GitHub after Microsoft: How it has changed | Hacker News Reader

GitHub after Microsoft: How it has changed

infoworld.com

19 pointsrbanffy18 comments

Interesting perspective. I'm tempted to move back to GitHub following their allowing free private repos, but I'm also hesitant to trust Microsoft. Might just stay with Bitbucket ..

Moving away from github "cause Microsoft" strikes me as an odd move fueled by 90s and early 2000s spite. I'm sure there are legitimate technical reasons to choose gitlab over github. But for a mature product and development team I saw no need to make the switch in our organization. The sky still hasn't fallen.

The reason to ditch a specialized product after it is acquired by a large, old user hostile firm is because they have the ability to turn the heat up slowly. They can wait you out.

> They can wait you out.

Sure, but git repo hosting is a commodity, unlike, say, controlling the Java ecosystem. The full code and history is maintained on all developer machines (at least for the master branch), and the metadata like issues, PRs etc. can be easily migrated off to GitLab.

It's a commodity until they extend it with stuff that locks you in, like (to be fair) Gitlab is also doing eg. CI, hooks etc. The whole playbook has always been to quietly remove compatibility and take the most locking-in possible approach. (proprietary standards etc etc).

I swear we're not trying to lock you in we're just implementing feature X that's been requested for years. Yes it does break compatibility with Y, but while Y is stable it's outdated and not capable of doing X without too much work.

And if/when they do, you leave once the temperature is too hot.

Doing it before is just premature optimization.

You'll be too entrenched by then and your org will be too dependant. At that point, you'll use fancy mental gymnastics to justify the, for example, impossible to disable telemetry. Get out while you can.

Frogs say the same thing.

Microsoft have never been developer hostile. In fact that's their entire business strategy, keep developers happy and then make integrating with Microsoft's other products the path of least resistance.

GitHub feeds into that. I'm certain we'll see a "deploy to Azure"-like integration soon.

> keep developers happy and then make integrating with Microsoft's other products

The 'then' part of that sentence is the issue. It isn't then.

Microsoft are about keeping developers on the Microsoft stack happy. Historically they don't want anyone using any other stack, so they don't want developers making things for other stacks.

It ultimately comes down to trust. Some people lost trust in GitHub because of the acquisition. With Microsoft still aggressively pushing IE and Bing through their products, I can see why.

Now that Microsoft is moving from selling products to selling cloud services, developer trust is becoming one of its main currencies. Microsoft is trying hard to regain that trust.

I think take precautions is a good thing for this case. It generated benefits for both who stayed and left.

1, Because GitHub need to be careful about their decision, they will likely to give out more to convince people to keep using their product.

2, People now starting to trying tier 2 product from other companies, this is apparently a good thing for those companies. Also, you don't want to feed a monopoly.

Nations(companies) have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

Microsoft has a permanent interest to lock you in a box, paying tax. Open sourcing some products or whatever PR move is orthogonal to that, that's why they can do it.

Maybe Microsoft has left Github doing its own thing, but they're still using their operating systems to massively spy on users. I cannot help but think Github is not longer neutral: its business used to be about code repository and only that, but now it's also about all the things Microsoft does and wants to protect. Actual and potential competitors legitimately can wonder how private their code is.

At least they're not Oracle ...

https://outline.com/VWkneB

That doesn’t show the full article either. Cuts off where the real article cuts off too.

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