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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

#261
sourceforge, github...these platforms have their moments but are almost always superseded by something else that is more of the moment and useful.I can't see this msft move, which has been in the works for what feels like years, will help github to stay in the position it's been in for the last 3 years or so...

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#262

This may just be paranoia but if I were competing with Microsoft on something that I'd have private code for hosted on GitHub, I'd be pretty worried right now.

That's not paranoia. That is completely reasonable considering Microsoft's history.

Microsoft have a history of corporate espionage against their customers?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#265
post #55

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…

I would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn

> what actually happened with LinkedIn?

It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#266
post #197

It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Ma…

The whole world's demanding it. No one really knows how to do it efficiently, it seems.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see developers ditching GitHub with the acquisition for a perceived conflict of interest. It's really easy to change your remote. I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.

Changing the remote doesn't migrate anything in the issue tracker, merge requests, webhooks, pages or wiki

It wouldn't be seamless. But it wouldn't be difficult for a competitor to create a "competitor import" feature that moved over most of it in a few clicks.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#268

What a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do thi…

> What a betrayal.

Why is this a betrayal?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see developers ditching GitHub with the acquisition for a perceived conflict of interest. It's really easy to change your remote. I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.

Changing the remote doesn't migrate anything in the issue tracker, merge requests, webhooks, pages or wiki

Migrating from GitHub to GitLab

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI

this adresses some of the issues.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#270
Guys and girls, I really don’t get this. It’s 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content?

Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.)

Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon’s store, Google’s search engine, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s social network ... don’t you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers?

Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we’re upset. Oh no, what’s the new owner going to do?

With a network that no one controls, we wouldn’t worry about that.

We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It’s a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to “the cloud” ie some servers owned by someone else.

Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.

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