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What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

jacquesmattheij.com

161–170 of 228 posts

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#161
post #4

The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me. Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted) There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same co…

>but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a disaster...

Are you saying the purpose of this acquisition is to make GitHub better? If not, why would Microsoft be interested in buying it?

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#162
> Foxes may change their coats, they don’t change their nature.

It seems clear today that the "Developers, developers, developers!" thing of Steve Ballmer is still in the plans of Microsoft.

I wonder how do people who believed in the modern Microsoft with Nadella feel now?

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian would have pretty much no reason to buy GitHub, unless it's to shut it down. They have Bitbucket and I think is pretty safe to say that they don't care about people hosting their open source stuff. Of course you can use Bitbucket for free but where the big bucks are for Atlassian is the enterprise market. I don't have market data but I don't think there are many big corps using GitHub as opposite to Bitbuck…

You'd be surprised. Case in point is my current main client, a huge national broadcasting company which is using Jira and Confluence for everything on one hand, but is just setting up a GitHub private instance on the other.

I'm indeed surprised and I'm sure there are other cases like this out there, it would be interesting to know the thinking behind it.

In my experience of working with big corps, if you are using Jira and Confluence, Bitbucket simply offers much better integration with them and lately Atlassian is rocking it with new features and deeper integration every time.

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#164
post #106

Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me. Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux,…

So, are you saying that both Lenovo (that say in manual for x280 that in select countries it ships with Ubuntu) and Ubuntu (That here https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201801-26057/ claim "certified pre-install for Ubuntu.") are lying?

If you are using Linux you are using Linux kernel that is managed by git. Microsoft contributes to git.

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it benefits developers who use Windows machines and develop applications for Linux.

I'm genuinely curious as to what drives a developer to run Linux on Windows rather than just booting into a Linux environment. Is that software support? Is that hardware support that's not available on Linux?

Desktop linux has been much less reliable for me. I'm also using a surface device and like to use it for sketching.

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#166
post #106

Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me. Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux,…

You know that Microsoft are the largest corporate contributor to open source projects on Github right?

Imagine there are two cities in a country, city A and city B. The president lives in city A and is very popular there, but not so much in city B.

Person from city B: I hate the president. He never did anything good for our people.

Person from city A: On the contrary, this is the best president we had in forever. In fact he built 5 hospitals and 10 schools in our city alone! How can you possibly hate him?

Like, maybe Microsoft has contributed to some open source projects, but are these open source projects something everyone benefits from? I'm not even sure what their open source projects are.

Also, isn't it a big conflict of interest then? When the largest user of a platform also owns this platform, it kind of puts other projects at a huge disadvantage.

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#167
post #4

The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me. Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted) There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same co…

Anyone with any morals would never want to be associated with the Microsoft name, so anyone who does is untrustworthy by default. And besides, the current CEO was the one who went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at a ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either. Or the locked-down ARM laptops. So it's not like the current management is innocen…

  Anyone with any morals would never want to be associated with the Microsoft name, so anyone who does is untrustworthy by default.
I'm not in the pro MS camp in this debate, but that sounds like a "no true scotsman" to me.

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#168

I myself am optimistic but some few questrions popped up: Microsoft is very proactive removing things from azure and shutting down sites as soon as they receive DMCA complaint or abuse complaint. Are they going to remove important github repos like these if they get DMCA or other complaints? https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-Project (cheat for Counter strike) https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl (download from v…

github has already been removing repos for DMCA and other reasons

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#169
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, out of all of the BigCorps who could have bought it (and who have deep enough pockets to sustain its bleeding,) Microsoft is one of the best of a bad bunch. I'm not quite as cynical as the author of the OP when it comes to Microsoft's recent apparent change of direction, but who knows, that may just be naivety speaking.

the best out of a bad bunch... what does this even mean. They are killing a neutral force in the market space there is nothing good coming from it.

It seems like the alternative was GitHub running out of cash, so the main good coming from it is that GitHub will continue to exist.

Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

#170
post #106

Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me. Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux,…

> because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows

As a Linux on ThinkPad user, I'd be very interested to learn more about this.

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