I kept reading, waiting for the insidious part. So what you're saying is that Microsoft has a company wide strategic vision to improve its relationship with developers?
Did you leave some part out?
Did you leave some part out?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?