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Comment by chadly | Hacker News Reader

This is a tired take. Can a company not legitimately improve their product/offering without this being accused at them?

If you are referring to GH being owned by MS now, it's 2020 for godsake. Can we move on from our fathers' trauma? MS has been damn good lately in support of developers and developer tools.

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I get just as tired of reading this take as the next person, but I don't necessarily think we should do away with it - it'd be akin to ignoring history.

I personally remain very uncomfortable with how massive GitHub has become and how ~99% of software development happens on the platform.

Looking at the history in the wikipedia article that was linked in the GP post, none of the executives who used that phrase are with the company anymore.

There isn't much lock-in yet though. If you wanted to move a project from github to gitlab, you could move the code over with a few commands. Open issues and stuff could be moved over with a script. There isn't much 'network effect' that means your project would die on other hosting.

This is classic "it could be built in a weekend" syndrome, and I think we're all intelligent enough on this site to know that it's simply not true.

Furthermore, technology isn't the lock-in - it's the network, which you can't drag as easily.

Subtract the bare assertions and questions and your argument boils down to "it is $current_year, and Microsoft has been good lately." Which, I think you might agree, doesn't contain a lot to convince someone who remembers the bad old days.

To me, this isn't a real counterexample, even at the height of MS's EEE, it was never at the expense of developer tooling, it was at the expense of openness. In fact, improving developer experience was the primary lever MS used to achieve it.

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