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Comment by notveryrational | Hacker News Reader

Nothing where they are going to gas all the developers or something. Nope.

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.

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> Microsoft doesn't care about the developers. It cares about having the dominant platform.

"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.

the problem here is that the self-interests of github and microsoft might differ fundamentally.

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.

FOSS will interpret Microsoft as damage and route around it.

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.

Looks like a pretty strong exit from GitHub to GitLab.

Just hope most go to a common place which appears it will be GitLab.

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?

But GitLab has an open core and GitHub is closed source.

that doesn't matter much, as the platform is only one side, while the hosting/service angle is the other. ultimately, hosting your code yourself is the only safe option, but of course it comes with its own downsides.

I think GP's point is that the nature of MicroSoft, as a platform, isn't lined up with your interests. They aren't looking to be developer friendly--that is, present you, as a developer more and better options.

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.

This is getting tinfoil hattery.

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.

Historically, Microsoft made a good platform. People wanted to use it. Then Microsoft consistently, over a period of years, in several different directions, tried to use the fact that people used Microsoft's platform to make it harder for people to use other platforms or products.

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.

> But they've been the best for developers.

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.

I don't trust self interest.

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.

People who care about their craft are still driven by self interest: it's just that their internal value/utility puts a higher weight on the craft itself: since they get more out of the process of creating things that have craftsmanship, they are not distracted by the opportunity to make 5 cents more per loaf (or whatever).

> 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.

>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.

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.

You've got it backwards. They are able to make a living happily doing their craft because there is a portion of the market that values their craft. They didn't choose their craft because they recognized their was a market for it. They chose their craft out of love of the craftsmanship.

Arguments like this fundamentally misunderstand human psychology. And this is why the economic model of the "rational man" is fundamentally flawed.

Lol this post shows an amazing savior complex. These poor altruistic artists just want to work for meagre amounts and no profit but thankfully heroes like you appreciate their craft and are unwilling to let them peddle their wares for anything lower than a healthy profit margin.

It has nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with the fact that most people are not driven by the hoarding of wealth. Most people recognize the need to make a profit because they need to survive and support their families, but it is not their primary motivator. If it were, there'd be millions more entrepreneurs than there are, and few people willing to work endless factory or desk jobs. For most people, they are primarily motivated to do things they enjoy doing. For the sorts of crafts people I'm talking about, those things are engaging in their craft.

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.

That’s totally backwards. Most people do their jobs because it pays the bills. Most people don’t have careers, with some glorious internal narrative in which they’re the protagonist. They have jobs. If they’re lucky or good spirited, they’ll find satisfaction or even enjoyment in their work. But they work because it gives them the means to get what they need and do at least some of what they really want to do.

Tho sarcastic, I upvoted you because you’re on target.

You are conflating self-interest with greed. That is a great mistake in trying to understand Adam Smith. They are not the same thing.

Values, ethics, morals... are part of self-inrerst for lots of people.

Sure, you could argue that, and maybe Adam Smith was at the time. It's been a long time since I've read him, I'd have to go back and re-read it to decide to what degree I think he's making that argument. But that is not how most people understand self interest in an economic context and that is not how Adam Smith is mostly wielded today (see the post I'm responding to for an example). Most people understand "self interest" to be "financial self interest" of the sort that supposedly is the primary driver of the modern economic idea of the "rational self interested person" who operates in markets.

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.

Of course: that is why Adam Smith speaks of people and not corporations. And I was speaking of people as well.

Corporations are a different subject matter.

Fair enough. However, the context of this discussion -- and the modern economic context -- is made up primarily of corporate actors.

Which is one more reason why the application of Adam's philosophy doesn't make sense.

Careful, Friedman and Hayek basically took Smith's theories warped it beyond recognition, and it is these two men that most of western economics has been tirelessly focused on this last few decades.

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.

Well, exactly, that is in another way, what I am stating: rational self interest is inherently unmeasurable because "rationality" is not something that can be objectively counted. So at any time one should assume that people act in their "self-interest": what at the time they deem "better" (in whatever their will decides is "better" at that point). I am not arguing that people never change or never act wrongly or never do things harmful to themselves. I am arguing that if one wants to "objectivize" their actions then one should assume that their decisions show their interests and their values at each time.

I like your answer. But you say : "are part of self interest". In which way ? What puts self interest above those traits to make it encompass them ? 'cos I'd argue that if values, morals, ethics are part of self interest, then self interest is not much more than "personality". If so, self interest is not a concept that is very useful in itself... (no I didn't read A.Smith)

then it’s practically a tautology

Most of western philosophy is just a bunch of tautologies. That is what makes it interesting.

how do you figure?

Evidently not to the extent that we can rely on self-interest as a viable regulatory mechanism.

I've met a large number of great craftsmen who I would rate trustworthy and who are driven first by craftsmanship and for whom self-interest is a secondary interest.

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.

Agreed. And we're suffering all kinds of negative consequences from this system. I think one of the great economic questions facing our generation is "How can we keep the efficiencies of scale we've gained while reintroducing the craftman's motivations and ethics that have been lost?"

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).

I'll never understand the middlebrow hate directed at America's most iconic brands. McDonalds made real business ownership a possibility for an entire generation of people that would have never had the resources to do something on that kind of scale. I actually like McDonalds' food, it's simple but endearing.

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.

I’d argue your craft beer, artisanal cheese, and hand-made distressed-wood furniture are all made out of self interest. You’ve simply chosen to believe the marketing positioning statements delivered by their million-dollar companies: that they operate out of some passion for a craft rather than increasing shareholder value.

> 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.

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.

Microsoft successfully pushed internet explorer to the front by making it cheaper and more accessible than Netscape. If they didn’t, the internet may have still lacked competition today and you’d still be paying money for Netscape. The foresight and competition that Microsoft brang to the browser market was probably the most significant factor for the adoption of the internet by the whole world back in those days.

I never, ever paid for a version of Netscape. Hardly anyone did.

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.

If you never paid, well that’s because you entered the scene after Microsoft’s commoditising effect of the browser market had taken effect. You now had a choice.

You've got your history wrong. Free browsers were always available. Mosaic first, Netscape and then Firefox, with plenty of other lower market share offerings. Microsoft didn't commoditize anything.

Netscape was basically shareware - it cost money, but hardly anyone paid for it.

Since shareware is kind of an alien concept these days, many people remember Netscape as "always free" but it was not really.

Many users would have obtained Navigator from ISP and magazine cover disks etc. So those copies would have been paid for as part of the price of the magazine or connection.

The butcher, the brewer and the baker have no ability to alter my biochemistry so I can't consumer other people's meat, beer and bread. So I am unafraid that they will harm me with vendor lock-in.

Microsoft, on the other hand...

> The butcher, the brewer and the baker have no ability to alter my biochemistry so I can't consumer other people's meat, beer and bread.

Yet. :-)

I trust those who exhibit exclusive self-interest to throw me under the bus the moment it is good for them. The term for it is selfishness. And you can usually count on a large corporation to be selfish sociopath. It is the job of society and the public to constrain the selfish they do not harm others through their greed.

You don't trust the creators of Python or Linux then, eh?

Feels like a page out of The Dictators Handbook:

> 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.

Oculus is vaporware, right? I don't see anything that encourages me that whatever thing they were aiming at will be a thing?

If I'm wrong, I'd like an example of something that justifies the hype

What have you tried so far? Doom VFR Edition? Skyrim VR? VR porn?

VR’s hype is easily justified.

It's not vaporware. It's available for purchase, and it fulfills its advertised purpose as a video game peripheral. The ecosystem of available games could be better, but it's far from stillborn.

Vaporware is software/hardware that is never actually manufactured or released to the public. Oculus has released the Rift, the Go and (with Samsung) the Gear VR, which are all available in stores now. All are successful, if relatively niche, products performing as intended, which is the opposite of vaporware.

> "its Machiavellian in its application of corporate strategy"

I'd say, rather, simply, "it's corporate in its application of strategy". Which is to say, Microsoft is a business.

As someone with no real stake in this deal, why should anyone care whether Microsoft kills Github or not? There are multiple alternative Git hosting competitors and switching costs are low.

The cost to copy a repo over is low, but you lose all the social aspects. You don't copy over forks or stars. People who want to fork your repo and make pull requests need to sign up for a new service. Old links to your repo on GitHub won't work anymore.

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.

You could pull in all forks also.

I don't have control over forks people make of my projects. Luckily, this concern is more of a hypothetical for me, as only one person has forked one of my personal projects on GitHub. I'm much more concerned about stars and hyperlinks no longer leading to the real repo when people follow them.

I did the same. I'm replacing the README on GitHub with "Moved to https://gitlab.com/... and a description of what the software does. If people finds it interesting they will follow the link.

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.

Even when I disregard the inate desire of humans for popularity, forks and esp. stars are a sometimes-useful signal for the size of your user base. If I have 10 repos with 1-3 stars and 1 repo with 100 stars, that is useful information to consider when planning the next project.

You sound like gitlab is the "right" choice.

Maybe, or maybe there is an emerging space for a service that would count stars, forks, etc on all versions of a repository and aggregate the values. But I would hate another centralized service.

This could be a kind of git search hub.

Isn't GitLab a centralized service?

I'm not worried about myself with the stars and forks, I'm worried about the people who starred and forked my repo and the costs that moving my repo has on them.

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.

This is in part some naming annoyance. Bitbucket let you once use your own domains for repos. Which was nice as you could migrate if you wanted.

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.

I don't mind not getting notifications or having my stars tracked. I just want people to be able to easily star/fork my repo if they want to keep track of or personalize it. That's harder when it's a moving target.

I don't care if they kill Github. It's the reverse. I'm worried that they will be successful.

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.

I'm not entirely understanding your point. You state that Microsoft's fear has been that their next major competitor will be an independent/hobbyist, yet then go on to describe how they've made life great for these guys while simultaneously putting the squeeze on more established studios. And I generally agree with this, though I don't think it's particularly nefarious - it's the established studios that can afford to drop 4 figures a seat a year on licenses - by trying to charge that to independents, they mostly just push people potential customers away from their toolchain.

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.

Do you think the founders of GitHub, who after the sell to Microsoft will be the 2nd largest owner's of Microsoft stock, started GitHub because they "cared about developers"?[1]

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...

> Microsoft doesn't care about the developers. It cares about having the dominant platform.

It'll need to start caring to a degree, and catering to them, in order to achieve this

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