Chris, Nat and Satya's Calldeck Regarding Microsoft and GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Chris, Nat and Satya's Calldeck Regarding Microsoft and GitHub

view.officeapps.live.com

131 pointsArmandGrillet97 comments

Slide 12:

> GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform

> Nat Friedman will become the CEO of GitHub

As far as acquisition news goes, this is pretty good news. I think the one thing I was hoping for was autonomous operation from GitHub, and we're getting that. Nat created Xamarin & by extension a large swathe of the Mono project -- which means that his heart is certainly aligned in the right spot. He sounds like an excellent CEO grab, and it wouldn't surprise me if this is more of the deal than it's being portrayed as. GitHub has needed a CEO for a while, and Nat at the helm is a great person for that.

I'm optimistic that, as long as GitHub remains an independent business unit (ala Heroku at Salesforce), then it'll actually be a good thing. Let's hope it stays that way.

If there is one thing that I've learned from watching tech acquisitions up close for way too many years then it is that you should not put too much stock into words spoke by execs of companies around or immediately after an acquisition.

I wish I could disagree with you, but sadly it's a "fool me once, shame on me..." situation. There is no point in drawing conclusions mere hours after an acquisition announcement. Wait until later when more information and evidence are available.

Slide 10: Microsoft <hearts> Open Source.

It's really amazing how much Microsoft has changed (to the positive) since Ballmer stepped down as CEO.

Huh, wasn't it Ballmer who coined the famous "developers, developers, developers"?

That ”developers” has become synonymous with Open Source shows how far things have come since then. :)

Someone had been drinking the Kool-Aid for sure. Get back to work, it's Monday morning and churn on those Github, er Microsoft commits. They will be watching you with vast interest.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I honestly don’t understand what you’re talking about, although it sounds like you’re not too happy about MS buying github. I certainly agree about that.

The term frequency of "developers" in today's slide deck surely brought up some memories...

> Slide 10: Microsoft <hearts> Open Source.

you do realize that's just PR talk right? Most of their money-making products and services are far from being open source, so let's tone down the grandiloquent claims a little.

Open-sourcing large parts of .NET and providing MSSQL on Linux puts some very concrete deeds behind that statement, though.

The point I was trying to make was that there was a time, not too long ago, when Microsoft was actively hostile towards open source (and all of their money-making products where closed source).

As to your point, it is possible for an entity to favor and support open source, even without the entity itself following this policy. These issues aren't one-dimensional.

>> there was a time, not too long ago, when Microsoft was actively hostile towards open source

Have things changed in the last five minutes? MS and windows is still very hostile to f/oss. They do contribute cash here and there, and occasionally release a bit of code, but MS is still an IP bully. Ask them their opinion on customers running custom software on the XBone.

Frankly, I'd be happy if they just switched their products to open standard file formats. Docx is the bane of my office existence.

We can do things like installing Ubuntu directly from the Windows Store - even if you despise MS you must concede they are changing for better.

>> installing Ubuntu directly from the Windows Store

I cannot stop laughing at someone seeing that phrase as a positive. A major Linux distro being relegated to a windows app? That's the stuff of nightmares. how about installing Windows directly from the Ubuntu store? Let us see MS Word and Excel executable running seamlessly under Linux. That's what support for f/oss looks like.

I find it beyond useful to have Ubuntu as an app in windows.

As someone who purchased a laptop with a valid Windows license, I would so appreciate if I were able to do run said Windows as an app under Linux without falling into despair.

Personally I would keep windows and just run linux using the Windows Sub System for Linux. At home I have a macbook pro but at work I run Windows10 + Ubuntu@WSSL and it makes for a quite decent developer workstation - 90% of the time I'm using the PyCharm IDE.

I refuse to use Linux as my primary desktop OS (Linux paste buffer is a pet peeve of mine).

So true. Actually if I can use my MS Office programs in linux I would almost never need to use windows for work again.

>> "... and occasionally release a bit of code, ..."

I'm not the biggest proponent of Microsoft, but they're open sourced some pretty large projects recently. They're the highest contributing organization on Github I believe.

I mean... https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

Microsoft is the largest contributor to open source on Github already...much higher than even Google.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...

But Google is a much larger contributor and patron to open source.

Not on GitHub, according to GitHub's own metrics. Microsoft-affiliated accounts contributed more than Google's multiple organization accounts combined, in commit-count, number of projects/repositories contributed to, number of lines contributed. Admittedly, such quantity metrics are not great for apples-to-apples comparisons of code quality and "patronage", but metrics are still the closest approximation we have to actions over marketing spin.

Even on github (which does not include giant codebases like chrome and android) I would argue Googles contributions are more influental.

You don't have to open-source all of your products to be friendly to opensource.

Isn’t the same true of GitHub itself? I can’t simply clone GitHub’s code and run a fully equivalent competing product with all functionality (eg: GitHub Enterprise) included. So despite GitHub being friendly to open source, they’re far from an open source company themselves.

If the openness of money-making products is your measuring stick, you should be as skeptical of GitHub itself.

Comments like these leave me no hope for the future. Even with a history like Microsofts, people are quick to forgive instead of learning from mistakes.

I didn't even think PR works on people but it does and it's sad to see it.

I've read countless positive comments about "new Microsoft" on HN/Reddit/etc for multiple years at this point.

Even if it's true, I humbly ask that we move beyond the fawning.

If they changed so much, let them reverse their claim that APIs are copyrightable, stop patent shakedowns (like on Android and etc.) and start supporting major FOSS cross platform initiatives like Vulkan. Until then I'll retain my skepticism about how much they have really changed.

Copyrightable APIs and patent shakedowns against Android we're done Oracle not Microsoft, right? Or did I miss something?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-teaming-up-with-orac...

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111111222912...

>Slide 10: Microsoft <hearts> Open Source.

>It's really amazing how much Microsoft has changed (to the positive) since Ballmer stepped down as CEO.

Protip: this is a lie

They haven't changed to the positive, they have switched to other evils. They took Google's evil (all that spying), and a bit of Apple's evil (disposable hardware, Windows S walled garden).

Lock-in is now sought at the cloud layer.

Also interesting: the laptop in the slides is a MacBook, not a laptop running Windows. It might look like a generic aluminium device, but see the window decorations...

Plenty of people in Microsoft use open-source tech running on Apple hardware. It's not rare or unexpected anymore in this current decade.

There is a big difference in "using for work" and "using in promotional material"

Why would they go buy a Macbook and put their Microsoft acquisition presentation on it for the subtle PR that they acknowledge Macs exist? How does that make sense? If they were going to put that much effort in, why wouldn't they to full ham and use something running Linux?

Pardon my ignorance. What is a calldeck? I couldn't find a good result on Google. It is like a sales deck?

If a company has an investor call, they sometimes supply the investors with a deck to follow the call - a calldeck.

slides for a meeting where everyone is talking on the phone

Mr. Nadella's version of "developers developers" is top notch. I was scared we will get something like: https://giphy.com/gifs/michael-strahan-enTimXqzmVXR6

Guess Atom is getting the axe then

Atom has been leagues behind VS Code for a quite a while. Even with an acquisition I don’t see it ever winning that fight. Too much baggage in the underlying architecture.

They were trying: https://github.com/atom/xray/

I wonder if they'll finish it.

Yup, Microsoft bought Github for 7.5B to shoot Atom into the sun.

That's not anywhere close to what parent said, so what's the point of this comment?

It just benefits large companies, not small ones. Now Microsoft is able to slam a deal with Github in the offer (which every company is using) to sell Azure. Brilliant!

My thoughts also, something to dethrone AWS. Azure is actually doing surprisingly well in Big Enterprise. But in the seas of Small Medium Coprs and Dev houses they have little to Zero penetration.

Because that's where the real techy developers are who knows quality from marketing. Enterprise is filled with consultants so of course they promote Azure - what else are you going to do if you are a Microsoft consulting company?

Why is Azure not quality?

Azure is not bad at all, but in my opinion AWS still has more and better offerings.

Funny, then, how we don't keep hearing about big Azure outages like we do with GCE and AWS.

Because not too many people use Azure?

To be fair, all cloud environments have (major?) outages. Do you have data to backup your claim?

Every single testing I googled, including my own results shows Azure, surprisingly have the fastest instances, CPU, SSD Access, and Network. They do lack a few other managed "Services" instances that made Google and AWS much more attractive.

I wonder if this is the actual final death of TFS (Server) at this point as they could now move Github into that offering space for enterprises

In an effort to show commitment to existing developer communities, all images of computers in the slide-deck have been changed to Apple Macs...lol

The degree of gullibility in these threads is unexpected. You'd think the hacker community would be vaccinated against PR by now but it seems to work just fine.

Next up: "Our incredible journey".

When it all comes crashing down, don't say you weren't warned.

I don’t get it either.

The thought that Satya Nadella, who joined Microsoft in 1992 and then steadily climbed his way to the top would be a better, more moral person than the "old guard" is kind of funny.

He's just younger and less out of touch than Gates (and particularly Balmer).

This must be what Stallman feels like most of the day.

I can't tell if it's astroturfing (e.g. WE/Waggener Edstrom - that PR firm actually had to change their name because they were so tightly connected with a negative/abusive kind of PR) or millennials (who were small kids in the 90s).

The PR they get Gates to perform on reddit is incredibly successful there. It's disgusting to look at.

Classic millenials

If you release a hip IDE with a free tier and open source half of a booby trapped ecosystem, all is forgiven (?)

Imagine Microsoft implementing AI “Code ID” for screening Github code uploads for intellectual property violations, if this becomes EU law in 2020, https://blog.github.com/2018-03-14-eu-proposal-upload-filter...

  $ git push ...
  remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects.
  remote: error: GH013: Your push could infringe someone's copyright.
  remote: If you believe this is a false positive (e.g., it's yours, open
  remote: source, not copyrightable, subject to exceptions) contact us:
  remote: https://github.com/contact
  remote: We're sorry for interrupting your work, but automated copyright
  remote: filters are mandated by the EU's Article 13.
  To github.com/vollmera/atom.git
 ! [remote rejected] patch-1 -> patch-1 (push declined due to article 13 filters)

Be nice if they flagged their own:

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

That thread says they have an internal system that analyzes code for conflict with StackOverflow and Github. Looks like an employee figured out how to thwart the automated code plagiarism analysis.

Yup. The level of koolaid drinking going on here is insane.

This is not a good thing in any way. None.

If it saved GitHub from bankruptcy or something then fine, but acquisitions like this rarely work out.

What was Github's current valuation? It seems that the last round valued them at $2b in 2015. Around ~3x multiple on the last round (~7.5b$). Hopefully, the employees are all happy!

On iOS this isn’t functional. I can’t advance past the first slide.

Works for me, swipe left/right

Can't view with javascript disabled. !@#$ that.

Not to be rude, but honestly can you view anything with JavaScript disabled anymore? I don’t exactly blame the website.

This website, as one example.

A very large amount of websites can be used without JS.

Microsoft have stopped giving a damn a long time ago, and require JS from a dozen domains just to display a bunch of text documentation.

They're definitely worse than your average JS-only website.

If you're genuinely curious, then I highly encourage you to try it out. For me, I can view almost everything I want and am much happier with javascript disabled by default and enabled only when needed.

Does it help you bypass paywalls? Asking for a friend.

Don't know, kinda doubt it though.

Why on earth should you give every document you open arbitrary code execution rights?

It'd be a little hard to show a PPT without some js viewer.

If only we could invent a way to show static documents reliably. We could call it, say, a Portable Document Format. And we could have a reader for it that anyone could install and see said document. Hm, what a world that would be.

If only PDFs were purely static

PDF is a proprietary format. Is it really considered better than JS?

PDF is an ISO standard, it's not proprietary.

And yes, it's better than whatever JS is cobbled together for presentations, of course, it was designed for documents, not blinking things on the screen :)

Yes. It became an ISO standard (ISO 32000) in 2008:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#History_and_standardizatio...

That hasn't been the case for many years.

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

or maybe some sort of "markup" that merely needs to be rendered without running any accessory program code?

How so? the arrows could just point to the next page, there's zero interactivity on that PPT.

How can you expect a webapp to work with javascript disabled?

Plenty of web apps work just fine with javascript disabled.

Once upon the time there was a thing called server side rendering.

Good point.

I generally agree with you. But just so you know, in this case if you enable a few scripts, a download button appears and you can read the file in libreoffice or whatever you use.

Yup. It's also just a redirect to a downloadable powerpoint with the original URL embedded in the linked URL. No need to enable scripts at all. Just Microsoft doing their Micro!@#$ thing.

Wow, that looks like crap on a retina/hidpi screen.

Where’s the slide for “Totally clobbers coverage of any Apple announcements from WWDC today”?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com