Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#571

Post by flatline »

EnderMB wrote: post #117

I spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear. With all that said, things have changed a…

I also spent years working with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies. The reality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was still alive and well as late as 2011 when I mostly stopped dealing with them. Since that time they have definitely taken a new direction, with increasing adoption of Linux in particular, but I have trouble belieiving the corporate DNA has been so thoroughly overwritten in the last few years that this does not spell the imminent demise of Github as the broadly useful plarform that we know it as today.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#572

Post by EastSmith »

voltagex_ wrote: post #530
EastSmith wrote: post #520

I am very interested in what will happen with these accounts (t name a few) the next few weeks / months: https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/mozilla https://github.com/google

What do you think will happen? What advantage would any change bring for Microsoft? (/torvalds/linux is not the upstream, btw)

I am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way.

Another issue: Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository. Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I still will be moving away right now.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#573

Post by AaronFriel »

nyxtom wrote: 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…

Humans* aren't built for decentralization. We can only keep so many unique names in our head a time, only so many connections. I don't have any papers to link to on this, but I think it's safe to say that's how things are - if not we wouldn't have created cities, national identities, and of course, newsgroups, message boards, centralized package managers and distributions, and yes, source code repositories.

There is something nice about knowing, with a high degree of certainty, that any given open source project (or any thing) is in one of a few places, and if I don't know where that is I can ask for help to find those places by their names.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#574

Post by alkonaut »

jakebasile wrote: post #444
parvenu74 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-relea…

I am forced to use Windows for gaming, and let me tell you what Microsoft has done to me lately. - Forced updates are a travesty. I should be able to delay or ignore updates indefinitely as I own my computer. - I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program, despite having no need of one. I can only temporarily pause Windows Defender's real-time checks before they'll helpfully turn it back on for me. This results in…

Completely agree. But windows and devdiv are two completely different beasts these days. In think the people at devdiv seem fantastic and the tools they have done recently are great (.NET core, VS code, GitVFS, ...).

Microsoft may not have changed completely but part of it has

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#575

Post by wongarsu »

frutiger wrote: post #498
indigochill wrote: post #339

Heck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.

If you ever get something for free, remember something somewhere is subsidizing it. Whether that's the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced, VC funding (which will eventually run out), or your data is sold.

I can't speak for Gitlab, but offering free Bitbucket should easily pay for itself as introduction to the Atlassian ecosystem.

Our experience went like this: We got Bitbucket for out project for the good free private repos (and a few other reasons). When it came to choosing a ticket system, being on Bitbucket made choosing Jira a no-brainer (one of the best ticket systems, good integration with Bitbucket, familiar interface). Then we needed a better wiki for internal documentation, so we naturally went with Confluence.

So getting free Bitbucket heavily influenced our decision to buy two other products from the same company, and we are about to buy into their CI system (Bitbucket Pipelines, not the other one). We don't regret any of those choices, but they might have looked different if we were on Github.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#576

Post by chrisan »

gerdesj wrote: post #503

Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty fr…

Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof

There’s a reason MS bought GitHub and not GitLab

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#577

Post by guitarbill »

013a wrote: post #259

This is a completely smart purchase on Microsoft's part. I can't imagine more synergy between two companies: - Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players (Google has been a great contender for this position since 2010). - Microsoft has moved most of their open source projects to Github. - Microsoft is a major contributor to Git, including massive infrastructure projects…

This "synergy" seems to be pretty one-sided. Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users? That's kind of the problem with this acquisition, which is why few Github users are excited for it.

It also doesn't feel like Microsoft understands developers or even end users consistently. VSCode is a nice editor, but not the only one. The MSDN docs and site is awful. Azure is okay, but Windows 10 is somehow more annoying than macOS.

Meanwhile Github is in a tricky position, because for most people there's nothing but "community" keeping them on it. Github has some decent features, but nothing so great it would stop me from using their competitors. And they don't even have a CEO to provide the vision. The only thing in their favour is inertia.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#578

Post by madeofpalk »

nyxtom wrote: 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…

If Git/Github is the epitome of the developer's centralised experience, then I full heartedly welcome that.

As others have mentioned, there's certainly advantages to centralised systems like Github's network graph, issues, etc. But at the end of the day, everyone on GitHub still cares a whole lot more about the code, and due to the very nature of the protocol that's something that'll always be able to be taken elsewhere. It's not like "if they announce shut down you can export your data", there's a very high lightlyhood you have already done that and you have the full repo on your local machine.

I feel like Github is the best possible compromise - centralised network and features that's built on a decentralised protocol and easily able to be taken elsewhere.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#579

Post by voltagex_ »

EastSmith wrote: post #572
voltagex_ wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think will happen? What advantage would any change bring for Microsoft? (/torvalds/linux is not the upstream, btw)

I am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way. Another issue: Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository. Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I…

A bit like if you're a bookshop running your online site on AWS.

The downside risk for Amazon messing with anything is greater than any benefit they could gain.

I mean, Microsoft has a kernel module upstreamed. It's not 1990 anymore.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#580

Post by alkonaut »

wmij wrote: post #550

There probably won't be (m)any noticeable changes for the open source and devs running personal private repos and possibly the same for GitHub team plans. However, I'd bet Microsoft will plan on a sunset timetable for TFS and push their licensing and sales machine toward GitHub for Enterprise. I'm glad my group isn't on GitHub for Enterprise because after seeing this news I'd be looking to migrate away ASAP. I can en…

Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? I use both and there is barely any overlap in features. GitHub is only code storage + a rudimentary issue manager. There is very little release management, test management, CI/CD etc.

If anything I’d expect them to integrate better and of course integrate more with Azure (e.g one-click setup of build/test on azure from any Github project)

Post reply on HN