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Comment by lotia | Hacker News Reader

Seeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony. They have profited greatly from locking up access to academic papers in their most prestigious journals.

The article includes the following tweet:

“Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code. I hope that expert coders in #openscience have a viable alternative to #github,” tweeted Tom Johnstone, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK.

Github's current position is to be default open with a paid option for private. Nature's default position was to lock up journal articles and sell them for extortionate prices.

It's surprising to see them post an article noting that scientists feel MS will change that for the worse. They have been good participants in the open source community of late specially under Mr. Nadella's leadership.

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Nature is also not an Open Access or Open Science journal at all, and furthermore, does not require authors to publish all of their data for replication purposes.

It's incredibly hypocritical. If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature.

> If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature.

True, but perhaps the thinking goes: we'll publish another paper in an open journal, so we can have our cake and eat it too.

When I was an academic, the thinking was: if I manage to publish in Nature then I might actually be able to get a postdoc when my current one / PhD runs out. Otherwise I'll go open.

Nature expressly allows preprints. You can put your Nature paper on arXiv at any point, before or after review. Authors are perfectly able to open their papers themselves. Authors also retain all copyrights.

https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html

I’m no fan of big publishing, but Nature’s policy is ok in this respect, and better than eg. IEEE.

See I hope that "expert" coders understand that 'git push' works even on non-MS controlled endpoints, and how to setup a damned wiki if need be...

GitHub is stupid valuable for MS, and will make their dev tools offerings much stronger (TFS is a dog, bringing GitHub Enterprise into MS Enterprise support & sales cycle is gonna make a loooot of scratch). But the value of the GitHub community persists only so long as the community is present. MS can't start destroying Open Science, because Open Science will be open any- and everywhere.

Frankly, disciplines should be creating their own community hubs and portals based on Git and the publishing standards of GitHub: leveraging GitHubs infrastructure and standards while capturing and engaging with the relevant users. That way they can always migrate and maintain the community.

Besides, even cynically MS is more likely to do a bad job of community management trying to upsell related services moreso than poop on things for the sake of pooping on them. If it becomes offensive you'll have a nice window to find a superior collaboration hub.

You can already use GitHub in visual studio. MS didn't have to buy GitHub to integrate with it.

Pretty much the best that can happen is GitHub will now get worse as MS puts in functionality to do with their tools. The worst is they really fuck it up like they did with Skype.

There is not much to be gained by defending Microsoft. But from my view, my appreciation for their tooling is highly correlated with my own technical maturity. I spent about a decade primarily Mac, ran several Linux servers and developed from my Mac environment. But in the last few years I have switched to surface book and a windows development environment. It does not totally suck. Especially, now that I’ve got an Ubuntu logo in my taskbar. Actually, it’s awesome. Now, I’m running our production web app on python with gevent on windows server OS using IIS with a reverse proxy. Dead simple to setup. With windows server 2019 we can even use the subsystem for Linux in production. It’s just awesome while Apple only gives a damn if I’m building IOS crap. Did I ever think I’d be doing it like this? Hell no. But it works great. To me, people that bash anything and everything Microsoft tooling leads me to believe they have a lack of technical maturity.

With a few exceptions, the problem with MS has never been their technical chops.

True, they've moved from a malignant stance to a more benign one recently, but their disregard for privacy and partnership with government should still make folks pause to consider. And pause we do.

Yes, I certainly didn't mean that the tool was bad, I use VS and have recently switched to the github extension inside the editor from using a combo of GitHub Desktop (really easy to use, but also incredibly feature lacking, including the new version) and GitTortoise (pretty good but annoyingly reliant on right-clicking in explorer).

I generally much prefer GUIs over command lines as I'm lazy and have a bad memory, so anything off the beaten path involves loads of unnecessary googling to remind me of the right invocation to the CLI gods.

I'd avoided using it for so long because of bad memories of using TFS, but I must admit it's pretty good for generally using git, with only a few minor UI gripes. I must admit I haven't had to do a merge yet because I'm flying solo on my newest project, which is usually the big test.

Or they remember the 90’s and early 0x’s. MS has made a mess of many a fine piece of software in their efforts to ‘integrate’ it with their other offerings.

I really don't get the hate MS gets for Skype.

I used it before the acquisition and it was usually ok, and I've used it since and it's usually ok.

I dont' like how I can't find some menu items because they keep moving, but this happened a lot before, too.

Is it just that they didn't progress the platform? What - specifically - have they done wrong with it?

If you and I were in a group meeting, you would get an alert stating _you_ would not be able to use the good features on this call because _I_ needed to update my skype client.

Of course, only client available to me is the same exact version they bought years before as they never updated with features just bug fixes. You would have been used an unwitting tool as you helpfully mansplained how to overcome my version deficiency.

That seems reasonably understandable from the technical point of view. I'd prefer to know that than the alternative of not knowing why I couldn't use some feature.

If that is the limit of the problems people have with that acquisition then I really fail to understand what the problem is.

It is not reasonable to trick your users into harassing someone who uses a platform for which there is no newer version because MS abandoned it. A more honest technical note would own up for their choice to discontinue adding features.

I have long since deleted it, too many semi-competent users telling me that all you have to do is go to this site and click on this link ...

Well in the general case it’s hardly tricking them, right? For most platforms that is exactly what the user needs to do.

But is that really the worst thing about it? Or have you heard other things?

I’m a desktop Linux users but even I don’t try using Skype on Linux.

There are multiple points of integration between Visual Studio and github, yes.

What there is not is a comprehensive end-to-end support for github based workflows (issues, projects, hooks, wiki-branches, releases), as first class citizens across the entire MS platform. Github Enterprise, sufficiently tailored for MS shops, presents some huge opportunities for scaling dev teams and integrating with other languages and tool chains. I believe there are also significant opportunities in academics: something like VS Code + Jupyter notebooks + deep Github integration, aligned with K-to-PHD and classroom support, strikes right at a core MS's market and would provide significant capture of key users and key metadata.

These are not hurdles of a technically challenging nature, just product design, and will improve their offerings markedly. I see them as givens for their next product updates.

The best that can happen here is a new breed of pre-shared, DCVS based, open source projects and learning tools. MS can't do a lot to stop that, as the tools are already available for GitLab or Atlissan or a monied interest, but MS can do a lot to enable it.

Seeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony.

1. Pointing fingers at someone else as The Bad Guy is a common tactic for diverting attention away from one's own behavior.

2. If Nature is not positioning itself as open source, then they aren't really doing anything ironic. There is nothing inconsistent with not being open source yourself while calling out a threat to open source stuff.

Does the publishing platform invalidates the message?

As to a corporations changing their ways, they do it all the time to accommodate their changing view on profit maximisation.

It's not just Nature magazine. GitHub was a corporation before. Maybe not as big as Microsoft, but a corporation none-the-less. We're just moving from one company owning the repository to another one. Big Deal.

In addition to Microsoft’s evolving attitude toward open source I want to add that I’m surprised at that tweet because Microsoft Research is extraordinarily open and has contributed a lot of freely accessible basic research to society now and in past decades.

Great point contrasting Nature with GH, it was the first thing that came to my mind as well.

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