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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

#831

Post by ausjke »

So it's time to move on, is gitlab up for the job? or bitbucket? or everyone should run a gitea/gogs container on their $5 vps?

While I use vscode sometimes for web hacking, I use geany/vim for anything else, other than that, I have nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever, and yes, I run linux as my desktop for the last 15+ years.

Money talks, Microsoft is embracing OSS because it's defeated by OSS, it never liked OSS, and it does all these moves just because it has no better options.

And, who knows,it might be the modern Trojan to ruin us all when time comes, I have no doubts on this when I recall how hostile MS has been to OSS.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#832

Post by rwoll »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #704
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 think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms. There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed. Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact agai…

    Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again.
I'd love to see GitHub (and GitLab) offer a custom domain name option which would proxy HTTPS and SSH clones via a company's custom domain (e.g. code.example.com) to GitHub's hosting. That way, if a company needs to move away from GitHub (or GitHub goes away), developer's references to some company's code is not stuck pointing to some stale github.com domain.

Hosting such a proxy (and the repos) takes infrastructure, time, and experience to secure and make available, so from a user's perspective it's great if a company does this as a service as long as you provide the domain.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#833

Post by pier25 »

naikrovek wrote: post #808
ebbv wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> gives X Code away for free Free with the purchase of Apple hardware. Not exactly "free," is it? VS Code works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Nobody gives hardware for free.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#834

Post by nelsonic »

azernik wrote: post #631
nelsonic wrote: post #123

Just when it looked like GitHub was "sustainable" through revenue ... greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") and they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! :-( Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? I would buy a few (thousand) shares ... Who else would buy sto…

> Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? No. Unless they want to go for an IPO, they are only allowed to sell to accredited investors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor ). > greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") That's their job . They put hundreds of millions of dollars into GitHub 3 (Series B) or 6 (Series A) years ago,…

@asernik I was referring to the idea of them doing a "Direct Public Listing" ("DPO") as opposed to an IPO (similar to what Spotify recently did...) http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/spotify-ipo/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-difference-between-ip...

> "a DPO is attractive to small companies and companies with an established and loyal client base. A DPO is also known as direct placement."

GitHub has the "established and loyal client base" with many millions in recurring revenue.

GitHub's principal VCs, Sequoia and A16z can both afford to wait for a return. everyone could sell in the "DPO" so VCs could liquidate if they needed cash ... https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#835

Post by 1123581321 »

naikrovek wrote: post #797
booleandilemma wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with your comment. As much as I love Microsoft, this is a weird development. It’s like if Google bought Mozilla and Firefox became just another Google browser.

What isn't commonly known is that GitHub was never profitable and was getting closer and closer to insolvency every day. Microsoft rescued them.

I’m willing to believe this, but what’s it based on? It seems like they have so many customers. What’s the free/public-to-paid/private traffic that would have made them sustainable?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#836

Post by skinnymuch »

jacksmith21006 wrote: post #718
PascLeRasc wrote: post #34

This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terr…

It sucks. We had as you said a neutral site everyone used. Now the big guys will move their code. Hopefully we will get a new common GitHub that is neutral and they will use. Sounds like it might be gitlab. Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.

Do you think Gitlab will stay independent? They’re burning money. They’ll in all likelihood be acquired in the coming decade as well.

Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#839

Post by ttyprintk »

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…

Unless I misunderstand the need you describe, git can in fact bundle in at least two single-file formats.
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