GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
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Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything, even when there were much better tools. Under Satya, it was better, but the emphasis is still very much on getting, as Steve Balmer said "Developers developers developers".
Microsoft knows its being challenged in the platform game and that developers have migrated. But having seen the inside of Microsoft corporate, legal, compliance and policy I don't have high confidence that this isn't another PR project destined for death of the startup.
It's also a terrifying lesson about the fragility of the open source movement.
Did you leave some part out?
No one has a problem with any company trying to improve it's relationship with any population of consumers it serves, but Microsoft seems to still be trying to create walled gardens and get developers in then make sure they don't leave.
Let's use Google's Kubernetes as an example -- it's a fantastic tool that doesn't require use of their ecosystem -- so open in fact that both Azure and AWS are spinning up their own hosted versions. Many of the architectural/organizational pieces are non-trivial as well, years of work at google went into it, and they open sourced it.
It's more about priorities and intentions. Microsoft doesn't care about the developers. It cares about having the dominant platform. It recognizes that its image makes that difficult.
The GitHub acquisition: Microsoft didn't suddenly get more beautiful. It put on a mask. It will kill GitHub - or at least let it flounder - if that's what's best for its business. It will push Microsoft technology into the GitHub user base if necessary.
Developer relationships aren't an end in themselves - something Microsoft wants because its good. Developers are a means to an end, and its Machiavellian in its application of corporate strategy to achieve this end.
Microsoft would happily buy Ubuntu Canonical if they thought it would win them either a market advantage or a way to push Microsoft stack into the Linux userbase.
Some people probably don't have a problem with that. I do. But maybe I've got a chip on my shoulder from seeing this go badly so many times.
> First, politics is about getting and keeping political power. It is not about the general welfare of "We, the people."
Or I guess here, 'we the developers.'
I don't think Microsoft is at all alone in this spot. Github got a huge payout from this. It benefited them. We don't think of them as a Microsoft style company, but they made the same decision we might have seen in reverse. They didn't sell out before, but now the payout was significantly high enough. It's the old "You'd be stupid to turn down that much money" line from Thank You for Smoking.
But keep in mind, Adobe, Oracle, Intel, Amazon .. they'd probably all do something like this if some essential backers on the board thought it was in their best interest, with the goals always being around maximizing profit (so you can pay all those CFOs, CTOs, board members and controlling stock members). The people who make these decisions care about staying in power .. and are most likely very far removed from actual development .. or their userbase (in this case the same thing).
Just look at what happened with a userbase of gamers and the Facebook purchase of Oculus.
VR’s hype is easily justified.
I copied my personal projects to GitLab today and that was very easy to do but I'm not sure what to do about the GitHub version for the one that had a little popularity.
A fork between services becomes more complicate but not so much: git pull from GitLab and git push to GitHub or whatever. Everybody knows how to do it.
Right, one loses the "fork" link between the two repositories but really, who cares? We're writing software for work or for a cause, we shouldn't be playing a game of collecting stars and forks.
For the stars, they presumably did it to get update notifications. I guess they'll get a notification if I update the README, and they can decide what to do about that. I'm making things just a little bit harder for each of these people though.
Forks are even easier to maintain than you're describing. You just need to do a change the url for your upstream. The issue for me is that I have several forks of other peoples projects and in almost every case it's because that's required to make a pull request. For each of these projects that moves, they're multiplying the small effort by the number of people who need to move their forks and/or learn how to make pull requests on the new service.
The forks thing could be tackled. With a notification, something like I forked you. Or a code search engine which is clever enough to detect and link repos.
The user management gubbins, is the normal irritation of user management and access control.
The stars part is already a bit of a horror across all software - not knowing how to gauge the popularity and quality of a project. Nevermind searching for it.
I'm not the biggest user of these silo repos, but I do appreciate that thin barriers to entry, and improved usability or a good usability wrapper, is charming.
My main concern (having spent about a decade working in MS shops) is that they will try to create a divide between "professional" developers and "hobbyist" developers. Microsoft's fear has always been that their next major competitor will be someone who comes out of their garage. They have always tried to control the programmers so that these programmers will be dependent upon Microsoft. I was literally forced to use Visual Source Safe on more than one occasion because the company I was working for had a contract with MS which prevented us from using any other source code repository (in exchange for discounts on other MS development tools). At the same time, Microsoft did not use VSS internally, because it was horrible. Similarly, we were always playing catch up with APIs. MS would be using them for 18 months or so before any of the rest of use would get any documentation for them (Ha ha! Source code??? Ha ha!)
So my feeling is that this is the embrace part of embrace, extend, extinguish. If I see an effort to rewrite libgit2, or something similar with extensions, then I will be very worried. The reason I can imagine "Don't worry, it will support the git protocol and any hobbyists will be able to make contributions, but if you want a professional interface to Github it is available on reasonable terms (prick your thumb and sign here)" is because I've seen it many times before.
It's not that MS is the only company that pulls this nonsense. Apple is consummately skilled at it: join our fold and have a privileged place in the walled garden.
Free software is intended to level the playing field. As much as MS has improved, I do not believe for an instant that they wish the playing field to be levelled. GitHub, though proprietary originally had no position where it would make sense for them to try to control developer. Now they do.
A really great example of this is the fact that they now give away Visual Studio Professional (rebranded to 'community') for free and even allow unrestricted commercial development/usage for independent studios. I don't recall their definition of independent precisely, but it's something like <= 4 developers, with gross revenue < $1 million/year - the exact definition is similarly fair.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." (Adam Smith.)
I don't trust benevolent people. I trust self-interest. I don't need to offer my undying allegiance to Microsoft - I can like them as long as they do things that benefit me, and dislike them when they don't.
github wanted to make money from their paid services to create a profit. microsoft couldn't care less about the money paid github accounts make (as long as it's not hemorrhaging too much), it's unlikely they'll get a ROI from paid accounts in anyones lifetime.
they need github to increase their earnings elsewhere, e.g. by getting developers to develop for the microsoft store or for their cloud services. so my guess is they'll at least start advertising their tech heavily on github and add features integrating their own tech while omitting the same for rivaling corporations.
the old github didn't have an interest in limiting integration with other platform providers, as this would decrease their usefulness for potentially paying developers.
GitHub is going to turn into the FOSS version of the MySpace wasteland. I'm sure GitLab and other alternatives are seeing a stampede of new sign-ups right now.
The question isn't really what MS will do, because - as is often the case - it won't matter.
MS bought Nokia Phone, trashed the company, flailed around dramatically for a while, and in the end nothing much changed in the phone space - except that WinPhone hung on for a year or two longer than it would have otherwise.
MS bought Skype, trashed the product, bolted it awkwardly onto Office, and in the end nothing much changed, because anyone with any sense moved to an alternative.
It's going to be the same with GitHub. There will be drama in the short term, but in the longer term MS will receive little or no benefit, except for maybe some closer integration with VS.
The money will simply be wasted.
The real winners will be the investors and owners of GH, who have walked off with a big pile of MS stock they can convert to money and use to buy nice things.
Just hope most go to a common place which appears it will be GitLab.
You know that Gitlab is also VC backed, right? They have to exit in the same way as Github did. It’s baked into their DNA. The only question now is who buys them. What will you do if that’s Oracle?
Since MicroSoft is a _platform_, their interest is to _limit_ your options to MicroSoft so that you aren't developing and enriching competing platforms.
GP, if I am understanding correctly, is implying that their purchase of Github will either go to waste (Github can continue, but with no new resources from MS, and will slowly dry out) or MS will leverage it to push their own tools while limiting how developers can interact with it for non-MS code bases.
Trusting self interest is fine, but trust doesn't always mean _trust in the good_. Trust means we can visibly see what their intentions are. The butcher depends on our money, therefor we can trust that they will provide us with a good service so that we return. MS depends on us using their platform, therefor we can trust that they will limit our options of which platforms we develop for.
Microsoft sells a platform. The success of that platform is based on convincing users and their agents to buy the platform. The platform is appealing because developers make money by creating apps or it. Has Microsoft done awful and possibly illegal things to competitors? Of course. But they've been the best for developers. Best dev tools, most powerful and widely deployed OS, at least in the PC era that made them famous and infamot.
That's not tinfoil hat stuff. It's historical fact, and I was around when it happened. They tried to, in their term, "leverage" their OS dominance. But on the receiving end of that leverage, it feels like being forced.
Microsoft has screwed developers on their own platforms too, when they didn't fall 100% in lockstep with Microsoft's whimsical decisions and about-turns.
> Best dev tools, most powerful and widely deployed OS
I strongly disagree they built the best dev tools or the "most powerful and widely deployed OS", but I'm going to talk about a more important point here.
There's a difference between making a product that is better that everything else, and preventing others from making a product better than yours. When you let one maker — irrespective of whether they make the best product or not — bully and cheat their way into preventing other makers from competing, you are and shall be left with a sub-par product.
One example: Microsoft single-handedly held back the web for close to a decade, all so it could continue to sell Windows licenses. As a result, the world suffered.
There's a lot of progress that was stifled and/or killed off — some of which we may never get again — by Microsoft, just to protect its OS, by abusing its position on the market.
It wasn't their dev tools or their "most powerful and widely deployed OS" that made them infamous, it was their own actions.
Especially not in my butcher, brewer, or baker. Pure self interest gets you McDonalds, Bud Light, and Debi cakes. I consume exactly none of those things and have no desire to consume any of those things. They taste terrible, are bad for me, and the companies themselves are generally bad for their communities and the world.
A good butcher, brewer, or baker is driven by craft first - care for their product, care for their customers, and care for the environment. They devote themselves to their craft. Not out of self interest ("I'll make more money if I do it this way.") but out of sheer joy of craftsmanship and doing good.
I have known few producers who's products I would rate trust worthy who weren't driven first by craftsmanship, care for their customers, and care for doing good in the world. Self interest (of the "I need to make a living" form, not the "I want to be rich" form) in these situations is consistently a secondary interest. For these crafts people, if they can't meet their self interest, they simply stop crafting rather than pollute their product.
That's who I trust. Never the behemoth driven by fiduciary duty and self interest.
Adam Smith's philosophy is nearly 250 years old and predates the modern industrial revolution. It's time we stop putting it on a pedestal. We've learned so much about the way people, markets, society and people in markets and society function that he simply had no way to know.
> That's who I trust. Never the behemoth driven by fiduciary duty and self interest.
Trust is orthogonal to craftsmanship.
> Adam Smith's philosophy is nearly 250 years old and predates the modern industrial revolution. It's time we stop putting it on a pedestal.
It's less a philosophy than an understanding/insight regarding human behavior. You might as well say "it's time we stop putting newtonian physics on a pedestal", to the extent that both are reasonable models of human behavior, and are helpful in many, many real-world situations.
Arguing that people "shouldn't" behave according to Smith's expectations is going to be about as successful as arguing they shouldn't fall when they jump off a ladder.
> I consume exactly none of those things and have no desire to consume any of those things.
Nor do I, but many people do, and that decision makes them different than me, not less than me.
Whoever you do buy your food from has recognized there’s a portion of the market that values what you do and is happily selling it to you, out of their own self-interest.
I, for one, like McDonalds and sometimes prefer a Bud Light.
Arguments like this fundamentally misunderstand human psychology. And this is why the economic model of the "rational man" is fundamentally flawed.
Altruism has nothing to do with it. Although, psychological research has shown that economics has it wrong: most people are basically altruistic, not basically selfish. It's how we can be such a social species. But that's a different discussion for another time.
Values, ethics, morals... are part of self-inrerst for lots of people.
Further, the vast majority of stock corporations have no values, ethics, or morals. They have only the maximization of stock holder value -- which is to say: greed. We know this from piles and piles of data on corporate behavior.
People and organizations of people are very different creatures and behave in very different ways.
Corporations are a different subject matter.
Which is one more reason why the application of Adam's philosophy doesn't make sense.
Believing that humans are merely information processors acting at all times only in their 'rational self-interest' is an incredibly narrow and simplistic view of humanity.
I'm privileged to work at a great shop with some 20 other people for whom profit is just a small part of the goal. We call fiscal health "oxygen": It's something we need, but if it's present it should be allowed to fade from the forefront of our minds, instead focusing on more rewarding targets.
This works great when you're working with a small number of people, and when the company is driven by and owned by a very small, close-knit group of people - ideally, you can count them on one hand. This allows non-fiscal values to be communicated. Unfortunately, communication is difficult among large groups, and the easiest and most common means of communicating values is in dollars.
I'm not sure that a $7.5B company can maintain this idealism. "Behemoths" are going to be present whenever you have economies of scale, and post-industrial-revolution we don't have craftsmen who are butchers, we have vertically integrated behemoth butchers with million-dollar tractors growing the grain that rolls in on conveyors to feed the cows that are butchered and packaged by automated machines, so each package of beef has less hands-on time than it takes the craftsman to wrap the finished product in paper and twine. The craftsman is going to be relegated to the edges of that industry.
I have some ideas towards that direction, but make no claims on a definitive answer.
Worker cooperatives seem promising, since they change the average worker from "grunt" to "owner / director". It changes the incentive structure around what gets communicated and how as a company scales. Worker cooperatives also change the incentives around growth itself -- disincentivising growth beyond a certain point because each new worker waters down the voice and control of the existing ones.
AI driven automation and robotics, in a context of worker cooperatives, presents the possibility of keeping our production efficiencies (that used to require huge scales) while maintaining small organization sizes. We're not there yet, but it seems like we're not too far off.
I think reconfiguring the economy around these two ideas, presents the possibility of a good answer to the question posed above. And has lots of extra benefits beside (like building democracy into our economic system and not just our political system, and creating a system that more equitably distributes wealth by nature).
Bud Light might not be the most flavorful beer, but have you ever tried the original Budweiser? You know it's actually pretty darn good. And when you compare Bud Light to truly bottom-market beers, you begin to see the value of Budweiser's offering. Also, I don't know how many foreign countries you've visited, but a lot of them really desperately need a Bud Light just to give the local brewers some real competition. Some of the beers I had were just bad.
I can understand if you don't want to consume mass-market products, but really, you shouldn't just dismiss something because it looks big to you. These things solve real problems that people have, at real scale. Your local brewer might have great beer, and your local butcher might have great meat, but you know what would happen if everyone was at the mercy of local business? Everything would be 4x more expensive and wages would be half as much. Just like it was before those brands emerged.
Sound logic, were it not for the fact that you may be trapped by the time you dislike Microsoft. Given Microsoft's history, it's a risk I will never take. I don't trust them, never will.
We nearly avoided a monolithic web in the browser wars. Microsoft pushed, successfully, Internet Explorer to be the only game in town. You didn't write websites against the standard. You wrote them to run on MSIE.
Mozilla, Google, the iphone and MS's hubris made IE 6 so noncompetitive that the web evolved past that blockage. It was luck, and we must recognize the near miss. The open Internet could have ended up closed and a lot worse. We almost ended up writing webapps in Activex.
I - like everyone - paid a huge cost in wasted time and non-existent security when I tried to use IE or develop a site compatible with it.
Since shareware is kind of an alien concept these days, many people remember Netscape as "always free" but it was not really.
Microsoft, on the other hand...
Yet. :-)
I'd say, rather, simply, "it's corporate in its application of strategy". Which is to say, Microsoft is a business.
It's always about the money. No one "cares" about developers not even your own employer. They only care about making money and we are all just a cog in the machine.
[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-b...
It'll need to start caring to a degree, and catering to them, in order to achieve this
Read that again and think about the culture they have at Microsoft, then think about the open source culture if it's the same. Do Microsoft embrace open source?
Microsoft historically wanted to monopolize everything. Your operating system, developer tools, office suites, Internet browsers... everything.
Microsoft doesn’t force employees to use Microsoft tools; Microsoft forces employees to think critically, empathize with our users and build great experiences for them.
So why isn't this reflected in their actions?
Microsoft have done this in the past. They actively eat the browser market share with IE and left it alone after being the monopoly in web browser. This forced Netscape to become Mozilla. They also tried to be the gateway and believe OS is the gateway for all program and was left in the dust with web app and web search engine. Their past modus operandi was always to stay a monopoly not to create a good environment for developers.
And I think it's a good thing to keep in mind because microsoft's past actions we should all be wary and keep in mind when we decide to do anything with Microsoft.
I mean if you go back far enough, Microsoft did this with IE. IIRC, they licensed a bunch of stuff from NSCA Mosaic, who thought they were going to make some good money off a percentage of sales. IE was originally part of the Plus! pack which you had to pay for with Windows95, but then MS released their browser for free.
And this is the same as developing a crummy browser, not sharing the code and not funding any alternate implementations, and leaving it stagnant for years.
Ok.
No. Google paid for having its search engine in firefox (as the default engine).
In fact, they did that during the Yahoo deal. Yahoo was default only in countries affected by the deal, while Google was the default one... I would say in the rest of the world, but I'm not 100% sure if they made deals with Yandex in Russia or some other deal.
The need for greater variety in the spread of popular rendering engines is dire and real. Browser monoculture is dangerous and I refuse to use any browser that’s Chromium/Blink as my daily driver for this reason. I seek alternatives for sites that obviously haven’t been tested in anything else - if you can’t be bothered to properly service Gecko and/or WebKit you don’t need my traffic.
Microsoft had no desire to improve IE and make the web a more desirable platform than Windows. (I'd suggest it still doesn't)
Google, however, directly benefit from the web being a better place, and they know first hand that a dominant browser can be toppled. And the competition is fierce, with MS back to bundling and it's so easy to switch browsers now that there's (currently) a good compliance of standards and no such things as ActiveX.
Microsoft was given an ultimatum by the US Department of Justice to stop improving IE, because at the time people thought browsers and the web shouldn't be a part of an OS base install.
Microsoft started what Electron/Cordova/PWAs are continuing today, where the web is a first class application platform in nearly every OS, and nearly every OS needs to bundle a web browser as core functionality.
> Google, however, directly benefit from the web being a better place
…to serve ads. As long as the web remains the most universal platform for ad serving, Google's interests follow.
> now that there's (currently) a good compliance of standards and no such things as ActiveX
Let's not forget how recently Google tried to make NaCL, its own play at an ActiveX-like thing.
It's only recently we've "killed" Flash, and Oracle and others are still holding a lot of Enterprises hostage to Java applets.
Mozilla may be the only group without sin here, and they live in a glass house, to mix metaphors.
Even MS Edge is on a rolling release with IE11 just sitting back there in its corporate shit role. Safari is really the last big browser not to move to rolling releases.
Firefox's share was never very high to beginning with, because Mozilla doesn't have the resources to play the vendor bundled game that Microsoft and Google have been playing.
And now it's rising again, because they've made great improvements in Quantum and are on a roll. I use Firefox and it really is the best browser, at least for me. The only problem that Firefox has at this point is that its developer tools are worse than Chrome's, however they've been making improvements there as well and I'm sure they'll manage to win back the developers they've lost.
> Google's render can be found in Opera, Vivaldi, and others
You mean WebKit, which originated in KDE and then forked by Apple? It's not really Google's engine ;-)
Also Opera, Vivaldi and others are at this point completely irrelevant.
Mozilla is playing this game correctly. If you don't have your own rendering engine, you can't compete and you don't count. Which is also why Google developed V8 and then forked WebKit into Blink.
Google has since replaced WebKit with Blink in Chrom(e|ium), and the projects based on Chromium have been following suit. Even Qt is switching from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine, which is Blink-based.
Granted, Blink is a fork of at least some of WebKit, but still.
>And now it's rising again, because they've made great improvements in Quantum and are on a roll.
You say MS/Google are winning because they have money to bundle their browser, and at the same time Firefox is rising because they made improvements to their software. That's a contradiction.
Personally, I left Firefox for Chrome because how unbearably slow Firefox is/was, something Mozilla seemed to ignore for a long time.
Heck Google created SPDY and gave to standards group who changed and then Google went and moved their SPDY to the standard.
Heck Google has over 60% of the browser market and the 2 most popular web sites in the world and easily could have kept to themselves as a competitive advantage. Most would consider that just good business.
But instead Google did the right thing while consistently MS does the wrong thing.
They want programmers to use their tools so they can exploit a dominant position and crush competition. They have been charged (and condemned) for abuse of monopolies as late as 2013.
I don't trust a company that used to be dominant and evil and suddenly as it becomes weaker tries to play nice.
The GAFA are problematic, but their ethos is nowhere as bad as what MS was when it was the dominant player of the software world.
An example of what could now happen is that MS could decide one day at will to drastically change how your data is accessed from github, maybe even requiring MS version of git, with added "security" and requiring you to login with your hotmail account or whatever they call it these days.
This is called “dogfooding” and all companies should do it. How can you sell to customers or understand customers if you’re not using the product yourself?
One day I’d love to visit SAP and see how they do their own vacations and expenses. It can’t be with their own software.
Maybe SAP uses their own software internally and they've all become power users that aren't bothered by the issues that you're having. Perhaps if they used competing products they'd have a better understanding of where theirs is lacking.
Things like uptime, support-contracts, having someone on-site within three hours when your multi-millon-dollar-order-processing-SAP-cluster goes down etc are what matter to their customers more than usability (traditionally).
Things are changing and a lot of effort has been put into getting better at UI/UX though. But I haven't been involved with them for several years now so I don't know where they are at or what their current offerings are (I keep tabs a bit on HANA developments but that's it really).
SAP still needs to get better at their dogfooding game in some areas (e.g. using our own ticket system products instead of internally-grown idiosyncrasies), but we're getting there.
It's not fragile, it very much antifragile. The highs and lows make it stronger and more resiliant.
What I find interesting is the commentary about this deal is all about Microsoft, and very little about the people who sold Github. Presumably they were highly regarded by many, and they sold out open-source (not my view).
An open source, open identity, self-hostable platform would be a lot better. And, we're running into issues ourselves in trying to migrate, because running your own-self hosted GitLab isn't really good enough, we don't have the team to ensure the uptime we need, but I would feel comfortable if there were more hosting providers for GitLab than just GitLab itself. Just to get that extra redundancy.
On the other hand, I imagine that's something that could exist quite readily if GitLab shut down or got acquired. Someone could step forward and do the SaaS for all the companies that don't really have the capability to self-host at the same reliability at a pro.
Move their repositories back to GitHub, switch to BitBucket or something else entirely?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c...
[2] https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando...
[3] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/
Fork it and move on with their day.
Vendor lock-in is a strategy that works even if you know its there. I'm building my code with the excellent CI stuff built into Gitlab today and I really don't want to move away from it because of its amazing ease of use.
I find it hard to believe that an audience of developers can't point their browser to a different url, or search for your project using Google.
I want stuff like the issue tracker/merge request dialog to be consistent across the federation (and of course for projects elsewhere in the network to be able to be the source for those merge requests)
I don't want an account on everybody's git{lab,hub,ea,xxx} instance I want a single identity that people can trust is me.
I want a way to discover and index other projects on the network. The same way that I often just go to github without knowing the name of a project just roughly what I'm looking for.
I know blockchain is excessively overhyped, but to my limited understanding this appears to be a good fit...
Look at how cryptocurrencies work, a wallet is singular (i.e your identity), exchanges and mining pools are numerous and independent (hosts and services for git repos).
The vital part to make this work is a specification for storing the social aspects of collaborating on these platforms in a git repo itself - it can definitely be done, git is so flexible, it doesn't have to interfere with the project code or even need to be present in the visible tree of any branch - but we need that for interchangeability. This first step could be made before figuring out how to make neatly interacting network to add portability to existing platforms.
By the way, I'm not sure if something like a blockchain is necessary here. You could use a simple public key cryptosystem, where your identity equals the public key, and you prove that you have that identity by using your private key in a challenge/response scheme, and you can also sign messages/commits/whatever by using your private key.
I think you're right public crypto is enough... i'm just applying blockchain unnecessarily.
I can see this working in a really nice way: right now people are dealing with "migrating" and having to choose to loose PR/issues starts etc that these platforms provide, all of that could be implicit to the repo with zero effort to use a different platform.
- Public crypto for repo authority (who can commit, who can merge PRs, who can manage issues etc - preferably more granularity than current platforms)
- A common Issues/PRs etc format is saved into the repo
- Hosts are networked, they sync repos with each other allong with any platform data... anyone can add (sync) a repo from github to gitlab without being the author (ownership is done by crypto not platform accounts, each platform/host would verify the repo content when syncing from some other host).
In other words, platforms like github and gitlab etc just become a viewport and a node in the network, like there are GUIs for git, github would be just another GUI for the collaboration protocols... at this point you could even do it offline with a headless server, the purpose of github/gitlab is to provide hosting and good UX etc. This would mean that a repo can simultaneously exist on any platform, there is no platform boundary, you could accept a PR from a user using gitlab on github... it wouldn't matter where they came from. Or if you hate all these platforms you can just use the cli and accept a PR from someone using these platforms (you would just need a public git host that the other host/platforms can sync with).
How the crypto integrates with the repo would have to be well thought out as it's essentially completely independent of platform accounts, anyone could locally clone the repo and attempt to push something to your public server (or a hosting platforms server on your behalf).
Accounts/authorization is already semi-federated through oauth etc. You can sign in to gitlab.com using your github.com account.
We still have only one kind of namespacing and for users and projects: domains, leveraged by Java (and go, others?) for packages, and email for identity.
Discoverability is really a matter of indexes and catalogs; npm, pypi, Google and duckduckgo.
Delegating login is actually useful for self-hosted vcs/issue trackers: not as low friction as just sending an email with a patch; but it's easier to be able to "sign in" with an existing account, add an issue/code - and get notifications via email - rather than having to manage an account for every program you use and find bugs in...
And if the functionality of github became the basic minimum, each provider will still provide their value-added on top of that.
If that sort of thing is forbidden, then there will be no motivation for improvement.
That's not a valid argument against GitLab, which offers you the option to host it yourself, and then builds features on top of the free version.
While GitLab EE isn't released using an open source license, its source is publicly available and you're allowed to make modifications to it, satisfying 2/4 essential freedoms of free software, as defined by FSF[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/
[0] Open Source Initiative's definition contains 10 rights, I'm too lazy to memorize them.
Of course if you have them as an investor they will obviously try to help you with their network which can definately steer a company to a more Google friendly path.
From the rest of your post, I think you mean “...very much not inevitable.”
If the portfolio company wants to be acquired by Google, then taking the network they get via GV certainly makes that route easier for them.
If the portfolio company decides if acquisition by another tech giant is the better route, they are free to do that and GV won't sabotage that deal. AFAIK there have been GV exits to all of the big Google competitiors.
This means "Google is going to acquire GitLab".
> If the portfolio company decides if acquisition by another tech giant is the better route, they are free to do that and GV won't sabotage that deal.
To me, this reads as "Google might not acquire GitLab".
“Inevitable” means “unavoidable", but what you've described is “possible, and maybe slightly more probable than if it wasn't a GV-backed firm, but by no means guaranteed.”
There are downsides to MS owning Github, but Google is in a whole separate universe of Evil.
So the answer is: Move out, don't hesitate, and if there's no other viable choice, yes, move back to Gitgub.
Microsoft had Codeplex and was rather similar. Didn't use it enough to form an opinion about it.
Both were largely left behind by Github.
The promise of these hosted services isn't the free storage/servers, its the maintenance of them.
We're running our own private GitLab server but we thought long and hard before doing it.
Looks like GitLab puts out one release a month. Not a big deal. One day a month you can roll out the latest and greatest if you really want to. I probably wouldn't even do it that often, depending on what's included.
As far as all the underlying stuff, depending on what Linux distro you pick it should be pretty self maintaining nowadays for everything that's required to self host GitLab. nginx, PHP, etc. will all self update with your package manager of choice.
> setting up monitoring and dealing with downtime?
If you're buying a VPS you shouldn't need to worry about these. Any decent host will make sure your VM is up and have a high enough uptime to be solid for any use case short of enterprise. If you're an enterprise you might want to spend more than $5/mo.
> We're running our own private GitLab server but we thought long and hard before doing it.
Well that's up to you but it's really not hard.
Okay, three things.
We've seen this over the years with previous code hosting platforms. If the platforms betrays it's users, developers are not scared to mass migrate to something else. The onus is now on Microsoft to keep developers happy or risk losing their $7.5B investment.
GitHub is just a signal to people who have been out of the loop, bloomberg and many linux developers.
When I start dropping my apps on their systems, they might be surprised how well they run.
With DotNet Core we have an extremely well crafted language available on all Windows and Linux. It's a great move on part of Microsoft.
Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate.
It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started proving success and showing an alternative to people.
DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license.
Same thing for most of the azure tools , you are only allowed to use them within Visual Studio.
I don't really called that "all in open source" .
It's gimmick to give C# devs the illusion of a choice.
Try to build , run & deploy a C# app on AWS with Atom. You're gonna have a bad time.
And regarding your claim, you can do all of that, even with Vim if you want. You just have to build some scaffolding.
After all, they can't be expected to implementing everything for everyone. More than that, they were actually nice and created LSP (https://langserver.org/) and now they're thinking about a Debug Adapter Protocol (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-debugadapter-node/issues...) that would do the same thing for debugging.
It's not "Open Core" if the core is not open. In this case a debugger is core part of a language. It's a very clear movement in order to keep C# devs within their ecosystem and guarantee revenue with Azure. They loose money here , they must get it somewhere else.
This guarantee a total monopoly over the .NET ecosystem , Rider is probably one of the only tools that tried to offer an alternative they are stuck with the exact issue of not being able to bring the debugger because of that hostile license policy.
>Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core.
I never talked about Gitlab and I don't care about them.
Don't be mistaken about MS , almost every move they do as a double intention behind it.
Just to name a few :
One MS engineer is core member to Webpack & Angular , why ? Windows Server dashboard is written in Angular , it's a critical product, they need some controller there.
One MS engineer is core contributor to Electron, why ? VS Code is powered by electron , it's a critical product, they need some control here as well.
One MS engineer is core contributor to Vue.js , why ? Azure is investing hundred of millions in China and Asia due to insane growth over the past 5 years, they need a good image in asia.
If you think MS has changed , you are delusional about the situation.
People keep bringing this up as if it's some evil plan, not a legacy problem.
The debugger is based on Visual Studio's closed source debugger. Visual Studio is a major paid product. It's not simple to just extract an integral feature from a paid product.
Why? This isn't a technical challenge. As far as I know, the actual debugging engines are pretty isolated modules with some alternative interfaces already available (e.g. cdb). So where do you see the real challenge?
OVH, who owns the largest datacenter in North America uses OpenStack, they're actually one of the largest contributors. Red Hat & IBM both seem to be really pushing private deployments as of late for their larger clients that already own large DCs.
They are the worst quality cloud provider, IMO.
That might be because I'm deeper into web development though, and both TypeScript, and VS Code are great contributions.
Maybe I'd feel different if I worked in ML, and used Tensorflow daily.
My SO migrated everything off Github back on Sunday when rumors broke, deleting the account & repos that had commits and contribs going back years.
Consistently, one of the first questions I ask friends and acquaintences who go to work across the lake to work for MS in Bellevue or Redmond is whether they are on an Embrace or Extend team. Most are on Embrace/Rewrite our own version but "better" teams.
Microsoft has changed, but they're no Red Hat or Suse.
FWIW, I don't and wouldn't use a source code repository of Google's or Facebook's, either. In fact, rather than open a GitLab account, I started self-hosting a year ago. GitLab made that easy. I also looked at Pagure.
they’ve gone insane.
https://opensource.microsoft.com
and all of these are active and well managed with microsoft employees engaged in communication.
Dart, Go,
Android,
Chromium,
Protocol Buffers, Java Guice/Collections, C++ Abseil
Plus a bunch of minor things
https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured
and stuff Google contributes to but doesn't lead.
So there is much less of a network effect which makes it less valuable. One example: most open source modern OO languages, e.g. Kotlin, Scala, target the JVM, and so are interoperable. Whereas C# is in a closed Microsoft bubble of open source. If it had an LLVM or Java backend, it'd be much more useful.
and saying “most open source modern OO languages ... target the JVM” is not accurate. if you mean modern OO JVM languages, then yea, of course, but that is satisfied analogously by the .NET languages.
the c# and f# compilers, .NET core (libraries and framework), and core CLR (the runtime) are all open source and cross-platform. there isn’t anything closed about it. i don’t know what you mean by “closed microsoft bubble of open source”.
why do the .NET languages need LLVM or JVM implementations to be useful? again, that doesn’t make sense.
Google however maintains a few products that can easily be considered standard, or at least will find their way in any other developer stack.
if you use google’s open source projects are you now a google developer?
and visual studio code is probably used more for web development than it is .net work. it certainly is the major selling point of it on the website.
I really don't know a lot of people who do anything with the MS stack. And those who do code on and for Microsoft (which already is a minority)
I personally don't know anyone who switched from Atom or Sublime to VS. Only VS users I know have been using real VS before.
Additionally, I find it comical that you would even suggest that a company that has sued other companies for using open source software is even in the conversation with companies that have championed open source software since their inception.
There is no undo button. All you can do is be better than what you were. If Microsoft really wants to start doing a better job in the open source community they can start by agreeing to never sue another company for using Linux.
Change of heart? Why? I think they are doing a pretty smart move to be friendly towards open source community, but it's not because I believe they changed their mind and want to contribute to the open source world, instead, I simply believes they embrace open source community is because it's good for business.
You see, open source software these years became pretty good and infrastructural. If Microsoft can't be a part of it, then they will soon be obsolete. And they don't want to be obsolete, so they just can't afford to not be a friend with open source.
The real thing that I curious about is what would happen when Microsoft managed to re-dominates the software market (in both user and enterprise end). Will they still be friendly with open source community after that?
It was always stupid to be against OSS from a business perspective and so long as developers hand over their IP on a platter it always will be - Microsoft would be really stupid to turn away free money, and they seem to realize this now.
Often, it was "programmer solve thyself".
Businesses have only been employing significant numbers to work on open source projects for the last decade.
They want an undo button? It's right under their nose: stop with the bullshit auto-update that re-enables itself, document all telemetry and make a big button to disable it.
But they don't do that, do they? Any idea why? Spoiler: it's all fake bs again, take one flashy but insignificant step forward and take 3 covert snake-like steps back.
I'm not a fan of the telemetry either, but they do have it all documented now, which is more than, for example, most phone manufacturers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level....
And I'm not sure what Windows is supposed to force users into things they don't want. I haven't had an issue with turning off functionality and having it be switched back on during updates - I guess it must happen based on the complaints, but it's not something I've experienced.
They didn't exactly help themselves, firing their QA team, and using their users as the test platform.
Microsoft aren't the only company that need constant security updates: I've never seen any complaints about Chrome's.
But really that's my only complaint!
When updates that only add telemetry (Windows 7), or that upgrade an installed Windows 7 / 8 to Windows 10 without even asking, among other garbage, are classified as "critical security updates" by Microsoft, it really should come as no surprise that people disable all automatic updates in response.
Even if they plan to keep good will support for strategic relational reasons, that good will is easy to go away with strategy changes.
Bloomberg got an honest laugh out of me.
In 2017 it was iMac Pro, HomePod. In 2016 it was Apple Watch Updates. In 2015 it was El Capitan.
> For Microsoft to trot this out during WWDC is a real thunder-stealer. It’s nice to see global-platform capitalism played with a little verve.
Or something.
Of course, there’s only so much you can do and make on such a small screen, and it is an accessory rather than a “primary” device, but that is another issue altogether, if one.
I think it may even function as a motion control input for the rumored VR headset they’re planning.
And is anyone seriously trying to pass off Dark Mode as a MINOR feature? It can be a significant productivity and wellness boost for many people who have to look at a screen all day. Microsoft has struggled for decades to achieve universal consistency across their OS even for a single system theme, and they still haven’t gotten it right, whereas Apple is already doing seamless switching of UI appearances across many apps (this is more than just changing the colors; I’m currently watching their WWDC session about it, and the amount of thought they’ve put into it and how easy they’ve made it to implement is impressive imo.)
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swis...
Being able to check messages, calls, Uber, flights, etc. right on my wrist are all killer applications for me, along with the fitness features of course.
I suspect the upcoming walkie-talkie will be fun too (something that should’ve been there from the start.)
> Which developer wants to miss out on serving potentially millions of users?
You are forgetting that most developers already have millions of potential users on the iPhone with a market at least 30x bigger than the Watch's, and iOS has none of the limitations the Watch has.
Right now a Watch app requires an iPhone app, is hard to monetize, it cannot be sold on its own, it's slow and frustrate your users, etc. The only upsides are for Apple. It might sell really well because the core functionality provides enough value, but developers need to see a clear return for their efforts and right now is not there.
Right now there is no reason for Youtube to make a watch app, and no reason for you to pick Vimeo over Youtube because it has a watch app.
I've seen users requesting a Watch version in reviews for iOS apps. Even I have chosen some apps in the past over others specifically because they offered a Watch app, like navigation apps and flight checkers etc.
As a user though, I must say that if "monetizing" and "selling on its own" are more important concerns for you than make your product/service a better experience for ME, then I probably wouldn't want to use any of your apps.
Having notifications and basic functionality on your wrist is surprisingly useful though, and I used that watch until it broke (after Pebble went under unfortunately).
I've got a Ticwatch E on it's way as a replacement.
Stuff the old ones do better (even today) but the Apple replacements are all that + constant years of OS upgrades and a stronger app ecosystem.
Though I have some philosophical and design issues with Apple, the biggest thing, the #1 requirement of any smartphone for me, is a notification LED for messages. I like seeing at a glance who or what is notifying me. Why is an LED so important? Because I want to identify a message quickly, without my phone always in my pocket (e.g. it's on my desk or next to the bed). With a watch accessory, for many, that need would go away.
Indeed. Waking up to that cacophony can mar one's entire day.
Apple's strategy is a blue-ocean one - they brought Apple users and active-lifestyle folks into a relative staid luxury goods market and (aside from an initial stumble with series-0 edition) co-opted the market and transformed it.
It wasn't exactly as powerful as the move to smartphones, and tech was moving there already but it's really great that my Apple watch is part of my work (2nd factor), lifestyle (Strava), and family (timer+music controls).
There's room for improvement but it gets the useful parts right.
Also, niche? I literally see Apple Watches everywhere. At first I was surprised because all I read online was how the AW was a flop. I hope I can be part of a niche product as successful as the AW one day. /s
That's rather "big fish in a small pond" in 2018, though, isn't it? It's like making the best-selling model of recumbent bicycle in the world.
Maybe another analogy would be some kind of specialized shoe.
People don't buy many watches, because they last a long time.
Last time I bought a watch was 7 years ago, and it still works fine. It's probably got another 3 years before I need to change the battery.
I think the last time my old man bought a watch was some time in the 80's or 90's.
Smartwatches can fix that problem. Obsolete in 1 year, battery failure in 2 years, incompatible with app ecosystem in 5 years.
I take the dog for a walk at lunchtime, or take an afternoon off. I can listen to music (Apple Music is crap) and receive texts. Clients can call me.
But I don’t get the normal smartphone distractions. And going places with just your keys, headphones and watch is really nice on my pockets too.
Microsoft is trying to ensure they retain relevance in a world where Google has successfully shaken their dominance, and having a service that's effectively become a commonly used piece of web infrastructure be under their umbrella as opposed to Google's (or Salesforce's, or Oracle's, or Dell EMC's) is an obvious win for them.
Microsoft always was about developers and getting them into their ecosystem and I do not think this is evil. It's business.
People act like the Open Source strategy is so much different from the Ballmer days but is it really? From a business perspective they tried to throw rocks into the paths of Open Source as a thing, and it did not work. It just alienated more developers. Logical conclusion is to blend in. And so they did.
Apart from that, with Open Source being kind of a de facto default for the past decade, it just becomes so much harder to find engineers who would work at a company not respecting the ideas behind Open Source development.
Microsoft is now sitting at the focal point for the majority of Open Source efforts. And it has a kill switch in its' hands.
The reformed Microsoft is the old Microsoft. It just learned a few tricks from the Open Source community.
So, based on this underlying assumption, what does Microsoft by gaining by using this kill switch? Heck, what does it even gain by appearing to threaten people with this kill switch? It's worse that no benefit, it's actively harmful for them.
So, why are we discussing about them this way? They're not irrational.
So to add two things to clarify: personally I do not see any of this as good/evil. It's business.
But one catch: business is comprised of human beings, thus it often _is_ irrational :-)
I’ve had a few (small) ideas but I’m confident that Microsoft already has people much more evil^W^Wsmarter than me working on this very problem (if it wasn’t already figured out beforehand).
I don't really get the deal with github and privacy right now. However it is obvious that this could upset many OS devs who avoided MS
The "actual data" doesn't get uploaded to Github but Microsoft has been working on getting their hands on that too -- see Azure, Windows 10 telemetry, etc.
(I used to actually like Microsoft Windows -- having ran every consumer version from 3.0 up to 7 and every business version from WFWG 3.11 up to 2008 -- and even earned several Microsoft certifications. I even taught courses on Microsoft server operating systems at a .edu for a few years. But... I've probably only spent 5 minutes on a Windows 8.x machine (and it wasn't mine) and have never used Windows 10 (or 2012 or 2016). Unless something major happens, I will never again run any Microsoft operating system on anything I own. For the last several years, I have simply been unable to trust them as a company.)
Also, I would note that the teams that work on Windows and Office, and the teams that work on .NET and Microsoft's other big open source initiatives, might as well belong to two different companies from the differences in how they appear to approach things. Your upset that one product of Microsoft's chose to implement something that everyone else in the industry was doing years earlier does not really justify the nonsense FUD.
For MS that means now cloud services, Office & Windows + some other smaller income stuff. In each of these areas they are aggressively pursuing their interests: the ODF scandal and Munich Linux project come to mind. The rest they can open-source freely and without any negative repercussions, it just makes business sense for the goodwill they will receive.
Please note that there are also many private repos and there's also github desktop.
I use GitHub Desktop for some things myself, but it's only slightly more capable than GitHub's web interface: Serviceable for basic operations, but probably not the Git client professional developers are going to rely on.
Microsoft realised relatively recently, like Google did a long time ago, that they can give away the sources to the non business-essential stuff and make money through services and exploiting user data.
.Net core, a text editor, those are the trinkets that keep the naive developers happy and content that they support a company that is open-source "friendly".
That's why open-source is no longer enough today. The big corps are working around it and locking in customers with their SaaS products (which surprise surprise are closed).
For example I avoid the GPL for our business because I use JavaScript, and it seems to me all of our JavaScript code would need to be open sourced if we used any GPL based JavaScript code (because JavaScript is source code and it isn't linked).
To me, that's a benefit :)
GitHub will be the only Microsoft product I use, but I'll give them a chance.
Why sell better things when your customers are locked-in and you can force them to buy garbage?
Big companies are reactive. They have no need to innovate. In fact, innovation usually harms business. Domination via lock-in is much more lucrative. GitHub offers lock-in via the social developer graph.
Great read.
It’s a great read (and good for a few laughs) for “nerds”, sure, but it still doesn’t explain to non-techies what Github is (besides “some thing that programmers use instead of e-mail”) — or, more importantly, why it’s worth $7.5B.
"You mean like 'Track changes' in Word?"
No pun
The SO documentation site thing was gone before I could think about using it.
Spolsky has a long and impressive resume. What was he doing during the SO era if not working on SO?
"Jeff started working on the code in April 2008, recruited two other programmers to join him (Geoff and Jarrod, who are still here), and the three of them heroically launched what became Stack Overflow in September 2008."
I'm guessing he was running Fog Creek Software, as its CEO.
Red hat is not secretly pushing anything on anybody. If something is better than Systemd, clearly other distributions will go that route and try to outcompete Redhat... No?
I see Redhat as the enterprise seller of Linux. They are catering to Enterprise needs and supporting where they go (even Systemd) what is wrong with that?
If you're mad that Debian followed RH's steps and adapted Systemd, then you should be mad at Debian not Redhat?
Disclaimer: I have no association with RedHat in any sense. Just trying to ask why Redhat is always blamed for Systemd.. I don't particularly enjoy systemd either.
Probably because Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee and wrote systemd while working for them?
Not a comment on whether systemd is good or not, but... the author being paid to write it as an employee of the company is a reasonable reason to believe they are responsible for it's creation.
Sure, a RedHat employee built something that Redhat wanted for their major Linux distribution. Why does the community direct hate at RedHat for it being everywhere? If it is deemed as not good by the community, the distributions are free to develop alternatives...
Perspective is everything.
For me it's:
> Redhat? The company that managed to standardize the init system across distributions, thereby making it trivial to create robust system services for Linux?
And why is the rest cruft? Are the extras technically inferior? Can they be compiled out if you wish?
- Colonialism consisted in annexing territory, forcing them to use your flag, sing your anthem, and work for you under penalty of violence.
- Neocolonialism consists into forcibly indebt countries, so they direct all their productive efforts into paying you a never-ending debt. A country can keep its flag, its anthem, its culture, can celebrate its independence day... but for economic purposes it is indistinguishable from a colony. This is done by gaining influence over those countries, so they act in the best interest of a foreign power: lobbying.
The idea of Microsoft is to allow open source to happen, but to happen in terms that are favorable to them. Like having people work with their OS, their tools, their APIs, their cloud, use their authentication services, etc.
This is achieved by gaining influence over the governance of high profile open source projects. Either by having their full time employees collaborate into an open source project, or by directly buying companies, like the case of Github. In either case, in the end, the idea is to obtain control over open source projects to steer them into a direction that benefits Microsoft.
As a mentioned earlier, the modus operandi is to either infiltrate projects or buying a company. When they've decided to acquire companies, the results are more aggressive and more visible, and are in my opinion not good:
- Skype: Linux version is largely unmaintained relative to other versions, UX is inferior.
- Xamarin: Standalone Windows IDE was abandoned, now you should use Visual Studio. Xamarin Studio for mac was rebranded Visual Studio for Mac. No Linux version is planned despite community requests.
- Minecraft: Java client development left behind with inferior investment, no feature parity with native Windows client.
- Microsoft R Open / MRAN: Encourages people to adopt a vendor specific flavor of R, and use vendor specific repositories, moving away from R and CRAN.
And for Github, I would not be surprised if it starts getting coupled with Microsoft products, like Azure, Visual Studio, etc... to the detriment of other tools.
Even if it doesn't happen at all, I am not over punishing Microsoft for what it did in the past. Without provocation, they attacked noble and altruistic developers sacrificing man years of their own personal time to the benefit of open source software, providing this generation with the tools they use today to put food in their table. Like the Linux kernel team. Microsoft called Linux and open source licenses "cancer". Never forget.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Microsoft HN voting ring. If that's not the case I wonder why would HN users act in their own best interest? (having all software controlled by a corporation)
Web browsers (Chrome, Firefox...), Math packages (Mathematica, Maple, RStudio)... and others like Spotify, Steam...
You should try enabling snapshots.
I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site?
Is the cost of moving to another platform, really that difficult??
If you built your company around GitHub team management, yes.
If you integrate with 3rd party services that function via GitHub, yes.
If you depend on an open source community which is primarily connected through GitHub, yes.
If I were to tell my team right now we were moving away from Github I'm pretty sure there'd be riots and fire. We rely on the hooks to tell us when things are being merged and we rely on PRs to do code review. Even the wikis are maintained and contain relevant information. No one does that. Corporate wikis are a black hole of shit, and somehow our Github wiki isn't.
The MS sales team is most likely currently engaged in some Defcon 2 sales planning in a war room bunker deep underground. Deals are going to happen, upsells will be sought. Account managers are being dropped from helicopters. Quotas are coalescing off the shoulder of Orion. Contracts are glittering at the Facebook compound gates. All of these deals will be won in time, making it rain.
Why would you move from Google to Bing?
For open source projects of multiple contributors, yes, because that's where the community is, along with all relevant traces, e.g. issues, comments, PRs, all linked to their user's accounts.
I've seen people here suggest that GitLab's import tool is pretty good in importing the history of issues. It's also a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, but beyond the import, the problem is that the community isn't there.
Not to mention that many projects have been uninspired enough to use GitHub as their homepage, which means that the web is littered with links to GitHub that aren't replaceable.
I've seen people here downplay the difficulty of moving off GitHub. Such people do not maintain popular or multi-contributor open source projects.
I remember back in the day IRC was the place to be for Debian. Ditto for when I was doing stuff with Perl.
Which is also linked to GitHub accounts and repositories. Ironically, Gitter was bought by GitLab and open sourced, but they haven't changed the implementation to allow for chat rooms linked to GitLab repos. At the glacial pace it is evolving, it wouldn't be unfair to say that Gitter is probably relying solely on OSS contributions at this point.
- https://gitter.im/scala/scala
- https://gitter.im/scala-js/scala-js
- https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats
- https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats-effect
Maybe a universal identity provider is required.
GPG does not solve identity, it requires additional networking (like WoT or TOFU) before it can begin to function as an identity tool.
I use the public GitHub many times a month. More importantly, every single job I've had for nearly the past decade has stored its code in GitHub. Not publicly accessible, and rarely at a private github.com account; every place I work uses a privately hosted GitHub Enterprise server. I wouldn't even consider using anything else, even though GitLab (and to a lesser extent, BitBucket) offer exactly the same functionality.
GitHub was groundbreaking when it arrived. Some people are having an emotional reaction and defecting to GitLab this month (for reasons that escape me), but GitHub has all the inertia. More importantly, GitHub has a vast community. It's just where code lives now.
I'm curious as to what sort of development you do or where you work that you're not a regular GitHub user. It's inescapable in every software company I've worked at since its inception, and as a consultant, that's a huge number of companies in nearly every industry. The only place I've worked in the past decade that didn't use GitHub was an all-Windows shop that used some horrible old proprietary revision control system whose name escapes me. Do you use git but not use GitHub (public or private or enterprise)?
On Bitbucket you pay for developer and have infinite private projects.
On GitHub is you pay for private projects and have infinite developers.
If one company has many projects and few developers, Bitbucket is cheaper.
I also have small customers who don't even know what a repository is. I self host with gitolite (I don't need a web interface, only push and pull) and give access to the most illuminated of them to a self hosted Redmine server for managing tickets. I write documentation in Redmine's wikis.
That is the legacy pricing model. Their new pricing model matches Bitbucket: https://github.com/pricing
Still, with Bitbucket we can have unlimited private repositories for free up to 5 users, then it's $2 per user. With GitHub unlimited private repository come at $7 per month, then it's $5 per month for the first 5 users and $9 for the others.
I can move. But it's definitly not painless.
Also, my impression was that young coders don't have Microsoft loathing that is held by programmers who were new before Git/GitHub were invented.
Additionally -- unlike GitHub or LinkedIn -- Skype was acquired for its technology. Microsoft used Skype to replace both Windows Live Messenger and Lync. They integrated it into Windows and extended it with various features to fit their use cases.
They already announced they will keep GitHub independent much like they did with LinkedIn. We will likely see some minor integrations like deploying to Azure or maybe GitHub Enterprise with Office 365. But this isn't anything like Skype where Microsoft pretty much bought the company to scrap its technology for parts.
EDIT: Also when criticizing MS don't make the mistake of mixing up complaints about MS with general complaints about acquisitions. GitHub was going to be acquired by someone. It's difficult imagine GitHub having a better fate after being acquired by Facebook, Apple or Google. The only other alternative I can think of would have been Amazon, who would likely have integrated GitHub fully with AWS much like they did with Cloud9 IDE.
No, it was not. The technology was NOT worth billions of dollars.
It was bought for the existing userbase and network effects. And rumours are that also for some payment-or-something-in-kind from the NSA, which wanted it to be run by a friendlier-to-the-NSA company.
There were quite a few competitors at the time, some with comparable firewall penetration ability and call quality, which could have been bought for a fraction of the price. But none had the ubiquity, userbase or network effects of skype.
- "Microsoft does this and that"
- "Oooo, that's not fair, Google has been doing it too"
- "Patents"
- "Oooo, that's not fair, Oracle has been doing it too"
- "Privacy"
- "Not fair, Facebook has been doing it too"
Predictable arguments that for the purposes of judging Microsoft are irrelevant.
Look, we all know that companies are meant to turn a profit. People are meant to survive too, but in society you don't get a carte blanche to act as you see fit in order to survive or make money.
When you do shit to others, some people will never, ever forgive you. That's just how society works. So you know, in case you're in management, might do well to consider the long term ramifications of the company's actions. That's just life, sorry.
Let's see after more years if they can pull it off.
But to answer, yes, if I were alive and if I would have suffered through the war like my grandparents before me, I couldn't have forgiven them as it would be my prerogative. So what can I say, I guess Microsoft will have to wait for those alive during the Halloween Documents to be either dead or really old.