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Comment by dorfsmay | Hacker News Reader

Because people with closed source, the paying customers, now have to trust their potential biggest competitor with their source code ‽

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Are you suggesting MSFT is going to _steal people's code_ from private github repositories? This strikes me as a bit fantastical.

What software hosting platform is not also itself a software company? Atlassian, Gitlab...?

Not steal source code, but platform companies have been known to use their insight into platform user metrics as a source of competitive intelligence metrics. Knowing which private repos are large and active is valuable info.

What if you run a recruitment web app that competes with LinkedIn?

What if? What if I run an operating system project, IDE project, email client, etc.? MSFT is going to steal or shutdown every type of software that competes with one of their products?

Doesn't add up to me.

The amount Microsoft would have to lose - in courts and public trust - if they were to abuse the private sensitive data held in their systems - would massively outweigh any benefit they could hope to achieve from that information.

That's already been tested:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

They're still in business. Numbers look good. They also have advertising and telemetry on paid stuff that people would usually assume doesn't sell them out like free, ad-driven services. Windows, Office, and Xbox are valuable enough that customers will tolerate quite a lot before leaving.

>"What if? What if I run an operating system project, IDE project, email client, etc.? MSFT is going to steal or shutdown every type of software that competes with one of their products?" Doesn't add up to me.

It doesn't matter.

The "what if?" is enough to cause a chilling effect. This will be the effective death of GitHub. I'm certain projects that are all-in on the platform will stick around out of momentum. But yesterday was the last day anyone would ever consider starting a new major project on GitHub.

Ridiculous. Please define "anyone" and "major project" and then let's make a bet.

So you tell that people trust private company which was loosing money since the creation better than Microsoft with all of its reputation at stake?

Yes. Financial stability and conflict of interest are two orthogonal issues.

The worst case scenario with Github closing the door, assuming no heads up, is that you'd lose your issues and PR. You have your git history on a bunch of machines (your devs + you should really have a dedicated backup).

The worst case scenario with Microsoft having visibility of your "closed" source code is that they take a peek at it and implement a better faster more integrated version of them in their own product competing with you, or heck even copy/paste your code. What can you do about it? How could you prove it? Remember, they can afford orders of magnitude more number of lawyer hours than you.

Is it unfair that I keep thinking of the SCO–Linux dispute at the moment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#Mic...

That's the overarching style of business that I associate with the Microsoft brand

That's comparing oranges with a monkey. How do they relate?

yes :)

Yes. 100% yes. Microsoft didn't care about their reputation for a long time. They currently do, at least a little, but that could change back.

Github was losing money, but that's pretty typical for SaaS businesses. I have no reason to think they couldn't have gotten to break-even. And if the can't get to break even, I have no reason to think Microsoft will subsidize them indefinitely.

I still think Microsoft had the lion share of the programmers mind with Virtual Studio? I am guessing it really has more to do with emotional response to the name MS then anything MS has done in the past 5 years.

I use Bit Bucket because I knew they were making money and were solvent and I knew GitHub was just waiting for a big pay day. BOY was I wrong with the timing and the amount.

> And if the can't get to break even, I have no reason to think Microsoft will subsidize them indefinitely.

This fits perfectly with their developer system with Virtual Studio, VS Code and Azure. I can't see how this isn't a great buy for them and their ecco-system.

That's not just a scummy breach of trust though, that's a blatantly illegal breach of trust. Source code is a trade secret. Copying it without permission is corporate espionage. People would go to jail if they tried. You are asserting that Microsoft's intentions are criminal.

I'm 100% sure that this is not their intention... But can you guarantee that this is not going to happen in the future?

All it takes is one rogue employee, and it could have devastating irreversible effects on a small startup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel#Unaut...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson#Downfall

What's stopping a Github or Gitlab or Atlassian employee from going rogue? That's not an MS specific problem.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? Because I don't think I am asserting anything like that.

Of course, Microsoft was famous for their dirty pool tactics in the past, so it's not irrational to worry that they'd return to them. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private

În a word, YES. Profitability <> quality.

I would argue that the case here is quite the opposite.

Github is loved for a variety of reasons, small & large decisions that are influenced by how profit-oriented the company is. And how willing they are to annoy their users to squeeze some more "profit" and/or data out of them.

It would seem Github had $7.5B at stake.

What's the evidence that Github was loosing money? Their first (and only, AFAIK) round was with Andreesen Horowitz for $100 million, many years after they had already become the go-to host for open source projects. Before that round the company was bootstrapped with personal funds.

This is not a concern that many real people have, just people on HN.

In the real world, people trust companies and context contracts with companyies to protect them. Eg all the people using clouds like azure.

Any company who is small enough to not host their own code repo are of little interest to Microsoft.

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