Actually I trust Microsoft more with Github than I would trust Google. Never imagined I would say this until few months ago. Also I just left free google consumer services few days ago.
As we're all aware by now, Google is an advertising company (with a heap of technology, but it's still a company which primarily sells advertising).
https://martechtoday.com/google-posts-31-1b-in-total-revenue...
The one thing coming to mind which is not designed to boost advertising is their Pixel line (after they killed the rest of their hardware, of course) but even that is not as much of a standalone activity as it is a way to effectively steer the future of the Android ecosystem.
Ask yourself this: Which Google products or services would have justification as standalone P&L units, without collecting user data and sending it to the mothership? Not too many.
Cloud
X
Waymo
Play (the non-admob parts: app hosting/monetization, licensed content providing (music, movies/tv).
ChromeOS / Classroom
The entire Hardware division (which now includes Nest)
An awful lot of the Geo/Maps org is oriented away from direct advertising.
FWIW, you didn't ask, and my answer didn't include, other significant pieces of Google investment that are not remotely ad driven, like Deepmind & the entire RMI (Research & Machine Intelligence) organizations.
What I am trying to say: The whole online advertising business would not be that creepy if Google and Facebook wouldn't compete on who can track more out of the web users. The reason why we call them an advertising company, is that their core actions are driven by their advertising business. Otherwise, you would consider calling them a search company ;-)
This is what people said about Google too a few years back.
The reality is: Everything they're doing is designed to increase the company value for their shareholders.
That's not exactly true. Both companies have shown that they _will_ switch to selling something different when they believe they can make more money that way.
Also, both these companies spy on you while using their products, and both sell that data to their advertisers. It's not just Google.
You should use both their products as you want, when they help you. My point is mainly not to trust that the company behind the developer products is some kind of a good actor. They will sell you out when it fits them.
It's a bit late.
i skipped the part during installation where it says to enter a key. after install, it says windows is activated, no watermark, no countdown. i don't use it, though. i just don't trust free shit anymore.
Also while MS is good to integrate third party open source projects, it also fails at the same time to address some core concerns of developpers from its own platform. For years people have wanted a portable UI framework for .net but the idea is always dismissed by the higher management. So, I think Microsoft is actually a developer-second, hype-first company.
More than a decade ago the behemoth was Microsoft. Now it's Google. I guess if those positions reversed again I'd go back to being more skeptical of Microsoft.
That's not even remotely true. Powershell core, SQL on Linux, WSL, vs code, etc etc. They're doing their best to give customers choice in just about every new product they release.
Their customers are still primarily enterprise/gov.
And the reason for giving choice and candy to the developers is to keep them onboard and happy to develop for the ecosystem, so that customers will continue to buy in as the ecosystem has what they need.
I'm not saying WSL or VS Code are evil. They make developing on Windows a joy. But they make it a joy with that goal in mind.
The only other apps they're selling on-prem to enterprises are Exchange and AD.
In both cases, their focus is on moving customers to a hosted/cloud based version, so it's not something I would ever expect them to spend a ton of time and effort porting to another on-premises OS. For SMB they've become far, far more open both licensing it to third parties as well as helping out the samba crew with the open source version.
Do you have a single example of them being openly hostile? Or you're just whining about them not open sourcing and giving away the farm?
The spyware literally built into Win 10 - and backported to previous windows - which can't be disabled without third party products?
To me, that's openly hostile to everyone. Note - "everyone" includes developers. I'm not sure why many people seem to give MS a free pass on this. :/
I'm not sure why everyone pretends this is an MS thing and not an industry thing :/
Maybe you're meaning some non-IT industry? eg Marketing?
Nowhere did I claim them to be hostile. I never expressed my thoughts on how they acquire business as good or bad.
All I did was state that "They're doing their best" isn't out of the goodness of their hearts, there's a biz decision behind it.
> Or you're just whining about them not open sourcing and giving away the farm?
Way to try and attack my character. Never said a word of what you're accusing.
With Google I’m not so sure any more. Hopefully I’ll soon be able to say goodbye as well.
Microsoft didn't take over the Evil Empire title until the late '90s, IMO.
If Google wants to throw some of their money on something that end user can fully control, then why not be happy about it?
GitLab is open core, not open source. They say so themselves:
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core-gith...
I'm planning on, once again, spinning up my own mailserver on a $5/mo VPS. Have lots of domains, but not that many users/traffic.
I used to run my own mail server for years but spam was becomming a problem as it always does when running your own system and I thought the pricing of most of the services was poor if you had lots of addresses but didn't send/receive many emails. Spam hasn't been an issue for me with mxroute so far and their infrastructure seems to be pretty solid.
I'm slightly bothered by the fact that their servers are located in the worlds surveillance hotspots no. 2 and 3. but i guess email always has at least 2 involved parties, so it's not exactly "top secret".
If you are the only actual user of those emails accounts, then it's a great option (I have 5+ domains under a single account with them)
I'm always very nervous when it comes to running docker in production. Also, it looks like it (by default) stores emails in a docker container, which in my book is just overcomplicating things. While i don't mind software being containerized, i much prefer having my data stored in the plain old filesystem.
AND they can import your gmail account. They imported mine in a few hours, 4.5gb of mails.
Besides, the risk here is toxic managerial choices, and you can and do swap out VPs and similar over half a decade.
Anecdotally speaking, the culture enforced by Ballmer was not that popular among Microsoft's employees.
What I'm saying is, employees don't get to decide how a company is run.
They haven't bought GitLab