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Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

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Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#91
post #25

There will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.

Can you maybe elaborate a little on BizSpark and how it was helpful?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#92

If this is true, I delete my account immediately. The last thing I want is my code to fall into the hands of MS.

Fair enough. After all, they did ship a free web browser with their operating system, 24 years ago.

Some things you can just never forgive.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#95
post #6
post #2

I guess it's time to move to Gitlab.

MS has had an 180 degree turn in policy since Balmer left. Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.

True, they went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either.

Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#96
post #16

Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ? If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet. As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use…

It is shockingly bad. The fact that you can't code search in a fork blows my mind. How have they not fixed this basic, important feature after so many years? What could possibly make it more difficult than a few person-months of effort?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#97
post #6
post #2

I guess it's time to move to Gitlab.

MS has had an 180 degree turn in policy since Balmer left. Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.

They really haven't. Maybe like a 150 degree turn at best.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#98
If you're thinking of moving off GitHub, one thing that I have heard about that might help you is you can ask GitHub to mirror repos, the way https://github.com/moodle/moodle looks -- note it says:

    moodle/moodle
    mirrored from git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
That way any URLs to your GitHub repo should carry on working. People can even clone and pull this repo. That may ease migration, especially if some tools assume code is on GitHub and don't allow you to specify the full URL to the repo.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#100
post #43

Oh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube). Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.

I was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)
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