Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

bloomberg.com

171–180 of 1001 posts

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#171

I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github. Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.

They weren't profitable. So the problem perhaps is these cool free tools that some people rely on just don't have a clear way to make money.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#172
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot…

I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.

This completely misses the forest for the trees.

I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:

- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.

- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.

- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.

- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.

The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#174
Microsoft's own hosted platform Visual Studio Team Services is nuetral. It supports hosted and on prem build and deployment agents for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are easy to use plug ins for building and deploying on both Azure and AWS. You can use Github now for hosted git repositories in VSTS and still use Microsoft's other build and release tools.

Thier Wiki is Markdown based and they have a very visible link that lets you pull down your entire Wiki using git clone.

They also have free private repos, 40 hours of hosted builds, up to five users for free, project management features that are at least as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) as the other project management tools - again free for up to five users. You can also host your own private Nuget, NPM, and Maven feeds for free.

For non open source projects, you can't beat the value. Additional users over 5 are $5 a month.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#175
post #107

I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github. At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This…

And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing. I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.

It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected.

Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#176

This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terr…

If it’s any consolation, Apple Music is terrible on iOS and MacOS as well.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#177

I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github. At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This…

what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change. as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.

LinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#178

I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github. At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This…

GitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow.

And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#179

Hey, GitLab, if you want to push a big migration from GitHub, inundate the GitHub design team with requests for a ribbon UI on github.com and to move the subscription system to Office 365.

We'll not spam GitHub. But we see people #movingtogitlab

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#180
This seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub’s biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub).

You see, whether or not it’s justified, some projects invariably will leave GitHub simply because it’s Microsoft. And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where most projects exist. And really, GitHub isn’t perfect: projects overlook a lot of minor imperfections in GitHub’s actual product because there are so many projects on GitHub and the usefulness of the networking outweighs the warts here and there.

Post reply on HN