Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

No surprise here, but I wish almost anyone else purchased github instead of Microsoft. One can hope the founders will eventually pull a "MySQL" --> "mariadb" :)

I wonder when github developers will be forced to moved from Linux to Windows ?

View on HN

Microsoft employee here. I was actually handed a MacBook Pro on day 1, I didn't even ask for it my manager at the time just assumed.

There is a large community inside Microsoft using Linux as their daily driver.

That's interesting to hear. Is it only certain teams that can do that? It thought Microsoft it's doing some interesting things but I didn't think I could work there because I'd be starting to from scratch with Ms tech, like even having a workflow on my own computer

You need to be able to in-tune the device if you want to access company resources.

Windows is definitely the happy path since support is pretty much baked into the OS. However there is support for both Mac and Linux.

"There is a large community inside Microsoft using Linux as their daily driver. " That's pretty cool to hear! (100% honest. No sarcasm.)

Same here. Work for MSFT, use a Mac Pro for work. They did give me the option between surface and mac, and recommended me use the mac because we were working on unix OSes with some ability to build/test on Darwin directly.

This was before M1 though, since we're building for x86-64 arch exclusively I likely will never move to an M1 device.

Yup. I was given a Surface Book and a MacBook Pro when I joined Microsoft in 2017, and the Surface Book was just so I could do some testing for things in Azure and make sure it worked well-enough on Windows. My last year at Microsoft, I focused entirely on Linux and used a combination of devices and there was even an internal team focused on making it possible to use Linux as your daily driver with little impact.

At GitHub (where I work now), it’s standard-issue MacBook Pros.

A lot of teams at Microsoft even used Slack internally before 2020. Compliance issues (and I’m sure cost) forced us onto Teams, which was unfortunate, but as a company, Microsoft was a lot more free/open than most other companies of its size with regards to what tools teams and individuals could use — especially when it comes to what you have to do to your own machines if you want to bring your own device to work (the InTune policies are completely and totally sane, more sane than when I worked for a company owned by Univision and Univision wanted me to call the help desk anytime I needed admin access or to install something outside of the Mac App Store — things I frequently needed to do for my job).

GitHub has completely separate IT systems. I can’t/won’t comment on what changes are happening for video calls, but I don’t see this as some sky is falling moment.

How might they do that given that Microsoft now owns all of the IP and GitHub is mostly closed source? It seems like a very different situation than the liberally open source MySQL.

Same way Gitlab and countless other services are built on top of Git, which is definitely not owned by MS :)

In my dream future, libgit2 is the official implementation of Git, taking most of the pain out of trying to create a Github-like service (among other things).

The problem is that what GitHub does is relatively reproducible (Gitlab, gitea, bitbucket? others do it) but the value GitHub provides is free hosting for so much content.

Anyone can make an image hosting site, making one profitable long term is always the problem. For now, GitHub is winning because of the free side of their toolset.

I'm fairly sure Microsoft doesn't even have the ambition to make it profitable. Like Youtube for Google, or costco hotdogs, it's to get a foot in the door (or rather, customers' feet in your doors) to upsell people on all your other products.

Why do you think YouTube isn’t profitable? Plenty of ads in it and bringing in something like $15 bln/year in revenue. Don’t know exactly the COGS, etc., but hard to say they aren’t making money. Android is probably a much better example than YouTube.

> Why do you think YouTube isn’t profitable? Plenty of ads in it and bringing in something like $15 bln/year in revenue

The infrastructure to store and deliver seamlessly zettabytes of video all around the world surely doesn't come cheaply.

For Google it probably comes about as cheap as it can for anyone, and based on a cursory search, the revenue YouTube makes minus the cost of paying the content creators and employees leaves (probably) enough for the datacenters and decent profit.

Though Google is likely doing accounting shenanigans with cross-company billing and charges YouTube "just enough" for the datacenter/cloud access that, on paper, it's barely breaking even (if only for tax advantages). But I don't have proof of that.

YouTube was burning money for years. They might actually be making money now with the rise in memberships and superchats (and more aggressive ads), but it took what, ten years to get there?

Youtube was founded 15 years ago, and might, possibly be profitable now… but I still doubt it. Between the eternally escalating storage and bandwidth requirements, political pressure to involve more humans in content moderation keeps rising too.

GitHub was a profitable bootstrapped business for 4 years before they decided to take a 100 million dollar investment and start bleeding money in pursuit of growth. Sourcehut is a profitable business even without requiring payment yet. The business model is not the problem. Network effects are.

The GitHub founders are long gone from the company. Most were gone before the MS acquisition even happened.

Why would they be forced to move to Windows if even Windows developers are not using Windows.

GitHub seems to be doing fine/the same, IMO. What negative consequences have there been for you as a user as a result of MSFT acquiring it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com