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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

#951

Post by EnderMB »

some_account wrote: post #864
EnderMB wrote: post #117

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…

Of course they will mess with it. Just slowly so developers dont leave. This is Microsoft. Read up on their tactics. It works.

It's why I'm surprised at the timing, since GitHub has had its own issues over the past few years, with a founder and other staff members leaving over harassment, and some questionable comments coming from members of their new team. I've felt for a while that GitHub had peaked, and that we weren't far away from seeing it push towards breaking the product to satisfy investors that want a return.

With an acquisition, most of this becomes amplified, based on how Microsoft treat GitHub. IMO, leaving them alone to do their own thing could be just as bad as being too controlling. I'd like to see someone like Scott Hanselman, a well-liked developer in the development community be given the opportunity to sit in GitHub and to use Microsoft's resources to improve the open-source community.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#953

Post by skohan »

EnderMB wrote: post #949
flatline wrote: post #571

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…

I guess it depends what side of Microsoft we get working with GitHub, whether it's the friendly outreach side alongside the .NET Foundation, or whether it's the internal software team that want to integrate GitHub into internal tooling and start moving their platform onto theirs. My dream scenario is the former, where Microsoft provide leadership to a company that's still reeling from its own scandals, and use GitHub…

"Dream" is the right word here. The idea that a major software firm would buy the worlds largest repository of and community around open source software with the sole intention of "providing leadership" seems pretty unlikely.

It's along the same lines as saying an oil executive would make a good candidate as the EPA chief because they "understand pollution".

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#954

Post by tome »

noah-kun wrote: post #878
tome wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has access to the running systems of so many companies.

Notably Google banned Windows years ago and every startup I know is 99.9% Mac.

I was actually thinking about Azure, but good point.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#956

Post by dragonsh »

EnderMB wrote: post #117

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…

Try https://kallithea-scm.org/ supporting not just git but also hg and svn.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#957

Post by skohan »

scarface74 wrote: post #801
flatline wrote: post #571

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…

I would be disheartened by any major software firm buying github. The temptation is simply too great for any company with interests in software development to leverage their control over the world's largest open-source community to advantage their own products and services.

If there's one thing which is predictable about corporate behavior, it is that they will act in their own best interest. Publicly traded companies are legally required to do so.

Also equating trust with product offerings is a false equivalency here: saying Amazon can't be trusted as a hosting provider because they were known as an online retailer is a lot different than saying Microsoft cannot be trusted because they have a long track-record of anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#958

Post by marcinkuzminski »

dragonsh wrote: post #956
EnderMB wrote: post #117

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…

Try https://kallithea-scm.org/ supporting not just git but also hg and svn.

Kallithea doesn't support SVN, only RhodeCode does which Kallithea forked. SVN support amongst many other security fixes and features were added at a later stage into RhodeCode.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#959

Post by nottorp »

Well, let's say I wouldn't switch away from github at once (I have a paid account with private repos and all), but consider the Skype precedent: from a mostly working native application, now it's an Electron abomination that takes 100% CPU and is a lot harder to use than the previous versions. But it has social networking!

It's very likely they will "improve" github in the same way. I don't think they dare to make the site explicitly not work on anything but IE, but I expect subtle incompatibilities to pile up over time...

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#960

Post by zanny »

This is the "extend" phase, in case anyone is keeping track. The embrace was "MS loves Linux!", switching Windows to use git, and putting tons of near random libraries and projects on github publically (vscode, chakracore, etc).

I just love how anyone that cards had been actively avoiding walled garden proprietary services like this and were using gitlab, phabticator, etc for years saying this or anything similar (could have just been github starting to sell user data themselves) but only when big evil MS comes along to put the reality in peoples faces that you don't bet your software infrastructure on some proprietary non interoperable web service.

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