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GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

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Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#61

Post by dmitriid »

CharlesW wrote: post #10
jack9 wrote: post #2

> The WWDC, sacred nerd summit of Appledom, is where they announce things like a new “night mode” for the operating system and try to convince programmers that Apple Watch matters. Bloomberg got an honest laugh out of me.

It is funny, but (for the benefit of those who haven't been to one) also a complete mischaracterization of WWDC. The keynote has always been "dumbed down" for press/analysts desperate for between-product-launch news, with most of the juicy stuff saved for in-depth developer technical sessions.

And that's the problem. It's a World Wide Developer Conference. And then, in the keynote and later in news and announcements all they come up with is emoji and dark mode?

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#62

Post by SllX »

dmitriid wrote: post #61
CharlesW wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is funny, but (for the benefit of those who haven't been to one) also a complete mischaracterization of WWDC. The keynote has always been "dumbed down" for press/analysts desperate for between-product-launch news, with most of the juicy stuff saved for in-depth developer technical sessions.

And that's the problem. It's a World Wide Developer Conference. And then, in the keynote and later in news and announcements all they come up with is emoji and dark mode?

The Platform State of the Union is the real Keynote and the sessions are the meat of the conference.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#63

Post by bscphil »

meddlepal wrote: post #36
Razengan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Watch is apparently the best selling watch (not just best selling smartwatch) in the world [0], with millions of users, and many copycats. Why shouldn’t it matter? Of course, there’s only so much you can do and make on such a small screen, and it is an accessory rather than a “primary” device, but that is another issue altogether, if one. I think it may even function as a motion control input for the rumored VR…

Best selling watch is believable, but who the heck buys and wears a watch for anything besides fashion these days? It's a totally niche market IMO.

It's not even that: Timex probably outsells Apple watches 100:1, but they have a crazy variety of models instead of just 1 or 2.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#64

Post by eight_ender »

ioquatix wrote: post #32
kumarvvr wrote: post #29

I am a developer, use git, but don't use too much GitHub. I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site? Is the cost of moving to another platform, really that difficult??

If you use pure git, no. If you built your company around GitHub team management, yes. If you integrate with 3rd party services that function via GitHub, yes. If you depend on an open source community which is primarily connected through GitHub, yes.

I went to reply to the parent but you just nailed it. Microsoft isn't after your open source project git user here, they're after the multitude of companies that are heavily invested in what Github offers on top of git.

If I were to tell my team right now we were moving away from Github I'm pretty sure there'd be riots and fire. We rely on the hooks to tell us when things are being merged and we rely on PRs to do code review. Even the wikis are maintained and contain relevant information. No one does that. Corporate wikis are a black hole of shit, and somehow our Github wiki isn't.

The MS sales team is most likely currently engaged in some Defcon 2 sales planning in a war room bunker deep underground. Deals are going to happen, upsells will be sought. Account managers are being dropped from helicopters. Quotas are coalescing off the shoulder of Orion. Contracts are glittering at the Facebook compound gates. All of these deals will be won in time, making it rain.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#65

Post by rqs »

yurishimo wrote: post #7

I think the author nailed it. This is Microsoft's chance to reach out to developers and prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source. We've seen this over the years with previous code hosting platforms. If the platforms betrays it's users, developers are not scared to mass migrate to something else. The onus is now on Microsoft to keep developers happy or risk losing their $7.5B investment.

> prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source.

Change of heart? Why? I think they are doing a pretty smart move to be friendly towards open source community, but it's not because I believe they changed their mind and want to contribute to the open source world, instead, I simply believes they embrace open source community is because it's good for business.

You see, open source software these years became pretty good and infrastructural. If Microsoft can't be a part of it, then they will soon be obsolete. And they don't want to be obsolete, so they just can't afford to not be a friend with open source.

The real thing that I curious about is what would happen when Microsoft managed to re-dominates the software market (in both user and enterprise end). Will they still be friendly with open source community after that?

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#66

Post by notveryrational »

Microsoft can not buy goodwill with me, personally. I worked at the company and was privy to "strategic conversations" whereby they were looking to regain trust with developers to get them back from Android and Google to Windows stack.

Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything, even when there were much better tools. Under Satya, it was better, but the emphasis is still very much on getting, as Steve Balmer said "Developers developers developers".

Microsoft knows its being challenged in the platform game and that developers have migrated. But having seen the inside of Microsoft corporate, legal, compliance and policy I don't have high confidence that this isn't another PR project destined for death of the startup.

It's also a terrifying lesson about the fragility of the open source movement.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#67

Post by iamtew »

kumarvvr wrote: post #55
hliyan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: is it possible to build basic pull request and comment information storage into the git repository itself? This way, sites like Github are merely interfaces with no data import export requirements.

I think the problem is with identity management. Maybe a universal identity provider is required.

You could just GPG sign your commits, then you can know for sure where the commit is coming from.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#68

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jlgaddis wrote: post #16

Since the announcement, I’ve been trying to figure out what the most evil uses of “telemetry” that could be incorporated into Github in order to invade user’s privacy are. I’ve had a few (small) ideas but I’m confident that Microsoft already has people much more evil^W^Wsmarter than me working on this very problem (if it wasn’t already figured out beforehand).

The vast majority of GitHub content is already public. Massive datasets have been generated, and hosted on Google BigQuery, regarding activity on GitHub[0]. I think we're trying a little too hard to find a way to invent malice here. Most of the client software people use to interface with GitHub is also open source and impossible for Microsoft to inject telemetry into: It's called "git".

Also, I would note that the teams that work on Windows and Office, and the teams that work on .NET and Microsoft's other big open source initiatives, might as well belong to two different companies from the differences in how they appear to approach things. Your upset that one product of Microsoft's chose to implement something that everyone else in the industry was doing years earlier does not really justify the nonsense FUD.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/github

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#69

Post by nikofeyn »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #52
Zyst wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that, as siblings echo. I genuinely think that, for instance, Microsoft is genuinely doing a better job of doing open source than Google right now (With Facebook at the top, MSFT #2, Goog #3 from FAANG). That might be because I'm deeper into web development though, and both TypeScript, and VS Code are great contributions. Maybe I'd feel different if I worked in ML, and used Tensorflow daily.

I wouldn't say that Google is high on my list of trust, either. But TypeScript and VS Code do not jump you into a #2 ranking. Go and Chrome easily trump them for starters. Then you get things like node that ride off V8, and Atom that rides off Chrome. The Google ecosystem of community building blocks is still much, much more significant than MS. After all, Google actually dogfoods OSS. FWIW, I don't and wouldn't use…

wait, how does go and chrome trump open source c#, f#, vb.net, .net core, typescript, asp.net, visual studio code, monaco, powershell core, mono, and the many, many other things they have open sourced?

they’ve gone insane.

https://opensource.microsoft.com

https://github.com/Microsoft

and all of these are active and well managed with microsoft employees engaged in communication.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#70

Post by blub »

jlgaddis wrote: post #16

Since the announcement, I’ve been trying to figure out what the most evil uses of “telemetry” that could be incorporated into Github in order to invade user’s privacy are. I’ve had a few (small) ideas but I’m confident that Microsoft already has people much more evil^W^Wsmarter than me working on this very problem (if it wasn’t already figured out beforehand).

They also have LinkedIn.

Microsoft realised relatively recently, like Google did a long time ago, that they can give away the sources to the non business-essential stuff and make money through services and exploiting user data.

.Net core, a text editor, those are the trinkets that keep the naive developers happy and content that they support a company that is open-source "friendly".

That's why open-source is no longer enough today. The big corps are working around it and locking in customers with their SaaS products (which surprise surprise are closed).

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