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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

By that logic any proprietary product that provides an interface with an open source tool is guilty. I think accusing MS of EEE in this case is a huge stretch; GitHub is a commercial product that uses a popular open source tool with 100% compatibility (that I'm aware of) and actively participates in the development and features of that tool. When Ms start implementing extensions to git that only work with GitHub, we can point fingers but accusing them of extending git to extinguish based on pull requests is baseless

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> By that logic any proprietary product that provides an interface with an open source tool is guilty.

In my view, the entire PaaS ecosystem modus operandi is building on top of open hardware & software, allowing and enticing people to move in easily (familiar tech/open source), and making locked-in products out of them. If that's not EEE I don't know what is.

I can’t think of a single person I’ve worked with in the last 10 years who understands the difference between vanilla git and GitHub. Nobody really understands why pull requests are named that way, or that it’s possible to have very different workflows to what GitHub offers.

I don’t know that this is the result of a deliberate strategy by GitHub, but by any metric the extend step is a resounding success.

GitHub isn't the only one using pull requests, Stash and Gitlab does too. Pull requests have just become standard workflow without it ever being part of git.

FWIW, Gitlab calls them merge requests instead of pull requests, which IMO is a more descriptive name.

> I can’t think of a single person I’ve worked with in the last 10 years who understands the difference between vanilla git and GitHub.

If not one developer in a decade can tell the difference between a source control hosting service and a tool they use, that's not really GitHub's problem. This is the same as my parents not konwing that "facebook" isn't the internet.

> Nobody really understands why pull requests are named that way,

Sure they do, the answer is one google search away on the largest Q&A forum for programmers [0]. it was the first google hit for "why are pull requests called pull requests"

> or that it’s possible to have very different workflows to what GitHub offers.

Maybe inside your circle, but plenty of people are aware of different workflows. Some of the largest open source projects in the world exist on github and don't use the pull request workflow (linux kernel, firefox, chromium off the top of my head).

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14817051/why-does-github...

> If not one developer in a decade can tell the difference between a source control hosting service and a tool they use, that's not really GitHub's problem. This is the same as my parents not konwing that "facebook" isn't the internet.

Nobody said it was GitHub's problem just like nobody said it's Facebook's problem in your example. They're both laughing their heads off all the way to the bank. It's everybody else's problem.

there's never a stretch with Microsoft. It is always, and has always been the same play. You can make excuses all you like, but in the end they will attemtp to embrace, extend and extinguish all competition.

Wheh they show any signs of extending git, or extinguishing any other open source competitors, I will be standing there with you calling them out. Until then, they're developing an excellent product that people want to use, built with open tooling

Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.

I'm arguing against soundbytes here, which is really unfortunate and something I hoped would be above HN. It's very easy to shut down an argument with a soundbyte or a famous quote when you don't have any actual proof that history is repeating itself. The situation and landscape is _very_ different from the mid 90s, Microsoft are showing _no_ indication of being bad actors whatsoever, (in fact they're showing the exact opposite) and haven't done for at least a decade.

We're down to soundbites because all of the arguments already happened and we're down to agree to disagree. You are basically asking for proof of a future event already occuring when the best we can do is look at the historic behavior of not just MS but similar companies. Your entire stance is to ignore any historical trends or behavior and only agree once the damage is already done. There's no constructive argument to be had there.

Effectively you're saying that all decision making should be based on current observable reality only and any projections about the future should be ignored because they are not 100% provable. I guess that's a way to function, and based on how bad people often get the future wrong it might even be a productive one, but it does explain why we're down to soundbites, because we've reached a fundamental disagreement not on opensource or Github, but a disagreement on how to plan for the future.

If you're going to tell me to look at the history, then I should tell you to do the same. The history says the did it, 25 years ago, and haven't been doing it for almost 20. The history says they are being good citizens in all their open source contributions in the last decade. It says they're actively working to further the open standards they're building on. At a certain point, a specific incident becomes an outlier, which is a point I believe we have passed.

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