Everyone complaining about MS buying GitHub needs to offer a better solution
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Sometimes it's clear how a particular solution is negative but beyond that we don't have the breath or depth of knowledge to suggest the alternative or it is not our job to spend the time to come up with one. Yet we may have enough experience in a particular aspect of it to know about a significant downside of the choice.
It always just seems like a way of dismissing valid criticism by someone who supports the choice and not addressing the criticism.
Edit: grammar & spelling
Only if the people making the decision are comptent and already considered the issues.
This is false.
Some people may not have given the matter consideration. When they don't they may accept the bad solution as normal, and "normal" often rightly or wrongly leads people to jump to the conclusion that the solution is proper. I've many times had to argue against something where the argument in favor was "we've always done it that way."
Pointing out that a solution is bad records challenges that can be met and satisfied in producing a new solution. But if no one notices, or those who do never say anything, then people will tend to assume it is normal and therefore proper.
MS not buying GitHub?
The complaints against MS buying it are not because are not made with the consideration that the deal is bad for GitHub itself.
That being said I like the direction they are going in but I’m sure people liked the direction they were going in before thier change of heart towards open source too.
Putting your project on github is the best way to ensure that you have the largest possible number of eyes on it. And if something better comes along, you can always copy your repo there. I don't see what you lose by hosting on github.
Potentially. Or it means that your work becomes diluted and lost in the ocean. The Instagram problem: many eyes but they're focused on a few targets. Most 'normal' posters will have only a handful of followers and a few 'likes'.
If you have a specialised codebase, say something to do with astrophotography, putting it on Github isn't really going to launch it into the mainstream with thousands of contributors who just stumbled upon it. People who need it will find it by other channels regardless of where it is hosted.
OMG, what about the whole antitrust case of the USA against Microsoft in the 2000ies?
I can't read any other paragraph written by "journalists" like those.
If I go to a doctor with an ailment, or the Agora with a public grievance, the notion of admitting and communicating that there's a problem is an essential step. Identifying etiologies, goals, and solutions ("getting there from here") are also necessary, but independent steps that need not be initiated or accomplished by the same people.
Sorry, but I'm tired of this very tired trope.
A key problem is that infrastructure, information, and information exchanges play poorly with markets and market-oriented institutions: for-profit corporations.
If markets are your problem, marketing-it-harder -- selling the company to a larger and more abusive monopolist -- will probably mean you'll be having a bad day.
MS is the biggest contributor on GitHub, and VSCode/TypeScript are exemplary pieces of open source projects.
Maybe we should wait and see before bashing MS and migrating everything on another centralized for-profit platform?
Of course you know why as the arguments of both sides were presented here ad nauseam, you just aren't convinced by them. In short, people who witnessed faul play by Microsoft that lasted for many years and their attitude towards users as presented in Windows 10 aren't convinced they should be the owner of GitHub.
The monoploist practice of bundling the browser with the OS isn't to blame at all?!
/s
I still have bad memories of those two from time when Windows 8 was released. Immediately before the release, arstechnica instituted down-voting. Then, upon release there were a flurry of articles (Mostly from Bright) talking about how great Windows 8 was, what a game changer etc. etc. In the comments anyone questioning the validity of that view was downvoted out of site.
Beyond that though, the article encourages and exemplifies the most blatant form of armchair CEO-ing.
The tech press has gleaned clicks from their fawning yet resigned corporate strategy fantasies for so long that now their headlines straight up demand that mentality from their readers.
Microsoft buying them doesn't even solve the problem that they're not financially viable right now. Unless cutting HR and other support roles is enough to bump them to profitability, but I doubt it.
At this point it's too late, though, because this sale is a direct consequence of them taking VC funding a few years back. How was a website for hosting source code ever going to satisfy venture capitalists looking for a big pay out?