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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

#911
Centralized and proprietary unfortunately are two key attributes to Github. That fits the old school MS bill. But it also fits the new “we have changed hype”.

It’s most unfortunate, because git made decentralized revision control popular.

My future Tooling bets are on sustainable open source.

Good for MS, though. It’s a smart move for them. And Github has been struggling for years, anyway. Scandals, new structure, more hierarchy. It’s probably easier to pick up now than three years ago.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#912

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…

As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better. I don't use any microsoft tools (and I _hate_ all windows after 7), so Microsoft integrating with GitHub has no appeal to me. I think the best case scenario for me personally is that nothing changes. None of the github changes in the past few years have added anything noticeable for me (not sure if others agree, be in…

> As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better.

It sounds like they were running out of money. So I guess it makes your experience better in that you get to keep using it.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#913

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…

> For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Maybe not now, but what about after the next reorganization or the next CEO? If it's no longer in MS' interests to keep a relationship with this audience somewhere down the road, why would they leave them alone? This is the uncertainty people are afraid of.

For Github there was always uncertainty; if MS didn't take over, investors would've, or another (less capable) competitor (like I dunno, Yahoo?). I'm confident in MS keeping github running smoothly and moving forward.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#914
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…

>- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.

Yes, I'm sure one company will support both editors in the long term.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#915

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.

This was largely my thought behind the move. Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby, I can't see them wanting to switch things up from a tech perspective. GitHub is stable, and it's tech stack is capable of staying up despite some major DDoS attacks. If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams, and to finally resolve the issues that stop Wind…

> Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby

And for that matter, GitLab as well :-)

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that both Atlassian and Github were to some extent successful, because they kept the open source competitors away by giving out free licenses to open source projects. With these free options available, people in community were less interested in putting effort to free (as in speech) alternatives for these closed source products.

Yes this is likely. However we can have our cake and eat it too, companies can host an instance of an open source service. Like Gitlab does EDIT, yes I am aware that there are some non open parts in Gitlab.com

What parts of gitlab.com are non-open?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#917
post #900

I consider this a huge waste of money on Microsoft's part. Why did they create and then shutter codeplex in the first place? Why can't we have multiple competing platforms (Google Code, Github, Codeplex, Sourceforge, bitbucket, etc.)? If I were Microsoft I'd rather invest a smaller amount of money (it surely is much cheaper than acquiring Github!) into making Codeplex the best platform. And then I'd just do a traditi…

You need to reach a critical mass of users. In contrast to Github, neither Codeplex nor Windows phone did that.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#918
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.

Xcode is the successor to Project Builder, the development environment for NeXT. It is written in Objective-C and AppKit.

Xcode was designed for writing Mac apps, why would anyone want to write Mac apps on a PC, when they'd need a Mac to test them anyway?

It's only after the iPhone that the question of a port to other platforms has arisen. But that would be a huge task equivalent to a full rewrite. Even Apple doesn't have the resources to pull that off smoothly.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#919

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 don't think Microsoft even uses the same deck of cards as FOSS people.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#920
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…

Yeah, I wanted to say exactly this. There's a different between specialisation in a market that still provides competition and consumer liquidity, and monopolistic centralisation (even when the monopolist is effectively benign).

It's like there's a middle-ground between everyone building their own automobile, and there being only a single car manufacturer on the planet. So long as have you have a few players who are genuinely competing, and you have the option to switch between them without paying an excessive penalty, then it's a good thing that a certain subset of people are working hard on building better cars than you ever could tinkering away in your garage (although you should still be allowed to do that, if you so desire).

What this requires is for governments to provide a framework of standardisation, access-to-data, data-transferability, and antitrust enforcement that allows a healthy competitive environment to emerge and persist, without either allowing a monopoly (or a cartel) to evolve, or overburdening everyone with regulation.

It's a difficult balancing act, even in more traditional industries, and anyone who presents a too simplistic "more regulation!" or "less regulation!" answer to it isn't being honest. Tech presents additional challenges because it's newer, and because it's evolving rapidly. I think it will take many more decades for the necessary level of technical understanding to metastasise through policy-making and civil administration realms until you get effective control of tech markets, although laws like GDPR are an interesting start.

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