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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

#281

Post by markmark »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #242
ASalazarMX wrote: post #97

This has me wondering, what Microsoft wants GitHub for? It's not like they can't use it without owning it, and I doubt they want to improve it as it is. Probably they want control before integrating it with their products.

DevOps and IaaS is growing so fast, I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet. This is absolutely about Azure DevOps.

They already have a bunch of tooling to make it easy for users on VSTS to ship their software to Azure, but VSTS users are probably 100% already in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Buying GitHub and then adding tooling to make shipping from GitHub to Azure easy (and the obvious choice) would help them push Azure more to companies not currently using other Microsoft products.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#282

Post by giancarlostoro »

umjames wrote: post #110
banachtarski wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.

That's not to say they couldn't revert to their embrace, extend, and extinguish tactics of the 90s, even under future leadership. I feel that no big corporation should own GitHub, even if their investors feel differently.

I've mentioned this a number of times, some of Microsoft's open source tooling is under the very permissive MIT license. In the case of GitHub it just means competitors will rise up and replace GitHub. Remember when SourceForge was the GitHub of the day, and then it became bad, and finally it's acceptable with the new owner. People will outright ditch GitHub if evil is truly done to it, but Microsoft doesn't want that, they'll do everything they can to not screw up GitHub.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#283

Post by philipov »

gsich wrote: post #277
lev99 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced updates are bad. 1. Updates can introduce breaking changes. 2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes. 3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software. I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone will…

2. Can be delayed. 3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.

I wouldn't mind forced updates if they were only used for critical security updates. They are not; Microsoft abuses the privilege, and therefore may not be trusted to have it at all.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#284

Post by markmark »

TooBrokeToBeg wrote: post #73

An acquisition would mean the inevitable split of support between the MS toolchain and the OS toolchain, which would eventually be left to die. Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS.

MS just want you using Azure and don't care whose toolchain you use. If they bought GitHub it would be entirely so they could get people _not_ using other MS products onto Azure. So there is no way they kill off the OS toolchain and turn it in to another VSTS.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#285

Post by gsich »

danso wrote: post #139
the_duke wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Has Google ever killed an acquisition or product of Github's scale? Most products that come to mind were niche things like iGoogle, or things that got deprecated/integrated into other products, e.g. Buzz, Wave, Picasa Google Reader is the product that seems to leave the most bitterness, but that too seems to have been relatively niche. Google killed Google Code in 2016 and moved much of their code base to Github. May…

Google Reader

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#286

Post by gsich »

philipov wrote: post #283
gsich wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. Can be delayed. 3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.

I wouldn't mind forced updates if they were only used for critical security updates. They are not; Microsoft abuses the privilege, and therefore may not be trusted to have it at all.

Feature updates can be delayed for up to a year.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#287

Post by singingfish »

d0lph wrote: post #135
AgentK20 wrote: 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.

If it were maybe 5 years ago I would be horrified, but under Nadella they are a lot less ... Microsoft-y.

I was at a container orchestration conference the other day, and got the distinct impression that microsoft are not the great satan, and azure is probably a really good choice for cloud service. I can't believe I'm saying that. I'm having dinner with a prolific debian maintainer tonight, maybe he'll beat some sense into me.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#288

Post by notamy »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #244
tomtheelder wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with. It's just the stickiest app of all time. Something something network effects.

How many projects are there out there that repositories hosted in GH, run in GH, and have package manifests that directly reference other GH repos. I'm sure there are a lot.

Most of the golang ecosystem, I think. Not to mention any other language-specific package managers that support pulling from GitHub...

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#289

Post by skj »

gerdesj wrote: post #260
tomtheelder wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with. It's just the stickiest app of all time. Something something network effects.

It's just the stickiest app of all time To me it barely exists. I'm a hirer in the UK. Before anyone touts how much wider our reach might be for potential hires, can I point out that my little firm has hired people from the other end of Europe directly ("real" friend of friend etc). Oh and just in case you are wondering - we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.

If you pay everyone equally, I don't think I'd want to work there.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#290

Post by tracker1 »

7952 wrote: post #209
ASalazarMX wrote: post #97

This has me wondering, what Microsoft wants GitHub for? It's not like they can't use it without owning it, and I doubt they want to improve it as it is. Probably they want control before integrating it with their products.

GitHub do for developers what Microsoft want to do for the rest of business through SharePoint. Maybe they could add Office 365 editing to GitHub and pitch it as the successor to SharePoint. Or try to integrate it with their other products in some kind of Frankenstein mess.

They seem to be doing much better with these things lately though. MS Teams is incredibly good. VSTS is pretty nice as well. I'm frankly unsure why they'd take on Github, other than better integration points into Azure services, CI/CD and other tooling for commercial/enterprise users.
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