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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

#621

Post by azernik »

majewsky wrote: post #450
simon_acca wrote: post #417

Ask yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github? I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github! Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, i…

My company (SAP) has a GitHub Enterprise installation that, given the number of active users, is going to be a very pleasant revenue stream for GitHub.

Oh wow. That's a monster of an account to land.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#622

Post by emodendroket »

ajmurmann wrote: post #563
phantom_oracle wrote: post #390

I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why? Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software. Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle tha…

That's assuming people here care deeply about open source and it's philosophy. It's probably fair to say that most people on HN care a lot more about how building the next Atlassian or GitHub and conveniently being able to use OSS for that than about those philosophical values.

Isn't the entire point of the "open-source" movement to throw out all the philosophical baggage that comes with "free software"?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#623

Post by feelix »

gkoberger wrote: post #589
feelix wrote: post #587

Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it? So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.

Linux doesn't use GitHub for anything other than a mirror, and Linus famously hates GitHub. (More reading: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/ )

Point taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA:

"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."

But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#624

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

AaronFriel wrote: post #573
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…

That's mixing up a whole lot of concepts. Centralization is about power.

Cities generally have very little centralization. Almost no interactions in a city go through a central entity, similarly for countries. Concentration is something different than centralization.

Newsgroups have very little centralization. Everyone reads and writes through different servers, and you can trivially switch servers without any impact on who you can communicate with. Agreeing on names and federation is something different than centralization.

...

There is absolutely no need to have software development happen on one proprietary platform in order to be able to search for software project in one centralized location. What you need for that is a search engine. Or even multiple competing search engines that can all index the same set of software projects.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#625

Post by frutiger »

ealloc wrote: post #558
frutiger wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use a huge amount of open-source software which I do not believe is subsidized. Some is, eg some linux/gnome devs are paid to contribute. But many smaller projects/components are volunteer-only.

> But many smaller projects/components are volunteer-only.

Someone is paying for it with their spare time. Spare time doesn't last forever.

If you're not paying for something, you should see it either as a temporary shortcut that eventually needs a more sustainable fix, or something you don't care about if it disappears.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#626

Post by sdesol »

_betty_ wrote: post #595
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…

Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories, I thought that was devdiv trying to migrate their code back to MS land. Wonder if that's what sparked the conversations.

> Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories

Is this public knowledge? They shutdown their public repos service a while back and I had a manager at Microsoft admit that getting public repo traction was insanely hard. GitHub literally has a strangle hold on the public repos space.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#627

Post by 7ewis »

jrs95 wrote: post #570
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…

I had forgotten about the Atom and VS Code angle of this. I wonder if MS will deprecate Atom in favor of VS Code now...

Forgot about that too.

Atom is open source though isn't it? So I'm sure it won't ever disappear. I wouldn't want to move to VS Code though. I use a Mac and have heard good things about it, but I'm sure it will always be a second class citizen.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#628

Post by matteeyah »

neckardt wrote: post #474
st26 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity. The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of…

I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up. The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make i…

We package GitLab with Omnibus - it makes the installation experience a breeze. See https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/ for more info.

We also offer a hosted service (GitLab.com), if that's more convenient.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#629

Post by manigandham »

Good. I don't understand the hundreds of comments invested in a company that provides one of the most fungible services around, with the weakest features and no profitability. The only other option for them was dying a slow death on the public markets if they did an IPO.

There are dozens of git hosting companies, including GitLab, BitBucket, Microsoft's own VSTS, repos by all the major clouds, and many others. Microsoft has every incentive to not screw this up but even if they did, so what? Nothing happens. Switch to something else and you're all set.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#630

Post by curiousgal »

ebbv wrote: post #612
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…

What? Microsoft is the biggest developer advocate? Apple gives X Code away for free and made Swift an open source, platform agnostic product among many other things.

And it also charges you 100$ a year plus half of what you earn on their app store.
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