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Comment by matchagaucho | Hacker News Reader

What are the reasons for distrusting Microsoft to be good stewards?

Do they have a good record with acquisitions? I doubt they'll be evil, but another Skype seems likely, where the product gets worse and weirder for reasons that make no sense.

I agree. Microsoft simply can’t resist pissing on whatever they buy, just to make sure we know it’s theirs. I can see “Microsoft Source Control Pro 3000” coming, in enterprise and smb versions, and with “git” shadowed in their marketing material. Also Skype collaboration and other hallmarks of their heavy handed lazy and ugly integration ideas.

The classic example is Skype but people forget Skype is a really, really old acquisition at this point. Most of the things done to ruin it were done well over 5 years ago.

Let's not forget GitHub already has enterprise products...

Regardless Microsoft has brought in many acquisitions and didn't ruin them. LinkedIn was kept separate and beyond some integration was left untouched. Same with the vast majority of game studio acquisitions. Let's not forget the Xamarin acquisition has been a huge boon to .Net developers as well as open source initiatives.

Microsoft has new leadership. Most of these arguments I'm seeing on HN are all referring to things that happened under much older leadership. This goes to show Microsoft still has some trust building work to do but at the same time they shouldn't be written off either.

Microsoft is to blame for Skype downfall

Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Microsoft has spent like 4 years building up good will after destroying trust in them for the past 20.

Trust is easily lost and is hard to earn.

GitHub is a company, not a technology. "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" doesn't apply. Unless of course you're worried about them doing that to git itself, not just GitHub.

This is exactly my worry.

1. Embrace Git by buying Github

2. Extend Git, fork git to add Github specific features (Basically integrate https://hub.github.com/ directly into git)

3. Extinguish, by gradually making Github incompatible with the original git. Then stop development on the forked git and push everyone to a proprietary product.

This is complete nonsense. Microsoft has actually _contributed_ to Git. But even outside of that Azure makes them a metric fuck ton of money. They need developer support to continue using Azure which also means Git integration.

They are not going to slowly change git to the point where no one else can use it. Git is opened sourced, by owning GitHub they still can't control Git anyway.

When I left MS about 4 years ago they were working on switching their internal source control over to Git. Not sure on their progress, but that hardly seems like they'd make it incompatible.

Exactly, there are a few MSDN/Channel 9 articles describing the pains of pulling the Windows repo into Git. If anything, Microsoft is going to make Github, and Git, much better. They have the largest code bases in the world, they aren't going to change anything that will disrupt internal processes, but will build tools to help others with massive codebases live better in Github.

I also don't see it - but isn't making Git 'much better' essentially extending it? If they released some kind of tight integration that was actually really useful and only worked well in the github context, don't you think people would use it? I can't imagine what form such a thing would take, but it definitely seems possible.

I get that there are reasons to distrust MS, I'd like to hear the reasons for trusting Microsoft LESS than pre-acq Github.

It might not be about Microsoft specifically.

It might just be about github no longer being independent.

Or it might more to do with the $7.5 billion sale price, and a wish not to join in a game of "you have to be on github because everyone will look for you on github because everyone else is on github".

(So much the same reason as some people leave Facebook: a wish not to be someone else's product.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Skype and arguably Nokia are two I can think of from the top of my head.

You haven't read the Halloween document yet?

stigma

As far as I can tell, it's because they did some bad things in 1995 and therefore can never be trusted again.

Not just 1995. Windows 10 spyware/crapware is a fundamental violation of the customer's interests in my book.

EDIT: is/was, I've heard they turned some of it down supposedly.

Skype was far more recent than 1995. They have integrated a lot of companies over time and some have done vastly better than others. The risk may be low, but the impact is high enough many are just going to jump asap.

If you lived through that time, you wouldn't be so flippant

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