Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

bloomberg.com

851–860 of 1001 posts

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#851

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…

This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.

> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux

Interix/SFU/SUA has always existed. WSL is just the latest iteration of it. And nobody uses it now just like nobody used it before

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#852

A lot of GitHub employees are remote. All of the big tech companies are allergic to remote teams. I wonder if that will change now?

I wonder as well. If linkedin is any indication, Microsoft hasn’t affected their engineering culture really at all yet. In fact linkedin still routinely poaches Microsoft engineers and used slack and google drive and bluejeans instead of skype. If anything linkedin has gone on a massive hiring spree on Microsoft’s dime.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#856

Some HN reaction reminds me of... "Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class." [A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark, 022] Big five representatives of the vectorialist class are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple.

feel like if any of the other companies made this acquisition less people would care. It’s just trendy and good for your hacker creds to oppose microsoft as people did in the 90s. No one is crying about AWS hosting all applications.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wouldn’t want git to have built in wiki’s, bug trackers etc. I think it’s better to have separate tools.

Point being, the data can and should live within the repo like gh-pages has been doing for a while. Not about those tools being integrated to official git tooling.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.

Yeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.

I doubt it, I think they are doing it because they’ve seen more and more of their enterprise migrate from TFS to git.

This is my opinion, but I think Microsoft tech is fairly terrible for open source and smaller projects, because .Net is a lot of complicated tooling you’ll never use outside of enterprise. At the same time they are rapidly becoming the “only” enterprise option rather quickly, and with that comes the question of why you’d chose AWS over Azure.

Sure visual studio has a free version, Windows now does Linux and .net Core is open but I see those moves as a way to make c# replace JAVA in schools not as a way to make open source love Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Their "corporate DNA" was established when the desktop was supreme and they could steer the direction of the industry based on thier Windows dominance. Times are different, mobile is more important, cloud hosting is a real thing and technology changes. They had to evolve or die. Saying you can't trust MS in 2018 based on the way the world was years ago is like saying that Netflix could only ship DVDs to people's hous…

Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.

“I can’t hurt you now, I have these handcuffs on” doesn’t mean you can full trust someone who hit you.

(All that aside, I have notice what does appear to be real cultural change at MS)

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Maybe for Microsoft.
Post reply on HN