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Comment by aniceperson | Hacker News Reader

didn't know npm was owned by github.. well, that explains things...

NPM Is Joining GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22594549 (March 16, 2020; 571 comments; 1829 points) - https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/npm-is-joinin...

Some of it aged... interesting.

Top comment:

> Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.

> ...

To be fair, the vibes (at the time) were that Microsoft has changed. Probably, in some way, a zero-interest rate phenomena.

Young people thought M$ was changing, the old folks knew it was just another cycle of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Young people were… right?

VS Code is open source. (Cursor is built on it!)

GitHub didn’t embrace, extend, extinguish git. You can git push to a different company (e.g. Gitlab) and you’ve migrated. The biggest problems with GitHub are scaling and availability, not lock-in.

Microsoft today is nothing like it was 30 or 20 years ago.

Fifteen years ago we were writing HTML and JavaScript specifically for Internet Explorer. Edge is built on Chromium.

VScode might be open source (to a degree), but the levers of control are on a different location. See https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ for an excellent blog on it.

Do microsoft own git now?

I don't think so

Pedantically no, but in practice almost yes. So many programmers born after 2006 think that Git and GitHub are the same thing.

Good luck migrating the ”forge” part with the ”git” part. Your github org settings, pull requests, rulesets, CI/CD pipelines, containers, copilot... The lock-in always comes from the ”forge” part, never the ”git” part.

> VS Code is open source

Open core at best. It's proprietary software built on top of an open source base. The remote coding feature is proprietary and you need to run proprietary software on the remote server / container to use it. People maintaining forks (like Codium and the Theia IDE) are not allowed to use VS Code's marketplace. Many of their flagship VS Code extensions are proprietary. Why would they do this if they believed in open source?

The distinction is quite important. VS Code aims to get control of the development process of those who are not using Visual Studio. That's the only reason why VS Code exists. VS Code is not a gift no strings attached.

By the way the title of https://code.visualstudio.com/ is a lie that says "The open source AI code editor". Three lines under, there's "By using VS Code, you agree to its license and privacy statement.". The license is https://code.visualstudio.com/license, which is very much like your usual horrible Microsoft EULA, including tracking and forbidden reverse engineering, decompiling or disassembling. Really, the only thing missing there is the license key field at first run.

GitHub is still proprietary SaaS also aiming to control the whole open source ecosystem. With GitHub, a big chunk of the open source (and free software! Which is even sadder) world relies on proprietary infra. That's as close as Extinguish as you can get (it's just that git is not the thing that's Extinguished). GitHub is actually a pretty good example of lock-in, see what other commenters wrote on this.

30 years later, Microsoft, still the same lying company trying to control its users and the world with proprietary software. With the twist that they try a bit harder to look cool and open source (since the moment they realized open source wasn't going to disappear, not before). They really are not, especially for end-user facing software, including when the end-users are developers.

The only thing that dramatically changed is that they don't publicly claim Linux is cancer anymore, and that's probably because they are coerced into dealing with Linux. Exactly like the Web against their failed attempt to privatize it with MSN (MicroSoft Network) (the current MSN news frontpage and the memory of their messenger are only shadows of the original ambitions behind MSN).

At least the stability and consistency is comforting… or not.

Don't fall for their open washing. They just play along and attempt to get control on what they didn't manage to extinguish. Only forced changes happened, the spirit seems intact.

Old folks are also aware that applies to every single big tech company that actually sponsors the FOSS tools many don't want to pay anything back, while expecting to be paid themselves.

Old folks also remember the days when it was possible to make a living out of selling software tools.

The ruthlessness of the Microsoft that we remember was probably due to influence from Bill Gates.

He is famous for hyper-competitiveness and strong desire to win at all costs.

Yeah but I worked with enough ex MS employees to know that Bill built a cult. Cults don't die just because the cult leader retires to go buy his way into heaven.

Remember when folks thought Phil Spencer was gonna right the Xbox ship lol

Microsoft has been causing a lot of problems lately but I completely disagree that it fits the pattern of "embrace, extend, extinguish".

MSFT acquisition of NPM was a massive shit show, they fired many staff engineers and people that were at github for quite a while. Top comment was a liar.

I was part of the npm team at GitHub. They laid off almost the entire team to focus on AI (CTO literally told us on the layoff announcement call that they're doing this to focus on Copilot)

Fortunately npm was a shitshow long before ai

> they fired many staff engineers

Would you rather the company went under after it ran out of money and had to fire everyone instead? Not to mention a quarter of the company was laid off the year before the acquisition.

Was that the case? Can you provide sources to your claims and provide a foundation to your theories?

https://www.theregister.com/software/2019/04/01/nice-people-...

Year before the MSFT takeover. No idea about their actual financials but they were definitely shedding headcount pre 2020, including kicking people for trying to unionise.

Nothing in there suggests that this was done to save the company from bankruptcy, which was the wild claim.

Yeah, it's like people are forgetting that the executive team at GitHub was composed of sex pests and people defending said sex pest. Of course they'll call any attempt at unionizing as "damaging" to the company and must be blamed accordingly!

After all the company was in such dire straights that they were acquired for $7.5 billion! Only companies with terrible prospects get acquired, that's just business 102.

No one said anything about bankruptcy, you seem to have made that up for your "argument" or whatever this is. The company didn't have a viable business model and was running out of cash. MSFT right-sized the team for the project they wanted it to be, rather than the business model the prior company was trying to be.

Learn to read

> Would you rather the company went under after it ran out of money and had to fire everyone instead?

Apparently you don't understand what bankruptcy means. A company can run out of funds and not be able to meet payroll without declaring bankruptcy, they're different things. But by all means keep talking out of your ass.

It's literally a Google search away. If you had the time to write this comment, you had more than enough time to do the search.

Not my job to proof the wild claim that the layoffs were to save the company from bankruptcy .

The company raised $10M, did two rounds of layoffs totaling a quarter of the company, and was then acquired not long after. Early stage companies like that don't do layoffs unless it's to extend cash runway, but run wild with whatever unfounded fantasy you have about it all.

Google said you are 100% wrong.

Right, the very public two rounds of layoffs the company did right before being "acquired" had nothing to do with them running out of money.

Uhh, I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right by it's workers rather than rat fucking them to appease corporate do-nothing leeches if I'm being frank.

> I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right

you would? has any trillion dollar corporation ever?

No, and that's why we must destroy them. Figuratively then literally.

Destroy what exactly? And replace with what?

With smaller companies that can't yield global power. It would be better if cloud, office and OS would be separate. Then you wouldn't get shuffed OneDrive into the OS. It's also better for competition if the playing field is equal and one solution isn't the only one that can deeply integrate. Build APIs or don't do it.

Can y’all just state your opinions on these things rather than constantly asking bait-y questions?

Enemies of democracy don't want to do this because it would require acknowledge that technology companies in the US have been mostly a force of evil rather than good and the idea we should change that makes a small minority of people uncomfortable.

it was all good until AI entered the chat

NPM (the company) was about to go under in 2020. They raised VC but never found a sustainable business model. GitHub acquired them to keep the ecosystem alive. The acquisition hasn't really benefitted GitHub much at all.

I don’t know if this is the case here, but it’s very hard in general to judge how much software projects ought to cost.

Software projects will grow in complexity to consume whatever budget you give it. If you hire 50 devs and give them a bunch of business objectives, they are going to do what they do and write a ton of software.

It’s not obvious to me that it would be theoretically impossible to build a cheaper package manager.

And additionally was it truly worth buying if this is what we've ended up with? Some things should be allowed to fail

Eh, easy to say. Remember how Sourceforge started shipping ads in binaries people downloaded? If you think failing was the worst scenario, you lack imagination.

No there are gobs of node projects on GitHub. I'm sure someone did the math on how many paying customers would have been fucked if npm.org went away and it worked as a loss leader.

Most people know this but the _real_ reason it explains things is that GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Oh, and Microsoft moved GitHub to Azure

To be fair, NPM sucked long before it got acquired by Github/Microsoft.

And to be fair 2: The other package repos also suck.

Yeah, but the azure supply chain attack explains why all of a sudden they can make this change.

It seems that if you want to get something important changed in npm, you simply need exploit some of its short comings against Microsoft instead of discussing why it’s necessary.

> And to be fair 2: The other package repos also suck.

If you mean other languages, then yeah a lot of similar issues and weirdness there as well. Maven dependencies in any complex project are a "fun" challenge as well.

Though the sort of recurring supply chain attacks you see within the npm ecosystem is something I haven't seen elsewhere to this degree.

To be fair, the entire problem space sucks and I’m not sure it’s possible not to.

Maybe I have nostalgia blinders on but I do NOT remember putting up with this much bullshit in the Ruby ecosystem and I didn't even like ruby. Gemfiles were pretty okay, and gemfiles are what everyone assumed npm would be a copy of.

It wasn't.

I knew it was owned by github, but this is the first time I've personally seen the release notes on github's blog instead of npm's.

yes, since 2020

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