Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

businessinsider.com

426 pointscoloneltcb552 comments

Really hope these talks fall through and nothing comes of it. Too many bad experiences with Microsoft buying something out, mismanaging it, and it goes down the drain. As much as I love GitHub, I won't be using a Microsoft-owned GitHub for any of my company's work.

To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with. It's just the stickiest app of all time. Something something network effects.

I'd argue LinkedIn is much worse than it was pre-acquisition, but it was already on that trajectory. The "news feed" and discussions around current events, etc. They've locked down more and more of it without a $30/mo subscription. Privacy controls are a nightmare to decipher.

I think it's significantly worse albeit probably short of totally "screwed up". Just marginally worse in a lot of small ways that add up to a less useful, less efficient experience for me.

Plus I'm sure under Microsoft they will have some sort of free private repos like GitLab, Bitbucket and Visual Studio Team Services already do.

Lack of free private repos is the main (only) reason why I don't use GitHub.

Last I looked, Minecraft seemed to be quite in order as well.

How about Skype, though?

People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.

> To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

I'm not sure if LinkedIn could be any less "screwed up" than it was when Microsoft bought it.

LinkedIn was so screwed up I don't know what they could have done to make it worse.

To be fair, they did screw Skype.

100% to the guy that said LinkedIn wasn’t a great product to begin with. X10

They didn't need to screw up linkedin -- they bought it that way.

So, previously Microsoft used to have a program to integrate new companies, called “venture integrations”. I wonder if LinkedIn is going through VI, or not.

I don’t know, isn’t Microsoft the only software company left? I love Google, but they sell ads, their mission isn’t to make software.

Microsoft is more and more cloud and services, but they still have a developer mentality and they have done some good stuff with open source lately.

If someone is going to buy Github, Microsoft is probably the most friendly to developers. Unless Google or Facebook wants to go full altruist and buy for the credibility.

Atlassian is very much a Software Company.

How has Kaggle fared under Google? Just asking. Also, ms has been focusing on open source quite a bit. Largest contributor on Github. Makes sense. It'll also send a message to the tech community. Mostly Google hogs the limelight for open source stuff.

Most of the big software firms also make hardware these days (unless they are selling open source or managed services).

Examples include Apple, most of the enterprise hardware space, IoT/wearables, *aaS, the top 10-100ish cloud vendors, etc.

Even Microsoft is a hardware company now.

Adobe.

Ignoring Azure, all the major MS products I can think of are at least partially ad supported (even when they release something that doesn’t serve ads, it’s a safe bet that it gathers data for better targeting...)

If it were maybe 5 years ago I would be horrified, but under Nadella they are a lot less ... Microsoft-y.

I was at a container orchestration conference the other day, and got the distinct impression that microsoft are not the great satan, and azure is probably a really good choice for cloud service. I can't believe I'm saying that. I'm having dinner with a prolific debian maintainer tonight, maybe he'll beat some sense into me.

I don't know why every massive corporation is trying to rebrand as "the friendly AI conglomerate!" but I'm not buying it for Microsoft or anyone else.

That's what they want you to believe :D

It could be worse, Oracle or SalesForce could have been in talks...

OTOH it speaks to the direness of the situation if you had to mention those two for an even worse scenario.

Why would Oracle buy it?

That would've been my exact reaction while reading this. Good thing I have no large projects on Github.

Well, I guess Gitlab would be happy about the new customers. If they're clever, they'll work on some tools to easen the transition.

From this perspective, Git has made some fundamental things right: Because it only functions as a decentralized system, it strongly reduces lock-in. In the case of Github, you "only" had to port over issues and pull requests. Imagine how great it would be if there was a standard way to save issues in a git repo[1] that was supported by pretty much every provider.

[1]: Such as https://pythonhosted.org/pyditz/

There's no standard, of course, but [shameless plug] I've recently built SIT (https://sit.fyi) -- a tool that allows to collaborate on information in a decentralized, "true serverless" manner. Its first application is (duh!) issue tracking and it has been operational since almost day zero and SIT itself is using it. There's even a GitHub -> SIT import tool (pre-release)

Now, what's also great (did I mention "shameless"?) about the approach used in SIT is that while you can use it with Git (and this is how I've been using it so far), it does not depend on Git's structures but just files -- so it can be easily carried over to whatever might replace Git in a decade.

I would understand if they sold, but it would make me sad. GitHub has done a great job. I'd hate to see them have to answer to someone other than themselves.

I still miss Sunrise.am

They also killed Danger Mobile.

I agree and I would feel that same way if it were any other large tech company.

So many nice products have passed on in acquisition either because users abandoned them or the acquiring party did. I'm not sure which would happen first here.

If GitHub is financially strapped and looking for a buy out, I hope they're exploring other options for funding.

https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT

GitHub clearly needs change of management. I havent seen much inmovation from them compared to GitLab. Microsoft is very strong on innovation since change of management.

GitHub is easy to use, and I’ve found the important features work really well.

I’m all for improvements, but I’m not even sure what I would want. At this point, I’m more worried any attempt at innovation would break the things I like about GitHub now, than I am excited for something new.

I use gitlab for all my private projects and don’t find it to be remarkably better in any way, and the UI always confuses me.

Depends what you like. I prefer my Git hosting suppliers to have better than 50% uptime.

I'm not super familiar with GitLab besides self hosted instances. Even then I prefer the simplicity of gogs. So what do you feel are still be innovations GitLab has but GitHub lacks?

Otoh, GitLanpb seems to have a messy code that is slow and taking much memory by slapping new stuff in frequently. (My impression from reading several comments on HN.)

The list of key MS acquisitions isn't that long and out of several products only Nokia is a definite failure. Skype gotten worse but I wouldn't count it as failure just yet. Remaining big acquisitions (Forethought PowerPoint, Hotmail, Visio, Navision Dynamics, LinkedIn) where rather successful.

Success for Microsoft doesn't mean success for the users of the acquired product, e.g. Skype users on Linux, and anyone using RoboVM.

such a presumptuous statement. Why proclaim you won't use a MSFT owned github, even as a hypothetical?

Microsoft's own history answers this question.

Some of us don't have short term memories and lived through the peak-evil-microsoft years.

And in the end, it's still going to be used.

I agree, as they say, 'snakebit and doomed to die' http://www.memidex.com/snakebit

Isn't minecraft ok, under the new Microsoft?

Why does it matter to you so much who owns GitHub if it's a good tool? Sounds unnecessary vitriol.

Some of us are old enough to remember Microsoft of the 90's and early aughties. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was the name of the game then, many of us haven't forgiven Microsoft for that yet (and nor do we plan to).

What's a good alternative in case it goes bad?

This Microsoft is quite different!

Yeah, I agree. I would immediately delete my github account if this happened. I don't buy that MS has seen the light and is a different company now. In the last 2 weeks, 3 people have told me their Windows 10 install updated itself and was completely borked. At least one of these people are going out and buying a new Windows machine as a result (thus giving MS a little more revenue). It absolutely disgusts me.

You must have very weird friends. My family and I havent had any issues since Vista.

Many people mention Microsoft's past history as reasons for worrying about this. However, I disagree. I don't think this would be bad because it's Microsoft.

I think it would be bad because GitHub wouldn't be a generally independent entity, with no business interests besides making a product good enough that people will pay for it anymore. Currently, GitHub doesn't really have any incentive to care what tools and platform you are using, or where you deploy your code. To the contrary, they want to appeal to the widest audience possible.

This would all change if owned by Microsoft. GitHubs role would then instead likely instead be to channel users into other Microsoft products and services, especially Azure. Instead of functionality that benefits everyone independent of platform, it will be in their interest to add features that only benefit users of the Microsoft ecosystem. Azure CI, deploy to Azure, .NET integration, LinkedIn integration. I don't think this is the kind of platform most FOSS projects would want to use, certainly not me.

This is what I was thinking also (though you articulated it much better than I would have).

A large company doesn't make an acquisition like this without a business incentive. For them, it's driving people to their products. Maybe making the tooling in github for interacting with microsoft-y products a little bit better. Maybe adding whatever licenses microsoft likes to the front of the default licenses you can pick from when you create a new repo. Things generated by their editors going into your .gitignore by default.

I don't see any reason they'd acquire github and then entirely leave it alone.

Maybe MS understands this concern and at least keeps it comfortable for the devs not to leave for alternatives else what's the point.

Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling. C# is a pleasure and visual studio code is an excellent, extensible coding tool.

Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.

I lived through the 90s, so I disagree. Anyone who feels perfectly comfortable with Microsoft's embracing of things they like is ignoring history.

Maybe it's different this time, maybe it isn't.

I lived through the nineties as well, that doesn't mean I think everything that was amazing back then still is amazing today nor that everything that sucked back then still sucks today...

I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.

Personally I'm not so much worried about Microsoft going back to Microsoft'95 but more about the fact that they, like most (all?) other big tech companies, collect more and more data and integrate more and more tightly into our lives. Still I feel that currently Facebook, Google and Amazon are all scarier in that respect.

Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.

I lived through the 90s too. It's been 20+ years since the peak of the Microsoft that gave them the reputation you're reflecting.

If "I lived through the 90s" was how I measured technology and companies, I'd sure as hell not be using Apple products - their technology was pretty terrible then, and the company was incoherent. Would any rational person say that the terrible tech and incoherence then translates to how one would accept what they produce in 2018? Some companies change, some don't (see: oracle). It seems a healthier approach is to measure the behavior and state of a company in the present.

A lot of the tooling is released under the MIT License. It's kind of hard to say they have ulterior motives when you get the right to fork and keep.

Visual Studio was the best Java editor by far. I wish Sun hadn’t blocked them as it took almost 5 years for Jetbrains to make a decent editor.

I loved through the 90s and think that Microsoft not requiring Windows shows that the danger from the 90s isn’t the same today.

Now it’s cloud vs OS lockin.

I lived through the 90s, and Ace of Base was the best band ever.

Sort of like the ship of Theseus, if all the people working at and running microsoft are different, is it even the same company?

> Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling.

Not going to deny this, but that's really the reason I'm not comfortable with the idea of a MS owned Github. Microsoft doing open source development is great. Microsoft trying to influence open source and FOSS development as a whole, not so much. Them aquiring a central hub of such development efforts doesn't signal good things to come: The users of Github have nothing to gain from this, whereas MS has, and there's a non-zero chance of them ruining the thing for everyone in the process.

Microsoft has been relying on Github to share all of its UWP samples for the last few years. This year, they added all their developer docs to Github so they can be directly addressed and updated by the community. They've done a good job of responding to PRs and issues. I write Hololens software and I could not have achieved such rapid development without their examples and developer outreach.

However, Github is one of my favorite services, professionally and for hobbies, and I really don't want significant changes. I also use VSTS (Microsoft's code+PM online service) and it is a beast. They don't need to be heavily intermingled.

That code you mentioned has opt-out spyware. It's not in the spirit of free software at all. It's just part of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Microsoft has never been about free software.

They are however embracing open source in a manner that feels very sincere to me.

For the record, the so-called "spyware" is telemetry which exists only in the SDK for .NET Core and not the actual runtime that you would ship to the user with the software. It is anonymous data, completely open source so it really is only what they say it is, and the first time you use it it tells you how to disable it.

I wonder what Linus Tovalds is thinking right now. If I remember correctly, he wrote Git because Perforce was forcing him to use Microsoft software licences.

https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...

Git was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper (which was originally provided freely to Linux kernel developers under the agreement that they not develop a clone).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper

Git != GitHub

C# is managed with GC, VS Code is Electron. MS has no native tools. QT rules that one.

UWP is native, you can code rich GUI in C++ without any GC involved.

Currently it only works for MS platforms (Windows incl. ARM, xbox, embedded) but they might make it cross platform in some future. Technically the API is not that complex, i.e. unlike WPF it’s not that hard to port from the current Direct3D to Vulkan or GLES or Metal.

There's .NET Native, not to mention older techs like Win32.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Who is this guy?

There is enough just criticism of Microsoft's bad practices that remain damaging to this day.

So no, MS is clearly a bad steward for GitHub.

Yeah, let's evaluate corporations for decisions made decades ago by people no longer at the company. At least spend 15 minutes reading about the progress MS has made in recent years before throwing around shade.

The one thing that I like about Github is that everything is public by default and you have to pay to keep your code private. I feel like a positive consequence of that business choice was the opening up of way more software. Gitlab, while being very awesome doesn't have that same rule and neither does Bitbucket. It's my assumption that this is the biggest reason there's so much open source code flowing right now.

It makes me wonder whether I'll be able to find as many random interesting projects just by searching for things anymore.

I'm a bit sad about this.

Though there is indeed much more software open source lately, I feel that is mostly a consequence of the free and easy availability of open source hosting.

I still remember the old days where most opensource projects were doing self-hosting or using sourceforge. Self-hosting is something that most developers that just want to build something nice won't consider. And using sourceforge back then was also atrocious (they didn't exactly have an easy to use UI, if I remember correctly).

This makes me think that what contributed the most to there being so much open source, is the easyness of creating your own repository on GitHub. With just a few clicks you have one.

Not having to pay for private is the reason we chose Bitbucket back in the days.

Same here, but for each one of us there was another who probably said 'screw it' and just put their stuff on github anyway.

Looking forward to the big rebranding to Microsoft GitHub Team Cloud Services for Enterprise 365 2019®.

*subscription required

Seems like the view here is pretty negative. I feel like most people here haven't worked with Microsoft dev products recently. They're getting better. I guess the crowd here isn't typically in the .NET world.

I don't care if MS is getting better lately.

The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing, but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.

I like the fact Github is independent of all the big players. I really, really, really hope it stays a neutral ground.

Also, if acquired by MS, I'm not that afraid for github itself. However, what is at risk in my opinion is all the integrations around github. There is a rich and striving ecosystem surrounding github. Tools like appveyor, travis-ci, coverall, readthedocs, codacy are really useful, ease a lot development and are infinitely easier to setup/maintain than a Jenkins box plus a few slaves. What would happen to this ecosystem remains to be seen.

> The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.

This is such a prejudiced statement. It can be said of any company.

I am not worried about the ecosystem. See VS Code.

Particularly with how they interact on GitHub now, it's quite impressive. I've reported issues for docs.microsoft.com, participated in discussions on Visual Basic development, etc. and while there's still definitely that corporate veil to some degree, they're extremely responsive, they're very active in responding to requests and discussing fixes.

I generally now hope that whatever Microsoft thing I'm dealing with somewhere ends up linking to GitHub, because everyone on the side of the company that's working with GitHub is pretty on point.

Which is what gives me some hope that they could manage this acquisition right: They're already doing GitHub the way GitHub should be done.

Even when it leads from GH to internal email chains, they're really good about keeping those on the GH issue in the loop... often from only parallel issues.

Issue filed in node sql driver... azure tech notices the issue, raises to sql team... sql team dev starts replying and working to resolve... recommends patch to upstream project in github... issue resolved.

Oracle would NEVER do something like that. It was actually very impressive, and that's just my one anecdote, and I've seen many others.

MS buying GitHub will be one of the worse things to happen to the industry in a long time. But should end all discussion that MS has changed.

FB, Google and the other big tech companies that contribute so much will have to go elsewhere and we will have a fragmentation mess.

I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.

> Seems like the view here is pretty negative.

Well it's not like the reason for being negative is unfounded. MS has a long history of running services into the ground, and their recent 'we love open source' charade brings back strong memories of E3 for many folks.

I have never seen any good .NET code in the wild. A typical story IMO is to come into a workplace where they are trying to dump legacy .NET systems as soon as possible because they are incredibly brittle. .NET seems to be one of the biggest software scams of all time. Great vendor lock-in though. Visual Studio, MS-SQL, LINQ, Entity framework etc... the only solution is to rewrite everything.

I don't know what you're on about. C# is basically a "better Java" so there's no particular reason you can't write good software in it.

I would say StackOverflow is a pretty good example

I think that's the point. I'm personally worried Microsoft may have a very narrow view of what GitHub is. A lot of tech hosted there doesn't even run on Windows, or isn't even related to software. (legal, political, docs, guides, etc.)

what makes you think that? they killed off their own code hosting site in codeplex and moved everything to github. they are one of the largest if not the largest open source contributors in the world. and .net core is setting itself up to be a major player in cross-platform application development. it has a chance, if microsoft brings over uwp, wpf, and windows forms to .net core, to take over cross-platform gui development. with the windows subsystem for linux, windows 10 can run most linux-based software. they've developed the hottest ide at the moment on top of github developed technology.

i have a feeling they get it just fine.

Since the Core era, not all .NET applications are built for Windows either.

Considering you bring up the second part, it makes me wonder if maybe outside of the obvious (owning GitHub), perhaps they're after the extra talent to bolster their SharePoint product.

Azure team gives a shit about "not invented here". They are exclusively interested in your cpu cycles and bytes in memory. Who organizes the cycles and bytes, they do not care.

Surely, there are preferred stacks (e.g. in the high level PaaS areas), but this includes node, python and .NET.

PS: one save bet: Java will never be on their support list :). But only for legal reasons :)

IIRC, internally Microsoft views GNU/Linux and GitHub as Big Satan and Little Satan, respectively.

I constantly remind myself that HN does not actually represent what most customers want and/or need in the real world.

Most routine jobs/contracts at the coalface are still Java/.NET (possibly with a bit of Kotlin thrown in) - I even see companies looking for PHP developers on a weekly basis.

They are definitely alive and kicking, though if you judged based on this website alone, they all ceased to exist 10 years, replaced by Golang, Elixir and Clojure.

Mild exaggeration (and it's not a criticism of the people here), but you get my drift. People here like to talk about new/shiny/cutting-edge - and that's fine, but it's also not necessarily what customers/clients want or need.

C#/.NET in particular, though not perfect, is one of the most pleasurable languages/frameworks to work in.

Many visitors to HN are concerned with selling their skills to various customers, whereas others are concerned with the best technologies for building a successful startup. If you're selling your skills to a legacy institution and want to switch to selling them to a startup, looking at tech discussed on HN could be useful.

The fact that the Microsoft of the past 2 years is "getting better" at something they've tried to do for many decades is a great reason to be worried about them taking ownership of a product they are unfamiliar with.

e.g. "GitHub is really starting to improve again" - Devs in 2050

Why do you think "they are unfamiliar with it"? On the contrary, Microsoft has a lot of stuff ongoing in GitHub. Seems many critical people in this thread don't have a clue.

It's actually really interesting. Seems like internally, MSFT has kind of been let loose and no longer has to adhere to the more strict style Ballmer was a fan of. We've seen this with them hiring OSS talent (Miguel de Icaza, who was a pretty big advocate of trying to make MSFT less proprietary and locked down).

Externally though, the image looks completely different to those who don't really care for what's happening at MSFT - they just seem like an outdated Apple. That's slowly starting to change, I think the Verge recently put out a piece claiming they've switched positions. However, a lot of major consumer problems (Windows Update, Skype) have plagued the company tremendously. No amount of loving Typescript or VSC is going to change that.

Microsoft products are becoming worse on privacy:

1. LinkedIn's dark UI patterns are as bad as they've ever been. Bringing the same to GitHub or otherwise LinkedIn-ifying it seems like a very real risk.

2. Ramping up telemetry. Key loggers in Windows 10, opt-out telemetry in .NET Core, seems impossible to get VSCode to stop phoning home.

This is the stuff we very badly want to avoid.

1. Agreed.

2. (Windows 10) Isn't that only in the technical preview versions? Or is the keylogger in the release versions too?

The ghost of the skype acquisition would make me panic.

They can stop updating the Github web interface and put all development efforts on a new Github for Windows Store UWP app.

http://blog.sunrise.am/

That one was really sad. Sunrise was an excellent product. I'm actually tempted to recreate it myself. I'm sure it would be possible to commercialise something like that.

That's Steve Ballmer. He had the reverse-Midas touch, but he's gone now.

Microsoft was actually highly successful under Ballmer. Just not in terms of image or in the consumer-facing world.

Why? I've been using Skype as my main video/text chat app since ~2002. It hasn't changed much after the acquisition.

I used to like Skype, but they've made a bunch of terrible choices.

Their integration of Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft IDs into Skype has meant that I now have two or three contacts for some people, and I have to switch which contact I send messages to depending on what device they are currently using.

They've also broken other basic functionality like sending messages - even with a solid internet connection on both sides, it will often refuse to send messages leaving them in a 'Sending' state. Other times i'll be in the middle of a conversation and I won't get a reply to certain messages that appear to have sent correctly. Hours or days later I'll get a confused "What?" message from that person, to which I've got no idea what they're talking about, and then they send me a screenshot showing a half dozen messages suddenly showing up from previous conversations.

Then there's situations where I'll get messages on one device, but not on another (eg phone). So I've got someone pissed at me because I'm not responding to them, when the notifications are all piling up on my phone or another laptop, or whatever.

All in all, Skype has become so unreliable that I will only use it to make calls, because at least that way I can be sure the messages are getting through.

Really? It's become nearly unusable for me. I used to have it open all the time and talk to lots of people. Now it feels closer to an infection on my computer that I only pull up when I have to talk to someone on it and then promptly struggle to logout and make sure it's truly closed.

You must not have updated your client.

Have you checked the mobile client? The last 2 features I've noticed on Skype for iOS are:

* colors - you can change your Skype colors from blue to red or green

* stories - follow your friends just like on Instagram or Snapchat

I haven't bashed Microsoft for a long time, and I won't any time soon. However, this development has me worried.

There's a big difference between engaging the developer community with great products and purchasing important services that the developer community relies on.

Microsoft has succeeded many times with products and services they've built themselves, and with products they've purchased, but how often have they succeeded with services they've purchased?

Powerpoint was a purchase. Hotmail was another one. Frontpage, Visio, Navision, Skype, Linkedin. They’ve had quite a few which were pretty successful.

Most of those are products. Of the services you mentioned, I would only call Hotmail a success in the sense that there wasn’t a net detriment to users because of the purchase.

FrontPage was purchased and pretty successful back in the day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

Github shouldn't sell. It has an opportunity to be a once-in-a-generation tech company. I can't believe they even held the talks.

Maybe the founders are fed up with running it. I can understand you want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.

Maybe the founder are fed up with running it. I can understand your want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.

I can't help but be insanely sceptical. Microsoft has a massive legacy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and I don't want the GitHub ecosystem to suffer from the same reoccurring pattern. Call me jaded by Microsoft's past behaviour, but I just cannot forget the numerous times Microsoft has absolutely ruined thriving ecosystems by using the same tricks.

Microsoft wouldn't benefit from killing GitHub.

Heck Microsoft killed their own competitor TFS and pushed people to migrate to Git, and uses GitHub themselves for hosting several products. Microsoft also has full Git support in Visual Studio Online (their enterprise competitor to GitHub), Visual Studio, and VS Code.

Microsoft would likely use GitHub to advertise their development products, tools, and services like Azure. I doubt they'd want to "extinguish" GitHub because it just means less eyes on their adverts.

They extinguished Skype. They will manage to do the same with Github eventually. They are the biggest user already and would therefore be forced to cater to their own needs first over those of the rest if the community. This would drive the service squarely into the ground by doing everything right.

TFS is not dead. And the TFS native source management (one small pilar in TFS) is just quite unpopular right now :). But not dead.

If you can see MS itself is a big customer, why kill it when their own teams have moved over to it over their own code plex?

Why does GitHub need to be acquired at all?

Do the costs of running the servers and hosting the free services not cover the revenue from Enterprise users?

I believe that any Enterprise users won't notice even a doubling of the subscription fee, if GitHub really needs it.

I don't know why there needs to be more than a handful of employees working at github, just don't break what's already there!

> Why does GitHub need to be acquired at all?

They raised a 250MM round a few years ago. You don't get to take that kind of money from VCs for a cut of yearly residuals.

>Why does GitHub need to be acquired at all?

So VCs can cash in.

IPO?

I agree. I guess most of us here pay for GH account.

Exactly.

This is negative value. The only reason the big companies host their source code on GitHub is because it's independent. They will stop doing that tomorrow if GitHub is acquired and it will lose all its value.

Positive for Atlassian I guess.

As someone who has always despised git for its complexity and being a movement more than a new technology I have been waiting years for this. Let git fracture and die. Maybe then we can get tools that work for us instead of the other way around.

I enjoy Mercurial as much as the next person. But git is an engineering feat simply because it works well enough for so many use cases. Also, if git is the worst part of your tooling, that's some great tooling and a good problem to have.

So, Which Microsoft login will I need to use for Microsoft GitHub?

My Microsoft Personal Account? Microsoft Work Account? Azure AD Account? Microsoft GitHub account?

p.s. All of the accounts have the same username, you just try different password and 2FA combinations til it works.

Does that not depend on you? Personal account - well that's your personal account ending in maybe @outlook.com

Microsoft Work Account - Defined by your workplace. Ending in @workplace.com

Azure AD Account - Same as your work account, unless your workplace uses a different tenant account for Azure.

Github Account - Well they still need to support the older accounts.

For the comparisons of this acquisition to Skype, yes Microsoft bungled the Skype acquisition.

But they have been killing it with Typescript and Visual Studio. I feel like that at such a large company, the Typescript recent history matters more than the Skype history. Two very different areas with different people in charge, etc.

As much as I love VSCode, you live in a buble. A communication app affects way more people than a programming language or a text editor. Even my mother uses the former, while only a fraction of all the programmers I met in my life use the laters.

And MS did messed up on other major products or companies

- Rare video games. They did freaking golden eyes and conkers bad day and they manage to kill it.

- they messed up Wn10, which is still not as good as Win7 after all those years but spies more on you and forces update at the worse moment on you

- the latest outlook is barely usable. Sometime mails can't be sent. Sometime it freezes or crashes. It's very slow, the search sucks and I never find the buttons I'm looking for.

- they killed Nokia and the windows phone despite all the investments the community did in it. And it was considered a good product.

- they are milking minecraft like disney is milking SW, so that all the creative community has moved to private servers.

I mean, we are talking about a company that had a monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world. The player and browser, the most used software ever by the non tech saavy users.

And to this day, none of their versions is remotely as good as the competition.

Many of your criticisms may be justified, but this one reads a bit silly to me:

> monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world

I know it's a trope to say that IE was a monopoly, but the longest view of these stats I can easily find comes from W3Counter[1] and at what appears to be its market peak in 2007, IE6 and IE7 had 50% and 17% of the market.

OK, so the combined share was downtrending since the actual peak in 2004, according to ADTECH data from Europe[2]...

Huh. There are stats that go way further back, to before IE was dominant, and Wikipedia says it actually peaked in 2002, with 96% of the market.[3] I stand corrected?

I started my reply to make a point, and upon doing the basic research found that it appears I don't know what I'm talking about. These stats are really interesting, though!

FWIW, I have not been primarily a Windows user since I was about 14 years old. That was in 1999, when Netscape was still a player in the market, and I began my switch to Linux. I guess I forgot (or blacked out, it was traumatic) the fact that there was a point in time in the Browser Wars when IE was effectively declared the winner. It's been a steady downhill trend since then!

[1]: https://www.w3counter.com/trends

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#AD...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Re...

Totally with you on all of that and that I live in a comfy bubble of tech stuff.

Conveniently, Github fits right into the technology bubble. :)

Win10 could be better than win7, but too much time adding in ads and not enough refactoring the old UX all the way.

MS has always been pretty good at making products.

MS has always been pretty bad at providing services.

Azure is pretty nice to use... Office 365 is second to none imho. Teams is great.

Could be worse. It could be Oracle.

Or IBM.

Or Google. At least Oracle would keep its dead corpse alive while it was still producing revenue.

Aaand this is the weakness of centralizing everything in Github. Inevitable that it gets acquired by something with other motives (or is forced to exploit its central position in some way because business). The fact it may be Microsoft that seals the deal is just a cherry on top.

We need proper decentralization.

There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.

> We need proper decentralization.

> There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.

The Web is decentralized, and so everybody’s using Google to discover it. The problem with decentralization is you still need global entry points, i.e. some sort of centralization.

These entry points could be run by networked organizations like Sensorica (except more developed) and run on free software.

As a long time GitHub user I really do hope these talks do not result in an acquisition. I would really like GitHub to be independent from OS vendors, or vendors of platforms, ecosystems, compilers, IDEs etc.

I want GitHub's goal to be a good GitHub. Not a good part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Those may initially be the same, but it takes very little for them to not be the same.

Something makes me feel like Microsoft acquiring Github will do away with Github's current, open nature.

If the extreme advertising in Windows 10 is any sign...

At first they will just inject random commits that don't change any files but inform you about the latest price offerings on One Drive and Azure hosting. Later on if you're still on the "free" plan some of the commits will modify your hosted software to show their ads at runtime. Have fun!

This comment made me giggle at first, but then the truth hidden in the outlandish idea hit home and I cried a little bit.

> will do away with GitHub's current, open nature.

Apparently the Gnome folks concluded that GitHub was already too closed to even consider them in the competition for the question "Where will the Gnome project live in the future?"

GitLab won that competition, btw, and icrosoft wasn't even part of that calculus.

With current trends in Microsoft's Developer Division, it's possible that GitHub could end up way more open if Microsoft acquired them. GitHub's core business is GitHub and they need that to stay closed to stay competitive. GitHub under Microsoft could have less financial pressure to keep closed.

Is it likely? I don't know. It is an interesting possibility though, that would certainly change the game.

What extreme advertising? I've been using Win 10 from the beginning and haven't seen ONE add.

This seems, to me, to illustrate perfectly how Microsoft still doesn't understand open source as an idea nor as a culture. The whole movement exists as a reaction against central, corporate control.

Large companies think that, by acquiring important hosted open source infrastructure, they'll somehow acquire the users or act as gatekeepers. But open source tooling is so decentralized these days that is not easy to be a captive user. The cost of switching is so low -- plenty of other comparable services supply collaborative utilities for git -- that, for most projects, a weekend spent altering URLs and configs should suffice.

If such a deal goes through, Microsoft will spend millions on the acquisition and, simultaneously, alternative providers who appear more independent (Gitlab, BitBucket, etc) will see a surge in new accounts.

And I, for one, think it'd be a good thing for open source. Every time an OSS sugar daddy turns on its users -- SourceForge, BitKeeper, Oracle, SCO, etc -- the community has grown more robust, more decentralized, and more resilient.

Does anyone have insight into what they're been working on recently at Github? I feel like the user experience hasn't changed/improved in the last couple of years at all. It feels to me like there is a lot of low hanging fruit to make a ton of money. For one they could integrate or replicate the functionality of Bountysource and let people donate to users. There is also tons of room for improvement in licensing like making copywriter-assignment frictionless and letting people dual license their software (so I could at a click of a button buy a proprietary license for someone's GPL'd library)

People are being overly pessimistic. This would be a potentially great deal. GitHub is very successful at what they do and I don't think MS would change that. More likely they would use GH as lead-in to selling cloud services the same way Google uses GitLab.

Some of my pessimism is not just with Microsoft, itself, even though I do have that. I think an argument can be made that we should not want all the decent software companies to be bought up by the same big five giant companies, no matter who it is.

If you've watched the last couple Build Conferences (Microsoft's annual developer conference) they frequently demonstrate their CI/CD pipeline based on Github checkins, not VSTS checkins (just takes a webhook invocation and all the source-hosting sites support sending those out on check-in or merge).

these talks are actually not new. the same rumor appeared back in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/github-is-raising-a-second...

imho, github feels a bit too slow innovating, which is kinda surprising since they are still "a startup"

I have the opposite opinion. I think every few months I see an interesting feature being added that are slowly making github a better platform. Just for the last few months we've seen a lot of improvements for Enterprise, improvement to gitHub pages, saved replies, team discussions, security alerts. I love the pace they have to release meaningful improvements.

GitHub has not been a startup for a few years, and it's business model is more or less mature now.

I hope they don't innovate that much. It seems everytime they do, the designs gets worse and worse.

I'm personally really happy with Github. I feel like anything they can add would like detract from my experience.

It's not perfect, but it's simple, easy to use, and gets to the point.

At this point I just hope that the acquisition goes through, is completely terrible and gitlab becomes the new standard.

It's getting depressing to see that mid tier companies are all now reliably getting swallowed up by larger ones. It is starting to feel like the golden age of technology - where brand new small companies emerge and become giant ones - is waning. Were Google, Amazon and Facebook actually the last of the tech giants to emerge and from now on, it's just a procession of watching every other company merge into the existing 5 or 6 big companies? I guess it is inevitable but it still makes me sad if we are transitioning to a more mature, but fundamentally more boring phase.

I think it is a cycle. When the middle tier companies vanish, the small ones start to rise again.

I really hope this doesn't happen. Microsoft design and services are all over the board, not in a good way. I'm sure they would add more features, or make it more enterprise-y, which could have benefits, but I would definitely move to a self hosted setup if this went through. It's nice to have diversity of brand/company personalities in the tech ecosystem.

Oh shit.

I run Windows. I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, and the sense that Microsoft is ritually unclean will drive many of them away from github. It's the best thing that's happened to BitBucket and Altassian ever. If I have a choice between MS tools and Altassian tools I will usually take MS. (Visual Source Safe really did suck, but Visual Studio is not that bad...)

Also, Microsoft acquisitions do not seem to go well. Look at Skype, LinkedIn, etc.

I'll be really honest. This would lead me to start looking at alternatives for all of my projects very quickly.

After years of watching Microsoft gobble up and assimilate companies, I'd rather jump ship before they start the extinguish portion of the cycle. Mojang is starting to leave the extend part with updates that are pushed out early for the "bedrock" version of minecraft.

I'd be interested to learn why there's the perspective that the LinkedIn acquisition hasn't gone well. I feel like most of the stories I've read about it have been pretty positive.

Perhaps they perceive that AWS and GCP seek to own more of the work infrastructure and they're trying to get out ahead of this.

* email/domain integration

* code hosting

* issue tracking/kanban-based project planning

* CI/CD processes

Developer tooling is evolving and there's a land-grab happening, from small workshops all the way up to global-scale enterprises.

Source Safe is ancient. TFS is their new jam and it's pretty solid. Especially if you're in the Visual Studio and Azure world.

Skype was horrible. But LinkedIn is doing very well afaik.

> I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, [...]

And for perfectly rational reasons, I would add.

Guess they could always relaunch VSS as "GitHub for Business" at the same time then! :)

An acquisition would mean the inevitable split of support between the MS toolchain and the OS toolchain, which would eventually be left to die. Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS.

> Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS

I'm not sure that's true, but it is true that MS would have motivation to leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software.

At a conference years ago, a Microsoft rep told me over beers that almost everything his division did had the ultimate objective of selling more SQL Server licenses. That's why SQL Server is a required component of almost all MS enterprise software.

So you might for instance see a SQL Server backend option, and then "Github Enterprise" sold with that configuration.

> leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software.

This is pretty much business 101. You have loss leaders, that are solely designed to drive traffic to different products.

Considering how many Windows admins would prefer it that way, I wouldn't blame them. (Not that I agree)

MS just want you using Azure and don't care whose toolchain you use. If they bought GitHub it would be entirely so they could get people _not_ using other MS products onto Azure. So there is no way they kill off the OS toolchain and turn it in to another VSTS.

> Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS.

This is the silliest thing I've read on HN in awhile.

Give it time. MS does what it has always done to competitors (even to MS internal products) that it acquires. Takes awhile sometimes and you younger kid will get to live through what others already have.

If anyone has used VSTS or TFS knows this is a bad bad idea. They tend to make unnecessarily complicated user interfaces with poor usability.

I happen to like TFS, specially the triggers to prevent commits on broken unit tests.

I'm happy that Microsoft has gotten so on board with git recently and made contributions to the project, but this kind of consolidation still makes me nervous, for multiple reasons.

What contributions has MS made to git?

They made a post listing some of their performance improvements last year: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/01/11/microsoft...

Are people here really reasoning like "C# / .Net and VSCode are really great SO Microsoft acquiring GitHub would surely end well".

What is the connection between SOME of their newer dev tools being good (oh, just try the mess that is Visual Studio) and... well, anything else.

You believe that these well-liked tools/initiatives were random anomalies, born independently from and untouched by Microsoft's leadership?

GitLab here we come...

More like "gah, we're going to have to self-host git, aren't we"?

Gogs/Gitea are my current goto for doing this. I expect one or both of them will get a lot of influx if github gets acquired.

Gitlab will also see upticks, but I suspect it's a lot more than most people need/want to maintain.

Bitbucket Cloud & Bitbucket Pipelines. Serverless CI/CD... as in, no servers for you to self-host.

Or you know... just use gitlab.com...

I hope that a tragedy like MS acquiring GitHub does not happen, ever...

I can't understand why Github hasn't built out a clear path from repository hosting, to continuous integration, ending in low-friction renting of cloud instances.

I don't want Google or Amazon to buy them, and that almost leaves Azure.

It seems like something they could have done themselves a few years ago, though. Puzzling.

Considering that software powers most of the modern economy, it's pretty sad how small the market is for quality software development tools. Programmers get paid high six figures, but balk at paying for quality debugging tools. Visual Studio, despite being a strong debugger and exceptional piece of technology in its own right, is not a real revenue driver for MS, it's just an exceptionally sophisticated way to nudge programmers to Microsoft's libraries and platforms.

Github has generally been platform agnostic (except for git itself), and it would sadden me to see Github start to compromise those values and start favoring one platform or another. (One could easily see Github / Visual Studio plugins, enabled by default, with built-in subtle nudges towards the MS Cloud platform).

If github had to be sold, which tech company would be a better buyer than microsoft and able to afford a $2 billion acquisition?

Possibly Amazon. They tend to leave acquired companies alone to manage how they prefer, apart from Bezos micromanaging how to cut costs and restructure logistics, which is often a good thing. Plus Amazon (like Microsoft or Google) also has economy of scale opportunities for hosting GitHub on AWS.

I do believe Amazon would interfere less with what users like about GitHub than Microsoft would.

Amazon?

They seem to handle acquisitions well. Zappos, Audible, Twitch...

Apple. I know it's not Apple's style but imagine if Apple started expanding outside of it's bubble like Microsoft has. If they really went all in it would be amazing.

IPO.

GitLab must be psyched for the potential influx of defectors.

or fearing for the stability of their servers...

Not too keen on GitHub being acquired. If Microsoft wants to do something good here, they should give GitHub enough money to form a Foundation similar to Mozilla. That would be the best way GitHub could pursue its mission.

That also crossed my mind. But they have shareholders.

This is our chance to gain a GitHub+LinkedIn integration. Just imagine... your LinkedIn profile and endorsements will auto-populate based on commit & PR activity.

‘Please login to your LinkedIn account to view this project’

That sounds horrifying.

Don't really agree with most comments trashing this hypothetical deal, bringing up the Skype precedent.

Its been what, 2 years since the Linked-in and Xamarin acquisitions? Nothing seems to have changed. Microsoft just seems to know that the desktop is no longer the cash cow that it used to be, office still is but may not last long, so its a good idea to diversify its portfolio.

Satya is not Ballmer.

Only one mention of CodePlex[0] in the comments?

Microsoft had a "github" it could not compete and github took the mindshare.

Now it seems Microsoft want to buy that mindshare.

I wonder how many FOSS and other projects will jump ship once/if Microsoft takes over.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex

I foresee a great future... for Gogs [1], Gitea [2], Gitlab [3] and other Github-alternatives. I was a late and somewhat reluctant adopter of Github as I don't like the idea of centralising so much of the free software infrastructure and putting it in the hands of one company, even a supposedly 'friendly' company like Github. I mirror everything I do on Github to a local Gitea-instance as a backup and exit strategy for when Github becomes a liability. If these talks go through and Microsoft does take over the latter will become true and I'll remove my accounts there.

[1] https://gogs.io/

[2] https://gitea.io/

[3] https://gitlab.com/

I wonder how projects like Electron are figuring into the interest that Microsoft has in GitHub. How would Microsoft move forward with such a project if they bought GitHub? Would its continue to be based on Chromium? Would future versions of Office follow VSCode and be build as Electron apps?

I was in DevDiv at the time of the launch of VS Code (but on a different team): The pressure was on to ship a cross-platform editor ASAP to support the new cross-platform .NET infrastructure. This was very much an "IBM PC"-project with the Directors tasking a small team to get something done and to disregard the NIH culture. Atom was chosen as the platform because it was already close to what they needed with the right license. Heck, the rush to ship was so intense that they screwed up the name (I forget the story exactly, but "VS Code" was not the name the MSFT naming department came up with, but the name they initially chose turned out to be used elsewhere and they didn't have the time to come up with something trademarkable so they just sighed and shipped as "Visual Studio Code").

Anyway - I think the VS Code experience helped with Microsoft's institutional "fear" of pushing ahead with a JavaScript ecosystem elsewhere - I think the knock-on effects contributed towards the Office org's recent announcement to add JS as a first-class macro language in Excel, I just wish it was TypeScript instead.

Electron is save. VS Code needs it. Atom however does not look that good.

This has me wondering, what Microsoft wants GitHub for? It's not like they can't use it without owning it, and I doubt they want to improve it as it is. Probably they want control before integrating it with their products.

Microsoft has been investing in developer services for a number of years - they acquired hockeyapp (mac/ios crash analytics), and have a whole bunch of other tools under the azure brand https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/

It's almost worth re-asking the question as...what does Azure want Github for, to try and strip away thinking about MS's windows/office products. There could be some crossover between github's Atom efforts and VS Code, and MS already worked on projects like Git virtual filesystem (GVFS) for their own needs ( https://github.com/Microsoft/gvfs )

GitHub do for developers what Microsoft want to do for the rest of business through SharePoint.

Maybe they could add Office 365 editing to GitHub and pitch it as the successor to SharePoint. Or try to integrate it with their other products in some kind of Frankenstein mess.

Maybe they just want something to buy with the $100B+ cash they are sitting on?

They want to join the social networking data with linkedin and office 365, yammer, enterprise Skype, etc, etc.

They have a clear long-term strategy of owning professional social networks, both within and across companies.

That way they can sell you access to your professional network, and your employer access to info you don’t even realize exists about you, and also sell it insights into its own org structure.

GitHub would just be another piece of the puzzle.

DevOps and IaaS is growing so fast, I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet. This is absolutely about Azure DevOps.

Because much of the free software world uses it as a coordination place - it's a weak, undefended target. If they were to buy it and quickly shut it down, the free software world would be in a tailspin for quite awhile. Microsoft could use the delay to push for legislation across the world to force developers to have a Microsoft(Linkedin/Ripple enabled) license attached to their (Microsoft) global ID. Within a year or two it could be illegal, worldwide to possess non-Microsoft licensed crypto software, then eventually all software. Especially look for software relating to the boot process/BIOS related stuff - that's another weak point right now, but there are probably others.

GitHub sales a product ms competes with.

If SendGrid and Twilio could IPO, then surely GitHub can. Keep incentives aligned and do that instead, please. If Microsoft acquired GH it would a non-neutral platform, and I would be off to Gitlab immediately.

.NET is great and the openness is great, I don't really see why so many people are up in arms about this. Microsoft is a large user of github. Maybe this will push you all to use gitlab ;)

I don't understand why all the bashing, there is no better time to cash in. Gitlab in few years time will make Github worth less.

Gitlab.com and self host GitLab offer the best of both worlds. Gitlab right now still isn't as good as Github, but it is good enough for many things. And we see improvement coming in every few months. Not to mention Microsoft will likely move the whole Github infrastructure to Azure.

HOT TAKE: The things that drove Skype to change from the Golden Age Of Skype were largely market-driven things like the rise of the smartphone that killed pretty much every other popular communications platform at the time (AIM is dead now, too) and there is no evidence that an independent Skype would have weathered the market shift any better than a Microsoft-owned Skype did.

Disagreed.

Skype worked perfectly for me on smartphone, and the few quirks could've been patched without screwing it up completely.

I feel like Skype was ahead of its time, it was essentially a cross-platform iMessage & FaceTime that was mainstream.

Had Microsoft not fucked it up we'd still be happily using it.

I'm mostly indifferent, but would like point out that MS has managed their dev products decently well. (At least the ones I use)

I don't care if Microsoft is the new Apple, or anything like that. I just don't want to see more consolidation.

It's ironic how Microsoft has embraced Git considering it was made for Linux's development.

Microsoft has been the largest contributor to Git for a while. Getting to a point where all of Windows is building out of Git repos has caused them to solve problems that Git has never faced previously.

For all the silly unicorn IPOs of companies which don’t necessarily have a clear product or revenue, GH seems like the type of company that could successfully go public and actually succeed. It would fend off potential suitors for a while too.

As much as I love GitHub, if Microsoft acquires it I might start looking for alternatives.

Sign the petition: https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-stop-microsoft-from-buyin...

I don't think anyone really understands what Github is. It's more like a spirit then a thing. I bet Microsoft is prepared to pay a lot for the goodwill, they don't care about the product/tech.

GitHub being bought buy Microsoft is like the opposite of what it represents. If Microsoft wants to pay for goodwill they should drop a big chunk of cash on forming a GitHub Foundation similar to Mozilla.

I understand most of the concern about Microsofty way.

However, basically I see two different era for MS. Before Satya and After Satya. So, I don't have any concern/worries in this acquisition.

If this goes through, it's going to impact users of Atom and VS Code - one of the two has no reason to survive. I wouldn't be surprised if the former is discontinued then.

That would be kind of awesome, but I don't know how the github culture would meld with a big corporation. It would be an interesting case study for other similar start ups.

Didn't github already deliberately kill their own culture a few years back with policy changes and a layer of middle management?

edit: This isn't snark. Didn't they legit cut a bunch of perks, refocus everyone's priorities, and hire some people to start cracking whips? Or was I reading the public accounts of that situation wrong? Got bad scuttlebutt?

Aren't dev tools are going cloud. MS might have just bought a bunch of servers with nasty dependencies on Jenkins in the hopes it results in more deployments to Azure.

E3 -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Stems from at least the 1990's. The MS behavior as opposed to the term can be argued to pre-date that decade.

I'll just remind people who may think I'm being old, crotchety, and living in the past, that this has been a repeated pattern of theirs that has resurfaced so often and reliably as to become considered by many to be a core component of MS culture. Repeated including in the face of DoJ prosecution and monitoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Almost nobody who even worked at Microsoft in 1996 still actually works at Microsoft. You are bringing up something said in one meeting from when floppy disks were still pretty important to the computing world.

I can't fathom a single statement from 1996 about a computer company that is still accurate today, and EEE falls into that category as well.

E3 is no longer relevant under Nadella, arguably even before Balmer stepped down.

>E3 -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Doesn't apply to buying the competition.

This could be the best thing ever for GitLab. (see: Skype)

Not unless they bought red hat first and shipped Linux laptops unseating Lenovo. Money is now in the mega data cloud center not the desktop market.

LinkedIn won’t let you cancel your account if you’ve paid a year subscription. The option simply doesn’t exist and their support is oblivious

This feels a bit like MS wanting to buy Yahoo, Nokia, and aQuantive. It feels like Github is now resting on its laurels and has peaked.

If Microsoft buys github I will be pulling all my repositories, deleting my account, and finding any software that I use on github and quickly cloning it and importing it to some competing server(Probably gitlab)...and I would encourage everyone else to do the same.

edit In the meanwhile I would recommend filing an issue on every single project as you would normally file issues on, asking what their migration plan in the event of a Microsoft takeover is, before, not after this happens.

Time to spin up that Gitlab instance, I guess.

Can't we do something like a customer-buy-out and put Github into a foundation of some sort?

Microsoft should actually buy Slack.

Already tried to clone it with Microsoft Teams.

Leave it alone! Github pricing is perfect for all incomes. They'll slap on a few features, create a tiered payment system and charge $20 for the first tier.

100% will take my code somewhere else if this acquisition goes through. Go acquire Atlassian if you want to "diversify" your portfolio. Go stick it up your Azure MS.

Trying to understand the cloud strategy here; does Github run on Azure, GCP or AWS?

I'd seriously consider migrating to bitbucket if this happens.

NO! GOD! PLEASE NO! [GIF]

Is there a truly decentralized peer to peer alternative to github or gitlab? And please no lectures about how git is inherently decentralized. Obviously there is something missing that causes us to rely on github etc.

So this is why they have closed Codeplex!

The price as stated seems lowball to me.

GitHub: the ale requires you to keep us open.

Microsoft:..

A better fit would be Docker. Totally unrelated but I can see that as a better fit with Azure rather than invest on the dev community around Github.

I’m bailing if Github gets Windowized.

Oh, oh. That doesn't sound good.

They're literally ruining my life. First Minecraft, now GitHub? Congratz MS. Now I hate you more.

God yes! Please oust the GH execs too, thatd be such a blessing for the product.

Nonononononono

GitHub: the sale requires you to keep us open.

Microsoft:..

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/V7Oyy

well I’m canceling my sub, thanks for ruining Github MS. Gitlab here I come!

please no! :-(

Up next:

- Github user account migration/integration with outlook.com

- A much-internally-championed Github/Office/LinkedIn integration effort created by some sharp but inexperieced program manager fresh just out of Washington State, that happens to require Github project descriptions to be authored in .docx format, launched as an improvement from that primitive format made by a certain mac fanboy.

- An effort to migrate the Github infrastructure to Azure cloud on Win 10 that ties up 85% of all development resources for the next five years and ultimately fails.

For the last one: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736149.aspx

And that’s from when they weren’t allowed to use BSD or Linux internally and Windows Server was rudimentary. Microsoft would have no problem migrating Github to Azure quickly.

Well, that's a scary thought.

Hopefully it's just a negotiation tactic to get Google to buy them for more than their first offer.

Google is notorious for killing products too, though.

For me, much of the same rationale would apply

See https://code.google.com/archive/

Google buying GitHub over Microsoft would actually be arguably worse for GitHub.

If Google actually bought GitHub, I would be thinking twice about using it.

but I don't want to leave github. Please no.

I can't believe people are salivating over the idea of giving google more control over open source. Need to wake up to their style of evil I guess.

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