employee) leading the charge. That guy is a billionaire now.
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/an-executive-depar...
I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why?
Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software.
Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle that:
> Open Source software needs Open Source tools
Looking at you Atlasian.
Although this doesn't directly have anything to do with open-source; look at what happened to Skype, LinkedIn, and other companies they acquired.
Did i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn’t changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.
Skype UI was changed dramatically for virtually no obvious reason and resulted in the usage of skype to be way more annoying for basically no good reason. They then rebranded Lync to be called Skype for Business which is a giant mess because like so many microsoft enterprise products it uses some strange scheme to connect to either a web-based server or to an enterprise server that invariably is not setup correctly and never works reliably. So they basically bought skype which everybody loved and turned it into something that a huge amount of people don't like now due to UI changes and created a second version of Skype that basically barely works and many people are forced to use at work..
We are forced to use Skype for Business at my job, and let me tell you, I have never seen a POS like that. Calls drop out for no reason, UI is unintuitive with all kinds of weird dropdowns and buttons, slow to start and just a pain to use in general. I wish we could use Slack calls instead...
Skype for Business is not Skype in anything other than name. I don't know why they tried to combine the branding.
I'm counting down the days until Teams has fully integrated all of the Skype for Business features so that they can finally shut the POS down. It is, indeed, the absolute worst.
I use it in my job as well. I agree it is pretty terrible but it is miles better than Microsoft Communicator which is what we used pre Skype for Business.
In addition to everything you said, and I would also add:
- Microsoft turned Skype into spyware. Before Microsoft, Skype used encrypted peer-to-peer connections which I'm confident had excellent cryptography given how much it annoyed some governments that Skype couldn't be bugged or monitored.
- Microsoft provides no way to delete chats, voicemails, and video messages, although they give the ridiculous option of "hiding" old conversations as if that's a reasonable substitute for deletion. At this point, it wouldn't be greatly surprising if they record and save all voice calls.
There's inertia in people and companies abandoning Skype because everybody knows it and everyone has it (or had it). But the thing that really preserves Skype is that it can connect from any device to device, including landlines, and it can do all of audio, video, and text.
A Skype-killer product needs (a) to run on all major platforms so you can communicate with someone regardless of whether they are on Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, or iOS, and (b) the ability to make connections to landline phones, (c) do all of audio, video, and text chat, (d) be reliable and trustworthy. That would be the Skype killer.
Tech scandals from the archive...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9786545
But now they're partnering with Signal so maybe that's a good case about how things change over time:
https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/
LinkedIn? The network everyone loved to hate? I don't think anything has changed in that regard, if anything, Microsoft are probably 1% more trustworthy compared to the super-shady LinkedIn management of old.
Microsoft is opening LinkedIn up to other tools while completely maintaining their goal of not sharing your data (Iframe integrations so no data is shared). They're expanding capability without selling out users
I can't see any big changes in LinkedIn really.
Nokia?
One could argue that both Atlassian and Github were to some extent successful, because they kept the open source competitors away by giving out free licenses to open source projects.
With these free options available, people in community were less interested in putting effort to free (as in speech) alternatives for these closed source products.
Yes this is likely. However we can have our cake and eat it too, companies can host an instance of an open source service. Like Gitlab does
EDIT, yes I am aware that there are some non open parts in Gitlab.com
What parts of gitlab.com are non-open?
They refer to it at as 'open-core':
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core-gith...
I thought this was interesting to re-read in light of this news, so I've resubmitted it for discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225725
Good call :) it just went from #13 to #12 on the front page.
That's assuming people here care deeply about open source and it's philosophy. It's probably fair to say that most people on HN care a lot more about how building the next Atlassian or GitHub and conveniently being able to use OSS for that than about those philosophical values.
Isn't the entire point of the "open-source" movement to throw out all the philosophical baggage that comes with "free software"?
Maybe for Microsoft.
I mean no that was esr's whole deal. He wanted a version more in tune with business than free software. rms hated it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
> Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software's practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear. Other supporters flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since then, and they make the same association.
> The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. Most discussion of “open source” pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success
Well, demonstrably, it doesn't.
I love open source, but it doesn't mean I think absolutely everything must be open source... the most important part here _is_ (git), github was (omg I'm already speaking past tense) a decent platform sprinkling some nice simple collaboration on top and convenience, it's not vital, and it's replaceable (so we have choice), and for a long time it was the best there was.
People are disappointed because many of us don't trust or like MS and want nothing to do with them, people complain about Google removing their "do no evil" clause, Microsoft basically has a fucking "do evil" clause but they will always tell you the opposite, they are probably even being sincere, it's just not true though.
As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better.
I don't use any microsoft tools (and I _hate_ all windows after 7), so Microsoft integrating with GitHub has no appeal to me.
I think the best case scenario for me personally is that nothing changes. None of the github changes in the past few years have added anything noticeable for me (not sure if others agree, be interested to know). And the best case scenario being "nothing changes" is pretty damning. I know it's overwrought, but Skype was perfect, and 2010s-Microsoft fucked them up. And if we're seriouslyhaving the best case scenario be "nothing changes", that's bad.
And it also just seems part of the bullshit mindset of startups being about the exit, and not about making a new, sustainable company.
GitHub didn't need to do this, but they did, to justify their reportedly insane burn rate. Microsoft still won't let them get away with that, they'll just take the heat for the inevitable layoffs.
It's just fucking depressing all round.
> As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better.
It sounds like they were running out of money. So I guess it makes your experience better in that you get to keep using it.
Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ?
If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet.
As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.
Their search is really frustrating, I agree. I feel like they only index a small percentage of files, so results are always bad.
The fact that you can’t search within a branch too...
They don’t index forks. Cloning a fork just to search through it locally is always fun. Very annoying when a fork becomes the de facto project because it’s the one being maintained.
I’m not even talking forks. I’m talking largish projects hosted on GitHub (100k+ loc). The actual results will contain less than half the results you’d see with grep, and even then the indexed content may even be out of date. This is exacerbated even more when database migrations are kept in source control, with older migrations archived, and the only search results you get for eg a stored proc search will be a version of the sp from 6 months ago.
Github won't let you do a code search in a forked repository. Clone & grep is literally the only option!
That would be really great. To improve looking through new repos at least a litte bit I like the browser plugin [Octotree](https://github.com/buunguyen/octotree), it adds a tree view of the code and eases jumping between files.
It is shockingly bad. The fact that you can't code search in a fork blows my mind. How have they not fixed this basic, important feature after so many years? What could possibly make it more difficult than a few person-months of effort?
Maybe avoiding the costs associated with keeping the indexes available for every fork? I believe they use elastic search so maybe someone with more experience with that can comment.
Um, have you actually tried doing anything about this? https://help.github.com/articles/searching-in-forks/
> You will not be able to search the code in a fork that has less stars than its parent.
... but since it's allowed if the fork has more stars, I guess they're just trying to save compute cost. Seems like a bad place to scrimp to me.
SourceGraph tries to fix it, and the experience of searching, jump-to-definition and generally getting to grips with a codebase is way better there IMO. They also have browser plugins with integration to GitHub. I recommend you to check it out.
Sourcegraph CEO here. Glad you like Sourcegraph! Regardless of what happens with GitHub and Microsoft, we agree that developers need great code search.
Do you have an on-prem version (to pair with GitHub Enterprise)?
Yep. Sourcegraph is self-hosted on your own network. Check out https://about.sourcegraph.com/ and run the Docker image to get started. Docs on the GitHub.com/GitHub Enterprise integration at https://about.sourcegraph.com/docs/config/repositories#githu....
Sourcegraph is great, but I had to disable the browser plugin because it opens a new tab on every github search. So annoying.
Sourcegraph CEO here. There was always a toggle for that feature, but it was too hard to find. It is now off by default and you can enable it in the browser extension settings. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I hope we get another chance to give you an awesome code search experience.
Cool, for sure, thanks for the response!
So we're asking the creators of Bing to fix it?
Bing is actually quite good. Not as good as Google, but much better than Github.
Or whoever implemented the start menu search.
I used to be able to execute programs through the start menu. Can't do that anymore.
I used to go:
press start btn --> type "utor" --> press enter --> uTorrent.exe executes.
Why would they remove such a useful feature?
Search in Windows is horrible too.
Part of the reason GitHub search is so bad is to mitigate people uploading their AWS keys and passwords.
Yea, Microsoft should acquire sourcegraph too.
I think they purposely weakened the search because people were using it to find secret keys.
That doesn't make sense. Ruin the feature to potentially help someone who made a mistake with security? Why wouldnt they just run the search to find keys themselves and remove them from search results.
Microsoft should be able to leverage Bing to do good deep searches across all code. This would be a big win for everyone (and Bing!)
As one of my pet projects, I'm trying to resurrect Google's Code Search (a fast search indexer that supports regular expressions).
It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.
I cannot agree more with this.
It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.
Huh.... GitHub only searches head for me. This is confusing as I've often wanted to search other branches and can't find a way to...
Search seems to be surprisingly bad at a lot of companies. I don't know about github but reddits search is so bad it cannot even find something when you type it character for character.
I'm super curious to what all these companies are using for search because they are so atrocious that tend to not even work in a basic substring search solution.
Exactly. I can’t search my own tweets on Twitter. Facebook doesn’t know how to rank people when I do people search there. Search is terrible across the internet except Google.
Yes they could, since they already have reasonable code search for VSTS [1].
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/project/search/code-se...
Can anything exist anymore without
A) Getting acquired by a multinational
B) Becoming one
Sure, MS visual code is open but as a few players get more and more power we all become subject to their whims and not them to ours.
MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment, or will it’s data be useful to MS for those ads?
What sort of integrations can we expect to see with other MS products that encourage a more closed ecosystem?
This may all seem alarmist but with so many companies having so much power this sort of behavior get through unchecked.
The only recourse people suggest is “well then don’t use it” but what options do employees have when higher ups mandate technologies? What about most users who just go with the wind and just let these snowballing large companies skate by? It all makes me very sad...
>Can anything exist anymore without...
See the recent post about ghost (it has a structure that can't be sold) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228
Not really the same. The Ghost foundation exists purely to fund John O Nolan’s digital nomad lifestyle.
Product hasn’t changed a lot since launch.
Is there too much to change on a blog engine? Besides rewriting it every couple of years.
What else are they paying a team of developers and designers for if not that?
Probably a direct consequence of VC funding.
Definitely, investors don't give you money just for kicks, they want a payday. It shapes the community... people who take that money get a head start, crowd out competition. Everyone needs to grow huge, get bought, or die.
What could change this? People refusing money? Some encouragement to stay mid sized? Wonder if that will ever happen...
doesn’t matter what you do. there will always be a competitor that takes the money and kills you. If not, the big companies themselves will fund their own projects with 100x your budget
The problem is that virtually all startup wants an exit. They have employees sitting on stock options for years while forgoing their market rate. They have investors wanting 10X return. This would work out for insanely profitable businesses like Google but for the rest they have built huge expectations on business models tha t are unworkable so buyout by a sucker is the only viable outcome for them. Coincidentally Microsoft has recently decided to become that sucker with LinkedIn and now GitHub.
GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft.
I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I’ve had paid private account since forever).
GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
TANSTAAFL
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574 [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com
If anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.
> I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is?
I imagine most HN readers are paying customers either directly or indirectly(their company/startup).
As a private customer, I wouldn’t object to an increase in the price if that meant they stay independent. If they get acquired by MS I am definitely stopping my subscription.
> I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
Either they eventually fail/become evil, or they don't. If they do, just move somewhere else. If they don't, good.
(Benefits of non-proprietary software and standards like git.)
And therefore I will vote with my $$$ and stay on GitHub until there is a real reason to do otherwise (and at that point enjoy the benefits of standards like git).
Alas, like several others have pointed out, this doesn’t scale to GitHubs other services like GH Pages, or their Wiki, issue tracker, etc.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
So you largely have the same problems GitHub had. I’ve seen you say this exact same thing multiple times in the past day, but what exactly is different?
EDIT: When I say “seen the same thing said multiple times” I’m referring to multiple linkages of the relevant page in the handbook by others, and in the CEO’s own recent blog post about the acquisition.
Out of topic, but how often do you have the ear of CEO: sytse, one specific wish for Gitlab that I have: please enable 'one-click' automatic LetsEncryptNow certificate creation for GitLab Pages with custom domain names (just like GitHub is doing it today) instead of me having to go out of my way to go get a X.509 from a CA for my TLS/SSL enabled site[1].
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_starte...
EDIT: typos
Heck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.
I'm sure GitHub will introduce free private repos soon enough.
I'd be surprised if the announcement didn't also come with that change. Easiest way to even the field.
If Microsoft decides to make GitHub free for all, this can honestly have a devastating affect on GitLab and Bitbucket. I really think Microsoft is a lot more interested in:
- capturing developer data for ML/AI research
- identify new product ideas
- identify ways to improve existing products
- create a funnel to existing products
Especially since Microsoft's own version control thing has this.
Well, sort of. It's limited to 5 contributors, which is kind of a big deal if you're on a serious team.
If you have more than 5 contributors, you can probably afford to spend $5/user/month If that isn't the case, then GitLab/Gogs/Gitea/etc. is probably the better route to go.
They do have free private repos for academic researchers already.
Gitlab also lets you register private gitlab-runners on gitlab.com, which is a killer feature for running CI on setups that aren't plain docker-in-the-cloud (such as integration-testing apps that require resources on our LAN, or macOS/iOS builds with private keychain items that is much easier to configure on a local Mac). (A side bonus is that you don't even have to pay for any CI "minutes")
I'd say +1 for GitLab. I just checked it out and like the UI better than GitHub anyways. I'm switching over and not looking back.
That's one big reason why we switched.
The other was the self hosted option.
If you ever get something for free, remember something somewhere is subsidizing it. Whether that's the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced, VC funding (which will eventually run out), or your data is sold.
> your data is sold
It's now easier to see some of this, with the GDPR rules.
The Gitlab cookie page lists 80 "marketing" cookies which may be set: https://about.gitlab.com/privacy/cookies/
Wow. On the one hand I'm impressed with the openness (almost - what does purpose='unclassified' mean?), as well as the option to elect which cookie category I agree to. On the other hand... my, that's a lot of tracking!
Something similar (sometimes exactly this interface) is shown on about every third newly visited website I look at from the EU, since 25 May.
If you don't see this, it could be informative to use a British or Irish VPN (to keep an English language default) for a day or two.
Most of which you can now disable disallow on first visit.
A public and a private repo costs the same to host, so I don’t see your point
I use a huge amount of open-source software which I do not believe is subsidized.
Some is, eg some linux/gnome devs are paid to contribute. But many smaller projects/components are volunteer-only.
> But many smaller projects/components are volunteer-only.
Someone is paying for it with their spare time. Spare time doesn't last forever.
If you're not paying for something, you should see it either as a temporary shortcut that eventually needs a more sustainable fix, or something you don't care about if it disappears.
While I understand, and kinda agree, the idea that Volunteer only projects are not susceptible longer term and your implication that commercial products are more sustainable over a long term is provably false
Many many many many many commercial software projects, that people paid money for, are killed every single year.. Many other volunteer only projects last for decades, some of which have been critical to the very foundation of the web.
So no "if you are not paying for you should see it as a temporary shortcut" is a completely false statement
It's subsidized by those volunteers' time. Time that could otherwise be spent on other things.
Granted, there's nothing nefarious about this, but there isn't anything necessarily nefarious about the fact that anything you get for free is being paid for somewhere else. Just potentially nefarious, if you don't know what's paying for it.
I can't speak for Gitlab, but offering free Bitbucket should easily pay for itself as introduction to the Atlassian ecosystem.
Our experience went like this: We got Bitbucket for out project for the good free private repos (and a few other reasons). When it came to choosing a ticket system, being on Bitbucket made choosing Jira a no-brainer (one of the best ticket systems, good integration with Bitbucket, familiar interface). Then we needed a better wiki for internal documentation, so we naturally went with Confluence.
So getting free Bitbucket heavily influenced our decision to buy two other products from the same company, and we are about to buy into their CI system (Bitbucket Pipelines, not the other one). We don't regret any of those choices, but they might have looked different if we were on Github.
...the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced,...
That doesn't follow. If the paid accounts are selling, then they must be priced appropriately relative to their competition and the value they provide. The cost doesn't factor into it - and free accounts are just a marketing cost, like putting up a billboard.
What makes you think the same thing won’t happen to GitLab?
No one would’ve dreamed of this happening 5-10 years back.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
I expect it'll happen to Gitlab at some point, but the beauty of self-hosted is that I can cut ties with the organization and continue using their software anyway because it's entirely running on my machine.
Which, incidentally, is just one reason I usually strongly prefer self-hosted options over SaaS. You're not signing a pact to become beholden to the business whims of a third party.
Good luck hosting an unmaintined piece of software though, there is no guarantee it will just instantly have community backing.
> Github's just got the mindshare going for it.
But in more ways than just the users. If you want tu use most of the popular integrations, the often github-only. Things like TravisCI are suddenly what makes me open a new project on GH rather than GL.
I switched jobs and went from Github to Bitbucket about 6 months ago. I've found bitbucket to be consistently and noticeably slower than github both in its web UI and in pushes/pulls, with more downtime. You pay for those private repos one way or another.
I too felt this pain. UI feels "heavy" in comparison to Github.
There are obvious, simple updates that could be made to the UI to fix significant pain points. This one [1] brought me much pain every time I installed a new package via yarn.
1 - https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/7086/add-the-abilit...
I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.
as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.
> what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.
I think that's his point. He's saying that LinkedIn has the opportunity to do lots of interesting things, and appears to be squandering it.
LinkedIn is excellent as it is; its a utility to keep your CV updated and connect with professionals. We don't want FB-like functionality here, thank god.
To be clear, I don't have an opinion on the issue myself. I was just trying to clarify the meaning of the grandparent comment.
Excellent if you like endless spam from clueless recruiters who think that Java == JavaScript...
LinkedIn is a massive pile of dark patterns and spam. What universe are you living in that that's "excellent" or even acceptable?
Well, it is excellent platform for self-declared thought leaders offering groundbreaking insights about business/culture and innovation.
It's a shit platform for that. Users who are attempting to read these "groundbreaking insights" are subjected to a deluge of tracking code and other malicious behavior. There are plenty of excellent platform for people to share ideas, LinkedIn is absolutely not one of them.
I think parent was joke.
I can't even tell anymore.
Just spam and advertisement. That is all LinkedIn has ever been. The contact aspect is shallow at best if you don't work in HR. It's a circle jerk.
LinkedIn is fine as it is. I found my last 3 jobs on it.
LinkedIn is perfect already.
I think it has actually improved. They added messaging and now I can get real-time recruiter spam to ignore.
LinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.
I've heard claims that Skype is no longer peer to peer but runs on msft networks/infrastructure and performance has suffered. Can anyone confirm or shed any more light on that?
Not sure about the performance aspect, but your mention of them changing architecture to send all data through their own servers is well known.
It went from seemed like a ~reasonable security architecture, to outright enabling the monitoring and forwarding of all user conversations. Ugh.
As I also replied to a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17222045):
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
Agreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
Agree. And I had a similar issue with Skype.
Yes, serious chance of GitHub fading like SourceForge did.
Me too. I'm waiting for the official transaction to be done and i'm preparing a plan b in case i have to migrate everything.
More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
Isn't that one of the strengths of Git? The whole decentralization means that it is ridiculously simply to take the whole shebang and migrate to another service or even just self host on a cheap VPS.
Yes but with services like Issues and Wiki built into GitHub and Gitlab ... If you made use of the extra services by the Platform Provider, then you possibly have alot of non-trivial project dependencies to move around ... like your Issue history for the project.
Yes but you still have configurations and docs referencing the repo to change. Then find a mean to alert all interested persons. And then write a script to migrate the issues.
It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
I would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn
> what actually happened with LinkedIn?
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
It does bug me that they pollute search results with login-required resources. Search engines should treat that as abuse, or at the very least default to freely available resources, otherwise they just become a menu without prices.
Google should start delisting their indexes for that reason, just like they are doing for sites with popups.
That's not a microsoft decision per se, my friend who was previously SEO PM at LinkedIn made this change to increase signups.
And even worse MSFT/LinkedIn is suing a small company for spidering LinkedIn's data.
LinkedIn remains as pointless as ever.
>At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
True in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.
I could make the same concern for a bunch of other companies who were to buy GitHub. Indeed, my main concern with GitHub being bought by anyone is the uncertainty of its future, and the fact that it no longer will be 'neutral' ground, so to speak.
It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
"Consider what happened to LinkedIn" Where are you going with this? LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%. Only good things have happened at LinkedIn (I'm an employee) since the MSFT acquisition. If LinkedIn is not doing something, then it sure will consider doing it now, with the vast resources it has available to it now.
"LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%."
I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh.
Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve.
"with the vast resources it has available to it now"
This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
Perhaps modifying code is out of the question, but consider how many juicy credentials / private keys etc must be tucked away in all those private repos...
GitHub is already an American company. What makes you think the NSA doesn't already receive a full copy of everything on their servers?
You place a surprising amount of trust in a hash algorithm with known collisions (SHA1).
Collisions, yes, but preimages are the bigger concern with hostile actors in git IMO.
Given the context this is not surprising at all.
A hash collision in git lets you show somebody one change, then substitute it for a different change (with the same hash) in a version others see that appears (to the first person) to be the same code.
This is a very narrow opportunity. It is _probably_ viable for a very powerful adversary (such as the NSA) to successfully trick someone working with binary blobs, like firmware for a black box. You can imagine a developer who (unusually) assiduously checks the firmware they're provided to see that it works as intended, then uploads a new version to github, and the NSA trap is sprung, they substitute a modification with the same hash but different firmware that, perhaps, causes your billion dollar spy satellite to point its cameras at the sun, destroying it.
But if the developer is less assiduous this was all pointless, just send the "burn spy sat" firmware to the original developer and lie.
Or if the spy camera owners decide not to take this mysterious last-minute update, or they try it on their ground-based prototype first to check it works... bzzt, your hugely expensive SHA-1 trick was a waste of time.
Yes, SHA-1 is broken. Nobody should use it for anything new, and things that already use it should have been migrating already _before_ the official announcement from Google et al. But, Merkle-Damgard hashes have done this before, and will do it again, and so we know how this goes. You get a collision but don't get anything else, critically you don't get second-pre-image.
This means, the NSA doesn't gain a way to substitute other stuff in a repo. They can only _collide_ their own things, by carefully choosing the inputs. So a plan where you just replace the _real_ firmware can't work.
Also, the nature of this MD attacks smashes up the input state, which for git will usually be source code. A mysterious anonymous contributor is surprising enough, but when their proposed patch adds dozens of bytes of what seems to be binary noise, you know something is up. That's why my example attack above involved firmware, where this might be less suspicious.
So yes, Git should have transitioned off SHA-1, and a window of opportunity for bad guys does exist, but it's not the sort of gaping window you imagine.
I had a pretty similar experience with skype. I lost access to my connected email account and was essentially locked out of my account forever - repeated emails to support were met with silence, alas! Then I connected my facebook account to use skype instead... then they discontinued support for that. Now it's got to a point where attempting to create a new account on the OSX desktop version just shows an error screen every time, so I'm stuck unable to use skype forever. I've moved on to other, better solutions, naturally :)
Could you tell us what "other, better solutions" would you recommend?
GitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
If Github does die out will be a slow and painful one. Skype was more of a radical change to the core technology. Of course anything is possible. I'm guessing many companies paying for Github's enterprise products are more concerned about the implications of Microsoft owning the company that hosts their proprietary code.
proprietary code which is hosted on git hub enterprise is customer-run on premise, there’s no outside access
If Microsoft does to github what they did to Skype, pushes will go into the wrong repo without authentication for no reason just like Skype had contacts and messages jump from one account to another for no reason. Pretty much everything they touch software wise is a disaster. I wonder if there will be ads or how exactly they will fuck it up, but I know for sure they will. Gitlab is fairly equivalent in features and much better in their pricing and plans anyway so I expect a lot of projects to move.
Ads like this no doubt. https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/1002879517751414784
Microsoft is big, with different divisions you can consider what it did with consumer apps, but you'd be better off considering what it has done with developer tools.
There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
Exactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace [0] app Pull Reminders [1] and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
[0] https://github.com/marketplace [1] https://github.com/marketplace/pull-reminders/
GitLab has always demanded too much faith from its users.
First with CI, it was the all-or-nothing approach where you couldn't use GitLab CI with any other provider. Lately they have tried to fix this but it was a half-hearted development after a lot of complaints.
Lately with their DevOps approach, it's exactly how you've said.
I don't have trust in GitLab leadership and their product feels way too bloated.
This is a sad day for Open Source and software in general. What makes Github great is that its a neutral place where anyone can host their code. Now that its owned by a Big Corporation, the values that Github has built will be abandoned in favor of making money for the corporation.
R.I.P. Github. Your move, Gitlab.
Ouch.
So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.
To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."
Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!
This seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub’s biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub).
You see, whether or not it’s justified, some projects invariably will leave GitHub simply because it’s Microsoft. And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where most projects exist. And really, GitHub isn’t perfect: projects overlook a lot of minor imperfections in GitHub’s actual product because there are so many projects on GitHub and the usefulness of the networking outweighs the warts here and there.
Why would investors care? It's a payday for them.
Current investors are going to be bought out in cash or MSFT stock.
They have reached the end goal of the big buyout. What more could they possibly want?
They don't call them "exits" for nothing - once a company is acquired, you have exited the market and no longer care about the future of the company, except insofar as it affects your payout at acquisition time.
Personally, I can't wait for GitHub360 Professional for Sharepoint 360.
Enterprise Edition with Cortana.
With VoiceCommit(tm)
Personally, I can't wait to start doing git push and pulls using HoloLens.
“Hi, I’m Gitty! I see you are having difficulty submitting your large file. Would you like some help with that?” [YES] [NO]
Clippy was last activated by default back in 2001 (!). When are we going to let go of this old joke?
Never.
Finally someone with the right attitude. I am waiting for a change in the URL ... https://GitHub.NET
"Please wait while we're updating your repo" ... 30-60 mins ... connection timed out
> Sharepoint
Don't you even dare think about it much less tell MS about this idea
I'm wrestling with Sharepoint as I type. I don't see why all you lot shouldn't have to suffer too.
With CandyCrush™ included in all free-tier repos!
Candycrush soda pop saga ?
There will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.
Can you maybe elaborate a little on BizSpark and how it was helpful?
BizSpark is discontinued.
Not the best example... BizSpark has been discontinued.
"Please sign in with your Microsoft account".
"Requires Windows 10".
"Best viewed with Microsoft Edge".
"This project violates our terms of service by competing with a Microsoft product."
OK, where do we move everything?
This is pretty conflicting. Github is nice on its own, but business wise they haven’t been profitable, so sooner or later some change had to happen. In my experience, Github is great for public code storage and small private projects (easy to manage developers that already have github accounts), but it does become pretty expensive and I don’t necessarily think the ROI is worth it compared to a self-hosted solution. For opensource and personal portfolios, the “network effect” or first mover advantage sort of set the stage for github’s popularity over gitlab, but for a paid enterprise solution I think gitlab does a better job and offers more value per dollar. Partially what sucks is having to have separate github/gitlab accounts/repositories since that’s now 2 things to manage. I’ve tried codecommit and bitbucket as well, but those were kinda meh (in my opinion).
Typically when “the Microsoft touch” is added it’s for the worse, so the expectations bar is pretty low. But who knows. I can definitely see them leveraging github to further go after AWS by giving Azure a leg up over codecommit. VSCode has also been pretty good, if they add in the “social integrations” of github to VSCode that also competes against Cloud9 on AWS. Right now AWS is solidly winning the cloud race, but if this puts price/service competitive pressure on amazon I won’t complain.
I also wonder what will happen with all the code and personal data from github. I really don’t want to have to make a microsoft account to access github. As long as the switching costs from github to a viable alternative (right now gitlab) remain low, I would not have a problem with jumping ship.
Why I'll never trust Microsoft ever again.
"postmaster@nsa.gov"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
I stopped trusting them when they stole the intellectual property of numerous small companies years before the _NSAKEY debacle. I know, I know, Bill Gates is supposed to be some kind of good guy now (malaria, etc.) but I can't think of any good reason to trust any robber baron, based on the past histories of robber barons. Even Andrew Carnegie was an asshole in the final analysis.
Don't forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Microsoft is basically the corporate version of the ship of Theseus at this point. The have a lot of questionable stuff in their history, but the leadership and the culture at large has shifted drastically since those days. At a certain point it is worth reevaluating one's opinions and question whether it is still worth hanging on to those old grudges.
I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
Yeah, I am not saying I would trust any other big competitor more than Microsoft.
However, I am still not convinced that Microsoft really changed as much as many people like to believe. I think it is obvious that they lost the fight against open-standards in many domains. Linux on Smartphones would be one example. Now they have two options, either to embrace these technologies or lose market. The question is: How genuine is their enthusiasm and are they really acting in the interest of open-standards? Do they still have strategies to hurt open alternatives to their own products in the long run?
I think the shift from a traditional sales focus to one on subscriptions and "The Cloud" is a pretty monumental change. Losing traditional sales markets like selling phones really hastened that change. I don't think you're looking for proof that they're genuinely enthusiastic, because imo desperation is the rawest form of genuine enthusiasm. It's whether or not they're altruistic in this particular field, and that has yet to be seen.
I don't think you have to be altruistic to have genuine enthusiasm -- some companies have fantastic plans to support open-source as well as their business plans. But I agree with the first point you are making.
I think it is naive to believe than any company that is beholden to investors would choose altruism over profit. Most corporate altruism is just marketing.
I don't think Microsoft is any more altruistic now, they just have adjusted their corporate strategy to recognize that supporting openness is good for business. That is enough for me.
and yet the response to anything by microsoft is reminders of EEE, while google gets praised for blatantly awful abuses of power.
True.
My days of google fan-boy-ism are long over :-/
> google gets praised for blatantly awful abuses of power
Do you have some examples of that? The first things that come to mind are AMP and related announcements, which were not received particularly positively here on HN.
mil drone stuff, Reader, the worst customer technical support…
Cue followup 'Actually these are all extremely good + business-savvy decisions for big G since' posts.
The key part I quoted was
> google gets praised
None of the things you list are things Google is praised for.
I don't think anyone on HN has forgotten considering it's repeated ad nauseum on every single Microsoft story on here.
Well, because the strategy was really nasty stuff and acquiring github might fit into this kind of pattern.
Except all the key players of this strategy are gone and Microsoft has embraced (full stop) open source as much as any major corporation in recent years.
But don't let actual evidence stop your pitchforks.
I see that Microsoft is not a corporation that is evil by design and that they are doing exciting stuff as well -- I don't hate them.
However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?
So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).
For the avoidance of doubt, the postmaster@nsa.gov address has nothing do to with _NSAKEY.
Somebody used this address in a joke, and then a Wikipedia editor took it seriously and put it in the article. sigh
This may just be paranoia but if I were competing with Microsoft on something that I'd have private code for hosted on GitHub, I'd be pretty worried right now.
That's not paranoia. That is completely reasonable considering Microsoft's history.
Microsoft have a history of corporate espionage against their customers?
Well, considering all this "telemetry" thing they have been pushing down its customer's throats, I wouldn't be comfortable at all with this move.
I think if Microsoft are even slightly shown to have used this to spy on its competitors, it'll be the end of the company as we know it, and people will go to jail.
Just for example, among the EU's criticisms of Microsoft were some of the documented (as in civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars documented) abuses of some of its notable customers like IBM and Intel.[0]
"Oh, but that was way back in the 80s and 90s, and different people run the company now. They're more mature and responsible these days." This is the only argument I've been offered when pointing out Microsoft's very shady history. It doesn't suffice.
[0] http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...
> among the EU's criticisms of Microsoft were some of the documented abuses of some of its notable customers like IBM and Intel
Scanning that, I don't see any mention that this was in any way due to corporate espionage, or weaponizing the customer relationship -- could you point me directly to that part?
Said by people who probably cheerfully use AWS.
That's a very weak counter argument
And nope, I don't use AWS or any other "cloud" service.
Microsoft doesn't have the time or resources to give a fuck about yours or other's shitty private repos. Besides, if they really wanted to compete, they would just utilise their massive engineering team to extinguish the competition.
Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty frontend.
MS buys GitHub for $5B.
Funny old world.
You'll be surprised to learn who has is primarily sponsoring git's development for the past years.
(It's Google.)
Aye:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junio_Hamano
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
There’s a reason MS bought GitHub and not GitLab
Because GitLab doesn’t have 5 Billion dollars? I mean, you act as if there’s a singular reason here.
Actually my real point was: scratch an itch and find you have lice living off you. No, err that's not it.
It is genuinely nice to see hard work pay off. Github have seriously put their back into it to create an environment that a lot of people feel comfortable with. I sincerely hope that MS do not fuck it up and wish them both all the best.
We still have git itself - that has never changed. That is the power of open source software.
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
Linus invented git because Linux needed a new code repo thingie. He was only focused on one project - Linux. He released git as GPL. GitHub n Co are value add sites with fees for services and are more than welcome to use GPL software for obvious reasons.
The way GitHub is developed (remote) and culture, this is pretty much death of GitHub and if most developers leave it will become a mess quite quickly.
GitLab just got big boost.
That's extremely doubtful. First, having to login to different Gitlab instances is terrible UX. Second, you cannot easily reference another instance's issues. Hosted Gitlab is also unreliable and slow and comes with no publicly mentioned SLO of any kind.
I'd be surprised to see any big projects going away from GitHub in the coming years, unless Microsoft actually manages to tarnish the GitHub brand in a meaningful way.
The typical tinfoil head probably never trusted GitHub anyways, whether they're owned by Microsoft or not.
Just when it looked like GitHub was "sustainable" through revenue ... greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") and they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! :-( Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? I would buy a few (thousand) shares ... Who else would buy stock/shares if they remained independent?
> they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices!
Right? It's like your wife leaving you for your high school bully.
> Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future?
No. Unless they want to go for an IPO, they are only allowed to sell to accredited investors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor).
> greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble")
That's their job. They put hundreds of millions of dollars into GitHub 3 (Series B) or 6 (Series A) years ago, and their sustainable business relies on selling those investments for a profit.
> relies on selling those investments for a profit.
There are more ways to make money than selling out
@asernik I was referring to the idea of them doing a "Direct Public Listing" ("DPO") as opposed to an IPO (similar to what Spotify recently did...) http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/spotify-ipo/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-difference-between-ip...
> "a DPO is attractive to small companies and companies with an established and loyal client base. A DPO is also known as direct placement."
GitHub has the "established and loyal client base" with many millions in recurring revenue.
GitHub's principal VCs, Sequoia and A16z can both afford to wait for a return. everyone could sell in the "DPO" so VCs could liquidate if they needed cash ... https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github
This point exactly. To me the move is a clear symptom that GitHub leadership has lost touch with the original vision/philosophy that made the platform popular in the first place.
If this goes through Microsoft basically gets access to all the private proprietary code of so many companies. I would have never expected Github founders to even entertain the notion. I guess times change.
That’s not too different than Azure/Office 365, is it?
Microsoft has access to the running systems of so many companies.
Notably Google banned Windows years ago and every startup I know is 99.9% Mac.
I was actually thinking about Azure, but good point.
From at least two angles this is great news for Gitlab.
But it feels a bit like the Atlassian / Trello arrangement, which has had little impact on users.
From recent behaviour I'd expect Microsoft to have a very light touch here.
I'm not familiar with recent behaviour anything in particular? (My memory goes to Skype...)
The Skype buy was seven years ago, and it was a pretty user hostile piece of software before that.
Post Balmer we've seen a more open (in the transparent, consultative, community sensitive sense) attitude, with genuine contributions to free software.
People also seem to be citing LinkedIn as an example, but that doesn't feel like it got any more unpleasant since the buyout.
Minecraft, LinkedIn as examples. While LinkedIn has not gone super well, it has been left to make the decisions that it made on it's own.
Minecraft has also gone untouched - it's still hosted on AWS in fact.
They bought xamarin and then made it open source and free. They also have continued to support mono despite having .net core
Hey, GitLab, if you want to push a big migration from GitHub, inundate the GitHub design team with requests for a ribbon UI on github.com and to move the subscription system to Office 365.
I am very interested in what will happen with these accounts (t name a few) the next few weeks / months:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/mozilla https://github.com/google
What do you think will happen?
What advantage would any change bring for Microsoft?
(/torvalds/linux is not the upstream, btw)
I am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way.
Another issue: Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository. Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I still will be moving away right now.
A bit like if you're a bookshop running your online site on AWS.
The downside risk for Amazon messing with anything is greater than any benefit they could gain.
I mean, Microsoft has a kernel module upstreamed. It's not 1990 anymore.
Do you seriously expect anything to happen to these accounts? On what grounds?
I'm guessing: access to all private repos.
I guess it's time to move to Gitlab.
MS has had an 180 degree turn in policy since Balmer left.
Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.
I simply have little trust in MS. They did improve in some areas, but not enough to gain overall trust. They are still not on the same page with many FOSS efforts.
Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
particularly when most microsoft investors value microsoft stock for its earnings potential, as opposed to growth/revenue potential.
Add to that Microsoft's position about copyrightability of APIs. That alone should be a red flag for many FOSS projects to avoid Github if MS buys it.
And TypeScript <3!
Looking at Windows 10, with stuff like telemetry that's impossible to disable completely and hidden behind every dark pattern imaginable, or ads in Start menu?
Microsoft of today is more Microsoft than ever.
Eh. Windows today might be more Microsoft than ever, but the rest of the org is spending lots of effort creating cross platform developer tools that's preparing Microsoft to remain relevant in a world that doesn't involve Windows PCs.
True, they went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either.
Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
They really haven't. Maybe like a 150 degree turn at best.
As i know it started under Balmer, but he have to left because the failed phone OS.
Honest question: do the still threaten Linux-related companies with suing for violations of unspecified Microsoft patents?
Last time I've heard, MS is still shaking down many mobile manufactures who use Android, using patent protection racket.
I am gonna wait and see. I know they messed up Skype really bad, but LinkedIN for example they havent touched and destroyed. I will wait and see..
LinkedIn is kinda hard to make worse though tbh
Microsoft screwed up Skype by trying to “make it more Microsoft” whereas LinkedIn is being left to operate as before (tough MSFT is using the data for something). My guess is that GitHub will continue as before with the main change being that MSDN subscribers will likely get private GitHub repos as part of their package.
Now MSFT just needs something along the lines of Jira to replace the dog’s breakfast that is VSTS Agile project management tooling. I don’t suppose the folks in Redmond are looking to acquire Atlassian next...?
You dont pay 2 Billion, and leave it untouched, they see an earnings potential in the company given the right management and shareholders expect ROI that is higher then the average market return
Thanks for this comment.
Most of the discussio here is just centered around Microsofts goodwill and trustworthiness, mostly ignoring that MS wouldn't make this investment without a solid plan and path to profitability.
That doesn't have to be bad per se, I guess there are a lot of options like integrating Github well with Azure and providing alternatives to AWS CodeCommit / pipelines, ...
Microsoft can monetize the data in a way that github themselves couldn’t. It can also afford to lose money for strategic reasons.
Although I completely agree with you, pointing at LinkedIn as a success story is kind of weird.
Microsoft's new future is to be a cross-platform vendor for developers. I see absolutely zero incompatibility between Github and Microsoft and a need to shut it down. I think the Satya's Microsoft is smart enough not to ruin it.
Or you can move immediately like many others. What would you gain by staying until it's too late?
It's good that there is such an alternative as GitLab, because there is a slight but still not unsignificant risk that MS will not do the right thing. I think they will though since they are power users of their own product. I'm hoping they know this space.
I thought many people did after the infamous incident at Github.
Some did, but this will be another major incentive.
What incident?
They ran dome SQL on wrong server and wiped main db instead of its mirror. Lost around 48 hours of stuff (as multiple backups also failed)
Any links to artciles that describe it in more details?
https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...
This is GitLab, not GitHub.
I think the majority of the Github users started using the platform in the time since that, and don't even know much about Github's history.
Not surprising. Microsoft has made a big deal of partnering with GitHub, showing off how well their Azure-based CI/CD products and services integrate with code hosted at GitHub. Not to mention that .NET Core and many companion libraries are hosted at GitHub, not on VSTS.
I am really sick of monopoly and centralization of internet. For last few years many of important projects changed hosting to GitHub... Now this? We have alternatives, and good ones (one may argue much better than GitHub), but where is all of this going?
And Microsoft going around devouring open-source community. To some extent we are the responsible ones. But on the other hand I am getting really tired of this. Then people ask me why I use Emacs... it's free and immortal as of now...
I hope this encourages people to fight vendor lock-in a bit and move to self-hosted git portals. With SaaS there is always the danger of acquisitions and degradation of service. The solution is open software, self hosted and portable. Git itself is absurdly easy to self host, but self-hosted alternatives to github deserve more attention, both in terms of use and development effort.
See here for some alternatives: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-manag...
(Funny that this list is hosted on github.)
I worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.
Why not self-hosting?
I'm not sure what exactly you're reacting to, but a lot of us absolutely do not want to self-host our github repos. Because it's work, because we don't need it, because we like using github/gitlab/other as a "marketplace"
But what about the social / code sharing / collaboration part, which is arguably the most interesting part? We need a quality central meeting place.
1. Electricity cost 2. Need for constant electricity 3. Internet cost 4. Need for constant Internet access 5. Cost of hardware 6. Heat generated by the running hardware 7. Noise generated by the running hardware 8. Space occupied by the hardware 9. Need to update and maintain hardware/software 10. Worse discoverability for your repos 11. ISP asking questions 12. Government asking questions 13. Police asking questions
Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
This is a weird comment.
"Self-hosting" doesn't have to mean having a giant server farm at home. You could put it on an AWS/GCP/Azure free-tier VPS instance.
GP admits to being in a developing country. Presumably, their reality is different from yours.
Most of these aren't an issue if you're self-hosting in the cloud though. You can cheap VPS for a couple of $ a month.
Can't afford it. $1 goes a long way here.
Not everyone will need to self-host, it is still possible to host your projects at someone else's instance. If you live in a place where $1 is a lot of money (where is this by the way?) you could either share a server with others who each chip in their $0.10 or just find an open instance somewhere. There are plenty of organisations which host services like these, Github is the best-known but by no means the only alternative.
Have you tried running GitLab on a $3 VPS?
Gitlab, no. Gogs [1] or Gitea [2], no problem. I run Gitea on an Intel SS4200 (2.4 GHz Pentium E2200, 2 GB, 8 TB JBOD), it hardly causes a blip on this rather anaemic system. The process generally takes up around 35 MB (RSS), it talks to a PostgreSQL database server on the same box. You would not want to run a service the size of Github on this but for a personal repository it is more than enough. If your projects get so popular that they outgrow the hardware or VPS just move to a higher tier.
[1] https://gogs.io/
[2] https://gitea.io/
GitLab does not recommend hosting it in such a low-spec [1]. Would love to see if such setup is still feasible, though.
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#memory
For personal projects I find it sufficient to simply have a VPS (or even just a shell account) that I can ssh into.
A lot of these would be problems anywhere. Reliability/uptime of electricity/internet is problematic everywhere, although noise/heat I don't see why it would really be much of a problem anywhere.
I think he's talking about running a server from home.
Yes, that's what I meant. If you're running a server at home, then you will always run the risk of power or internet outages.
Its very hard to open issues or PRs etc on many self-hosted setups, as they don't have a way to create logins, or accept other identities.
You can run gogs/gitea and get that basically 'for free'.
People don't really want to create an account for every project they send a patch to, and I say this as someone who does self-host.
People want the nice UI of Github as opposed to just a hosted .git folder, and self-hosting Gitlab is a hassle compared to using a SaaS.
If you self-host you will probably never get outside contributions. For most people it isn't worth taking the time to figure out whatever system you use. I'd like to see a federated system like GNUsocial/Mastodon for git. I've thought about trying to make such a system but I don't know much about federation.
For us (sqlitebrowser.org), self hosting the code, comments, and similar should be achievable with something like Gitea (Open Source GitHub clone).
Hosting our downloads though... hmmm... that could be more tricky.
Our releases generally have ~180k downloads a month, with each being (very) roughly 15MB in size.
That's only 2.5TB/mo, but the downloads aren't evenly spaced throughout the day.
We'd probably need a small cluster of servers with unmetered bandwidth or something. Scaleway might suit.
Except for the social part as far as I know, I hope that Bitbucket could see this as a big opportunity and expand that aspect of their platform.
Microsoft was the second most frequent contributor on Github (to Google)[1].
[1] https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...
Absolutely, and this has been the case for many years. Microsoft has contributed to open source heavily for a long time, but it won't stop a lot of people that have been burned in the past from not trusting Microsoft.
It's worth noting that the same goes for Apple. They have tons of closed source stuff, but they also make huge contributions to the open source world. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have LLVM or Clang as they exist today. WebKit is another big one.
Tbh, I like this move. I hope they will merge Atom with VS Code and shutdown VSTS in favor for GitHub.
Atom and VS Code are both built on Electron. No need to kill Atom as it and VS Code are built for different purposes.
What different purposes? They're both text editors / lightweight IDEs focusing on plugin extensibility built on top of Electron. They're literally the same thing.
And there are many who would say a sedan and a crossover are basically the same thing, but the devil is in the details.
Atom is extensible to a fault. A plugin can do just about everything and anything. FFS tabs are actually a plugin! While that means that performance will suffer, many (myself included) use Atom because of that insane freedom that plugins have to do what they need to do.
VSCode on the other hand is much more "if you want to do X, use this API". It's much more controlled, much more opinionated about how things "should" be done using VSCode as a platform.
From 30,000 ft, they are the same. But their goals and details differ, and I always prefer more choice rather than less.
I use neither, and I can see that the two take fairly different approaches, but why would you say they're build for different purposes. I don't think it's clear why a single org (though very far apart) has two approaches for a code text editor.
Atom has a whole team under Github. If they're both run by Microsoft, that seems like a clear cost-cutting measure; why develop two vastly similar electron-based code editors when you could just move that team + all of the interesting tech into VSCode?
Why do you hope for this outcome?
Probably less redundant work and overall a better editor/IDE?
I wonder if they will merge VSTS or shutdown VSTS, or maybe just add CI and CD from VSTS to github
I used to be a big fan of Atom in the beginning, but there’s nothing Atom does that VS Code does not do better. I wouldn’t see a purpose in merging the two, but I could see them killing Atom.
I agree on the VSTS front, but a lot of people use Atom and I can see many of them being put off by being forced onto VS Code.
Lately, based on comments made while promoting .NET Core, it sounds like Microsoft don't want to consolidate tooling, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Atom and VS Code co-exist as entirely separate entities/teams.
I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot of individual developers are biting at that price.
I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.
It's a convenience thing for me. As a hobbyist solo dev it'd be nice to have a place to work on code across different devices in private and then open it up when I feel the code is mature enough and the time is right to put it out there under an open source license.
Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.
I can only speak for myself, but I like hosting private repos on GitHub because I like using issues & milestones to track my progress
Especially when you have free bitbucket for that purpose.
This completely misses the forest for the trees.
I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:
- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.
- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.
- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.
- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.
The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.
But what if they increase the price or add more plans...
I'm hoping they go with the current VSTS pricing...
https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/pricing/
It's very simple, reasonable, and sane compared to GitHub's.
Hoping it becomes free for vs subscribers.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
> I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure.
Well, it's Microsoft, so more complex tiering and tie in to MSDN should be on the road map.
> Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers.
How so?
> I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper.
Perhaps, so what? That's an unrelated service.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Their competitors do that to build a user base and mind share in the face of GitHub’s huge advantage in network effects.
VSTS does a lot of things that GitHub does not. VSTS takes the workflow roles of Jenkins, GitHub, Jira, and has a few additional features that I don't know what open-source equivilant exists for (staged production, push to cloud - maybe done as Jenkins plugins?). It's highly unlikely VSTS will be shut down, especially in favor of a project which does very few things that VSTS does.
If they shut down vsts they would have to make github have vsts’ level of issue management, ci/cd, test management, ...
I think most people who use github would NOT want that.
Microsoft being an owner here doesn't bother me that much.
The Azure integrations are inevitable. I guess we'll see if Microsoft has learned that strong-armed vendor lock-in makes people not like them. At this point, I am more glad they were acquired by Microsoft than Amazon. Still - there is still so much Microsoft ill-will, that this will take away the aura of 'software purity' from the GitHub.
Microsoft, please be a kind steward... I don't want to waste time migrating.
Putting aside my general dislike for Microsoft for a moment, I still believe this is bad for the tech industry.
It was great having a neutral player running the site, I don't think anyone should own them. GitHub would be best as a nonprofit, though unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen.
Imagine if CNN for example bought Twitter, would other news companies use Twitter still? Probably not.
Will Google, Amazon etc. move their code elsewhere? Maybe. But we will no longer have a centralised git repo, whether that's a good or bad thing.
GitLab have already said they're having 10x the amount of normal traffic migrating GitHub repos to them.
Will employers now ask to see your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket profiles?
yeah but frankly 10x of a small number is still a small number. we still have to see what the real numbers are.
I consider this a huge waste of money on Microsoft's part.
Why did they create and then shutter codeplex in the first place? Why can't we have multiple competing platforms (Google Code, Github, Codeplex, Sourceforge, bitbucket, etc.)?
If I were Microsoft I'd rather invest a smaller amount of money (it surely is much cheaper than acquiring Github!) into making Codeplex the best platform.
And then I'd just do a traditional way of forcing people a bit: Why did Microsoft put their software on Github, a competitor? Why not force people a little bit into your ecosystem? Why give up the fight for winner takes it all every single time??? If I were Microsoft I were a bit more proud to use Codeplex, Windows phones, Windows instead of Mac, etc...
Why shutter MSN messenger for Skype? Why making apps for iphone first before Windows phone? Why does Microsoft not simply fund their projects (Windows Mobile had a head start and was abandoned, tablet PCs were already there with XP) and try to compete and create an ecosystem full of solutions working together?
Of course it's kind of nice to see Microsoft embracing github and being more open etc. But where's the fight? Why give up all the time?
Why letting codeplex die when all we need is a bit competititon.
Just depends on the product. Microsoft decided to create Teams in house instead of acquiring slack.
You need to reach a critical mass of users. In contrast to Github, neither Codeplex nor Windows phone did that.
If you're thinking of moving off GitHub, one thing that I have heard about that might help you is you can ask GitHub to mirror repos, the way https://github.com/moodle/moodle looks -- note it says:
That way any URLs to your GitHub repo should carry on working. People can even clone and pull this repo. That may ease migration, especially if some tools assume code is on GitHub and don't allow you to specify the full URL to the repo.
This will certainly be one of the first features to be deprecated once the deal goes through. Quietly deprecated, of course.
how do you do this? I can't find this option anywhere
Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reasons, now no tech company who hosts its codebase on GitHub would want to continue doing that if its MSFT-owned. It's already happening: https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632
> Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reason
My former employer, a major e-commerce player in Europe and a direct competitor of Amazon, had basically their entire infrastucture on AWS. You might want to reconsider your definition of “no”.
Just because someone did it, it doesn’t mean it’s wise and advisable. Just saying.
I don't understand how GitHub has been unable to become profitable. Anyone know more and want to share some details?
It is weird, isn’t it? GitHub was the first SaaS I ever subscribed to out of my own pocket. Spotify was the next one.
Plus they have very large private enterprise instances of github.
My guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.
The costs of the fancy office and the workforce should be quite high as well.
The cash flow is probably good but even with a million customers at $5 a month, that's not enough to sustain a large company.
The weird part is that they were actually profitable before they started taking funding. [1][2]
[1]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... [2]: https://a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-developme...
Does it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit.
Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
Hop, that's one thing less to do tomorrow! ... of course it was just a matter of time before it happened, github have stood on the other side of the mirror for a long time now, they just happend to have kept that not-for-profit/garage-built-startup image for some time, kinda like twitter. Or reddit and even y combinator. And yet people comment stuff like "let's switch to {gitlab,bitbucket,gogs}". We need to understand that making a self-hostable floss clone of a service that has been designed for a monopoly captive market is not gonna change anything durably. Build something based on small friend-to-friend networks. Something that doesn't need to be big to suceed. That will slowly change the way people think about collaborative tools and get people out of the "giant ad-based ex-startup owned; `free' (as in beer) to use; hosted service" mental model. Please stop building services and start sharing collaborative tools with your peers.
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace app (https://pullreminders.com) and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
P.S. Here's the GitHub Marketplace: https://github.com/marketplace
I bet GitLab is getting infrastructure ready in anticipation of the exodus.
The exodus began a number of days ago when this was just a rumor.
I bet the first thing GitLab is going to do is put the word out that they're looking for a "strategic partner".
I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
But that Microsoft has changed, I see the most what people are complaining about is telemetry that is send, for following up on their biggest product. But all companies do this ( eg. https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not-just-you-clicking-... ), also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this.
Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too, because I think they have more to lose if they fail with GitHub then when they succeed (with more integration for visualstudio.com probably)
Being evil is a natural state for any large corporation. Trying to be not evil is always either fake or temporary. Microsoft cannot change, until it is split into hundreds of companies. Neither can Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple.
> I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
And because of how Microsoft was in the 2000s, and the 2010s. Ballmer was after the 90s. Did they ever stop suing Android manufacturers for using FAT, or open up exFAT after managing to get it as part of the SDXC standard?
> also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this
...Yeah, Ubuntu did that. Not Debian. Not Fedora. Not Arch. Not Gentoo. Even RHEL barely phones home enough to check its license and get updates. And in Ubuntu, the single Linux distro to have done this, you could toggle it off in 5 minutes and it would actually respect your choice, rather than "accidentally" resetting to the most invasive set of options every other update after you spend hours hunting the latest set of registry hacks that make it better.
> Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too
I agree that they want to show that they've changed. I even agree that the current ecosystem is forcing them to change some. I also expect them to pull something the moment they think they can get away with it.
> Microsoft has changed
Changed? What makes you say that?
From the tiny interaction I have with MS I don’t think this is the case.
E.g. In my wife’s PC I have Firefox as the default browser, however:
1. If she clicks on one of the login manager wallpaper photos, the page opens in MS Edge.
2. Every time there is an update, MS Edge reappears as an icon on the desktop.
No, MS hasn’t changed. Their PR may have, but at core they are as evil as ever.
I wonder what the reaction would have been with Apple being the acquirer. Microsoft still receives lots of hate, sometimes justified, but often just baseless. On the other hand, whenever Apple fucks devs (or users) over, they're just "protecting users" or "making business decisions". I feel there's a strong bias in the dev community.
Apple being the acquirer wouldn't change the potential conflicts of interest or the trend towards monopolization, which is what a lot of people are upset about. Animosity toward large corporations isn't unique to Microsoft.
I bet the reaction would have been largely the same; a megacorp monopoly is a megacorp monopoly.
That being said, Apple did make a few nice moves lately -- e.g., open-sourcing FoundationDB (when was the last time Microsoft opened up anything it acquired?).
I doubt that Google or Amazon will use GitHub to opensource anything two years from now.
I was just thinking the same thing.
If github ends up running completely on Azure infrastructure; how likely will microsoft's competitor's be to host large projects there.
that said, I'm not sure the impact will be too negative if google or _______'s open source being on some other git-based system if it includes decent github / gitlab like collab tools.
...And in the comments, a thousand developers suddenly realize GitHub is a plain old business rather than some kind of core infrastructure service altruistically provided by Free Software Elves and their Infinite Bandwidth Rainbow.
My dissenting opinion is that this is good. I am not a Windows user and only peripherally use their services however ironically I believe Microsoft is now the challenger if monopolies:
- Bing is one of the only english search engines with a big userbase; provides a google alternative. I like ddg but it isnt mainstream yet.
- Provides alternative to gmail and enterprise services
- a big 3 cloud provider, competes with AWS and GC. Likely why this github acq makes sense
- runs linkedin to keep fb in competition
There are a lot of examples where they drop the ball, but they are surprisingly the challenger in a lot of new markets providing an alt to the leader/incumbent
Get ready to merge your Github account with your Office 365 and Skype accounts
doesn't seem like something that will happen, just look at LinkedIn, they don't even have MS Account logins
Maybe this is an unpopular question.
People unwilling to pay for a service they think is important for their work, yet lose their shit when the the said service does what is best for them. That is, to be sustainable.
AFAIK, GH charges for private repos and yet they are not-profitable. Gitlab offers free private repos, how will the story end differently?
EDIT: Typo
Oh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube).
Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.
I was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)
You didn't use Youtube before it was acquired? I vividly remember finding a lot of cool videos and music that I couldn't otherwise have found. Now once you watch a few garbage videos it's all Youtube autosuggests to you. Also if you start exploring videos they'll probably be mostly around the same what you've already seen and not diverge too much from what's popular. Anything novel and out-of-ordinary is pushed to the bottom in most cases.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is different but the freshness of it is gone. I don't expect anymore to find anything super-interesting and the same old stuff that I've already watched is being suggested to me again and again.
Videos get demonetised for questionable or non reasons
Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time).
Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything.
Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today).
Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site.
Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant.
Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them.
YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections.
And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.
Most of these features (and problems) appeared after YT was acquired, but demonetization and account problems (including wholesale blocking) seem specific to Google, so I agree.
Youtube would probably be dead if not for Google.
Google acquired Youtube so early on, how could you know what it would be like without them?
According to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.
I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.
I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.
I talked to a VP from MSFT last year. He asked how MSFT could do a better job appealing to the open source community and start up community. I said just keep doing what you are doing. It is going to take time for those of us that were around during the Balmer days to be willing to believe that MSTF has turned a corner. I think that they are on the right path, but I certainly don't judge anyone who is skeptical about the future of github. I've been on gitlab since 2011 so it don't make much difference to me.
This is seriously depressing. GitHub had such massive network effects that you'd think if anyone could stay independent it would be them.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion around here but I see nothing but positives in this announcement.
This move towards a "good" Microsoft has been going on for a decade, ASP.NET MVC was released as Open Source in 2009. Seeing where they're going with .NET core, VSCode and TypeScript makes me pretty confident they will be good stewards of the site.
Microsoft had their own open source hosting solution Codeplex but closed it and migrated all their stuff to GitHub so they could be where the community was. That was a bold move and I think demonstrates how they see the community now. This isn't the Microsoft of the 90's.
GitHub is great but it's not profitable and I'm sure there are lots of improvements they could make with a bit of a cash injection.
On the flip side if Microsoft stuff it up or there is an exodus from Microsoft because people hate Microsoft, that's not such a bad thing either.
There are great alternatives out there, it's not the same landscape as when GitHub launched, everyone's learnt from GitHub, GitHub's biggest feature is the network effect. Everyone has an account and it's super low friction to contribute there. If we can break that a bit and everyone has an account at 2 or 3 places I think we might see some great innovation as competitors try to differentiate themselves.
Finally on that point. Bitbucket is awesome, you can build apps that are integrated directly into the UI https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/
In case you haven't seen it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
TL;DR, Microsoft's known strategy is to feign goodness, then use the goodwill to kill competition, especially in the open standards/open source area.
Every business that built their service around the GitHub ecosystem will get massively screwed. They should immediately start to integrate as many GitHub competitors as possible or Microsoft will just eat them within the next months. GitHub always wanted to concentrate on the code hosting, not the CI/CD, code quality, code analysis, etc parts but Microsoft will soon start to extend GitHub to support Azure's services directly.
GitHub was never conceived as a charity. But this didn't stop people to put half of the world's open source code centrally on this one platform. Now they are crying/worried because this platform is being sold. Can't really understand your point, guys. That is the way it often goes with commercial enterprises. It's quite an irony that free/open source makes this platform so financially interesting to buy.
I use it for work like everybody else here, but being so comfortable and happy with it, I paid $7/month for a few private repos which maybe used $.02/month in their resources. Just a shame companies and the developers paying for it wasn't enough
At least it's not Oracle
Or Google.
I searched through the comments to see if anyone else had the same thought I did.
Gitlab is a good solution for most folks. They have a for profit business powered by open source software.
GH also had a for-profit business. Apparently the profits weren't enough, but they were profitable and bootstrapped in their early days
It says in the article:
GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work.
And why exactly do you think that GitLab is any more profitable than Github?
I never said it was. I am just pointing out that the article says Github hasn't even turned a profit yet while the OP said they were profitable.
Fair enough. The parent said "early days", though. It's fairly common for reporters to get this stuff wrong.
From 2010: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-...
At some point the situation clearly flipped
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it? So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.
Linux doesn't use GitHub for anything other than a mirror, and Linus famously hates GitHub.
(More reading: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/)
Point taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA:
"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."
But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."
The official git repo of the kernel is git.kernel.org. The github one is just a mirror and it's just sad that is returned as a first result on Google.
> and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github
Linux isn't hosted on github, it's hosted on their own cgit instance: https://git.kernel.org/
There was a short period of time, back in 2011, when kernel.org went down for some time (from late August: https://lwn.net/Articles/457142/ to early October: https://lwn.net/Articles/461465/), so Linux was temporarily hosted on github. After that, the repository on github was kept as a mirror of the official kernel.org repository, but it's a one-way flow.
See also the following article: https://lwn.net/Articles/464233/
From a recent github blog post: "Millions of developers trust us with their data—and protecting their privacy is a top priority for us."
Now these millions of developers will face a dilemma.
Some years ago I wrote "The Github Threat" https://carlchenet.com/the-github-threat/ and I'll be delighted to update the conclusion with this quite predictable and logical outcome.
Personally, I think this is great news given the investment Microsoft has made in hosting their open source projects on GitHub. I'm heavily invested in the Microsoft stack so I'm kind of excited to see where they take this.
Also, I'm excited because I'm in the middle of launching a product that aims to build people in to Git experts, or at the bare minimum build up your comfort level with Git to make you productive.
I'd love for you to check it out. This open source version is kind of the basis for my upcoming commercial project.
https://github.com/ryanrodemoyer/git-evangelism.
Also, let's connect if you're in the Denver area. You can find my email through my GitHub account or comment on my message.
Speaking of fickle developers, I'm already planning my exit.
Any mention of Microsoft is enough to turn me off, I have seen enough - I have had enough.
And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/microsoft-fort...
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/
>And... what has Microsoft done to you lately?
Skype.
That acquisition was almost 7 years ago under the old leadership.
So skype isn't shit any more?
You didn't say anything about that. I've never used it, so I don't know anything about its quality.
Which has recently gone even more steeply downhill now that they've tried to push React/Electron everywhere.
Nokia too, although it didn’t affect people directly, as opposed to the series of ultrabad decisions on Skype. Acquisitions aren’t always successful with Microsoft.
Funny enough, I don't feel that way about Skype anymore. Yeah, Microsoft destroyed it, but, on the other hand, why did I even use it? Right, because there was nothing else back then, and Skype was "good enough". And everyone else was using it. Even though, honestly, it always was some buggy proprietary piece of shit, dragging all that legacy of the Delphi era into 201x. If anything, it may be even good it's not so dominant anymore, even though we still don't have anything decent to completely replace it.
In bed with the NSA, telemetry, forced W10 migration, just off the top of my head.
That said, I do appreciate their recent strategy decisions. Lets hope at some point the two hemispheres of MS converge.
> Forced Windows 10 migration
Incorrect. Nagged, yes, but my Windows 7 machine that runs my Primera 4102 DVD duplicator still runs Windows 7 and will for as long as I own it. And it wasn't that hard to find the "don't nag me about upgrading ever again" option on Windows 7.
You may have missed a few news items and non-apologies over the last few years.
There was a peroid where interacting with (closing) the windows 10 upgrade popup caused an unexpected upgrade to windows 10, stop rewriting history.
How is "I was able to tell my machine to stop nagging me and not upgrade to Windows 10" rewriting history? I'll take the kudos that I have way-above-average skills with Windows if you want to bestow that on me, but I know of no cases not-involving confused users hitting something they should not have where a machine was upgraded without any user interaction at all. By all means: send me links to such stories if you have them and I will concede the point to you.
Microsoft being (possibly) the biggest 'partner' of the NSA is one of the worst aspects of this acquisition and underrepresented in these discussions here.
Check the recent history of computing. They willingly botched many good standardization efforts and devalued many by throwing their industry weight around - all in the name of self-interest.
And oh, their software sucks. Sometimes it's kinda bizarre even how much their software sucks, bad engineering abound.
Have you tried updating Windows 7 recently?
They took over the world of computers and made people believe that computers suck and are boring, which they do when they run Windows.
They brainwashed so many corporations and governments to use their stupid solutions for every problem and plague tech people with incredible headache in the process.
It's even worse in the "developing" world, where every single comapny is like: "Oracle! Microsoft! Oracle! Microsoft!". You will never know till you experience it.
I guess it'll just take a lot longer for this generation to see MS as anything but embrace, extend, extinguish.
This. Very much this.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-requiring-...
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/06/03/0626246/microsoft-s...
I am forced to use Windows for gaming, and let me tell you what Microsoft has done to me lately.
- Forced updates are a travesty. I should be able to delay or ignore updates indefinitely as I own my computer.
- I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program, despite having no need of one. I can only temporarily pause Windows Defender's real-time checks before they'll helpfully turn it back on for me. This results in a loss of gaming performance.
- Turning off their spying telemetry is essentially impossible and will helpfully turn itself back on.
- They hold some good games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows (Halo Master Chief Collection) since they don't take gaming seriously on PC.
- Every once in a while, they become dedicated to PC gaming again which simply means they will use their power to force something awful onto the community, like the Windows Xbox Game Bar, Games for Windows Live, etc. in their quest to make my gaming PC into an Xbox.
- UWP is trash and greatly restricts what the user can do with their game, such as mods or fan patches to fix bugs developers ignore.
- The Windows Store is horrible in and of itself and is full of even more low quality software. Instead of releasing their games on Steam, Origin, GOG, or even UPlay, they force them into this dumpster fire.
- They install Candy Crush and other drivel by default on a fresh copy of Windows, and sometimes it magically reappears.
Just because Microsoft has put on the "I'm changed!" act recently by releasing some FOSS and donating some money does not mean they have actually stopped being a negative influence.
Yes, thank you. People are quick to point out the Microsoft hasn't done anything detrimental to society, forget that their software is such a mess. We're too focused on judging companies based on whether employees get paternity leave, an offhand remark by a CEO, or recent scandals, that we're forgetting about the quality of software we're installing on our computers. When I saw a bunch of spammy games like March of Empires and Candy Crush installed with my Windows 10 Pro, I thought I got a bad copy -- instead it was truly just part of their operating system. They force their terrible antivirus (which keeps quarantining files I'm working on, when I'm working with low-level .exe patching) and forced updates and reboots. I wish there was a way to have Windows that's just an operating system.
> Forces updates are a travesty.
You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to block your machine's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do this.
> They hold some games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows...
Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don't follow.
> UWP is trash...
This is true. UWP tries to be many things, like a single container for desktop, tablet, and (Windows) mobile apps. In the end it mostly fails.
> I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program.
Uh, dude: I run Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines and none of them FORCE me to use antivirus. They nag about it for a while but those alerts and nags can be disabled.
> You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to block your machine's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do this.
That's not disabling Windows Update, that's hacking name resolution to prevent the connection itself. That's like saying you can disable Windows Update by not connecting to the internet.
And I'm not even confident that the host file solution will last forever, in future you might have to do it from the router level instead.
> Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don't follow.
If you play PC games you are effectively forced to use the Windows ecosystem. Several of my favorite games are available on macOS/Linux, but it's like watching movies. You might watch Blazing Saddles and Evil Dead 2 on a regular basis, but you're also going to want some variety in there as well.
What the GP is saying though is that Microsoft is holding game franchises as XBox exclusives to try to slow their marketshare bleed. They are taking franchises that were formerly present (if delayed) on Windows such as Halo and using them to sell XBoxes.
I couldn't agree more. What a pain. GitHub good bye, hello GitLab (I already am on Bitbucket).
Currently, Microsoft is blocking an open source mod of the Halo Online engine, called ElDewrito. It's an incredibly fun to play mod but now development has been halted because of legal action. I hate Microsoft for all the things you mentioned.
I'm with you on this one: Win10 is a travesty and is literally forcing me (and the organisation I work for) to switch to Linux distro. Cannot have Pro editions randomly install Candy Crush and reset privacy settings at Microsoft's leisure. No.
Completely agree. But windows and devdiv are two completely different beasts these days. In think the people at devdiv seem fantastic and the tools they have done recently are great (.NET core, VS code, GitVFS, ...).
Microsoft may not have changed completely but part of it has
I don't use any product from Microsoft. I understand Microsoft is for-profit, but there's no way they can get a single dime from me, and I don't want to become a second-class citizen. That's why I would be leaving.
I don't mind their strategy from a business perspective, but from a human perspective I mind they have crushed the goodness out of so many companies they have acquired. It's analogous to the chinese cultural revolution, or if some 3rd rate florentine artist got to buy out Botticelli et al. just as they got started. I know this is not only Microsoft (Cisco, Google et al.) but MS are not innocent and don't deserve to have their slate wiped clean (yet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Ask yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github? I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github!
Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, it might be too late for github now, but I will myself conduct a review of the free services that I use regularly and reconsider pitching in, since I value independent businesses.
EDIT: looks like my experience may be atypical, that’s good! Just for anecdata, would you include where you live as part of your replies? In my case it’s central europe.
I know plenty of orgs paying for Github. I don't know if your experience is typical.
My company (SAP) has a GitHub Enterprise installation that, given the number of active users, is going to be a very pleasant revenue stream for GitHub.
Oh wow. That's a monster of an account to land.
I’ve paid for private repos on my personal GitHub account for years, and many of the companies I work for/with have paid organization accounts for GitHub, since the integrations and access control / management is really slick vs. setting it up internally. I can see many of these orgs (and myself) determining it’s worth the effort to move to GitLab / self-hosted depending on what Microsoft does.
> I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool.
You're looking at the wrong people. It's companies who are paying for GitHub.
And yet the article mentions losses, companies might not be enough
I know several small, medium, large companies paying github to keep their repos private. Also, github offers on-premises installation of their product.
I pay for it for my business's private codebase; live in the SF Bay.
Another sample of one: I pay for a personal account, although I don’t really have any projects that couldn’t be public, and my company pays for company account.
I may be in the minority. I’ve had a change of heart over the last 5 years or so towards Microsoft. They’ve changed a lot of the practices that used to make me not like them. They’ve embraced open source a lot more than in the past and have clamped down a lot on the anti competitive practices they used for decades. I also have a good friend that works there and I’ve seen how the sausage is made from the inside a bit. They treat their employees really well and from what I’ve experienced they’re a good company to work for.
I don’t have a hard opinion on this acquisition for the OSS community, but it will be good for the employees and I’m hopeful that not much will change with Github as a service and somethings may even get better. Time will tell of course.
GitLab's prayers have been answered. Hopefully they can make GitLab easier to use.
Can you imagine how this story would have gone over on Slashdot in 1998? Microsoft was the Borg, Linux was the nerd's favorite OS and Google was a benevolent and powerful new search engine. How the tables have turned...
Great news ! Maybe now people will understand why github was the wrong was to do things.
Using a designed to be decentralized development tool and flocking all in one place, centralizing free software development on proprietary centralized platform is the epitome of not doing things the way they should.
Hopefully people will catch the difference between opensource which microsoft is surfing on in a PR effort to regain prestige and free software which is a nemesis of microsoft.
Now let's see projects scramble to find another centralized place to migrate to in order to keep doing things wrong, and see which ones do not care enough to even do this.
But what would be the alternative then? I mean, GH serves as the de facto opensource social network, it allows private and public collaboration and integrates with many tools creating a web of transparency and free flow of knowledge.
How do we make a similar or comparable service that is decentralized yet transparent and instantly accesible to millions of people across the globe?
So it's time to move on, is gitlab up for the job? or bitbucket? or everyone should run a gitea/gogs container on their $5 vps?
While I use vscode sometimes for web hacking, I use geany/vim for anything else, other than that, I have nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever, and yes, I run linux as my desktop for the last 15+ years.
Money talks, Microsoft is embracing OSS because it's defeated by OSS, it never liked OSS, and it does all these moves just because it has no better options.
And, who knows,it might be the modern Trojan to ruin us all when time comes, I have no doubts on this when I recall how hostile MS has been to OSS.
The final step will be acquiring StackOverflow. After that, nearly every developer will find their next job via Microsoft.
I don't mind this, as long as the side of Microsoft which has been on GitHub so far as the side of Microsoft who ends up dealing with GitHub in the future.
But this will definitely end the concept of GitHub as a single-source place to find code. Microsoft's competitors will likely move their code, at the least, and of course, the crowd who will never trust Microsoft will leave as well, regardless of how well they manage it.
All-in-all, I don't think that's a bad thing for anyone: Software shouldn't all come from one site, and the industry was becoming far too centralized around GitHub.
Github to Gitlab migration:
https://gitlab.com/import/github/new
EDIT: the old links were useless:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
I'm stuck here:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/github.html
what is the gitlab Authorization callback URL?
We've been lamenting the github-centralization of open-source for years now, this might be the wake-up call people have been waiting for. Rightly so. Gitlab ops people might be in for a treat tonight.
Any plans to make backups/archives before Microsoft takes over? There is an enormous volume of useful open source code from individual authors on Github. A pleasing respite from the world of team-developed commercial software. It is difficult to imagine Github could remain the number distribution channel for individual authors of non-commercial code when it is run under the auspices of a large, proprietary enterprise and consumer software company.
Since its inception, I have been using simple tcp/http clients and text-only browsers to download and browse source code from stable Github urls, as I did throughout the 90's with Freshmeat, Sourceforge, etc. To its credit, Github has always been very accessible.
What are the chances this kind of accessibilty will continue to be possible if Github is being administered by Microsoft. Direct downloads of small, source code files, many with no licensing restrictions, no sign-ups, no web browser required, no hassle... Microsoft has never managed anything like that. Microsoft has always done the opposite. Indirect downloads of large collections of binaries, often coupled with installers, licensing restrictions, usually requiring some sign-up or click-through agreement, and today, possibly with telemetry.
I hope I am wrong to be concerned about this takeover. Will Github continue to be the respository service of choice amongst authors of free source code? Perhaps some will pull out and move their code elsewhere.
IMO, Microsoft will most likely take a hands-off approach. They would not want some people's frights to be realized, and they would appreciate developers being okay with their acquisition.
I was really hoping GitHub would focus on a IPO vs. acquisition. I honestly think we would be saying the same things about Google/Apple if they had decided to swoop in and make a deal here (so none of what I say is directed specifically at Microsoft).
I think the general consensus is that we want a new, independent org, that genuinely cares about OSS but has the mind to create/maintain a sustainable business model and ensure the long-term success of an OSS platforms is extremely important (and now we'll look to Gitlab and others for that).
Microsoft will, no doubt, have their fingers all over this platform in short order. It's what they're paying for; and it's an extremely smart move (EXTREMELY). Some of GitHubs product offerings have competitors within the Microsoft ecosystem already, which may spell bad times for those long-term. Atom directly competes with VSCode and it simply doesn't make sense to continue development of two, independent, IDEs. Electron utilizes Chromium under the hood, and I'd be hard pressed to thunk Microsoft wouldn't want to try and inject Edge/Chakra into that platform somehow.
It makes good business sense to consolidate efforts once a company is acquired. I give it, at most, 12-18 months before you start seeing major changes to both of those platforms that reflect Microsofts own interests.
To everyone switching to GitLab or considering it: Theres a feature on GitLab where you can import all your GitHub repos in on go. Or you can do it one by one if you want.
Based on the way Microsoft has been “punishing” their on-prem customers since they started pushing O365 this has me a bit concerned about the fate of GitHub Enterprise.
I can't believe Microsoft isn't aware an exodus (at some level) will occur and Github will no longer be what it is if they buy it.
But apparently they don't care. Demonstrating they have not changed as so many claim but are still the same old M$.
I'll be closing my account as soon as this is official. As for clients who decide to stay, sorry, I won't be able to help them as I won't have a Github account. But I will walk them through moving if they like.
It looks like you’re trying to issue a Pull Request! Would you like to use Visual Studio Azure Github for Windows 2000, Enterprise Edition with Skype & Linkedin Integration?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/suranyami/works/32080448-it...
As [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.
If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.
Smart and inevitable, to secure dominance in the talent vertical. I remember walking into an org where none of the engineers or UX folks had Linkedin accounts. They didn't need it to land in a healthy workplace w/ a decent salary. They were active on GitHub instead, had Angellist profiles. One of them mentioned LI's InMail tool drove him away. Another said he can network just fine with Meetup and twitter.
Edited those typos.
Deleting my accounts tonight. I just can't stomach a future Microsoft Github Azure™ 365 Enterprise Edition with LinkedIn™ integration. Fucking gross.
Microsoft paying $2B for a company based on Linus Torvalds' work, unreal.
It's probably not for the platform, but for the user base and the community.
I'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI
As for me, I also dislike Github being owned by Microsoft. Big conflict of interest. Microsoft core business is closed-source software.
But, it's not wrong to give Microsoft a chance to cultivate Github. Yes, Microsoft have a long track record of being disproportion with open source products. This is also true with other companies.
Good thing to point out is, there are alternatives.
"The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work."
Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?
Extinguish.
I mean, if I had wanted to troll. Still..almost everything about MS's choices in Win10 (aside from Linux Subsystem) bother me.
Microsoft's own hosted platform Visual Studio Team Services is nuetral. It supports hosted and on prem build and deployment agents for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are easy to use plug ins for building and deploying on both Azure and AWS. You can use Github now for hosted git repositories in VSTS and still use Microsoft's other build and release tools.
Thier Wiki is Markdown based and they have a very visible link that lets you pull down your entire Wiki using git clone.
They also have free private repos, 40 hours of hosted builds, up to five users for free, project management features that are at least as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) as the other project management tools - again free for up to five users. You can also host your own private Nuget, NPM, and Maven feeds for free.
For non open source projects, you can't beat the value. Additional users over 5 are $5 a month.
I think you ascribe different meaning to "neutral" than most others here
I ascribe "neutral" to technology. VSTS supports every major platform/OS and the tools are on par for all of them.
By "neutral" people mean politically neutral (as in no affiliation with anybody). There is a big chance Google will start using their own hosting platform again for all their code. Same with other Microsoft competitors.
That's not how big companies work. Netflix hosts all of it's infrastructure on AWS and competes with Amazon Prime Video. Google pays Apple $2 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS and Apple hosts part of iCloud on Google Cloud Platform.
Microsoft and Google work together on Angular and Typescript.
Apple buys components from Samsung while at the same time suing them.
The Fire TV stick competes with the AppleTV but Amazon Prime is available on iOS devices - including the Wpple TV3 that doesn't have an App Store.
Who do you trust more not to abandon git hosting? A Microsoft owned GutHub or any replacement that Google conned up with?
Unfortunately, the company that owns it profits from Windows sales and doesn't profit from any other OS.
They profit from Linux. They host it on azure and have their own distribution.
They profit from hosting Linux VMs on Azure and Office for Mac.
What is Github's reason for this? I'm looking for some salient reason why they'd sell their company. Is it investor pressure or founder apathy, or ...? It seems to me like creating and running a product as admired as Github is a bigger prize than just cash in the game of life?
“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though, it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.”
~ Adam Smith
If somebody of the size of GitHub can't manage to stay a standalone company it's a pretty sad state of affairs. We really need more players in this industry. It's becoming more and more a monoculture (not sure what the term is for a few players that together pretty much have monopoly. Oligopoly?)
I'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft to begin with, but I definitely see a reason to be wary about this. I don't really want any Microsoft integration into GitHub, and really the best case would be for them to not change much with the site at all, although I don't see this being the case.
My fear in this is that MS may require MS passport or whatever it is called ID system to log in to GitHub, with their really unreasonable 16 character max password length restrictions.In general MS websites are poor in usability, and littered with marketing copy, difficult to find useful information.
Does this remind anyone else of the back to the future movie where Biff is the free worlds leader and just a pompous asshat with the power to keep being a pompous asshat?
Having watched Microsoft over the years steal ideas from smaller companies (not purchase them then bastardize and part them out mind you), but actually steal their ideas and make them standard in their operating system.
Some examples are CDR/CDRW now standard after small companies in the late 90's developing the standard.
The bastardized implementation of Active Directory after Novell's Netware platform and the later implementations of OpenLDAP and the standards that were spurned.
What about the MIT Kerberos authentication mechanisms after Microsofts MsCHAPv2, MsCHAP & NTLM roll your own crypto schemes were found easily crackable and exploitable?
I can go on but actually have to do some work today...
I read about this as a hypothetical a few days, but it really moved to done deal quicker than I expected.
I started to look for alternatives to host private repos and found that Amazon CodeCommit has a plan that's even much better than the GitHub plans. Does anybody have experience on how well this works?
I’ve got a couple of code commit repos for various purposes, and it’s high friction. Uploading a large repo with a plain git push will likely fail. The user management is way more complicated and enterprisey than github. It does work, but it feels awkward.
Keybase has encrypted git for free https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone
Are Amazon considered less evil than Microsoft these days?
I can imagine the people at GitLab being very excited about this! Perhaps sytse would like to comment?
I think instead of moving everything to one new (central hosted) silo like GitLab.com, we should move to self hosted git instances, with some GitHub like web interface to do remote comments/pull requests (e.g. gitea/gogs with some simple modifications).
Moving all my projects to gitlab. For those wondering why gitlab is different see this comment from another HN thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yogthos
There probably won't be (m)any noticeable changes for the open source and devs running personal private repos and possibly the same for GitHub team plans. However, I'd bet Microsoft will plan on a sunset timetable for TFS and push their licensing and sales machine toward GitHub for Enterprise. I'm glad my group isn't on GitHub for Enterprise because after seeing this news I'd be looking to migrate away ASAP. I can envision the the potential for their draconian licensing lock-in and TOS language spawning a nightmare for teams that are running GH Enterprise. These GH enterprise installations will likely be required to purchase MSDN licenses.
Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? I use both and there is barely any overlap in features. GitHub is only code storage + a rudimentary issue manager. There is very little release management, test management, CI/CD etc.
If anything I’d expect them to integrate better and of course integrate more with Azure (e.g one-click setup of build/test on azure from any Github project)
Agreed. I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting.
VSTS is awesome, and quite feature-packed. Maybe Microsoft will use GitHub specifically for repo hosting, while offering VSTS as an CI/CD/ALM platform.
> I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting.
I didn't say that the "simple" choice for repo hosting would go away... My point was that if you need GitHub Enterprise, you get it only with the biggest MSDN subscription and end up with a bunch of things either you don't need or don't want and having to agree to licensing that's MS/MSDN specific.
> Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)?
Admittedly I've been away from TFS for a number of years, however, it seems that GitHub Enterprise is a natural fit product wise for revenue stream via licensing thru MSDN to get organizations onboard with GitHub that weren't before. If they were to sunset TFS and provide a migration path, it would end up giving them significant licensing dollars.
The more important point I was trying to make is that orgs that are now on GitHub Enterprise would need to subscribe to MSDN enterprise licenses for a bunch of things that aren't relevant and get locked into TOS that they hadn't been previously.
Regardless of sunsetting TFS/VSTS, I think that Github Enterprise will be only available through a MSDN enterprise/premium license or whatever that is now in 2018.
Superficially it seems there is some overlap, but github’s issue tracking for example is very simple (assuming enterprise is the same, I haven’t seen it).
VSTS supports the JIRA level of features like complex workflows, hierarchical issues, scrum/kanban boards (including hierarchical sub teams with differing sprint dates), burndowns and hundreds of other charts.
I would love to see all that ported to github, but it just wouldn’t be GitHub any more then.
To me they seem like VS and VS code. One is a big fat enterprisey thing and one is lighter. The enterprise version of GitHub doesn’t seem so focused on enterprise processes as VSTS is, but rather on enterprise infrastructure things (auth stuff, cloud integration stuff...).
This is the "extend" phase, in case anyone is keeping track. The embrace was "MS loves Linux!", switching Windows to use git, and putting tons of near random libraries and projects on github publically (vscode, chakracore, etc).
I just love how anyone that cards had been actively avoiding walled garden proprietary services like this and were using gitlab, phabticator, etc for years saying this or anything similar (could have just been github starting to sell user data themselves) but only when big evil MS comes along to put the reality in peoples faces that you don't bet your software infrastructure on some proprietary non interoperable web service.
Gitlab must be really happy. I know my team will move out of Github if Microsoft buys it.
For people looking for alternatives, I've started to write code forge tools in Salut à Toi (on top of XMPP).
It's decentralized, already working (tickets and merge requests), based on standards, and written in a popular language (python), help would be more than welcome!
It is also agnostic of the tools, I'm using it with Mercurial, but Git implementation will of course follow.
You'll find details and a demo at https://www.goffi.org/b/9555cc02-6a87-4b6b-af85-20f1c0736722...
I'm kind of happy with this happening as it seems to me that this can cause the VCS hosting arena to diversify a little bit. The "monopoly" of github always worried me as a huge freaky single point of failure.
Now we need a GitLab alternative, just in case MS decides GitHub isn't enough.
So it looks like Github is going to be the next sourceforge! Onward to gitlab!
Well, let's say I wouldn't switch away from github at once (I have a paid account with private repos and all), but consider the Skype precedent: from a mostly working native application, now it's an Electron abomination that takes 100% CPU and is a lot harder to use than the previous versions. But it has social networking!
It's very likely they will "improve" github in the same way. I don't think they dare to make the site explicitly not work on anything but IE, but I expect subtle incompatibilities to pile up over time...
Lets just hope Microsoft has learnt how they tend to kill good products by merging them into their ecosystem and won't do that.
If Microsoft honestly wants to improve GitHub, they should ask the community first.
IMO, I think Microsoft will take a hands off approach, they don't want some of people's fears to be realized, and they really would want a friendly attitude towards their acquisition.
The negativity in here is crazy. It‘s not even official yet everyone already seems to know that Microsoft will destroy Github. Microsoft tried really hard to improve their relationship with developers in the last couple of years and they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again. I can understand the scepticism and that people dislike the fact that Github is not independant anymore, but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
Are they still trying to extort "licensing fees" from Android device manufacturers? Have they apologized for ever doing that and promised never to do that again? Until that, I won't even consider it. Fuck Microsoft. They're horrible and their recent attempt to go back to the "embrace" part of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deserves absolutely zero good will.
I hate when people accuse others of negativity when manifestly negative thing happen.
"Hey, stop punching me in the face!"
"Why are you being negative?"
There are very good reasons people aren't happy about this. Microsoft's track record for one. And the loss of independence of major repo source for another. Not being happy about this isn't being "negative". It's entirely understandable.
> they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again
The old MS — and I'm not trying to comment on how different or similar the current MS is to the old one — did indeed spend a lot of money to screw developers and the developer community, including developers who bought into the MS stack.
> but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
I don't think many people are worried MS will ruin GitHub, per se. I think what most people are worried about is that MS will change GitHub enough to inject MS-specific stuff in there.
GitHub is the website 90% of the packages I use are hosted on. All our company code and hundreds of hours are invested into whats hosted on it. I would hate to see this change...
This might be a stupid question, I did Cmd+F to search if it had already been asked and answered and it hasn't, so it might actually be stupid.
I'm guessing it's very illegal (IANAL) and that it's not the intention of Microsoft (IANACEO), but what are the ramifications relating to IP (GitHub's customer's IP, rather than the GitHub's IP) - has Microsoft essentially bought access to a massive stash of IP/trade secrets in the form of private repositories?
I'm wondering this too - private repos might be a goldmine of intellectual property, which businesses assumed would stay "private", i.e., not in the hands of companies like Microsoft.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DezCaWaUYAAa5ih.jpg:large
What's a tool for moving every GitHub repo to GitLab?
Not judging if this is a good or bad thing but in general it's annoying to be dependent on a single company. While git is decentralized, github's social platform features are centralized and lock users to github. I would love to see more solutions that allows users to migrate freely between platforms without losing their social contacts. See https://fejoa.org for more information.
Centralized and proprietary unfortunately are two key attributes to Github. That fits the old school MS bill. But it also fits the new “we have changed hype”.
It’s most unfortunate, because git made decentralized revision control popular.
My future Tooling bets are on sustainable open source.
Good for MS, though. It’s a smart move for them. And Github has been struggling for years, anyway. Scandals, new structure, more hierarchy. It’s probably easier to pick up now than three years ago.
I'm hopeful. I like typescript and Visual Code. I like their linux subsystem on windows granted that I don't use it since I'm not a windows user.
Guys. Enough with the FUD please. I myself don’t even believe I’m saying this but clearly Satya Nadella != Steve Ballmer. Dude has seen the light and is trying to put the company on the right path.
Every time they do something good all the tinfoil hats come out. Give them a chance. They’ve turned over a new leaf. And until and unless we see otherwise we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt.
This is not our childhood Microsoft.
Ballmer didn't turn Windows into spysare the way Nadella has. Windows 10 is basically a rootkit that phones home about your every activity.
So much parroting going on in here.
Microsoft has been doing amazing things recently for devs. Wait to see what their plans actually are before you start to freak out.
What Microsoft acquisition has been a "success"? Because there are quite a lot that got worse under MS. They have a long track record and it'l take years before they can begin to counter all the stuff they've done.
Would have rather seen an investment or partnership in github than a purchase. Recognizing the desire for github to stay neutral but supporting it to continue would have been a much better received move and done far more to build up reputation.
> GitHub preferred selling the company [in this case to a public company --jrochkind] to going public
Anyone have any comments on what might drive this preference?
Microsoft ruined Skype, why wouldn't I think a company whose main source of income is from closed-source software wouldn't ruin GitHub?
It was good while it lasted.
We will have to start migrating our software there into a more neutral platform.
I don't like the consolidation in Software in which there are only 5-6 huge players. It means politics and private interest of the conglomerate take precedence over everything else, like competence, and freedom.
Those oligopolies can just send their lawyers against competition or just buy them to stop the threat.
So, where should I switch to now? I dumped LinkedIn and Skype since MS acquired it, next is GitHub. Hosting own GitLab? Something else?
I'll probably quit github once they add their horrible login system. Have you experienced the login on azure portal or skype ?
I wonder how Microsoft can manage to commercialize all the projects on GitHub. Maybe by providing an universal installer that works through the Windows Store. Maybe by adding a few mandatory patches to each project that improve compatibility. Maybe by making a much improved version of Git with a proper GUI interface. The possibilities are endless!
Perhaps there is a market for a really simple Git based issue tracker, which doesn’t require Ruby. This acquisition feels like Freshmeat / SourceForge v2; the hardcore OSS enthusiasts will begin their exodus. Is there an argument for actually building simple issues management into Git itself with a simple API for pull requests?
Will it go the way of Nokia, LinkedIn, Skype or the way of ... err... did they have any really successful acquisitions ever?
I hope they keep GitHub Pages, even if it's not free anymore. It's so convenient to host small static sites there.
Netlify does this for free along with a path to hosting larger sites as well. I found them via HN and have seen them recommended here many times.
Netlify is great! I also found them via HN at some point and use them for a couple customer projects. Totally moving my personal stuff to them too now.
Now is the time to move to Fossil https://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
Issue tracking & wiki built in.
You can use its git integration to ensure recruiters/employers can find you.
Funnily enough a friend of mine and I migrated some of our projects over to GitLab right before this original story broke. It’s really unfortunate though that this will probably go through since GitHub was/is really the staple site for social programming and project management, something that GitLab is certainly lacking.
Microsoft ruined Hotmail, JellyFish, Skype, LinkedIn, Yammer ... and now they want to ruin GitHub? :/ Noooooo
Some HN reaction reminds me of...
"Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class." [A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark, 022]
Big five representatives of the vectorialist class are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple.
Not very much on topic, but is the book worth reading? I started a couple of times but always kinda tuned out at some point.
It is not an easy, pleasurable read, maybe too intellectual. But it is worth for the truth and insight it provides.
Thanks for the input! Will give it another try.
feel like if any of the other companies made this acquisition less people would care. It’s just trendy and good for your hacker creds to oppose microsoft as people did in the 90s. No one is crying about AWS hosting all applications.
If it's true, I'm cancelling my paid account immediately. A monopolist tried and found guilty of monopolization shouldn't own the company where many of their future competitors have their private repositories, it's frankly rather disturbing they think it's a good idea.
I hope this deal results in Visual Studio Team Services somehow getting support for public projects. It is amazing for private ones.
Also, paid tiers of GitHub moving to (or on top of) VSTS would not be a bad thing IMHO.
I hope both GH and VSTS benefit from this and I'm inclined to think they will.
Long live https://notabug.org
If this is true, it is really sad news. Remembering what Microsoft did with Skype, turning it from one of the most usable communication platforms to a pile of unusable crap, I can't help but wonder if it's time to prepare a migration strategy right now.
I guess now this makes sense:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-...
Relevant https://help.github.com/articles/about-archiving-content-and...
Citation needed ?
https://octoverse.github.com/2016/ under Organizations with the most open source contributors
What specific user-affecting changes would the new overlords make that suck for developers? I don't doubt that there are good answers to this. They could treat it like a cash cow and just start charging more for less, but I mean functional changes.
This doesn't bother me at all. I'd be far more worried if Oracle acquired GitHub.
Of all the big players who could have acquired GitHub, I'm most glad that it's MSFT. Their open source initiatives of late have been fantastic, and they really get developers. Visual Studio is a 10/10 IDE. Congrats GH and co :)
Gitlab is seeing 10x the normal daily amount of repositories
https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200?s=19
If anyone could stay independent, it should have been them. If it weren't Microsoft but someone else, it would be almost the same to me. There are so much things they could do to improve the experience and make it more profitable.
Prediction: 5 years from now github will be a memory for anyone but the Enterprise.
Color me naive but it can't be that bad, maybe they will surprise the FOSS community by opensourcing the NT kernel. Satya has said it is a possibility. And he is probably the only CEO who has been friendly toward FOSS.
Microsoft 2016' new year resolution [X] Join bigest open source community and get right to vote #linuxfoundation
[X] Acquire the largest open source community #github
[X] Do not share even bit of valuable open source (*do not count azure toolkits)
.. completed in 2018
I’m sure they paid a good chunk of change but this looks like more of a soft landing than an acqusition. Even the language: “Microsoft agreed to acquire” dampens the enthusiasm. I wonder how this worked out for investors.
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...
Done or not, at least Github's wikipedia entry has already been updated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
I wonder what this will mean for VSTS? That has it's own public/private git repositories. Though they're more 'enterprise integrated ci/cd' than github's 'portfolio'
This the end of an era. GitLab, BitBucket, self-hosted options, here we come!
Step 1: Embrace.
We still have Gitlab if MSFT decides to do anything malicious.
I don't think the big loss here is GitHub-the-software, but this short sweet period in time where everyone, from Microsoft to Apple, had their source code on the same platform. I doubt that e.g. Swift would have moved to GitHub if it had already been owned by Microsoft.
Agreed. Having GitHub be the place for OSS code has definitely been beneficial and convenient. That being said, I don't feel like it would be the end of the world if some of the projects moved to competing platforms.
I think they're on step 2 now.
They already embraced it by adding 1k repos. They're now going to extend it.
We'll soon have an msgit, which is git with extensions that only github will support.
You mean like the current extensions in the .github folder (pull request template, etc)?
If is true, this is one of the saddest news I've heard in the last 5 years. Please Github don't allow this. Look of what crap Skype became to be... look at what crap LinkedIn became to be...
Time to move to gitlab.
I wonder what Linus thinks about this. He has a mirror of the Linux kernel on GitHub: https://github.com/torvalds
Probably doesn't give a crap. Microsoft have their Linux disto for embedded stuff already.
Maybe this means Netlify will speed up adding GitLab support to their CMS.
I really like Microsoft, but this is a TERRIBLE idea for GitHub. Some rich bastard needs buy GitHub and then make it community owned. Why is GitHub a for-profit? It should be considered a utility.
Previous discussion re:acquisition talks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208293
GitHub became too expensive. I’m curious to see the new pricing model.
Interesting that you say this. If the price was 3x what it was (for both individuals and organizations), I feel both parties would still find it valuable enough.
Look at Amazon Prime. For ONLY $99 free video, deals, free shipping, and many more.
This purchase is about increasing 365 value. They'll make the pro version free with office 356 subscription.
I am so happy to see this moving forward. Microsoft will provide the proper management to drive innovation again in GH. Start by creating a replacement for the astronomically priced Travis
Why Github can't host the Linux kernel community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872
This is great for Gitlab. I'm going to try to use more and more.
Used to seeing these kind of reactions on HN. Saw this during FB React licensing issue. Angry Engineers moving to Vue or whatever was non-react, only to move back to usual in few weeks.
I surely become tired of becoming the product for someone else's overly inflated bottom line after having an option to feel it is "safe" to be a part of a community...
Microsoft got me using IDE's it was a nice cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good .... likely they will turn it into shit like everything else.
I wonder if instead Apple had acquired GH and today morning introduce laptops with 32 GB RAM, discreet GPU and fully tinkerable laptops for geeks to recapture losing mindshare.
Well I can wish!
Microsoft had codeplex which was older than github. They are probably going to spend 4 or 5 billion buying Github. They most likely write down the value a few years later.
So a lot of people mention GitLab as an alternative. Would anyone with experience with that platform care to chime in and list some pros & cons compared to Github?
I like that is also has CI/CD and other features, and that you can host it yourself (also for free). I do keep hearing about database issues on their hosted version though.
In general: haven't had problems with it, am cheaper than hosted GitHub, cheaper and works better than (self-)hosted Atlassian software.
That is for a developer duo.
GitLab appears to be the default choice for migration for many people... I wonder though if this might prompt some folks to go old-skool and move back to SourceForge?
Microsoft is also heavily "embracing" Python. CPython is on GitHub, the infra is partly controlled by MSFT employees and the CI moves to MSFT as well.
Caveat emptor.
Could have been great to see the GAFAM agree to finance GitHub to remain an independant platform.
Now, I can't imagine the GAFA let their open source projects on GitHub...
GitHub UI is terrible in recent years. The launch of discovery was a mistake; now they finally made the newsfeed "simpler" and cleaner, thank god.
Are there any projects in the "blockchain" / "decentralize everything" industry that's tackling the source control problem?
I'm hoping this puts the times of people with political agendas stearing the GitHub message well behind us. They weren't really neutral anymore when the CEO stepped asside and they got the business guy to take over...
I suspect MS is aware of the delicate situation in regards to alienation the user base. If this goes through I expect them to address this directly and with perhaps some creativity.
As a bonus Microsoft did some great work scaling git for the Windows codebase. That and other great engineering efforts making there way into GitHub could be great for the community.
I also think that Microsoft is very aware of this situation. They should already work on the communication part of this. And if true that maybe Nat Friedman will take over, they will handle it the right way. He has shipped his Mono team and the later Xamarin stack through four companies with success and stability for the product and the team.
Good. I don't understand the hundreds of comments invested in a company that provides one of the most fungible services around, with the weakest features and no profitability. The only other option for them was dying a slow death on the public markets if they did an IPO.
There are dozens of git hosting companies, including GitLab, BitBucket, Microsoft's own VSTS, repos by all the major clouds, and many others. Microsoft has every incentive to not screw this up but even if they did, so what? Nothing happens. Switch to something else and you're all set.
90% of this comment section could have been copied from a Slashdot post in 1999. Ironic, all the FUD being thrown here.
Really showing HN's selective myopia.
This is a little unfortunate but I think theres a possibility this could turn out to be a positive thing for both MS and GH. I hope so at least.
Soonds like a good time for gitlab to go fundraising!
I'm a CTO in the genomics sector. I'll hastily be looking for an alternative. I've long ago abandoned the Microsoft morass.
Google open source ERP and realize what a gold mine github data will be to an enterprise play like Microsoft.
As acquisitions go, it's pretty brilliant.
Part of me likes the possibly new native Windows-Git integration projects to come for developers.
Part of me wishes some companies were non-profit entities.
good. github sucks and i don't want to be forced to use it just because everyone uses it. if microsoft buys it it will slowly die.
Good. Can we make a distributed GitHub now please?
Anyone know the easiest way to migrate to GitLab?
Click on “import from GitHub” when you create a new repo.
A lot of GitHub employees are remote. All of the big tech companies are allergic to remote teams. I wonder if that will change now?
I wonder as well. If linkedin is any indication, Microsoft hasn’t affected their engineering culture really at all yet. In fact linkedin still routinely poaches Microsoft engineers and used slack and google drive and bluejeans instead of skype. If anything linkedin has gone on a massive hiring spree on Microsoft’s dime.
9 hours ago: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub
6 hours ago: GitLab sees huge spike in project imports
I think that says all there is to be said.
I'm not one to praise Microsoft without reason - I've worked the last 2 decades with their tech.
However, I don't see this as a negative thing. Provided they don't trash it like most of their acquisitions - and bear in mind they sort of depend on github themselves.
I feel this will prevent github from going like sourceforge now that someone with deep pockets can support it.
They have a lot of PR to lose if they screw this one up. Generally, migration is a only few git commands away.
I'm probably being silly, but it is ironic to me that Microsoft will own the service that hosts the Linux codebase.
That's just a mirror. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... is where it's at.
sourceforge, github...these platforms have their moments but are almost always superseded by something else that is more of the moment and useful.I can't see this msft move, which has been in the works for what feels like years, will help github to stay in the position it's been in for the last 3 years or so...
I wouldn't be surprised that the first thing they do is open source it. Removing the advantage of its competitors.
was this when they decided, nah fk it let s just aquire the thing https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...
Well, they must be over the moon at GitLab!
I hope that we will never read "X Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Stack Exchange" With X being a GAFAM.
I wonder if Stallman will be right, again, and whether we will see the rise of the Fossil SCM? (Or a similar clone)
Unhappy about this. If TFS and Github are ever glued together, you'll see the end of github as a platform.
They can finally join github and LinkedIn
https://sivers.org/horses
Just in case people are looking for one more alternative, it looks like no one has mentioned codegiant.io yet.
We’ll be migrating everything off GitHub this week.
This is good, because I’ve been wanting to dive into GitLab for a while.
Git is great, but it has a few social features missing
Centralised git is great, but becomes a target
Is this the perfect blockchain pairing?
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......
That means I could finally get to cancel my multiple subscription and setup gitlab.
I love this! Maybe the absolute fetishism over the overrated GitHub and Git will finally cease.
Why lump git into this?
It is a matter of concern for private repositories (of Microsoft's competitors) in GitHub.
Was GitHub under monetary duress? I thought their private Git hosting business was doing well.
I expect partial geoblocking and more censorship.
The chinese government tried to force Github to censor shadowsocks and the NY times repository. But back then it would have to block the whole site with other resourceful content.
My guess is that when Github is with Microsoft, the communist party in China has far more leverage as Microsoft has to follow Chinese laws, e.g., for selling Windows (even a special government-version), and bc China is an important market. I hope I'm wrong.
If this is true, I delete my account immediately.
The last thing I want is my code to fall into the hands of MS.
If you've used GPL then you have nothing to worry about.
80% of github projects here are hidden, inhouse trustworthy secret private projects! This is such horrible news!
So you put trustworthy, secret projects on GitHub instead of hosting them in-house?
yes, my bad, should have listened to IT
The idea was that it's more likely our servers get hacked than a breach at github. Guess I was wrong.
Microsoft built its business by selling software products. If they had meddled with Fortune 500 companies running their business-critical information on top of Windows, Microsoft wouldn't be here now. There are situations to be wary of MS, but I don't think this is one.
In Europe there are real worries about state-driven industrial espionage.
We shouldn't be worried that our developers coding habits will get connected with linked-in and fed into the surveillance state (which MS is big part of)?
Microsoft is not gonna give a fuck about your shitty little repos or anyones for that matter. What makes you think they are gonna put time and effort into mining people's code?
Fair enough. After all, they did ship a free web browser with their operating system, 24 years ago.
Some things you can just never forgive.
A shitty free browser developers still have to deal with today because enterprises refuse to fix their garbage in-house software..I'm not bitter at all.
don't worry, I'm sure they've got backups
Github harassment in 2014, Microsoft potentially (at time of writing) buying Github.
Mountains, molehills.
Why microsoft and google ruin the things developer loves? First Kaggle and than Github.
what happened to Kaggle?
Is this a done deal, or could GitHub (maybe after seeing the backlash) still back out?
At least it wasn't Oracle.
You want to buy gitignore.io? I'll sell it for a fair and reasonable price :).
I'm losing faith that people are in tech for anything more than the payday.
RIP Github.
I can't wait to see Skype, OneDrive and Office integration in GitHub......
Seems like a big boost to their recent ML offering that suggests source code.
Will it mean that we will see Atom and VS code merging in the near future?
Finally, we will be able to use the same login for both Skype and GitHub.
We've all seen how it ended with Skype... Terrible news indeed.
"Nothing speaks louder than money; except more money."
I can already see gitlab and bitbucket jumping up in popularity.
Horrible and sad news.
Just posted the petition on Hacker News:
> Github petition: please remain independent
https://github.com/independent-github/petition
Petitions don't pay bills; GitHub is bleeding money. The solution is not signatures, but for developers to start paying for all the free hosting GitHub has given them. The open-source community itself is strapped for cash, so this is an excellent time for all the users of that open-source software (especially companies) to start chipping in for hosting and development costs. However, the cynical side of me says that ain't going to happen. :/
That was my original idea but if the deal is already closed it is too late. I've been paying for years even though I never needed it only to support Github's amazing work. And now this :/
What are the goals Microsoft wants to achieve with this?
790b9db572a6a819f11ad0e0cac7d261 --- will update later.
What's this?
Why isn't all this code on 'the chain'?
Alot of MSFT codebase was moved to Git in 2016 and this just makes sense. Wow.
Wonder how hiring/firing is going to be now at Git. They are pro-remote, while most MSFT positions are going no longer remote.
Git != Github
I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
I feel the same. It's not the end of free software, but the end of free software as we knew it (or something, still trying to rationalize).
Someone explain the extreme feeling of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
There is not a single Microsoft product/tool/service I like. Including the ones they aquired. So I expect them to turn GitHub into something I don't like too.
Not even VSCode ?
No, because as the VSCode license puts it "The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft."
Everyone says on here that VSCode is way faster than Atom but I've found the opposite every time I've tried, Atom opens faster and feels slicker when editing, especially multiline. I'm also not a fan of the VS UI and its icon.
What does Github have to do with free software? It's a closed-source, non-free SaaS. Free software repos can (mostly) relocate to any other hoster as they wish.
Microsoft has a history of taking the open source philosophy out of their products. Github is one of the few large, commercially successful platforms that have not only embraced, but built their entire platform around those fundamental values.
It's not a surprise we feel unease, and to hope that Microsoft is actually going in a direction that aligns with those values, instead of simply twisting them for it's own continued success - that's being a bit naive.
We'll all see what happens, but honestly, I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
There are plenty of examples that stick to the core philosophy of open source software and open ideas, but there are rarely examples that manage to become extremely successful and maintain that success without drowning in the confusion created through their own influence.
> I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
An example that comes to mind is Wikipedia. Maybe the lesson here is that if you fear this happening, don't come to rely on services that are not setup as non-profits.
I think it's a balance. Non-profits have their own problems, individuals aren't fiscally organized and instead, have their incentives tied directly to the service. These incentives are philosophical ideals, therefore, not invariant (continuously being used and tested against the system they exist in), therefore, not equivalent (unified) across all participating minds. So there can be confusion there as well. Competition due to ego can cloud clarity, and this impedes the finding and actualizing simple solutions.
Same problems still in a for profit enterprise, just shifted across whatever the base values are. Life will never be perfect.
and .. we will start seeing Linkedin ads on Github.
Right click and publish to Azure. For the win!!
GitLab > Import all repositories from GitHub
Better than getting bought by Dice at least.
I'm really looking forward to IPFS ...
Future often rhymes with the past (Skype).
Good for Github. Bad for Github users.
Can't help but notice the announcement aligns with Apple's WWDC this week. Wonder it'll take a bite out of Apple's PR.
Might be the other way around: Apple's event overshadows this one, and Microsoft quietly acquires GitHub with many being none the wiser.
welp, bye github, it's been fun.
Hello gitlab.
Alternatives and no not bitbucket
Gitlab.com is what I was already slowing moving to, because their code is open source. This will just hasten that migration.
https://gitea.io/
Have YET to turn a profit?! Wow.
Well. There’s always bitbucket.
Time to migrate to SourceForge.
What a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do things?
Sure. It motivates millions of young developers to try to become kings.
> Sure. It motivates millions of young developers to try to become kings.
... so VCs can profit.
So? The point is that millions of people are trying to create things who otherwise wouldn't.
Millions of developers are shooting for the moon, while of course only few succeed, but VCs are laughing all the way to the bank because they spread their risks.
Again: So? I think people focus too much on the "VCs are getting rich" part while overlooking "the world is creating thousands of things that wouldn't otherwise exist" part.
If you imagine what the world would be like without any incentive to create, it would be a very different place.
There's nothing wrong with it per se, except the image of "becoming wealthy like a king" isn't realistic, and the ones profiting from this image are the VCs.
The GitHub founders likely did quite well. They were completely bootstrapped until they took a $100M Series A from a16z in 2012 (5 years after founding), and then took a $250M Series B valuing them at $2B from a16z, Sequoia, etc. in 2015. Figure that they gave up 12.5% in the Series B and 30% in the Series A with a 1x liquidation preference, and that they sold for $4-5B to Microsoft (it's unlikely the VCs would allow a sale that didn't at least double valuation since 2015). The three founders then split ~60% of the roughly $5B, for a cool billion dollars each.
There are other options for hosting code on the Internet, and people will definitely take advantage of them, if a non-neutral party purchases GH.
Besides, what is wrong with someone who created a business later selling that business for a profit?
The problem is that our data is in there now, and it costs time and effort to get it out.
We faced the same question, when we looked at externally hosted or on-prem.
Do you mean that Github shareholders will benefit from users that are hosting their projects on Github? Isn't "content is king" true for all platforms?
> What a betrayal.
Why is this a betrayal?
Because Microsoft wrecks almost everything it touches lately, including its own sacred-cow products like Windows itself, in an effort to force it to serve the company’s interests over those of its (paying!) customers?
Xamarin has improved, they've improved how git handles large repos, typescript is extremely stable...
I mean, on the consumer end they're definitely kind of failing, with the notable exception of minecraft being supported far more than any other game. Seems more like people are still stuck in the Ballmer state of mind - even Windows itself had to practically perform a 180 thanks to Ballmer's obsession with low powered tablets.
Okay, so you don't like Microsoft. But that doesn't answer the original question - why is this betrayal?
100% disagree there. microsoft has a bunch of amazing software -- vscode, visual studio, azure cloud is actually quite good, sqlserver actually runs on linux (and it's a good db!).
microsoft under satya is a great company and doesn't even compare to the ballmer days.
>microsoft under satya is a great company and doesn't even compare to the ballmer days.
I think everyone here would agree with that assessment. But ultimately Microsoft is not a neutral party, and this news will cause a massive fracture in the open source community. This is the death of what GitHub was.
>I think everyone here would agree with that assessment.
Ah, for the days when HN was a refuge from this type of bullshit.
If you cared this much today you shouldn't have put your code on GitHub yesterday :/.
It's a real problem.
And yet, pure open-source / community initiatives don't seem to have the strong centralized control that appears to be needed to make good, user-focused software. Alterantives?
(I wonder if projects that reach a certain size shouldn't basically be nationalized. Private enterprise is great at innovating, not so good at maintaining w/o slipping into bullshit exploitation / ruining what was good in the first place. Obviously you'd have to be careful to do this in a way that still left enough of a payoff to not discourage new private enterprises.)
Do they really get more wealthy than the greatest kings who ever lived in history? I can name a few Roman emperors (kings all but in name, ironic as I'm being pedantic) who had a whole lot more money, respective of their peers and the times. Same with a lot of European monarchs, historically and in the present day.
Well, the difference is the users had and have the choice which kingdom, if any, to inhabit or build. If Github goes the way of Microsoft something of value will be lost, namely the relatively open - as far as any centralised resource can be open - culture of a non-affiliated source repository. The actual functionality which Github offers is by no means unique and can be achieved in many different ways.
To be honest I don't think Github, or any other centralised resource, is the way to go. Now that Github may fall on the list of locations to host your projects it is worth thinking about alternatives to this centralised system. Self-hosted gogs, gitea or gitlab is probably the easiest option right now, I've had a gogs/gitea instance running for a few years which mirrors my activities at Github and can be used as a substitute at short notice. These mirrors are not complete though, I currently do not mirror the issue tracker nor the wiki. I guess I better start doing this as well to really have a turn-key Github alternative for when the time comes for us to part ways.
Today, there is far more connection between contribution to society and personal wealth than in the past. If you have good ideas about how to make this connection stronger, share them in a blog, research paper, book, talk. If you have nothing to contribute, then don't complain and enjoy the improvements that happened over the past centuries.
I've been giving the concept of distributed ownership some thought. None of it's concrete and I certainly don't currently possess the wealth of knowledge or experience necessary to make it work or form it into something less abstract.
At anyrate the thoughts are along the lines of distributing shares of a company either eveningly to everyone or depending on how much an individual contributes will be returned with some increase in shares. Anyone participating in any form of company is at least immediately given some share. For example if you helped produce something that the company sells you're given some ownership. However additionally shares of ownership can be attained by directly buying the product that has been produced.
Idealisticly the goal is a company, or companies, where every one benefits from the interactions/transactions and not a small number of individuals that have direct incentives to consolidate more.
GitLab++
Time to move to Gitlab...
/me moves to GitLab
End of an era for sure.
guess it's time to move away from github.
O-boy! I hope they'll make GitHub as awesome as Skype.
A monopolist wants to buy a monopolist. Linuxers disagree.
Pack it in boys
"Open season on open source"
Dammit!!!
Oh, fork
So long, and thanks for the fish!
The irony. 404 comments.
RIP GitHub.
Oh crap.
Disaster.
RIP
All good things must come to an end. We had free software before Github and we will have free software after Github.
I was using gitlab anyway. But it's significant that Microsoft is taking another step towards destroying open source and the community around it (while making it look like they are embracing it, of course).
If it's true, it's the moment that GitLab will see a major boost and replace GitHub within 2-4 of years
Horrible news. Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.
Wonder where the big tech companies will move their projects to? GitLab?
We finally has a single, neutral site for code and which everyone uses and MS messes it up.
I do hope once and for all we can put to rest this idea MS has changed. Clearly these actions show they have not change.
Wait a minute. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so it has prime access to recruitment. It now also owns GitHub, where it can run anything they want to find the best programmers. I don’t know what Microsoft plans to do, but those are good wats to find all kinds of talent.
I wonder now that Microsoft controls LinkedIn and Github what kind of synergies can form between the two to better serve recruiters looking for software developers.
It just seems odd that a company that threatens to sue companies for using Linux, unless they pay their patent licensing extortion royalties, may control GitHub.
This is amazing. I hope they build in support for Azure and let us have free private repos.
Congratulations to Microsoft!
This is terrible news. Big guys will have to move code elsewhere. We finally has a single and neutral site and MS destroys it.
Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.
Good! Getting rid of Atom for Visual Studio Code should make things a lot better (and allow them to free up some staff). And if they eliminate they head of "community" that makes public repository owners have to tiptoe around any sensitive snowflake's sensibilities, that will fix most of the remaining problems.
I wonder what will happen to Atom, considering that Microsoft makes VS Code..?
Seems like something that would have been more fitting for Google...
Why would they when they have VSTS already?
Never used github. Always used bitbucket.
I am a [full-time open source developer](https://github.com/ahmadawais) working as a core developer of WordPress contributed to every single major version for the last couple of years.
I am also well versed in JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem and have a deep interest in DevOps, Cloud, and the new serverless tech. I care very deeply about Developer Experience and most of my open source work is related to dev-tooling.
Now that you know this about me, it's easier for you understand why I am writing this post, and maybe why I think my opinion matters. Below is a copy-paste from the Twitter thread that I created on this topic:
1️⃣ @Microsoft is about to acquire @GitHub. A lot of folks are skeptical. But I have a different view. Many of you know I am building a course on VSCode.pro for that, I've seen firsthand, how 🆚@Code repo is one of the best #OpenSource repos out there
2️⃣— Once I created a GitHub issue at 🆚@Code repo for markdown and I was impressed by how vscodebot auto-assigned @MattBierner (who works on Markdown of VSCode) to the issue and then @tonybrix from MarkedJS helped me out. It was best GitHub automation WITH results ever!
3️⃣— Don't "@" me coz I know about @Microsoft's history with #OpenSource. I am a full-time open sourcerer and I can't sit here quiet instead of supporting what looks like the new @Microsoft — @SatyaNadella's moving the company from @Windows dependant to in-house @Linux dev
4️⃣— Every other day I find/meet people working at @Microsoft using Linux/Mac based devices — even bought by the company for them. Guess what? 1,000 MSFT Employees pushing open source code on GitHub. This is a BIG 🆕 change. Taking it lightly in 2018 would be tomfoolery.
5️⃣— I've been most inspired by teams behind 🆚@Code (@auchenberg ) and @Azure — I think that @JeffSand has built an incredible team of @AzureAdvocates folks like @ashleymcnamara @sarah_edo @jawache @burkeholland @simona_cotin @_clarkio @John_Papa @holtbt @film_girl @TommyLee
6️⃣—I'm a big fan of "Dev Experience" (DX) that's why I pay $200 for a font I use in 🆚Code & have built s of #OpenSource dev-tooling github.com/ahmadawais—Teams at @Azure are doing a lot to make DX better for the cloud → @AzureFunctions + @Code integration is impressive!
7️⃣— GitHub's been struggling to find a new CEO for a year. What if? It's my primary code hosting company. It's helped me go full-time open source with the support from awesome dev community/companies. Safe to say that @GitHub has made #OpenSource better
8️⃣— @Microsoft has done a lot for #OpenSource in the last 4 years with @SatyaNadella.
🆚 @Code's love. @Linux Subsystem on @Windows. Draft.sh for @kubernetesio didn't have a Windows version and still offers @MacHomebrew as the go-to way of installing it!
9️⃣—@GitHub is not exactly a cash-cow. @Microsoft has put money where their mouth is — out of 1.5 Million organizations on GitHub MSFT has most GitHub contributors to its repos, it's the biggest company with over 1000 employees contributing code to GitHub →proof of good faith!
— I think @Microsoft is changing for good. The intent here's to connect with developers and not offend them by disrupting a good company. MSFT won't change a lot but this acquisition might make GitHub a lot better. Also, MSFT will jump into ROR. It's high time for #OpenSource.
What are your thoughts on this whole thing?! Peace! ️
Oh well. Github was great while it lasted. What's next?
People moving to a alternative just because they can't handle change is hilarious. Good riddance!
Can the old CEO be sued for 'breach of trust'? At least they must have to give prior notice before any of our sensitive data (trusted to github) falls into the hands of MS (untrustworthy)?
Guys and girls, I really don’t get this. It’s 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content?
Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.)
Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon’s store, Google’s search engine, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s social network ... don’t you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers?
Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we’re upset. Oh no, what’s the new owner going to do?
With a network that no one controls, we wouldn’t worry about that.
We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It’s a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to “the cloud” ie some servers owned by someone else.
Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.
We don't use Github to host Git repos alone. We use it as a tool for collaboration - to track bugs, host some documentation, do code reviews, track workflow and so on. And, most of all, we use it for discoverability. It's easy to find things on Github.
> Why did we stop at DNS?
A lot of companies host their domain servers on AWS because Route 53 makes it convenient.
A real successor to Github would allow all the extras around Git, but in a federated way. We'd deploy a server for our projects, different addresses for our repos and all members of this federation would agree on an API and share data with each other.
It's doable, but, unless it's easier than other options, it won't fly.
Back in 2011 I saw this problem — that social networking (profiles, ratings, collaboration of all kinds) is all based on centralized platforms.
Even github as you said provides all the social layer on top of git and you jusy have to trust them.
There was no good software to take care of that stuff. So we built it. It’s exactly the federated API layer you’re talking about!
Here it is:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
Can you provide more details on how IPFS/SAFE can help and if there are any interesting projects?
Yes. Any centralization/single point of failure developing on the internet is a bug.
Reading through replies to this and especially about "the death of free software" makes me ask, "Was software ever free?"
From my perspective, any software that has made it to production use ended up supported by some large for-profit corporation.
Java<-Oracle Linux<-multiple distro's with paid-for enterprise support
And IBM and other companies hiring developers to work on "free software".
Without the support of corporations, most software just dies.
So Github is losing money and can't figure out a model to become profitable. They could start charging for all repositories. They could go public, but then they're beholden to some small set of investment groups.
Microsoft, under Nadella, has been about as pro-open source as you can get.
The only change I expect from Microsoft re: Github is that they will very likely bake DevOps into their tools (Code/Visual Studio) and their cloud (Azure) so that developers can be more productive.
The illusion of free software has always been just that. An illusion.
This isn't even about free software... github is closed. It's SaaS. It just became a defacto standard interface, a sort of facebook for git. git is free and will stay that way.