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Comment by EnderMB | Hacker News Reader

I spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear.

With all that said, things have changed a lot over at GitHub over the past 2-3 years, so I can't say I'm all that surprised that this was the outcome. Restructures, scandals, and some crazy comments over the few years has led me to believe that GitHub probably isn't the same company that the development community embraced. For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft mess with GitHub then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years, it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service (i.e. GitLab).

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This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.

This was largely my thought behind the move.

Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby, I can't see them wanting to switch things up from a tech perspective. GitHub is stable, and it's tech stack is capable of staying up despite some major DDoS attacks.

If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams, and to finally resolve the issues that stop Windows from being a first-class citizen in the Ruby world. If they can do this through both Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux then I think they'll be on to a winner. It's a capture of a much-loved service, and an opportunity to bring a mature set of tools into their domain.

I work for Microsoft, we run systems that are not built on MS technologies. There’s absolutely no push for migration. In my opinion, no-one will pressure GitHub to change their stack, it would be a suicide.

Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion.

Aside from Wunderlist, who was acquired and running on AWS, and had to switch to Azure and rewrite a bunch of their code to become ToDo.

There is a large difference in complexity here though, and Wunderlist need extra coding for O365 integration so it wasn't just redevelopment purely for a platform shift.

GitHub more complex than todo-list-on-steroids app so a platform change would not make any real sense. MS today may still have some of its old habits but they do seem to have purged a lot of the "not invented here" problem that caused much embarrassment when the first attempts to migrate HotMail over to MS technologies failed. It also has pretty good integration with relevant MS tools (VS & VS.code, etc.).

I expect to see them moving the base infrastructure over to Azure, but non-MS technologies are well enough supported on the platform so that won't require any notable changes to the main codebase of the product itself (though perhaps some rework of the deployment processes to make them more optimal for their new target network?). These days they care a lot more about what runs on Azure than what is written using .Net and even what runs on Windows, and are comfortable releasing their own code using other tech (VS.code being based on Electron being the first example that springs to mind). They'd prefer you used an MS stack from top to bottom of course, but they are more than happy for projects to use other components in/on Azure.

It'll be interesting to see how they would position it alongside TFS, as there is a lot of overlap between the two products. My guess is they'd keep pushing TFS for people who are completely MS shops and GH for people with more varied stacks.

> VS.code being based on Electron

(self reply as it is too late to edit)

As pointed out in another location I post: Electron was created at GitHub and they are its primary maintainer which may have had some bearing on the decision, and a wider effect as it could touch many other projects. Though as Electron is open source there is always the fork option if the community doesn't like the direction MS go with it.

Looks like their will be two sets of automatic posts on news of any project that used Electron: those bemoaning its use because it is Electron and those bemoaning its use because MS!

The scale of products you're talking about are vastly different.

Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft".

> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft"

OK, I respect the call for keeping an open mind. Always a good approach. But let's not forget all of the moves toward a friendlier Microsoft/Linux world looks suspiciously like "Embrace"

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

I for one am willing to keep an open mind, but will be following these types of developments closely.

I hope to be proven wrong.

Then EVERY single other business of its size has a strategy that looks like "Embrace". The only difference is that Microsoft had a memo leak.

... which is exactly the problem. The issue is the tactic, not the company employing it. It’s just this company has a serious habit of employing those tactics, hence the distrust.

I'd like anyone in any business contemplating an Embrace, Extinguish strategy to know that it ends in people not trusting your company and being unwilling to work with your services.

I would like to know how much it is costing Microsoft to fix that damaged reputation so that other executives will know if they do this it will end up costing at least X amount.

That might be the reason why many people dislike all businesses of Microsoft's size. I for one wouldn't be happy if Google or Amazon or Apple bought Github either.

I completely agree. The biggest issue here is that we are losing a neutral player as the top comment says. The tech world is that much more monopolistic without an independent GitHub.

The Memo leak was just the tip of the iceberg. MS also lost multiple court cases about their anticompetitive behaviour (for example gov of US, Sun) in that era.

Did you forget the Extend, Extinguish parts of the strategy, or are you just paraphrasing EEE to make it sound somewhat ok?

Pretty sure he means that just seeing symptoms of Embrace is not enough to sound the alarm that it's going to be extended and extinguished.

After all, what's the point of building software, if it's never embraced, aka, used?

> But let's not forget all of the moves toward a friendlier Microsoft/Linux world looks suspiciously like "Embrace"

“Embrace” is happening everywhere these days. Don’t sound the alarm until you see Extend.

Wsl is getting scarily close to Linux performance in benchmarks and improving fast. I don't see extend being too far away...

WSL has horrible horrible IO performance. It's really not going anywhere until they fix it, and the fix won't be easy

It runs on Windows and can interop with Windows applications, that's already an extension by itself.

I am sure no one in the company has changed since that memo leaked in 1996...

Developers that exclusively use MS stack are very similar to those exclusive to Delphi. MS and Delphi stacks are very specific in nature and very different from everything else out there. Developers stepping out of those feel very uncomfortable and unfamiliar, thus wanting to stay in. Even though the Delphi stack is very obviously dying, the resistance is great, and many people stay on the sinking ship. MS stack is live and well which gives a viable incentive to never even look over the fence. That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way". Where does that put GH? How will it change, in what direction (to accommodate the MS stack)?

> That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way".

And unix developers complain endlessly about any dev environment that isn't identical to what they use. Powershell gets shit because it isn't bash/core-utils (even though it's better in just about every conceivable way), Windows API gets shit for not being posix (even though posix is a crappy API), etc.

Delphi might be a small community compared to JVM or MS. Is Delphi dying?

I work in the M/Mumps space(healthcare), another small (almost invisible) but active community and it seems far from dying. I imagine Delphi is bigger.

I wonder how long the MS stack would last without the support of MS. Would the MS stack fare as well as the Ruby stack has without Microsoft’s massive investment in turning developers into sharecroppers? (Or salesforce, scala, unreal, php, erlang, etc.)

Personally, I wonder how ReactOS (www.reactos.org) will affect things when it finally gets to the point of being usable for general population end users.

Seems like a wild card entry, which could go any number of directions. :)

How does this personally affect you such that you consider it your duty to disparage whole groups of developers for the choices that they make ?

Did it ever occur to you that people stick with certain environments because they make a lot of money using them ?

Your statement basically reads as "I can't believe that people/companies have the nerve to stick with a codebase that cost them thousands of dollars to create and has made them very successful over the last couple of decades..."

> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft".

To be fair, Microsoft need to stop doing stuff that makes people dislike them. Microsoft aggressively court developers who don't use their platforms, but if you are a Microsoft partner or worse, a mere Windows user, you don't always feel so loved.

Case in point: ads in Windows 10.

Mod parent up. I bought a Surface Pro thinking I should give Windows 10 Pro a chance with WSL on it. Even the “Pro” version comes with bubble gum jam games on it, ads, spyware / telemetry and the like. No way of removing it. I wiped Windows 10 after a week and installed Ubuntu.

Off topic, but how is the experience with Ubuntu on the surface. I love the hardware and the pen of the surface pro, but Xubuntu has been my daily driver for a few years now, and I can't imagine going back to Windows.

My main requirement is for a good experience with the pen...

Not even a viable option.

Shame really since the techn isn't bad these days.

Are these only available in Home edition? I'm in pro edition and have ever seen any ads. I also use ClassicShell start menu so maybe that's why I never see it...

Ads are definitely present in Pro. Perhaps you're just not calling them ads. In the start menu you get "recommended apps", explorer pops up "recommendations" for OneDrive, and when you switch your default browser to Chrome it nags you that you should really give Edge a chance, to name a few things people are referring to when they talk about Windows 10 having ads.

Fortunately, there's free third party software that fix a lot of Microsoft's bullshit: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10.

They're present even in Enterprise versions. The worst part? Every time you upgrade you get all the garbage back: games, ads, etc.

I was stupid when testing W10 and didn't backup W7 so I was left with W10. My solution? Bought MBP's for my whole team, and buying more as we grow. I've been MS since ms-dos and walked thru all the versions since 95 (excluding Vista), but now I'm happy Apple guy. All it took was Win 10. :/ I'm kinda missing Win UI but OMG how much I hated W10...I felt so betreyed :(

People hate Microsoft for "being Microsoft" BECAUSE of what Microsoft is, does and has done.

I'm sure you will find most people who voice those opinions have their own reasons, based on history, to be distrustful of Microsoft and the way this acquisition will be handled.

> Meanwhile, I'd really like for people to stop hating Microsoft just because "Microsoft"

Why is that? Why should people forget how evil MS was and still is?

> Why is that? Why should people forget how evil MS was and still is?

I'm not asking for that, but making wild baseless predictions of how the service will go to shitter or how suddenly all private code will be ripped off and "I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!" is not part of a healthy discussion.

I do have some privacy concerns but they're no less than when Github was not owned by an enterprise software company; If anything I'd be more concerned about privacy if it were Google or Facebook making this acquisition.

People base their expectations on past performance. And for MS it hasn’t been stellar. But there is no need for speculation; we will wait and see.

The problem is deeper than that though. Unless you were developing an Editor or a Git hosting service, you were not in direct competition with GitHub. Suddenly a lot of startups will find their private code hosted by a direct competitor. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I was them.

Exactly. GitHub Enterprise under MS rule would be an epic conflict of interest for many customers who currently use it because MS could/would compete with them.

While it's not a complete 1-1 mapping, I keep thinking of Stac Electronics disk compression lawsuit against MS when it comes to handling source code:

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

The same people also host their deployment with some of these corporations, who doesn't use either of AWS, GCP or Azure? Do you also have the same concern that a direct competitor possibly has access to your deployed code, API keys and is also in direct control of your production environment?

Not that because it happens, it is nice; but at-least at this point the source code access concern is more of a conspiracy theory if anything.

OK I'll avoid iterating the ludicrously long list of Microsoft acquisitions that immediately did go to shit. Often intentionally, like AutoRoute straight after purchase from Nextbase.

All I need do to have concern about this acquisition is look to last year. https://archive.codeplex.com/

How long before they get bored of github then? Codeplex wasn't as good or popular as github, but did seem to have many valid reasons for existence if you were Windows focused. So they killed it.

Codeplex died because GitHub won. There was little point in keeping Codeplex around especially after MS decided to move their open source stuff to where the developers were, i.e. GitHub.

> I'm not asking for that, but making wild baseless predictions of how the service will go to shitter or how suddenly all private code will be ripped off and "I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!" is not part of a healthy discussion.

But they're not baseless predictions, they're based on past information and it tells us it would be prudent to minimize reliance of Github sooner rather than later.

I'm not really interested in being part of a "healthy discussion" with Microsoft. There are enough people telling Microsoft about all the things it is doing to make people dislike it.

It knows what these things are. If it wants to stop doing them, then I'm happy to use some of its products. Until then, I'm going to gitlab now, because Microsoft sucks!

> baseless

If the company that ships OS with preinstalled, hidden keyloggers (using that as a pars pro toto) acquires the platform I host my code on, that's not a basis on which to be concerned?

Are you referring to the issue where the crappily written driver had a keylogger to detect keyboard volume keys, etc, or something else?

If it's the first, that's not exactly Microsoft's fault, in the same way it's not exactly Mocrosoft's fault that if you buy a Dell it might come with McAfee preinstalled.

Although, it could be argued that if the driver was verified, perhaps they should extend their verified driver program to cover that instead of just crash protection. Then again, since the arguments here are centered around not trusting Microsoft with your source code, I can see why they may not require that...

Do you have examples of Microsoft acquiring technology that was beloved and embraced by it's community and making it better?

MGS did right by Bungie/Halo circa XBox; though Halo hadn't yet been released, and it's initial fanbase were all Marathon fans.

After what they did to Skype, such predictions are hardly baseless.

Evil are the companies that pollute rivers, sponsor wars, have work conditions on borderline slavery, agree to work with dictatorship governments....

No. Software developers, doctors, post delivery personell, whatever, is supposed to do the best in their own field, and just because there are other sectors which are considerably worse doesn't mean that we should let ours ever fall to that level too. It's not difficult to see a dystopiant future in which software might help create the most horrible of all societies, and its reach could also be global.

> Why is that?

Because this isn't slashdot.

The call is not to forget - I didn’t see that from the comment.

However knee jerk responses are today out of line with MSFTs behavior and actual ability.

Simply they are anti-objective and inefficient in discussing current reality.

Don't forget how evil Github is!

I agree... GH is evil

Because Microsoft was never that evil and they aren't evil today. It took me seeing the stuff Apple got away with the iPhone to see what a non-issue Microsoft 90s desktop hegemony was. The fear was overblown.

They were convicted of anti-competitive behavior, and that was after at least a decade of unprovable rumors and industry open-secret of anti-competitive behavior. How much more clear-cut of a case do you need?

Evil is not a legal term though.

All large global corporations are constantly involved in legal battles, because that's how conflicts are resolved in our society. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose and are convicted. Quite often they settle before they are convicted. That's not the difference between good and evil.

Microsoft took the view that they could bundle IE with Windows and that they could license Windows to PC manufacturers on an exclusive basis. A US court decided that given their market share they were not allowed to do that.

Google is in a similar bundling conflict now with the European Union. So far Google has lost and they may or may not ultimately lose before the European Court of Justice. Or they may settle before it comes to that.

In 2015 Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe were caught trying to keep wages down by agreeing not to poach each others' employees. They paid $415 million to settle that case.

Please look up [Company Name] litigation on Wikipedia and you will find countless cases of large companies being convicted for something or settling this or that case.

Is any of this evil? That is a question everyone has to answer for themselves in each particular case, because "evil" is a moral term. The simple fact of losing a legal battle does not qualify as evil according to my moral compass.

More than 20 years ago; The entire leadership has changed since.

Also, not getting convicted isn’t a very high bar.

Telemetry and ads in an OS you paid for, which supposedly targets the “Pro” market. That’s not evil?

Not being the worst of the bunch doesn't mean you're good.

I wasted many years using Windows, an OS that I gained nothing from using except memorizing UI patterns. This may be great for some, but I really developed as a computer person when I got OS X, which allowed me to use Unix without diving into Linux. The impact was huge. I still think sadly about the wasted years clicking around Windows.

Just the other day I was helping my mom with some C# code in VS, stepping through lines in the debugger. When I hit some library code I excpected to step into the library code, like in Java. Instead it force stepped over. Wouldn’t even let me see a decompile, like XCode shows you for code without available source. That’s microsoft for you. You get some binary libraries, docs that may or may not be crap, and Steve Balmer screaming “developers developers developers” while you bang your head trying to figure out some poorly documented library works. Microsoft relies on users’ ignorance, Stockholm syndrome, and the perception that Apple is more expensive. You get so much more from Apple, it’s incomparable.

That said this acquisition seems like a great fit and doesn’t trouble me at all. As much as I love it, GitHub is nothing special. Microsoft has little to ruin and a lot to improve. Seems like a solid vanity pickup for MSFT, and a good source of guiding vision for GH.

That is all down to your config. If you go to "Tools \ options" , then in that dialog, expand the "Debugging" node and select "General", you can "Enable .Net Framework source stepping", and you can also tweak the way the debugger handles external code with "Enable just my code" and "step over properties and operators". There's loads more - by default it is really paired down.

I really would love to see how XCode is able to display anything for binary Objective-C libraries, beyond pure Assembly.

If you want pure Assembly in binary libraries in C++ and C#, Visual Studio can also display them, one just needs to select the right options.

> I really would love to see how XCode is able to display anything for binary Objective-C libraries, beyond pure Assembly.

Indeed it only shows disassembly. I was frustrated that VS wouldn't even show me that. Others write that newer VS lets you enable the showing of assembly.

Anyway, I am spoiled by Java, where I can step into standard library code (which is in Java), can decompile to produce pretty nice Java source where the source is not available, and IntelliJ, which automatically downloads the source where it is publicly available. It's quite wonderful. But I am guessing you already know this, judging from your profile.

To me, not being beholden to documentation is an incredible freedom. The ability to just pop open the source to understand the tool you're working with is indispensable once you've experience that freedom. Microsoft developers don't have this ability, and having had it, it's hard to imagine being without.

You can see .NET bytecode since version .NET was in beta with ildasm, distributed with .NET SDK tooling.

ILSpy and Reflector are almost as old as .NET itself.

Visual Studio always had an Assembly view since version 1.0, and there is always WinDbg as alternative, including macro commands to dump .NET JIT information.

Sorry, but it looks like that you haven't properly explored Windows development.

Visual Studio 2017 15.6 shipped a new feature called "Navigate to Decompiled Sources" in March.

Read-up on MS's ongoing Linux patent racket and you might change your tune.

I don't see how it relates to Github but sure, link me to someplace I can read up on it because a Google search of "Microsoft Linux patent racket" only led me to an obvious troll bait blog.

Can't reply to the child comment so replying here:

> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/signs_deal_with_cas...

You just look at that shit. Look:

> We’re pleased to reach an agreement and to see continued recognition of the value of our patent portfolio, particularly as it relates to operating systems,

Nothing evil here, move along, lol. Fucking cockroaches. For a multi-billion OS giant you sure are afraid of something 'small' and produced by volunteers that gives users their freedom. What a pathetic display.

https://meshedinsights.com/2016/11/22/microsoft-linux-patent...

That was only 18 months ago at which time MS had harvested a cool $85 million form its Linux patent racket. God knows what the Linux Foundation were smoking when they accepted Microsoft's membership. Suse Linux is another victim of Microsoft's extortion. Worst is the patents remain unspecified, as far as I'm aware.

I don't want to sound dismissive but you've linked to a blog post from 2016, which in its entirety only mentions how much they make from the entire patent portfolio and a wild guess on how much they could be making from "Linux patent racket" and no other details on who they're pursuing or what the demands are/were.

> God knows what the Linux Foundation were smoking when they accepted Microsoft's membership

The Linux Foundation doesn't care about Linux. It's mostly a way for the CEO to get paid big sums, he uses a Mac on stage when talking about Linux. They sponsor a bunch of good projects and pay Linus and Greg, but they're not ideologically commuted to Linux, as long as MS pays the fees, in they go.

Microsoft milks Casio for using Linux: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/signs_deal_with_cas...

And there are many more companies they've sued for using Linux.

Well, you may love to forget, but a lot of us don't.

We didn't forget that our community was called a cancer (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...)

We didn't forget that microsoft is one of the biggest pattent troll in the world (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=... or http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/27/microsoft-has-received-five...).

We didn't forget than they litterally corrupted officials to capture markets (https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrawrage/2013/03/20/micro... and https://www.tomshardware.fr/articles/pots-de-vin-microsoft,1...)

We didn't forget monopolistic practices (https://www.networkworld.com/article/2221165/microsoft-subne... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...)

We didn't forget the lies (http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/2096/) and sabotage (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009051922175320).

We didn't forget they aided dictators (https://www.salon.com/2011/09/06/wikileaks_microsoft_tunisia) or destroyed products you bought remotly (http://sebsauvage.net/rhaa/?2010/01/06/13/21/41-microsoft-pe...).

We didn't forget they force updated Win10 and all the integrated ads and spywares, after a terrible Win8 while everybody was happy with win 7.

We didn't forget that microsoft killed rare, nokia, skype and that currently outlook is becomming less and less usable everyday.

So yeah, VSCode, Excel, TypeScript, the Xbox and C# are good products. So what ?

Unless you suddently fire everybody from MS, change their raison de vivre, and reboot them, they are still Microsoft.

Attitude like yours is why crooked politicians get reelected. Why big companies can mess up with consummers and get away with it.

People say that you can't change the world. That you can't do anything about what's wrong. They feel helpless.

I'd start with stopping this habit of giving a free pass to all the entities with a disrespectful background just because they got better on some points. Or because they have a better PR.

Because they do. Half of the links I had on them were cleaned off. They are green washing them, cm by cm. Until all that remains is that they were the good guys.

Upvoted you for going through the effort to put these points so eloquently together :)

However, it's not forbidden for MS to change their ways and public image. There is no danger anymore of depending too much on MS tech today. And there's the tactical argument of "the enemy of your enemy" if you know what I mean; eg. these days it's all about about your attention and invading your privacy (and MS also has no clean hands here). But still MS is mostly a software company with a predictable pattern, unlike darker forces able to influence public opinion to a degree not seen before, while MS shilling and astroturfing is easily spotted and amateurish by comparison.

The things I'm more concerned about when it comes to GitHub I've already posted in another story:

They could change the terms of service and essentially drive certain types of projects away. They could limit access to older builds and versions to non-paying customers. They could limit access to verified/signed builds. They could reserve certain rights to your software such as they did with npmjs.com. They could run ads, offer IT staff skill matching and promotions, FizzBuzz-like services, or other LinkedIn integrations. They could come up with clever schemes for offering commercial licensing for open source. They could go after the enterprise package mirrors and policy checkers market Artifactory et al are serving. Not saying they'll be doing that (MS isn't stupid), but given MS is selling mainly to enterprises, there are many creative ways they could make money of it.

Overall, however, I'm not too worried. In fact, I think GitHub has become too much of a monopoly (though I have absolutely nothing against them at all), and I'm always for more choice.

> And there's the tactical argument of "the enemy of your enemy

I agree on this one. After all, IE is now in great shape because of the competition.

Hold on. GitHub has become too much of a monopoly? And this is somehow fixed by being acquired by Microsoft?

> We didn't forget that our community was called a cancer

This is disingenuous. He was referring to the licensing model of certain open-source projects, where the introduction of a single line of code coming from an open source project would require the whole of the Windows stack to be open-source, effectively "contaminating" the rest of the stack. To this day this is still a problem to many companies and legal department must carefully review the licensing of the libraries used by their devs.

Yeah, this is so disingenuous, Balmer had really no other words to use. This was totally appropriate, and as a FOSS lover and somebody that was able to make half of my carreer thanks to those licences, I should not be offended. No matter how much of my free time I spend on projects protected by said licence.

Espacially since the economical model of microsoft is to lock you in by using softwares and formats that call for getting the entire stack with it, hence infecting your business. But it's ok because they make you pay for it.

And I note that you choose the most important points of all my comment to focus on.

I'm glad some people still defend them. It's good honest people take care of those innocent little guys.

That's a choice that the developers choose to make to enforce their wishes. It's supposed to be embraced by a capitalistic system, i.e. they choose to serve only the customers who abide by their terms. Free market!

I don't think MS, whose OS infects every PC on store shelves has any place to complain.

They cant just ask for forgiveness after all that they have done.

Action speaks louder than words. I don't care about Open Soruces or Paid or Free. Bring me better products! Bring me better services. Proof it to me that they care.

They are obviously doing a lot of things right under Nadella. But asking many to not hating them after 4 years of good and 20 to 40 years of bad may be is a little too much to ask for. They will have to do a lot more to wins us back.

As soon as SQL Server isn’t an inescapable trap for your data, my impression of Microsoft will improve on the developer side.

Right now the idea of doing things that every other major Relational DB can do, like hook directly to ElasticSearch or feed live data into an outside system is crippled. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a business decision that negatively impacts my codebase.

The name is burnt. They still are a company with business interests. While their interests might align today with the open source community this doesn't have to be so tomorrow and there is no resistance internally to burn these bridges they are building today.

I actually was never anti-Microsoft but I must say that the aggressive, user-hostile moves they made with Windows 10 seriously irked me.

Microsoft need to stop creating sub-par products.

Skype is absolute junk...takes me 15 mins to get a call working each time.

Microsoft Teams/Planner is junk too.

I understand things are changing, but it still feels like they have weak product managers who don't care about the quality and polish of their products.

Haloween documents, and literally the twenty years they've been trying to destroy free software.

Not to mention . . :

https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505

Tl;dr, Microsoft ignored his license, attributed nothing, and copied his program directory-by-directory.

Fuck Microsoft. Trust them with email, not your software.

What about the people who hate Apple just because `Apple`?

(or any other form of "brand envy" against other companies, for that matter.)

> What about the people who hate Apple just because `Apple`?

Yeah, sure. I'm totally on that but this isn't a thread about Apple, is it?

Blatant what-about-ism.

Dislike the word "hate". It is more people that have been in the industry for a long time know what Microsoft has been all about for a very long time.

But finally we have a new culture in software. Where big tech give away crazy amounts of IP. Google gave away Map/Reduce and K8s and TF and so many papers. FB has given away so much also.

We finally had a single and neutral site which everyone uses.

So things were just fantastic and then the old guard just can't resist and messes it up. Now the big tech companies will have to move to a new site and a single place is no more.

Looks like they will move to GitLab which will just become the new GitHub and ironically way down the road MS will probably have to move their code to GitLab if it becomes the new place.

There are many, many developers, most developers?, that do not use any MS developement technology. Now without them wanting it MS has injected themselves and will cause a hassle. Either moving your repo to GitLab or now having to go to multiple places to find things. Or confusion if the repo is on Github or Gitlab. It is not a huge hassle but a hassle that was not necessary.

That is the thing. The new leaders in the tech world are all about moving the ENTIRE industry forward. But MS move here has slowed the industry as people have new work to deal with it.

BTW, do hope we can put to rest that MS has changed. Clearly they have not. I never really thought it as company cultures rarely change. But here is the nice black and white proof.

The funny thing is that Google is 20x as evil, and the fanboys still love them

Oh please, very few people actually like Google.

It’s very different when it’s a direct competitor, especially one you’re paying $ to every month. CEOs hate funding their competitors.

I was looking at draft.sh from the Azure open source team and the current (very early) version literally only works on Mac. The only install method listed is Homebrew.

Actually we have release assets for Mac, Windows, and Linux with support for 64-bit and ARM architectures. Someone from the community added Chocolatey support not too long ago. :)

Disclaimer: I am one of the core maintainers of Draft.

Oh, nice! Please update your docs. Releasing code is worthless if no one knows how to get it.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm currently going through the docs and re-vamping them as we speak in https://github.com/Azure/draft/pull/770. For now https://github.com/Azure/draft/blob/master/docs/quickstart.m... is the canonical list of options to install Draft.

Awesome thanks. Would you recommend WSL for my dockering on Win 10 or stick to Powershell.

Do what tickles your fancy.

Microsoft bought one of my favorite pieces of cloud software from a few years ago Deis[1]. With that they also got Helm[2] with the purchase. They are doing GREAT with Helm and are going in a different direction that looks super cool as they mothball Deis called Draft[3]. They are moving away from the OS company they used to be and betting heavily on cloud technologies and I think this Github purchase makes sense. Github has been stagnate for years. MS is embracing open source in a way they haven't before, and I think they are doing so in a way that is going to surprise people.

In NO way am I a Microsoft fan boy. I've been windows free going on a decade. I run Linux Mint and OSX as my primary desktop environments. Apple is burning me hard, the way the computing world is going to change in the next couple years, cluster technology is going to be at it's core and we are going to see some very different things grow out of it. I'm as shocked as anyone to see MS play nice with linux and especially contribute how they have to Kubernetes; which I think is the largest open source project in the world right now?

What if MS dumped resources into world class CI tools to go with Github? What if they made a Github open source module and would let you federate your content? I could see this being a really interesting thing. They could also screw us all, but under their current management I think they are getting ready to be competitive in an emergent environment that can't exist without open source.

[1] https://deis.com [2] https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/ [3] https://github.com/Azure/draft

> What if they made a Github open source module and would let you federate your content?

Wow, that's optimistic! I'd be happy if they just keep it neutral.

Fact is all the big vendors publish and collaborate on github, this purchase threatens that ecosystem. And we are more likely to see a message of private code hosting sites, than a solid federation system for source control.

I don't disagree with you on the threat to our ecosystem, but I think Github has been treading water for a while. I'm really excited to see Gitlab step up, especially with the traction they are getting from the diaspora, but I don't know that they will. There are a ton of reasons people won't take Gitlab seriously as a replacement right now. I hope they find a way to take their tools and this new attention and produce what we all really want.

I think at this exact moment, there is a really interesting space that can be filled by a FOSS Github alternative. I think a new player might be better equipped to offer it. Maybe someone can build something off of Keybase's[1] git services.

I am sad to see an independent voice go, but I don't think Github has been able to stay competitive and IMO this could be a good thing. That remains to be seen, but regardless of Gitlab's ability or what MS might do, I think there is a vacuum left that I'm hoping we can fill as a community and I'll put my effort and dollar behind whatever shows up to do it.

Someone should ask Linus what he thinks about git federation. Maybe he can save us from ourselves again.

[1] https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone

Helm was contributed to CNCF last week: https://landscape.cncf.io/cncf=hosted,graduated,incubating,s...

Draft (which started with Deis and is continuing with Azure) continues to get active development: https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=appli...

I don't know how I haven't seen CNCF before, but can you give me (and anyone else who might not know) a brief summary of what they do?

Their page makes it clear that I should know, but doesn't give me an obvious place to click to get a clue.

EDIT:

Found some markety things here.

https://www.cncf.io/

------

What is CNCF?

CNCF is an open source software foundation dedicated to making cloud native computing universal and sustainable. Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. Cloud native technologies enable software developers to build great products faster.

I'm the executive director of CNCF and would be happy to answer any follow-up questions. Here's a good overview deck:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BoxFeENJcINgHbKfygXp...

Oh! Well then, nice to meet you!

This deck looks very interesting, I don't mean to hijack this thread and make it an AMA, but I do have some questions for you.

- What does it mean to host my project with CNCF?

- Why was CNCF created?

- What do you consider the core services that CNCF offers?

- I have colleagues who work in the automotive industry, I know cluster technology and IoT are huge for them right now but also it's a strange place to operate. Since they have a small community compared to normal web services, what sort of value prop are you providing to them?

- Why should I look at CNCF for resources relating to my companies cloud services?

- Your company/product really does not appear to be geared towards developers, which I would think would be essential, can you show me a developer portal that tells me why I should depend on you for the information you appear to be aggregating?

Halfway down https://www.cncf.io/projects/ has the best overview of why you should host your project with CNCF and the services we provide.

In the automotive industry, I would recommend our sister organization, Automotive Grade Linux. https://www.automotivelinux.org/

The first question I asked was really important. I think y'all are selling snake oil. Your responses here confirm that for me.

I personally will be avoiding your organization like the plague.

Reminder: That didn't stop them from converting HoTMail over to NT/Exchange.

How many times did they try and publicly fail first? Two or three? Excellent validation for choosing FreeBSD and Apache for your 1999 startup. At least two announcements that it was "complete" turned out to be lies.

Years later the back end was still on FreeBSD and Solaris, but the front end was on Win 2000 using Windows Services for UNIX.

Twenty years ago!

It took them about 20 years to do so also.

> Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby

And for that matter, GitLab as well :-)

I have lived and worked in SV for a decade, and still don't know a single "Silicon Valley hipster" developing with WSL or VS Code.

I do know the power of analytics and control over prominent backend systems, and the allure of being "gatekeeper" with the power to extract value from integrations.

> VS Code

you don't know anyone using vs code?

in all the circles I know, it's the new de-facto goto for text editing heavier than notepad.

I used Sublime Text for the longest time; tried Atom but wasn't thrilled. After 2 days of using VS Code, I uninstalled Sublime Text. VS Code is an excellent tool.

It is a shame though, because Sublime Text was/Is a great editor, but it's really tough to out compete a dedicated team of paid developers.

No, I don't.

Vim, Sublime, Atom, Eclipse-based IDE...

Not once have I met anyone using VS code on any platform.

For sure! I've managed to get a good chunk of people I work/coauthor with to use it (and like it!), and I've observed an increasing number of my students using it as well (in classes on ML and numerical computing).

I think it got popular fast in the JS-heavy communities.

I'm running it on Ubuntu and like it much better than pycharm for python development.

Yeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.

Can't speak for everyone but that won't happen personally until they start respecting privacy.

The Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem does not have a problem with how Google respects privacy.

What a spectacular example of faulty generalization and false dilemma.

> The Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem does not have a problem with how Google respects privacy.

I don’t think that’s the case anymore.

But then again “the SV hipster development ecosystem”. Who is that exactly?

> But then again “the SV hipster development ecosystem”. Who is that exactly?

That was a reference made by user tomato.

But if you prefer my point of view, those that fill up SV coffees or live in other parts of the globe trying to replicate the SV culture and are naive to the point to give Apple and Google human attributes, while believing they are any different from a profit oriented corporation.

The ggp claim was re: the open source community.

Debian developer here, speaking only for myself: while Debian doesn't like proprietary software any more than before, the change we've seen from MS has been dramatic.

MS now ships Debian for Azure through a collaboration with Debian and credativ, and also in the Windows Store running through the Windows Subsystem for Linux. They've hosted a Debian cloud sprint, sponsored DebConf, and engaged in good-faith substantive ways that don't only benefit their platforms. Of course, they care most about their platforms, but that's fine.

In the other direction, Debian does ship fully open source software (what Debian would call DFSG-free) with Microsoft as author.

Debian isn't playing favorites, of course, and is similarly working with Amazon and Google (among other partners of all sizes) in areas of shared interest.

Thanks to the work of projects like Debian, for some 20 years now people have the right and ability to run a computer in freedom, and there's little point for Microsoft to compete on the consumer/Desktop OS sector any more (compare to mobile, web, Apple, etc.). What do you think what they're competing over now? Imagine if Azure integration starts to appear in FLOSS, because it's an online/hosting service and the "Open Source" guys don't care much about SaaSS and don't favor the AGPL.

The main Azure integration in Debian is supporting use of Debian in and with Azure, just like they're supporting every other environment in which one might want to run the Universal Operating System (that's Debian's longstanding tagline). Including physical ones, with no plans to change that.

I agree it's important to be able to Debian in the environment of your choice. That includes Azure as well as self-hosted and small-hosting-company options.

Yes, that’s great but doesn’t excuse their surveillance tech and recent consumer hostile behaviors as described over these threads.

I agree. Doesn't excuse it at all, but may be of more relevance than that in predicting how they'll handle GitHub.

Please, don't talk as you are spokesperson for anyone but yourself.

Stop bashing Google without any proofs. They do respect privacy and don't share data you elect not to. In fact, their take out tool was released in 2009 or something, way before GRPR made others do it too.

Uhhhh your doing this backwards. Prove that google is protecting my privacy not the other way around.

The default state for people needs to be DISTRUST of corporations (and governments) that they do not have a direct financial relationship with (when you aren't giving them cash).

I don't think that much of this holds water but it exists and the picture isn't one of "were standing up to defend your privacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...

It's insidious how Google has redefined "privacy" from "what's yours is yours" to "what's yours is ours, as long as we don't share it."

Microsoft is moving fast along the same path.

[Replying to sibling comment]

> MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.

They're trying pretty damn hard with Windows 10, which by default collects pretty much every keystroke you make. That data in turn gets shared and sold to advertisers - see MS's own privacy page: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement

I'm not convinced they are -- the models are entirely different. Google receives the vast bulk of its revenue from advertising based on mining what they know about you. Microsoft receives the vast bulk of its funding from companies using its systems and paying them to run them well.

MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.

That's part of the problem: we have no idea what Google is doing with our data, so we have no idea if they are respecting privacy - assuming there is even a definition for such a thing.

The only answer is to simply gather less data, or be more explicit about when you do. And Google isn't great at either.

In what ways is Google but explicit about what they collect?

One example that comes to mind is that Google Maps has started telling me when I've been somewhere before, like a restaurant. It's very useful information, but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way. Can advertisers target me based on this location history? I'm not sure. Does it affect how results are ordered on Maps? Probably. But I don't know.

Relatedly, Maps shows me when a location is likely to be popular vs unpopular. I have to assume that's based on the location history of everyone using Maps - seeing how long they spend in a place and at what time. But what percentage of Maps users are aware their information is being used in this way? I doubt the number is high.

Also, now I come to think of it, Google search itself. It shows different results sometimes when I'm logged in vs logged out, but it's not clear why. And I don't recall ever being asked if I wanted, say, my browsing history to influence future search results. It just does. Somehow.

I believe that Google's theory is what mine would be in similar circumstances, why sell the data to a business when you can use that data to build a competing business.

There is a YouTube update that's been pending on my Android for 1-1/2 years. I haven't agreed to it because YouTube decided that it needs access to my contacts. IMO, if Google needs to know who I communicate with in order to watch videos, they don't respect my privacy at all.

On the other hand, a Google product (YouTube) is asking for permission to access information already available to another Google product (Android). If Google had no respect for your privacy, they wouldn't even ask.

Respect for privacy is a continuum and Google isn't on either extreme. I'd even go so far as to say that different parts of Google have different stances on privacy. People who try to make them into a monolith with a single binary stance on the issue are lacking nuance.

I don't think it's an issue that deserves nuance because it's not unreasonable that they should behave as a monolith with regard to privacy. It should be a top-down corporate policy.

I stopped using official Youtube long ago. I recommend SkyTube and NewPipe. They are awesome!

So they don't share data with the government? Tell us more.

I think it is a long term goal.

"Old" schoolers have and will likely have for ever that evil 90s vision of MS. However it is changing a bit in that people too. They still may be evil, but at least the look more modern (opensource, new technology, using/contributing to Linux etc).

However the important thing (for MS) here is new people. If you come into the scene now or in a few years you only get to know the "new" masked MS image. Yes, they are still doing dubious stuff but is all under the hoods, buried by layers of hype, cloud, linux and fireworks.

Rebranding some big stablished company with that kind of history is something that takes a long long time.

Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of it's heart, they want something of value from it. What is that, and is it compatible with what made Github useful?

I won't stick around to find out, my time is too valuable and the competition is strong. For me, Github doesn't really have any distinctive features except that is was the biggest, and so most convenient. I suspect most people and organizations will be in the same situation.

>I suspect most people and organizations will be in the same situation.

I suspect the vast majority of people won't be bothered to move their stuff unless MS pulls a Skype.

I think that's right, and I don't think it will be a problem to move since Git is distributed by nature.

>Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of its heart, they want something of value from it. What is that

If they bundle the pro version of github with office 365 - just like with Teams, the 365 bundle becomes even more compelling for organizations.

And hopefully kill SharePoint?

We can only hope.

> Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of it's heart, they want something of value from it. What is that, and is it compatible with what made Github useful?

What is that? I think its ownership of the huge amount of computer programs (and not to mention the associated metadata of authors and their professional network). The editor and the client provide a continuous stream of samples ready to be drawn from the world.

I believe its in the owners best interest to keep this golden goose of continuously increasing source of computer programs in good health.

The thing that I didn’t understand at first was why did MS gave up codehub (Google had Code, FB never pushed phabricator that hard) only to acquire GitHub later?

Is that really the case, obtaining to own code? Depending on the Terms of Use, did GitHub receive a special, separate license that allows them to make use of code under separate permissions of what's otherwise libre-freely licensed or proprietary/closed/private? If so, wouldn't the acquisition allow to exit existing contracts? Sure, the metadata is exclusively on GitHub and moving will result in a loss of stars, followers, contacts, etc.

Companies that use github, both as teams on the main website and with the enterprise version, pay 9 dollars per month per user. If Microsoft can get it's enterprise customers to trust the product enough to pay that sort of a price this will be a very profitable acquisition for Microsoft. If anything, I don't think github would've ever been able to acquire enterprise customers had microsoft not made this acquisition.

Maybe they want to finally put a bullet through the skull of the zombie that is Team Foundation Server.

Not at all, they are supporting the model of TFS corporate deployments and generic (but embraced and extended) Git clients.

There's an increased chance of Microsoft starting to behave like they own Git, and trying to make it a part of their "platform" with proprietary extensions like their Git filesystem hack.

As one of those "old schoolers" I don't view MS as any less evil than they used to be.

But they aren't the only 800 pound gorilla in the room - open source, google, apple, amazon have all taken a big chunk out of what MS was.

What prevents MS (or any one who acquires GitHub) from pulling a sourceforge? Well nothing prevents them, and I can't name someone who wouldn't want to monetize it -- that latter fact is going to be what kills the product/project.

This is a furphy. GitHub is already monetized -- it is highly profitable, selling fee-paying plans to corporations. MS's major customer is corporations. Of course they're not going to do a SourceForge because this is a traditional acquisition where the purchaser has recognised that GitHub's current monetization ties in well with their existing business model, and they gain value in the acquisition from it building their reputation with business as the go-to place for corporate cloud. They have no interest in damaging the corporate value they gain by fiddling with the consumer and open source side.

Sources for highly profitable ? According to the linked article they were not and lost >60M in 2016. They could probably still optimise to make a profit, but seems like they were struggling a bit with making money.

Hmm, looks like that's changed. Back in 2012, they were reported as "profitable nearly the entire way" in their history. https://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-...

and more recently there've been articles on their revenues hitting 100m. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run...

but it sounds like their costs have outgrown their earnings.

I stand corrected.

I think I should have said sourceforge/skype - I don't think MS is going to detonate GitHub the same way sourceforge went.

But I also don't have a lot of confidence in them doing well by the community either... it could be as "harmless" as a move to "Microsoft logins" that kills it off.

One click deploy to Azure and AD integration is very compelling for businesses as well.

Yes, all I'm saying is: _some_ people; and only a _little bit_.

Or even more old school that remembers the original MS that put BASIC on my Commodore.

Or bundling GW-BASIC with MS-DOS. That might be the reason I got into software.

Remember QBASIC.EXE, too?

> you only get to know

You know wikipedia exists. Or people like me who will harp on on how privacy standards that are somehow acceptable now would be something inconceivable in 90's.

Some old schoolers did not have any issue using Windows and related Microsoft tech.

This was absolutely my first thought too. I've developed for work over the last year on Windows. It's dark patterns to suck up data and ads now. There are ads on the login screen!

This is in regards to one Microsoft product: Windows. Reality is, they're not focused on Windows anymore, but I do agree it would be nice if they took away all that telemetry nonsense and allowed people to have better control over updates. To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.

To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.

Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.

I'm still hoping Microsoft see the light on all the telemetry and forced update nonsense before the Windows 7 cut-off in a couple of years. The trouble is, I can't see it happening as long as Nadella is at the top, and I can't see that changing as long as the big enterprise customers who aren't subject to that kind of nonsense are propping up the share price.

> in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.

A few years ago I turned on my windows machine to see the dreaded upgrade. Being in a rush I went to another machine and the exact thing happened. I blew my top and replaced all windows with Ubuntu. I would have preferred Macs but I couldn't afford the Apple tax (high prices and not working on my existing HW).

> Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0.

That's nice for you, but if you use any non-open software or software not covered by the package repo then there's a fairly good chance you'll see downtime after an upgrade of your linux distro.

If you're talking about a major distro upgrade, say Jessie (8) to Stretch (9) in the Debian case, then yes, there's a fairly good chance at least some minor things will break, but that's a much bigger deal and presumably not something you'd ever expect to happen automatically.

To be clear, I was talking specifically about the unattended-upgrades package, which is primarily for automatic installation of things like security fixes. In my experience, this has been rock solid: it's never broken a distro package, nor any dependency that non-distro software we had installed was relying on.

Windows was completed with Windows 7. Everything after that is just churn. Consider for a minute that Windows doesn't need to be redone every 3 years anymore.

I’d concur from a user interface perspective it really peaked at Windows 7.

Windows 10 is almost usable with a keyboard and mouse. It’s much better than 8 was.

It feels good, if you can set your own low-points, to redefine when you will peak next.

If you're on latest Ubuntu (or derivatives) since 16.04 at least you've been getting security track upgrades (through the default config of unattenfed-upgrades) forced on you.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what you get default out of the box with Windows as well?

On Ubuntu you can install it on every computer in your house and still pay zero dollars and zero cents. LTS releases let you use the same core packages for the next 5 years.

Your OS can be configured to pull updates not only from official Canonical sources or those blessed by them but also any sources you please including your own. You can put up your own packages and use them just for you or promote them to all of planet earth. If you don't like a particular package or a particular version you can not update just that package although you might be unable to update others if they require the new package in question.

If you feel strongly about it you can fork and support old versions indefinately or take the package in your own direction.

Further you can even fork the entire ecosystem and not even call it Ubuntu anymore.

On Windows home you can't even decide not to update. You have to pay $99 per computer for that privilege and might have to pay again if you update say the motherboard. The windows store is only for apps that MS designates at its privilege and supposing you agree to give MS almost 1/3 of your revenue for a privilege it can revoke at its descretion at any time.

You can't fork Edge if you don't like how it works and if you could you wouldn't have the right to distribute such let alone create an alternative store/source usable by all for people to install/update such a creation.

You have pretty much misunderstood the entire point of open source software.

Best of all, feel entitled to voice the opinion about what developers should focus on, being angry when they don't, without paying anything back.

>You have pretty much misunderstood the entire point of open source software.

What? That's a stretch of a comment from saying both the Ubuntu and Windows behaviour of updates is the same out of the box.

How software is managed is fundamental to the ecosystem.

how are they forced? you can turn them off

can't with Windows 10

You can, it just isn't as simple as a menu option. Considering Linux's habit of requiring config file changes and obscure command line invocations to perform configuration it is hardly fair to judge in this case.

And my update settings.

I understand the need for security, but updates shouldn't break my computer either.

MS heavily respects privacy and mandates that every employee go through privacy and GDPR training every year. And remember, MS’s business is not rooted in exploiting user data to sell them ads. Replacing “they” in your sentence with Google or Facebook would be much more appropriate.

Uninformed post of the year, with a side order of whataboutism, congrats. Who said i trust G or FB?

Indeed. I'm always a little surprised at how readily developers recommend VS Code, given the lack of privacy guarantees and Microsoft's recent track record on both telemetry and quietly overriding past user settings with updates.

I think that this is real "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" and they know it will bring them good times.

I doubt it, I think they are doing it because they’ve seen more and more of their enterprise migrate from TFS to git.

This is my opinion, but I think Microsoft tech is fairly terrible for open source and smaller projects, because .Net is a lot of complicated tooling you’ll never use outside of enterprise. At the same time they are rapidly becoming the “only” enterprise option rather quickly, and with that comes the question of why you’d chose AWS over Azure.

Sure visual studio has a free version, Windows now does Linux and .net Core is open but I see those moves as a way to make c# replace JAVA in schools not as a way to make open source love Microsoft.

Game development has used C# for quite a while, and with official support for Mono, and adoption of .NET in Unity [0], it's a viable choice. The language is constantly improving [1], and is doing so in the open, on GitHub no less [2]!

From what I saw as an intern at Microsoft a while back, there's way more of an engineering-led culture at Microsoft than people give it credit for, and to the extent there's a push to promote their own language and tooling, it's largely driven by a wholehearted belief (and challenge) that Microsoft tools are the right ones for the job, with initiatives being chosen to fulfill and expand that promise. And, more recently, what I hear is that Nadella's initiatives are genuinely promoting that ethos across the entire leadership structure. In that context, they make a lot of sense as a partner for Github.

[0] https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/28/updated-scripting-runti...

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csh...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vbteam/2015/01/10/were-movi...

No, they're totally reactive to everything. Why re-invent the wheel with NuGet if there's already software package repositories in the libre-free world for decades, but then not make it the main software distribution mechanism while allowing independent package signing and repository providers (to prevent Microsoft from gatekeeping the distribution channel), effectively eliminating viruses and the attached antivirus industry from the Windows OS? Why give out Internet Explorer gratis, but not the OS if it's that important for human communication? Why does Notepad only in 2018 get support for GNU/Linux line break \n and not in the many, many years before? Why can't Word export a valid XHTML file from a document in 2018, but VS never fails to generate valid XML? There are just thousands of examples like this that speak against the company having to do with engineering, it's more a law firm in my opinion. Let's not forget that it was their idea to claim that software is copyrightable in the same way like a novel is, with laws that are from the print era, and it made them an unbelievable amount of money and prevented the software field to enter a truly digital future. Humanity just lost several decades of progress because of this, and now GitHub, one of the few major innovations in the field, will go down the drain, too.

The web dev part, anyway. Microsoft still has a long hill to climb to be in the graces of nearly any kind of native dev.

While partially true, there are a ton of small and medium size companies out there that are just starting to rewrite their legacy stacks, with many choosing .Net with MSSQL. Worst part is, these shops keep turning up at my local LinuxFest yearly, looking for new dev talent.

What mirror universe do you live in where Windows doesn't have a huge amount of 3rd party native applications?

I don't think Microsoft even uses the same deck of cards as FOSS people.

Microsoft had their chance, and they worked hard to show us what they're made of. We learned the lesson, and they don't get another chance.

> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.

I can tell you from experience that that will never, ever happen.

The most likely outcome is that GitHub will slowly but surely start to bleed open source projects to alternatives like GitLab. And GitHub will continue to live on, like LinkedIn and Skype before it, but it will lose mind share and will no longer be the epicenter of open source development.

Remember SourceForge? Yeah, that's right.

> Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating

Not sure what you mean here.

They've never specifically targeted non-Apple developers as a core constituency. It was mainly due to the fact that OSX was UNIX derived that the platform became popular at all.

> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux

Interix/SFU/SUA has always existed. WSL is just the latest iteration of it. And nobody uses it now just like nobody used it before

That's kind of a broad statement. I see a lot of people using WSL, I even think it has become part of the standard software kit for new hires within PlayStation Network. I know its widely used among the employees who opted for the Windows laptop over a MacBook. Anecdotal, of course, but I think you're downplaying the spread of its use.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221777 and marked it off-topic.

May I ask why? It seems germane to the rest of the thread speculating on what Microsoft might be doing with this acquisition.

Whoops, that was a mistake on my part. Sorry!

It's fixed now. Thanks for responding so politely.

Can you elaborate on what the Silicon Valley "hipster development ecosystem" is?

There are several distinct developer ecosystems. Some people write C# and VB on .NET in Visual Studio on Windows machines for delivery to Windows Server enterprise networks. Some people write Java on Spring/J2EE in Eclipse for delivery to Java enterprise application servers. Some people write C++ in proprietary IDEs for delivery to proprietary embedded systems platforms. But the one I’m talking about is the one centered around Github, Kubernetes, Macs, and trendy open source tools like Go, Rust, React, etc. The “hipster” characterization is tongue in cheek. It would be insufficient to say “the developer ecosystem” because MS already has one of those, including its own VCS, Team Foundation Services.

Rust is an interesting one, because I think it bridges those last two - normally very separated - groups. Some of those who deliver software into embedded systems are excited about the possibility of a replacement to C++.

(disclaimer: am an embedded systems engineer and a Rust fanboy)

If it requires an explanation, don't explain.

To me, if it requires an explanation then an explanation would be best. I certainly don't care for explanations of things that don't require explanations.

Guess I'm not gonna ask why you created an account just to say that

Linux subsystem for windows is garbage, it brings all the same issues with running a linux VM on windows with no more benefit than cygwin gave and who exactly is apple alienating? This sounds like opinion since apple profits are doing just fine and waking into any incubator will show you who the dominant player is. also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes

> Linux subsystem for windows is garbage, it brings all the same issues with running a linux VM on windows with no more benefit than cygwin gave

> also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes

This sounds like opinions ;)

I also spent years working with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies. The reality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was still alive and well as late as 2011 when I mostly stopped dealing with them. Since that time they have definitely taken a new direction, with increasing adoption of Linux in particular, but I have trouble belieiving the corporate DNA has been so thoroughly overwritten in the last few years that this does not spell the imminent demise of Github as the broadly useful plarform that we know it as today.

Their "corporate DNA" was established when the desktop was supreme and they could steer the direction of the industry based on thier Windows dominance.

Times are different, mobile is more important, cloud hosting is a real thing and technology changes. They had to evolve or die. Saying you can't trust MS in 2018 based on the way the world was years ago is like saying that Netflix could only ship DVDs to people's houses, Amazon can't be trusted to do cloud hosting because they only sell books, and that a minor niche computer maker should never be trusted to sell phones.

Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.

“I can’t hurt you now, I have these handcuffs on” doesn’t mean you can full trust someone who hit you.

(All that aside, I have notice what does appear to be real cultural change at MS)

> Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.

Exactly. Unless all the leaders who flourished under the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" regime have been fired, that attitude is still in their blood. And especially with leadership roles, I doubt that those people didn't manage to adapt and stay employed, because those are exactly the type who can adapt to appear to play nice. Whether in sheep's clothing or any other animal, I'm sure there are plenty of wolves still at MicroSoft.

TBC, I am not MicroSoft is evil, or that everyone working there is. They do world-class CompSci research, and I am a very happy Visual Studio, VSC and TypeScript user. But it's a company with thousands of people, and I doubt that they have completely reformed.

I would be disheartened by any major software firm buying github. The temptation is simply too great for any company with interests in software development to leverage their control over the world's largest open-source community to advantage their own products and services.

If there's one thing which is predictable about corporate behavior, it is that they will act in their own best interest. Publicly traded companies are legally required to do so.

Also equating trust with product offerings is a false equivalency here: saying Amazon can't be trusted as a hosting provider because they were known as an online retailer is a lot different than saying Microsoft cannot be trusted because they have a long track-record of anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.

I guess it depends what side of Microsoft we get working with GitHub, whether it's the friendly outreach side alongside the .NET Foundation, or whether it's the internal software team that want to integrate GitHub into internal tooling and start moving their platform onto theirs.

My dream scenario is the former, where Microsoft provide leadership to a company that's still reeling from its own scandals, and use GitHub as a platform for promoting open-source, rather than as a way of mining their access to the open-source world to benefit their own tooling.

"Dream" is the right word here. The idea that a major software firm would buy the worlds largest repository of and community around open source software with the sole intention of "providing leadership" seems pretty unlikely.

It's along the same lines as saying an oil executive would make a good candidate as the EPA chief because they "understand pollution".

Microsoft is one of Linux Foundation biggest donors, which means they have leverage over them. They are invited to discuss new Linux developments, products, etc...

Is that bad? Do we not want Microsoft involved with Linux? They are the #2 cloud provider.

A lot of the sponsors of the Linux Foundation have tried very hard to make sure that Linux's copyleft is not enforced. VMWare is one recent example. They exerted their influence by defunding the Software Freedon Conservancy. I consider this a net negative.

On the other hand, most Linux devs do not want to ever take anyone to court for copyleft violations. While I agree that it's very reasonable to almost never take anyone to court for a copyleft violation, it still needs to be a weapon of last resort.

The day Linux goes MIT/X11 is the day it's gone. Lord help us if they ever succeed.

Linux can't change its license without getting permission from the (tens of) thousands of people who contributed to it, or throwing out their code.

You don't need prayers to ensure you can continue to run your software. It's unrealistic Linux can ever change to a different license than GPL2. Note, however, that this hasn't stopped Linux from being used as giant spyware (Android) and being overtaken by a single entity (RedHat) slowly eroding it (Systemd, Docker).

If you're concerned, I'd recommend basing your software on POSIX and make it also run on the BSDs, rather than just Linux, and in particular avoiding Linuxisms such as Docker and Systemd which you'll find are poorly designed anyway.

Seems like a conflict of interest to me.

Except now they have billion dollar data centers they need your servers on and don't care if you use their software as long as they turn a profit from the hosting. Bill G is probably kicking himself for not renting servers decades ago.

"Decades"? Bandwidth requirements and difficulty of virtualization essentially precluded enterprise cloud hosting much more than one decade ago. Virtualization was essentially impractical or mainframe only until Intel added VT-x. Two decades ago most Internet users were on AOL dialup. And anyways, Azure is #2 behind AWS, so it's not like they're doing badly.

EC2 was released over a decade ago. And Microsoft could’ve done it way easier than Amazon.

And it went out of beta not quite a decade ago (October 2008). Whether you count it 2003 or 2006 or 2008, however, I still wouldn't call it "decades" which is what I was objecting to.

“Decades” referred to how long MS has had the opportunity.

> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Hmmm... Windows Subsystem for Linux... the 1998 Microsoft-vs-Linux report... hmmmm.

While I'm currently picturing a pacman trying to eat a dot a bit bigger than it expected, I do wonder what kind of hilarity Microsoft have planned for, presumably, 5-10 years from now (I'd presume they're in the Embrace/Extend period if my conspiracy theory is right).

[Small edit: currently at -1; interesting | Edit 2: Now at -4! Anybody care to actually comment? I'm interested in why people disagree!]

In the interest of providing data, here is at least a single reply. Though I haven't voted, by my criteria your comment leans more to downvote than upvote. My reasons:

1. It adds little to nothing to the discussion. You raise two items with no commentary but "hmmmm", then offer a metaphor and an admitted conspiracy theory - neither of which you explain in depth nor draw interesting conclusions from.

2. There is inherent ridiculousness (almost to the point of trolling) in connecting a 20-year old report (1998) to a modern initiative, particularly considering the massive industry, technical, and organizational changes between those two events. Implying that one leads to another as part of a 30-year strategy to consume/extinguish Linux assumes a level of long-term planning and, frankly, managerial competency that is almost unheard of in today's public companies.

3. Assuming I can even understand your poorly constructed point, I still disagree with it (see #1 and #2) and, more importantly, think you fundamentally misunderstand the landscape in which Microsoft now competes. In a world increasingly accessed by mobile devices, MS has no mobile presence. In an OS landscape increasingly disintermediated by the browser, MS has little significant browser presence. They have oriented their entire organization around Azure (its biggest revenue growth area) and cross-platform applications deliverable in the browser and on 3rd party mobile OSes. They reorganized and, for the first time, no longer have a Windows division. Thinking they're in the middle of some Machiavellian scheme to take back an increasingly irrelevant OS dominance position by extinguishing Linux (and failing because Linux is too big?) completely misses the point that Linux's size wasn't the cause of Microsoft's inability to extinguish it, it was these other countervailing industry forces. And to imply that they've somehow failed also ignores the fact that MSFT's market capitalization has had a nearly identical growth to GOOG and AAPL over the past two years while they've made this transition.

As they say on Food Network, for those reasons we had to chop you.

3: I hugely appreciate you taking the time to reply. This is incredibly helpful, I now see the ridiculousness of my half-thought-through point.

2: The reason I connected current activity with long-ago activity was based on sentiments I read that Microsoft were still behaving in some of the ways they used to. But a 20 year stretch is kind of pushing it, particularly in the tech industry.

1: Fair point.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Update since edit period has expired: back at -1 again - adding this because I think it's interesting, also first edit was after about 20min, 2nd edit was after an hour, this edit is after ~2h | Update 2 after ~1hr; parent is at 2, this is at 0]

This, I was trying to think of the right way to state this. Looks like I’ll be looking for alternatives.

Skype wasn't ruined because they attempted to merge it into their other platforms. Skype was just flat out ruined with bloat, horribly inefficient code, turning it into a spying tool and not listening to their vocal users. Everyone was rioting after every update and it just got worse. To add insult to injury the last major update they have tried turning it into Snapchat. Their incompetence knows no bounds. If you think the same middle managers that ruined Skype aren't there anymore, you don't know how big companies like Microsoft work.

The client was mismanaged, but forcing the backend onto their abysmal Lync stack did ruin reliability as well as privacy.

I wonder if pre-acquisition Skype was one of the hardest software the Windows team had to deal with. For example, at one point they used SYSENTER directly to make system calls!

Do you have a source for this? I enjoy reading about horrible software.

For SYSENTER: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1710

Another example: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=27

This is just what is public.

Source? Skype was always quite cross platform imho.

> For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms.

Maybe not now, but what about after the next reorganization or the next CEO? If it's no longer in MS' interests to keep a relationship with this audience somewhere down the road, why would they leave them alone?

This is the uncertainty people are afraid of.

For Github there was always uncertainty; if MS didn't take over, investors would've, or another (less capable) competitor (like I dunno, Yahoo?). I'm confident in MS keeping github running smoothly and moving forward.

I completely agree with your comment. As much as I love Microsoft, this is a weird development.

It’s like if Google bought Mozilla and Firefox became just another Google browser.

What isn't commonly known is that GitHub was never profitable and was getting closer and closer to insolvency every day.

Microsoft rescued them.

Any idea how they could possibly make GitHub profitable? It seems more likely that they want to attach the Microsoft name to GitHub to build up positive sentiment among the open source community. Something like keeping GitHub alive without wrecking it could cause some people to hate Microsoft a little bit less.

- It gives then 'streetcred' in the OSS communities using GitHub. This goodwill is valuable.

- It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office. All major players host code there, likely a lot of them in private repos too. Microsoft has a large trackrecord of 'me too' products (i.e. the ones released after the original from another company is successful) and corporate espionage isn't something that's just happening in the movies. This too could make things very profitable

- Developer relations across private repos could increase the value of linkedin profiles which in turn could make that more valuable.

But that's about what I could come up with. I seriously don't understand why one would spent $2B on github if it hosts your OSS stuff. Also, to make sure VSTS become more successful with an integration doesn't make sense to me: GH isn't the most profitable service out there and was losing money. Hell it might even go belly up sooner or later and VSTS would look to be a better alternative.

> It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.

That sounds incredibly unlikely if not borderline ridiculous.

>It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office.

Allows logically, not legally though I'd expect.

I imagine, in my paranoia, the first thing MS will do is change the T&Cs.

How profitable is Visual Studio? Visual Studio Code?

Microsoft wants people to develop for Windows, because with no apps you have Windows Phone. If what you want to use runs on Windows, Windows is what you purchase (or in a few years probably subscribe to along with Office 365 and OneDrive). A lot of that subscription model already exists on the Enterprise side of Windows, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see it expand - "Windows as a Service" has been a topic of discussion for years now.

They will operate them as a loss leader to Azure.

This. They own where the code is lands, and will try to build the best, most streamlined CI system straight to profitable Azure deployments. Probably cheapest too, if they update agreements to get a slice of the deployment pie if people do want to deploy to AWS or GCE.

'Extinguish' might be right, but Amazon is the target here and holding off Google in second place. Other cloud providers will have to race to the bottom if they are not already there.

Last I checked, AWS is in first place by a wide margin, followed by Azure and then IBM in third. Google is trailing all of them at the moment.

Source? I thought the story was that Github was profitable from day 1 in 2008?

How did they become unprofitable? Their expenses are servers and people. It seems that there are an enormous number of companies paying for private repos and that should more than cover their costs.

They were profitable in 2008, but by 2016 they were running at a loss.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is...

I'm guessing it was from corporate mismanagement, overbalooned salaries for initial employees, and probably hiring too quickly to meet demand.

And probably to some extent people treating it more and more as a free hosting platform for all types of content.

I put all my cooking recipes and links in a free repo yesterday, published with pages. History of changes, fast, reliable, mobile-friendly. Owns. PR me a recipe man!

I’m willing to believe this, but what’s it based on? It seems like they have so many customers. What’s the free/public-to-paid/private traffic that would have made them sustainable?

Is it? I imagine VSS and their cloud source control offering (don’t remember the name) probably aren’t doing all that well in the face of GitHub.

They want to be a player in that game, so they’ll transition off they are old product which isn’t that popular onto a new one they purchased that has all the mind share.

As long as they don’t screw it up, and recent Microsoft seems to me like a company that won’t, it will benefit them. And perhaps it will benefit the user some to do have a company with deep pockets behind it.

Microsoft adopt git as their main source control, even in internal projects.

Makes sense they try to control the future of the tool they use in so meny projects.

Github don't control git --

> Torvalds turned over maintenance on 26 July 2005 to Junio Hamano, a major contributor to the project.[25] Hamano was responsible for the 1.0 release on 21 December 2005, and remains the project's maintainer.[26]

I'm guessing Torvalds still has a lot of control if push came to shove, so we can assume git is executively controlled by Torvalds and Hamano.

Not many people use git without Github though, whether it's Github proper or a local installation of Github Enterprise. It's pretty tough to do code reviews without it. There are tools out there to do it, but Github is the standard.

Github does own a vast share of the git-related developer mindshare tho, which is probably more valuable to Microsoft.

Git != GitHub, fyi.

I want Mercurial and Subversion in GitHub.

Why not just use a service that supports them?

Use RhodeCode then - but it is a self-hosted solution.

AFAIK, I don't think anyone seriously used VSS inside Microsoft, but heard that long time ago they forked perforce in customized way... A bit like google.

Yes, I used that internal Source Depot (based on Perforce I think, or at least something old and convoluted) when I worked on Windows Phone 7 back in 2010, it was not fun. There were a few teams within Microsoft at the time using the visual studio team system source control but I don’t believe it was common, as a lot of the error reporting (watson) had plug-ins for the proprietary Source Depot.

Why was it not fun? I had no trouble with sourcedepot when I was there.

I think git and decentralized source control are great, but I get a little suspicious of people saying tooling is "not fun" simply because it isn't their favorite or most familiar.

That’s fair, I’m probably being too harsh on it. It was my first job out of college so my first time interacting with professional-scale source control. I don’t remember specifically what I didn’t like about it, I think mostly that it was slow and a bit unintuitive, but I can’t say with any conviction that it was actually a bad system. I do remember there being a general sense on my team that people wanted to move off of it and onto something more modern, so perhaps I just internalized that.

Ugh, Perforce. That was painful. Perhaps it’s time to see what’s next in source control systems, ie bzr.

Hah, our team is a bit of split - half of us know perforce well, the other half git, then almost all other developers are perforce driven (game company with several studios).

I like it, and really love that they added web interface (review, overall view of changes, etc.).

P4 is very easy to get started, all you need is to learn several things, and tools underneath can easily be changed, learned to do this for you. Then it's easy to comprehend changes, since all CL's are monotonically increasing, so once gets perception when a CL is announced whether it affects him, or her, etc.

And the elephant in the room is the really, really huge files: psd, tiff, max, maya (ma/mb) models, fbx, zip, iso, exe installs, etc.

There are some peculiarities, like text files handling and conversion (e.g. \r\n <-> \n).

Then some useful (but controversial) features: locking (per extension), or manually per file.

Having all your projects from different teams in one place, but each team/project can customize a view to its own work (a bit opposite of what google is doing with their mono-repo, but unlike g4 there ain't option to sync only what you want, and have the rest off the network).

The timing is suspect, because Google has been pushing Cloud Source Repositories as a private Git repository recently [1]. So, GitHub will most likely be part of Azure portfolio. Developers might be fickle, but they are fully locked into their respective cloud platforms in the recent years.

[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Cloud-Source-Re...

It makes that Gitlab graph https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/forrester-ci-wave... even more interesting.

Try https://kallithea-scm.org/ supporting not just git but also hg and svn.

Kallithea doesn't support SVN, only RhodeCode does which Kallithea forked. SVN support amongst many other security fixes and features were added at a later stage into RhodeCode.

On Kallithea activity and release is better than rhodecode and truly open source under software conservancy. Kallithea do support svn and it has moved on, with turbogears 2 support and now the theme is also modern based on bootstrap.

I created RhodeCode, and know for sure Kallithea does not support SVN.

- RhodeCode is based on newer and more modern than turgobears2 framework, called Pyramid.

- RhodeCode had 20 releases since 2017, Kallithea had two.

- RhodeCode fixed many security issues that Kallithea didn't, not to mention dozen of features that RhodeCode has but Kallithea doesn't, e.g pull requests updates, integrations framework

How is that a better activity and release?

Of course they will mess with it. Just slowly so developers dont leave. This is Microsoft. Read up on their tactics. It works.

It's why I'm surprised at the timing, since GitHub has had its own issues over the past few years, with a founder and other staff members leaving over harassment, and some questionable comments coming from members of their new team. I've felt for a while that GitHub had peaked, and that we weren't far away from seeing it push towards breaking the product to satisfy investors that want a return.

With an acquisition, most of this becomes amplified, based on how Microsoft treat GitHub. IMO, leaving them alone to do their own thing could be just as bad as being too controlling. I'd like to see someone like Scott Hanselman, a well-liked developer in the development community be given the opportunity to sit in GitHub and to use Microsoft's resources to improve the open-source community.

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