Dodged a bullet for now.
I’m worried this is their extend-embrace stage, and the extinguish is yet to come.
I truly hate to be pessimistic, and I’m not trying to start a flame war. I just can’t see this behavior lasting in the long run.
I’m worried this is their extend-embrace stage, and the extinguish is yet to come.
I truly hate to be pessimistic, and I’m not trying to start a flame war. I just can’t see this behavior lasting in the long run.
We've seen new features launched (e.g. this one) long enough after the acquisition that much (most, all?) of the work happened in the post acquisition environment that I'm optimistic. But I've been wrong before.
Look at how it shat on Markdown with what it calls "GitHub Flavored Markdown". Look at the things that it calls "wikis". Look at how GitHub's PR merge tool junks up the commit log. Look at how many projects don't even have a way to accept a fix unless you submit it with GitHub's janky pull request workflow. Hell, a bug in Netlify's command-line client managed to make its way into release versions that would straight up cause the process to terminate when cwd was a repo that wasn't hosted on github.com, leading to unhandled exception.
The tacit assumption that you're using GitHub is like the tacit assumption 15 years ago that you were using Visual Studio, only this time, you can't escape just by steering clear of Windows-related tech.
Are there a lot of walled gardens that only allow sign-in with GitHub? That's not really an issue I've run into. I can't think of any site I want to invite my aunt/uncle/cousin to log into that only accepts GitHub login. In fact, I'm not sure there's a lot of tools I want my colleagues to use that require a GitHub login that isn't already tied to a GitHub hosted repo.
I would love to hear what I'm missing though.
They acquired a company that was doing the thing that they are wont to do and are criticized for, and have poured the significant resources at their disposal into growing the circle of impact. Where it originates from and whether it was or wasn't already independently in full swing (or partial, in this case) before their involvement doesn't matter, the effect on the user is the same. Besides that, if a person's problem with a given practice is whether or not Microsoft is the perpetrator, then that person is a hypocrite and doesn't actually give a shit about the the thing they claim to be concerned about.