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Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

businessinsider.com

61–70 of 567 posts

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#62

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…

Skype was horrible. But LinkedIn is doing very well afaik.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#63
Up next:

- Github user account migration/integration with outlook.com

- A much-internally-championed Github/Office/LinkedIn integration effort created by some sharp but inexperieced program manager fresh just out of Washington State, that happens to require Github project descriptions to be authored in .docx format, launched as an improvement from that primitive format made by a certain mac fanboy.

- An effort to migrate the Github infrastructure to Azure cloud on Win 10 that ties up 85% of all development resources for the next five years and ultimately fails.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#64
post #27

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.

Some of my pessimism is not just with Microsoft, itself, even though I do have that. I think an argument can be made that we should not want all the decent software companies to be bought up by the same big five giant companies, no matter who it is.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is notorious for killing products too, though. For me, much of the same rationale would apply

>Google is notorious for killing products too, though. For me, much of the same rationale would apply Agreed. The best possible solution for making GitHub long term sustainable would be following the Mozilla model.

I mean the other option is to just not sell and if money is a problem adjust pricing. I find their plans to be incredibly cheap for what they offer so they definitely could have room to grow in that regard.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, for dev tools Microsoft was always very open. Github and Microsoft might make a great combo, boosting dev productivity and open source

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#68

Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling. C# is a pleasure and visual studio code is an excellent, extensible coding tool. Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.

I wonder what Linus Tovalds is thinking right now. If I remember correctly, he wrote Git because Perforce was forcing him to use Microsoft software licences.

https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#70
post #28

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.)

what makes you think that? they killed off their own code hosting site in codeplex and moved everything to github. they are one of the largest if not the largest open source contributors in the world. and .net core is setting itself up to be a major player in cross-platform application development. it has a chance, if microsoft brings over uwp, wpf, and windows forms to .net core, to take over cross-platform gui development. with the windows subsystem for linux, windows 10 can run most linux-based software. they've developed the hottest ide at the moment on top of github developed technology.

i have a feeling they get it just fine.

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