Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub
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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).
I understand the need for security, but updates shouldn't break my computer either.
"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.
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 the vast majority of people won't be bothered to move their stuff unless MS pulls a Skype.
If they bundle the pro version of github with office 365 - just like with Teams, the 365 bundle becomes even more compelling for organizations.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
The only answer is to simply gather less data, or be more explicit about when you do. And Google isn't great at either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft is moving fast along the same path.
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
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 that’s the case anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 10 is almost usable with a keyboard and mouse. It’s much better than 8 was.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what you get default out of the box with Windows as well?
can't with Windows 10
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion.
Disclaimer: I am one of the core maintainers of Draft.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
MGS did right by Bungie/Halo circa XBox; though Halo hadn't yet been released, and it's initial fanbase were all Marathon fans.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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...
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10-speech-inking...
Also, not getting convicted isn’t a very high bar.
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.
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.
Because this isn't slashdot.
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.
And there are many more companies they've sued for using Linux.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
After all, what's the point of building software, if it's never embraced, aka, used?
Hence the justified caution and monitoring of a known extinguisher.
“Embrace” is happening everywhere these days. Don’t sound the alarm until you see Extend.
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...
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.)
Seems like a wild card entry, which could go any number of directions. :)
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.
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..."
(or any other form of "brand envy" against other companies, for that matter.)
Yeah, sure. I'm totally on that but this isn't a thread about Apple, is it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fortunately, there's free third party software that fix a lot of Microsoft's bullshit: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10.
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 :(
My main requirement is for a good experience with the pen...
Shame really since the techn isn't bad these days.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think MS, whose OS infects every PC on store shelves has any place to complain.
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.
I agree on this one. After all, IE is now in great shape because of the competition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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!
Years later the back end was still on FreeBSD and Solaris, but the front end was on Win 2000 using Windows Services for UNIX.
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
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 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.
Draft (which started with Deis and is continuing with Azure) continues to get active development: https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=appli...
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.
------
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.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BoxFeENJcINgHbKfygXp...
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?
In the automotive industry, I would recommend our sister organization, Automotive Grade Linux. https://www.automotivelinux.org/
I personally will be avoiding your organization like the plague.
And for that matter, GitLab as well :-)
(disclaimer: am an embedded systems engineer and a Rust fanboy)
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.
It's fixed now. Thanks for responding so politely.
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
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.
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.
Vim, Sublime, Atom, Eclipse-based IDE...
Not once have I met anyone using VS code on any platform.
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.
> also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes
This sounds like opinions ;)
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!]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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)
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.
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.
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.
It's along the same lines as saying an oil executive would make a good candidate as the EPA chief because they "understand pollution".
It’s like if Google bought Mozilla and Firefox became just another Google browser.
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.
Makes sense they try to control the future of the tool they use in so meny projects.
> 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.
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.
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).
Microsoft rescued them.
'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.
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 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.
That sounds incredibly unlikely if not borderline ridiculous.
Allows logically, not legally though I'd expect.
I imagine, in my paranoia, the first thing MS will do is change the T&Cs.
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.
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.
[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Cloud-Source-Re...
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.
Another example: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=27
This is just what is public.
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.
- 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 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!
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.
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.
Back in the day that was the centralised site that people used to host code, mailing-lists, issues, and etc.
5 years from now when GitLab is acquired by Google we'll have to migrate again.
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.
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.
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.
People say this every time stuff like this happens, and yet people never learn :/.
Keeps his tools related to Cydia closed-source...
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.
That said, I have always been uneasy with one central player hosting a huge percentage of open source projects.
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.
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.
Sorry, tangential thought, I agree with your main point, and the others are much tougher.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
We also offer a hosted service (GitLab.com), if that's more convenient.
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.
As if installing gitlab was the last step in setting up a highly available and disaster safe git server.
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.
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.
It was not always that way, they have made huge improvements on the install path over the last couple of years.
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
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?
How so? Centralization is merely enforced by the government and incentivized by the system it exists in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do quite like the idea of using DNS instead of standing up proxies.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
Give it 7-10 years before it is riddled with advertisements or has a subscription fee for 'premium' downloads.
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
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)
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:
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
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.
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.
The amount of people using GitHub shows otherwise.
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.
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.
What does your tool offer to make sure I never have to deal with abusive users, server patches, or a split-brain scenario?
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'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.
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.
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.
Most people also don't have a server running constantly, so a centralized service is convenient.
Git was built to track changes and resolve collisions, if I get it right.
- 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).
That just means that none of the major tech players have been doing a whole lot in this regard.
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.
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.
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.
There wouldn't be a major need for Jira, GitLab, etc for the most part.
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.
And if so, then were open source to move toward GitLab with their even more permissive policies, how could they avoid the same fate?
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.
I would say the one that keeps Github alive. That's a pretty major one.
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.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/04/27/vsts-publ...
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...
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/05/07/a-new-micr...
For the time being, my comment stands.
If you want to write apps for macOS and distribute them yourself you can do so with no cost.
^and some "CodeLense" feature that I've never used.
http://www.visualstudioresources.com/2017/07/09/differences-...
Free with the purchase of Apple hardware. Not exactly "free," is it?
VS Code works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I'm sure one company will support both editors in the long term.
what? linkedin became garbage, it's worse facebook with more ads and stupid emails not related to anything I do.
Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.
A recent changelog episode addresses this exact issue:https://changelog.com/podcast/298#transcript-78
Github should remain a neutral ground in my opinion.
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.
Good. Need more people like you.
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..
Else, changes were made for "reasons", and those justifications are effectively lost.
I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI
this adresses some of the issues.
(I believe with all critique on Microsoft they aren't as bad, but want to exemplarize the risk)
GitHub pages is super easy to move except for getting users to know the new domain.
Anyway, there are APIs which one can use to export issues.
Conglomeration, unless you hated github before which I wouldn't object too.
I agree with you anyway.
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.
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.
Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...
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.
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.
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.
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...
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)
A light IDE is not rocket science and this project is known (and loved) by many open source developers.
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.
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.
Total Commander for example.
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.
Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.
So I'm not super hopeful.
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).
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.
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.
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.
redacted: i mistook the acquisition date
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/an-executive-depar...
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
- 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.
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:
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.
EDIT, yes I am aware that there are some non open parts in Gitlab.com
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:
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
I used to go:
press start btn --> type "utor" --> press enter --> uTorrent.exe executes.
Why would they remove such a useful feature?
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.
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.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/project/search/code-se...
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...
See the recent post about ghost (it has a structure that can't be sold) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228
Product hasn’t changed a lot since launch.
What could change this? People refusing money? Some encouragement to stay mid sized? Wonder if that will ever happen...
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
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.
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.)
Alas, like several others have pointed out, this doesn’t scale to GitHubs other services like GH Pages, or their Wiki, issue tracker, etc.
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.
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_starte...
EDIT: typos
- capturing developer data for ML/AI research
- identify new product ideas
- identify ways to improve existing products
- create a funnel to existing products
The other was the self hosted option.
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/
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.
Some is, eg some linux/gnome devs are paid to contribute. 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
No one would’ve dreamed of this happening 5-10 years back.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
It went from seemed like a ~reasonable security architecture, to outright enabling the monitoring and forwarding of all user conversations. Ugh.
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.
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.
It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
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.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
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.
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.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
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.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
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.
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/
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.
R.I.P. Github. Your move, Gitlab.
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!
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.
Current investors are going to be bought out in cash or MSFT stock.
Don't you even dare think about it much less tell MS about this idea
"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?
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.
"postmaster@nsa.gov"
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.
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 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.
My days of google fan-boy-ism are long over :-/
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.
Cue followup 'Actually these are all extremely good + business-savvy decisions for big G since' posts.
> google gets praised
None of the things you list are things Google is praised for.
But don't let actual evidence stop your pitchforks.
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).
Somebody used this address in a joke, and then a Wikipedia editor took it seriously and put it in the article. sigh
"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...
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?
MS buys GitHub for $5B.
Funny old world.
(It's Google.)
There’s a reason MS bought GitHub and not GitLab
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.
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.
GitLab just got big boost.
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.
Right? It's like your wife leaving you for your high school bully.
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.
There are more ways to make money than selling out
> "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
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.
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 has also gone untouched - it's still hosted on AWS in fact.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/mozilla https://github.com/google
What advantage would any change bring for Microsoft?
(/torvalds/linux is not the upstream, btw)
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.
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.
Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.
Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
Microsoft of today is more Microsoft than ever.
Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
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...?
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'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.
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...
See here for some alternatives: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-manag...
(Funny that this list is hosted on github.)
Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
"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.
[1] https://gogs.io/
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#memory
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.
[1] https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/pricing/
It's very simple, reasonable, and sane compared to GitHub's.
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.
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.
I think most people who use github would NOT want that.
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.
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?
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.
moodle/moodle
mirrored from git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
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”.
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.
[1]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... [2]: https://a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-developme...
Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
- 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?
EDIT: Typo
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
At some point the situation clearly flipped
(More reading: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/)
"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."
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/
Now these millions of developers will face a dilemma.
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.
Any mention of Microsoft is enough to turn me off, I have seen enough - I have had enough.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/microsoft-fort...
Skype.
That said, I do appreciate their recent strategy decisions. Lets hope at some point the two hemispheres of MS converge.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft may not have changed completely but part of it has
- LinkedIn
- Skype
- Lies around Windows 10 semi-forced upgrade
- Nokia
- The hell that is Office365
- Vermeer
- Groove
- Rare
- Visio
- Hotmail
- FASA
- Firefly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
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.
You're looking at the wrong people. It's companies who are paying for GitHub.
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.
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.
How do we make a similar or comparable service that is decentralized yet transparent and instantly accesible to millions of people across the globe?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.redbubble.com/people/suranyami/works/32080448-it...
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.
Edited those typos.
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.
Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?
I mean, if I had wanted to troll. Still..almost everything about MS's choices in Win10 (aside from Linux Subsystem) bother me.
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.
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?
“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
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 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?
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)
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 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.
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...).
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.
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...
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...
If Microsoft honestly wants to improve GitHub, they should ask the community first.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Microsoft has been doing amazing things recently for devs. Wait to see what their plans actually are before you start to freak out.
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.
Anyone have any comments on what might drive this preference?
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.
Issue tracking & wiki built in.
You can use its git integration to ensure recruiters/employers can find you.
"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.
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.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-...
Microsoft [...] is now one if the biggest contributors to GitHub
[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
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.
Time to move to gitlab.
This purchase is about increasing 365 value. They'll make the pro version free with office 356 subscription.
Well I can wish!
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.
Caveat emptor.
Now, I can't imagine the GAFA let their open source projects on GitHub...
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.
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.
Really showing HN's selective myopia.
As acquisitions go, it's pretty brilliant.
Part of me wishes some companies were non-profit entities.
6 hours ago: GitLab sees huge spike in project imports
I think that says all there is to be said.
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.
This is good, because I’ve been wanting to dive into GitLab for a while.
Centralised git is great, but becomes a target
Is this the perfect blockchain pairing?
That means I could finally get to cancel my multiple subscription and setup gitlab.
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.
The last thing I want is my code to fall into the hands of MS.
The idea was that it's more likely our servers get hacked than a breach at github. Guess I was wrong.
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)?
Some things you can just never forgive.
Mountains, molehills.
> Github petition: please remain independent
Wonder how hiring/firing is going to be now at Git. They are pro-remote, while most MSFT positions are going no longer remote.
Someone explain the extreme feeling of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
Someone explain the extreme feeling
of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
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.
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.
Same problems still in a for profit enterprise, just shifted across whatever the base values are. Life will never be perfect.
... so VCs can profit.
If you imagine what the world would be like without any incentive to create, it would be a very different place.
Besides, what is wrong with someone who created a business later selling that business for a profit?
Why is this a betrayal?
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.
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.
Ah, for the days when HN was a refuge from this type of bullshit.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations to Microsoft!
Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.
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! ️
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.
> 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.
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:
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.