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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Assuming GitHub was actually losing money and couldn't fix that problem quickly enough it's fair to assume they had to sell, and it's reasonable to believe there aren't that many companies who could have bought them if you think an understanding of the domain is important, then you're really limited to Facebook (user surveillance, adverts), Apple (bad at software, not developer friendly), Google (user surveillance, adverts), Microsoft (history of extinguishing things) and maybe Oracle (very hostile).

Regardless of who GH sold to they'd be facing a ton of negative reactions. Microsoft's actions recently make me thing maybe they're actually the least bad as far as their dealings with developers go.

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Microsoft don't have a competing product in their portfolio to extinguish Github in favour of - and any overt moves like kicking projects off the platform would instantly torpedo any value the acquisition brought as every single project left the service in protest.

I don't really see how anything other than being perfect stewards of Github works out in their favour.

> Microsoft don't have a competing product in their portfolio to extinguish Github in favour of

Actually they did (VSTS, TFS), but it was so hilariously bad that they started moving to git a couple years ago.

They also used to have CodePlex, but eventually they killed it and migrated projects over to GitHub.

Microsoft is the worst-case. Everything Microsoft touches turns into dirt.

Google would had run it very successful for a few years, and then suddenly shut it down. Oracle would have strangled it slowly, and then given in to the Apache foundation (where projects go to die).

Facebook may actually have been a good choice - except for us select few who don't use Facebook at all.

The assumption is missing some context. A couple of years ago GitHub underwent internal re-organization or, as some people put it, got overrun by suits. Predictions at the time were rather grim.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067

Some parallels to the Nokia-Elop affair could be made.

The real lesson here is that GitHub should have tried to develop a profitable business model by increasing the range of products services they provided and experimenting with universal tiered pricing.

How about Atlassian?

That would essentially be a merge with BitBucket, so people would complain about there being less choice.

Atlassian would have pretty much no reason to buy GitHub, unless it's to shut it down.

They have Bitbucket and I think is pretty safe to say that they don't care about people hosting their open source stuff.

Of course you can use Bitbucket for free but where the big bucks are for Atlassian is the enterprise market. I don't have market data but I don't think there are many big corps using GitHub as opposite to Bitbucket together with other Atlassian products.

You'd be surprised. Case in point is my current main client, a huge national broadcasting company which is using Jira and Confluence for everything on one hand, but is just setting up a GitHub private instance on the other.

I'm indeed surprised and I'm sure there are other cases like this out there, it would be interesting to know the thinking behind it.

In my experience of working with big corps, if you are using Jira and Confluence, Bitbucket simply offers much better integration with them and lately Atlassian is rocking it with new features and deeper integration every time.

You are absolutely right from the technical perspective, but I guess these decisions are based on buzzword matching rather than any sound technical design.

How is Apple not developer friendly?

They are, just not to the FOSS crowd that tries to use macOS as if it was GNU/Linux with a pretty face.

Well, you pretty much describe my use case for Apple laptops. I resisted for a long time and used Linux desktop for dev work, but when I bought the first MacBook I never looked back. I would describe macOS as Linux desktop that works.

That is great but the point was that it has nothing to do with apple being developer friendly or not.

XCode is a clunky horrible mess of an IDE, iTunes Connect is worse, and they charge $100/year for a developer account. Also, they try to lock you in to buying Apple hardware to develop for Apple devices (though you can get around that using, among others, Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center).

You can use AppCode. XCode being a mess is not making Apple developer unfriendly, it just means that they don`t know how to make a good IDE. I don`t mind 100$ per year if it means better support then nonexistant Google support. Also if I am making money off the platform I don`t mind paying. And it also stops random people submitting crap apps to the store.

And it also stops random people submitting crap apps to the store.

It clearly doesn't work.

It's much better than the Windows app store though.

That isn't really a good argument

Agreed about XCode but Eclipse is also a horrible mess of an IDE, that doesn't make IBM unfriendly to developers.

> How is Apple not developer friendly?

I’m going to put in some good faith and assume this comment was meant sarcastically and not as a pure trolling.

You haven't dealt with Apple faithful much I presume.

Apple store EULA agreement with developers is the most macabre and lengthy mis-spelling of the words: "fuck you".

Its not a nice agreement.

Apple places users first, developers next, hardware makers (direct competitors) last.

Microsoft places competitors (people who develop operating systems, databases, etc) on an entirely different list.

Apple shuts down hardware makers in the Apple eco-system aggressively and at least Microsoft usually has the manners to buy out the developers that makes things it likes and wants to integrate into its OS.

Apple is user-friendly first. Developers for Apple technologies come next and all other developers who like the Unix environment of OSX come next. The only reason I use a Mac is because the computer is very well built, fast enough, and runs an OS that's Unix-like enough for my needs.

The fact it's not Linux is the reason I routinely use two other laptops, one with Ubuntu, one with Fedora (and a big Lenovo box that runs about a dozen VMs).

How is Apple bad at software?

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