How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
It's easy to knee jerk on HN but let's try to do better than this.
> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it.
Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
I feel like you’re missing a few features here
As the centralized git repo, it allows devs to collaborate, by exchanging code/features, tracking issues and doing code reviews. It also provides dependencies management ("Package") and code building/shipping (GH Actions).
Sure, if you usually spend one day or more writing code locally, you're fine. But if you work on multiple features a day, an outage, even of 30 minutes, can have a big impact on a company because of the multiplier effect on all the people affected.
This is a sign that their CTOs should be replaced. Not that github is critical.
There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.
They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.
I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.
And since the acquisition, they have built it out to be critical. Similar to what META did with Instagram. Instagram wasn't critical when META purchased it, but now it is the cornerstone of any business's online presence as it has been built out.
And git lives on regardless of GitHub
Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.
The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
It's definitely not easy to self-host Gitlab for hundreds of devs working of hundreds of projects. Especially if you use it as your CI/CD pipeline, because now you have to also manage your workers.
Why company chose to pay GitHub instead of self-hosting their Gitlab instance? For the same reason they pay Microsoft for their emails instead of self-hosting them.