Microsoft has been talking about buying GitHub

businessinsider.de

7 points·l1k··5 comments

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208293

I don't have much knowledge behind me, but my gut feeling is that repositories require to be independent. Has there been any product Microsoft has taken over and kept the original goals as is?

Any company can take something and maintain it, and Microsoft has the money. But the motive never appears to be much more than a business to make money with. Perhaps I am still a bit bitter about Skype.

Your mistake was in thinking that Microsoft actually cared about Skype. The acquisition was subsidized/paid off by the NSA, which had been wanting Skype to be owned by an American company for a while:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions...

Microsoft put Skype into the PRISM program one month after announcing it was acquiring it:

May 2011: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/

June 2011(second image): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

In 2012: they replaced Skype's P2P architecture to make it easier to spy on (obviously they wouldn't say that, just like Facebook never says it's building shadow profiles for advertising reasons: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype...

More: https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514938/nsa-could-pull-em...

Thank you for your comment.

Good thing the exodus from GitHub is already well on its way. This would be the catalyst for many others to move away from it.

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