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Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

businessinsider.com

41–50 of 567 posts

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#41

Hopefully it's just a negotiation tactic to get Google to buy them for more than their first offer.

but I don't want to leave github. Please no.

I can't believe people are salivating over the idea of giving google more control over open source. Need to wake up to their style of evil I guess.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#42
post #12

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…

Source Safe is ancient. TFS is their new jam and it's pretty solid. Especially if you're in the Visual Studio and Azure world.

TFS (or more accurately TFVC) is old news. Git is their new jam and it's pretty solid. ;)

(Not entirely a joke. The Windows team has moved to git, which is a fascinating sign of the times.)

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#46

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 f…

Almost nobody who even worked at Microsoft in 1996 still actually works at Microsoft. You are bringing up something said in one meeting from when floppy disks were still pretty important to the computing world. I can't fathom a single statement from 1996 about a computer company that is still accurate today, and EEE falls into that category as well.

"postmaster@nsa.gov" is probably still true.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#47

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 f…

Almost nobody who even worked at Microsoft in 1996 still actually works at Microsoft. You are bringing up something said in one meeting from when floppy disks were still pretty important to the computing world. I can't fathom a single statement from 1996 about a computer company that is still accurate today, and EEE falls into that category as well.

Company culture is a thing, and like other cultures it doesn't require the original folks to keep it going once it has been established.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#48

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.

Intel has followed Apple into the rabbit hole of style over substance. I know so many people who want to do neural networks and they want to buy a mac and sorry you can't do that because Apple picked the wrong horse in the GPU race and it might be a few more years before they refresh their models.

Back in 1984 Apple released the first microcomputer that came without a software development kit. Since then it has all been about the computer using you than the other way around, a proud tradition of bay area companies such as Google, Facebook, Palantir, etc.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will do away with GitHub's current, open nature. Apparently the Gnome folks concluded that GitHub was already too closed to even consider them in the competition for the question "Where will the Gnome project live in the future?" GitLab won that competition, btw, and icrosoft wasn't even part of that calculus.

With current trends in Microsoft's Developer Division, it's possible that GitHub could end up way more open if Microsoft acquired them. GitHub's core business is GitHub and they need that to stay closed to stay competitive. GitHub under Microsoft could have less financial pressure to keep closed. Is it likely? I don't know. It is an interesting possibility though, that would certainly change the game.

There is precedent. Prior to Microsoft acquiring them, Xamarin was closed-source and licensing was $1000 per platform per year. At the Build conference in March 2016 Microsoft announced (1) that they were acquiring Xamarin, (2) that pricing would be dropping to zero, and (3) the Xamarin platform code would be open sourced as soon as possible after the acquisition.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#50
post #6

Really hope these talks fall through and nothing comes of it. Too many bad experiences with Microsoft buying something out, mismanaging it, and it goes down the drain. As much as I love GitHub, I won't be using a Microsoft-owned GitHub for any of my company's work.

such a presumptuous statement. Why proclaim you won't use a MSFT owned github, even as a hypothetical?
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