Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#731

Post by rixrax » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:14 AM UTC

GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft.

I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I’ve had paid private account since forever).

GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.

TANSTAAFL

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574 [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#732

Post by 2_listerine_pls » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

Iv wrote: post #721

hobofan wrote: post #132

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...

Atom is open source though. One company can not decide to kill it. https://github.com/atom/atom

Someone has to maintain it.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#733

Post by yrashk » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #712

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…

Decentralization is a wonderful idea. It brings with it benefits that are technical, architectural, and social. Yet is also carries with it its own set of costs and risks. Bluntly, I doubt this will shock the world of software development into being less centralized. The practical benefits of centralization are, apparently, too large to be readily overcome.

(shameless plug) I recently built a tool (SIT, https://sit.fyi) that has decentralizes issue tracking and similar workflows, giving full days ownership and independence of storage and transport. Can be (and actively being) used with Git, or other SCMs.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#734

Post by grenran » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

singularity2001 wrote: post #59

cup-of-tea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've used GPL then you have nothing to worry about.

80% of github projects here are hidden, inhouse trustworthy secret private projects! This is such horrible news!

Microsoft is not gonna give a fuck about your shitty little repos or anyones for that matter. What makes you think they are gonna put time and effort into mining people's code?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#735

Post by Kalium » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

yrashk wrote: post #733

Kalium wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralization is a wonderful idea. It brings with it benefits that are technical, architectural, and social. Yet is also carries with it its own set of costs and risks. Bluntly, I doubt this will shock the world of software development into being less centralized. The practical benefits of centralization are, apparently, too large to be readily overcome.

(shameless plug) I recently built a tool (SIT, https://sit.fyi ) that has decentralizes issue tracking and similar workflows, giving full days ownership and independence of storage and transport. Can be (and actively being) used with Git, or other SCMs.

Very nice! Looks cool.

What does your tool offer to make sure I never have to deal with abusive users, server patches, or a split-brain scenario?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#736

Post by ReverseCold » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #434

objclxt wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope they don't discontinue Atom Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).

How many build from source as opposed to downloading binaries from atom.io?

Someone can just make `libreatom` and start distributing binaries. The MIT license is nice like that.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#737

Post by prh8 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

rixrax wrote: post #731

GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft. I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lament…

If anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#738

Post by zxcvhjkl » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:21 AM UTC

rixrax wrote: post #731

GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft. I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lament…

> I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is?

I imagine most HN readers are paying customers either directly or indirectly(their company/startup).

As a private customer, I wouldn’t object to an increase in the price if that meant they stay independent. If they get acquired by MS I am definitely stopping my subscription.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#739

Post by nicwest » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #659

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…

You can easily migrate your repo to a different service, so having lots of developers rely on GitHub isn't really a big deal. Many large projects have GitHub mirrors. I'd say the biggest issue is that Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases. Compare that to Fossil [0], which lets you bundle up everything into a single file. If there was better built-in support y…

> Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases

I feel like a lot of these features could be handled with git-notes[1]. For example git-appraise[2] uses the git-notes feature for a code review system:

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes

[2]https://github.com/google/git-appraise

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#740

Post by luckydata » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

guitarbill wrote: post #577

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 m…

> Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users?

I would say the one that keeps Github alive. That's a pretty major one.