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Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#21

Post by falcon620 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Oh shit. I run Windows. I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, and the sense that Microsoft is ritually unclean will drive many of them away from github. It's the best thing that's happened to BitBucket and Altassian ever. If I have a choice between MS tools and Altassian tools I will usually take MS. (Visual Source Safe really did suck, but Visual Studio is not that bad...) Also, Microsoft ac…

> I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, [...]

And for perfectly rational reasons, I would add.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#22

Post by pasbesoin »

E3 -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Stems from at least the 1990's. The MS behavior as opposed to the term can be argued to pre-date that decade.

I'll just remind people who may think I'm being old, crotchety, and living in the past, that this has been a repeated pattern of theirs that has resurfaced so often and reliably as to become considered by many to be a core component of MS culture. Repeated including in the face of DoJ prosecution and monitoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#23

Post by deedubaya »

tomovo wrote: post #7
thosakwe wrote: post #5

Something makes me feel like Microsoft acquiring Github will do away with Github's current, open nature. If the extreme advertising in Windows 10 is any sign...

At first they will just inject random commits that don't change any files but inform you about the latest price offerings on One Drive and Azure hosting. Later on if you're still on the "free" plan some of the commits will modify your hosted software to show their ads at runtime. Have fun!

This comment made me giggle at first, but then the truth hidden in the outlandish idea hit home and I cried a little bit.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#26

Post by ocdtrekkie »

skellera wrote: post #14

Seems like the view here is pretty negative. I feel like most people here haven't worked with Microsoft dev products recently. They're getting better. I guess the crowd here isn't typically in the .NET world.

Particularly with how they interact on GitHub now, it's quite impressive. I've reported issues for docs.microsoft.com, participated in discussions on Visual Basic development, etc. and while there's still definitely that corporate veil to some degree, they're extremely responsive, they're very active in responding to requests and discussing fixes.

I generally now hope that whatever Microsoft thing I'm dealing with somewhere ends up linking to GitHub, because everyone on the side of the company that's working with GitHub is pretty on point.

Which is what gives me some hope that they could manage this acquisition right: They're already doing GitHub the way GitHub should be done.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#27

Post by tootie »

People are being overly pessimistic. This would be a potentially great deal. GitHub is very successful at what they do and I don't think MS would change that. More likely they would use GH as lead-in to selling cloud services the same way Google uses GitLab.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#28

Post by kosinus »

skellera wrote: post #14

Seems like the view here is pretty negative. I feel like most people here haven't worked with Microsoft dev products recently. They're getting better. I guess the crowd here isn't typically in the .NET world.

I think that's the point. I'm personally worried Microsoft may have a very narrow view of what GitHub is. A lot of tech hosted there doesn't even run on Windows, or isn't even related to software. (legal, political, docs, guides, etc.)

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#30

Post by forgottenpass »

youdontknowtho wrote: post #8

That would be kind of awesome, but I don't know how the github culture would meld with a big corporation. It would be an interesting case study for other similar start ups.

Didn't github already deliberately kill their own culture a few years back with policy changes and a layer of middle management?

edit: This isn't snark. Didn't they legit cut a bunch of perks, refocus everyone's priorities, and hire some people to start cracking whips? Or was I reading the public accounts of that situation wrong? Got bad scuttlebutt?

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