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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

#321

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…

Well, the difference is the users had and have the choice which kingdom, if any, to inhabit or build. If Github goes the way of Microsoft something of value will be lost, namely the relatively open - as far as any centralised resource can be open - culture of a non-affiliated source repository. The actual functionality which Github offers is by no means unique and can be achieved in many different ways.

To be honest I don't think Github, or any other centralised resource, is the way to go. Now that Github may fall on the list of locations to host your projects it is worth thinking about alternatives to this centralised system. Self-hosted gogs, gitea or gitlab is probably the easiest option right now, I've had a gogs/gitea instance running for a few years which mirrors my activities at Github and can be used as a substitute at short notice. These mirrors are not complete though, I currently do not mirror the issue tracker nor the wiki. I guess I better start doing this as well to really have a turn-key Github alternative for when the time comes for us to part ways.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#323
post #89

I worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.

Why not self-hosting?

If you self-host you will probably never get outside contributions. For most people it isn't worth taking the time to figure out whatever system you use. I'd like to see a federated system like GNUsocial/Mastodon for git. I've thought about trying to make such a system but I don't know much about federation.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#324
post #186

Thanks for mentioning GitLab as the next big one. We're seeing people #movingtogitlab

GitLab is also venture funded. What's the end game there? Wouldn't GitLab's investors, including YC, be ecstatic to see the company achieve a similar outcome? Wouldn't they consider basically any other outcome to be a failure? The bigger question is why GitHub didn't IPO. They have name recognition and prominence such that it wouldn't really be a surprise to hear that they were doing so. I don't have any internal det…

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Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#325
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…

This. As with so many things, laziness has driven developers to be using Github as single point of truth. And it is cringeworthy to see how few developers actually know what git is and that Github is just a company monetizing opensource software. About time everyone got a wakeup call.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#326

I read about this as a hypothetical a few days, but it really moved to done deal quicker than I expected. I started to look for alternatives to host private repos and found that Amazon CodeCommit has a plan that's even much better than the GitHub plans. Does anybody have experience on how well this works?

Keybase has encrypted git for free https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope they don't discontinue Atom Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...

I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)

Well, answering myself... Looks like it uses the Electron Shell project which was part of Atom

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...

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