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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos? Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have. It starts to go downhill? Just push your repo to another Git host. Yes, you'll need to figure out how to port some of your workflows, but it won't be an insurmountable pain.

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That's why the "extend" phase is there in the embrace/extend/extinguish strategy - to make it an insurmountable pain to migrate elsewhere, after first having lured the users in with the "embrace" phase. Letting it play out is just what they need to move from phase 1 to phase 2.

But "extend" hasn't happened yet. There's no need to cry foul until it does, because until it does there's no evidence of anything nefarious going on. "Embrace" on its own is perfectly normal and acceptable behavior.

Vendor lock-in is an important concern regardless of who owns the platform you're being locked into.

> But "extend" hasn't happened yet.

If we wait for it to happen by then it will be too late

So you're saying anytime a new technology gets embraced by anyone it's time to jump ship? That's ridiculous. Should we be abandoning email because Outlook exists?

Edit: Actually, I don't think the idea of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" even applies to buying out companies. The idea behind that phrase applies to technologies, not companies. You can't "extend" GitHub with proprietary tech, it was never an open source technology in the first place.

If Microsoft starts extending git with new proprietary features that only work with GitHub, _then_ it may be time to start being concerned. As of now though, I don't see how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" applies to this situation in the slightest.

No need to get concerned. Just look at codeplex, it fully supports Git and Microsoft haven't touched that feature. :P

GitHub is to git as Outlook is to e-mail and as Internet Explorer is to the web.

As for how EEE applies to this situation: The situation is consistent with an EEE strategy currently being in the "embrace" phase. It's also consistent with a "embrace, be nice, create win-win outcomes" strategy, but that is not usually Microsoft's modus operandi.

The idea is that stuff like issues and PR comments (the added value a social coding site like GitHub provides) are the extend around pure git source management.

Fair point, but none of that is Microsoft's doing. Why are we only talking about this now?

Because Github wouldn't have been able to do the extinguish phase. Microsoft can, and will.

Pretty sure issues and PR comments came before the acquisition

The "extend" has already been done, by GitHub.

Git doesn't support issue tracking and pull requests.

So what do you call TypeScript !? They now bought the site where 99% of all free NodeJS packages are hosted. A few years ago NodeJS didn't even work properly on Windows, and was growing at exponential rate, taking market share from the Microsoft ecosystem. So what happened in the last few years ? Many developers now code JavaScript/NodeJS using TypeScript on VsCode. And their code is hosted on Github.

Unless they disable the APIs migrating to another platform would take a couple of days to hack something together. Disabling those APIs would also break a load of tools people already use for management so they would be shooting themselves in the foot.

>Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos?

History.

GP gave you a very good reason why this is different than historical Microsoft EEE[0]:

> Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have

There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced; it uses git at its core. Comments, issues, and wikis are convenient, but relatively simple to implement.

The main value in Github is the de facto community status it has, which it earned by being an open community and good steward of open source projects. The worst MS could do here is shoot themselves in the foot and ruin that value (which they just purchased for 7.5B) by driving developers to other platforms (who will make it all too easy to switch).

I think the M&A teams at MS must have seen this possiblity and have a different plan in mind for Github. Think dead simple (one-click) Azure deployments and integrations. And if you want (or need) that functionality for a different cloud provider, you'll just have to build it yourself on a different site.

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

It's not like anything about github is open source. Maybe that will change.

well, there was the atom editor. which now i fully expect msft to kill in favor of vs code. damn it.

How would they kill it? It's open source.

They can't really "kill" it as in destroy it, but the biggest contributors to that project were all GitHub staff. MS will most definitely redirect any staff efforts to VSCode instead.

VsCode is open source too: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

i vastly prefer atom - open source or not.

> There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced.

Integration and workflow. Thanks to the various gubbins available in the marketplace[0], CI/CD goodies, hooks into communication and project management tools and so on, for a lot of people migrating away from Github would mean losing access to enough little convenience things that actually it's not feasible for a large organisation with not great process change management techniques.

https://github.com/marketplace

Yea, but if you maintain that mentality, that affects your thoughts, affects behavior, affects 'crowd' behavior generally (all those agree), is perceived as such from those you predict about, get it? Affects all those who disagree too.

2 sides, same coin. You assume chaos, they see you assume that. They shape their narrative to fit their perspective with this data in mind. That rationalizes the behavioral pattern from their end, which continues the cycle.

Not saying I know any better solution, just that it's annoying as fuck to actually change when everyone keeps assuming you won't, and treats you as such. Chaos is probably going to happen even if there's a general mutual trust that springs forth. Can't control chaos.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

They haven't fooled me since the 1990's and they won't fool me this time.

Exactly. Which is why today I typed "go help importpath" to remember how to use my own domain name for my import path.

Dear reader, you should too.

When you see a fox entering a chicken coop would you also say the same? Microsoft will most likely gut GitHub, not as badly as Oracle would have done it but they will.

This said, Free Software Devs should never have trusted GitHub in the first place.

It works for the git repository, but GitHub is more than that.

There is a wiki, a bug tracker, a platform for pull requests and distribution, etc...

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