GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by staticassertion » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:24 AM UTC

notveryrational wrote: post #66

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 muc…

I kept reading, waiting for the insidious part. So what you're saying is that Microsoft has a company wide strategic vision to improve its relationship with developers?

Did you leave some part out?

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

#72

Post by staticassertion » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:26 AM UTC

rqs wrote: post #65

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…

All companies that embrace open source do it because it's good for business. It's a seemingly unlimited resource that accounts for billions (made up number, feels reasonable) of dollars of unpaid labor.

It was always stupid to be against OSS from a business perspective and so long as developers hand over their IP on a platter it always will be - Microsoft would be really stupid to turn away free money, and they seem to realize this now.

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

#73

Post by Fomite » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #40

meddlepal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My Apple Watch is surprisingly useful: I can figure out which conference room my next meeting is in with a single tap of the home screen, control music, etc. It honestly surprised me how much value I got out of it.

Same experience here - I got it essentially so I could have something being like "Hey buddy, you should be somewhere in 15 minutes..." but I've gotten a lot of use out of it.

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

#74

Post by blub » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #68

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 t…

No need to try hard to find malice. Corporations are amoral and they will do what it takes to make money.

For MS that means now cloud services, Office & Windows + some other smaller income stuff. In each of these areas they are aggressively pursuing their interests: the ODF scandal and Munich Linux project come to mind. The rest they can open-source freely and without any negative repercussions, it just makes business sense for the goodwill they will receive.

Please note that there are also many private repos and there's also github desktop.

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

#75

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:30 AM UTC

redial wrote: post #48

Razengan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which developer wants to miss out on serving potentially millions of users? What kind of “killer” app do you envision for a watch? Being able to check messages, calls, Uber, flights, etc. right on my wrist are all killer applications for me, along with the fitness features of course. I suspect the upcoming walkie-talkie will be fun too (something that should’ve been there from the start.)

Any potential the Watch has is clearly not enough for a strong app market to develop. > Which developer wants to miss out on serving potentially millions of users? You are forgetting that most developers already have millions of potential users on the iPhone with a market at least 30x bigger than the Watch's, and iOS has none of the limitations the Watch has. Right now a Watch app requires an iPhone app, is hard to m…

The upside for you is that if you have a watch app and your competitor doesn't, customers are going to choose your product over theirs.

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

#76

Post by Fomite » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:31 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #26

Razengan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which developer wants to miss out on serving potentially millions of users? What kind of “killer” app do you envision for a watch? Being able to check messages, calls, Uber, flights, etc. right on my wrist are all killer applications for me, along with the fitness features of course. I suspect the upcoming walkie-talkie will be fun too (something that should’ve been there from the start.)

I think you make your own point. There is no killer app, so why would developers care about millions of people with a watch they can’t do anything novel by a third party?

I've switched my app usage several times to ones that have better watch integration.

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

#77

Post by krrrh » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #45

meddlepal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like having time easily accessible. Though I have some philosophical and design issues with Apple, the biggest thing, the #1 requirement of any smartphone for me, is a notification LED for messages. I like seeing at a glance who or what is notifying me. Why is an LED so important? Because I want to identify a message quickly, without my phone always in my pocket (e.g. it's on my desk or next to the bed). With a wat…

Don’t underestimate where the watch trumps LEDs: discretness and gentleness. After owning one for a few years I can’t stand the abrasive sound of a vibrating cell phone on a table.

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

#78

Post by sixdimensional » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #70

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 longe…

Eyeballing Oracle here who are especially moving to cloud only versions of many products, such as their ERP platform. Part of my day job, and do I trust them not to lock our data away in their SaaS and then charge us for AaaS (analytics as a service)? Not as far as I can throw them.

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

#79

Post by r00fus » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:34 AM UTC

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.

I hated watches - had a wrist ornament years ago and stopped wearing it because it interfered with my active life.

Apple's strategy is a blue-ocean one - they brought Apple users and active-lifestyle folks into a relative staid luxury goods market and (aside from an initial stumble with series-0 edition) co-opted the market and transformed it.

It wasn't exactly as powerful as the move to smartphones, and tech was moving there already but it's really great that my Apple watch is part of my work (2nd factor), lifestyle (Strava), and family (timer+music controls).

There's room for improvement but it gets the useful parts right.

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

#80

Post by caymanjim » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:34 AM UTC

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??

GitHub is where developers go to find the software they use on a daily basis, and find the libraries they use to build even more software, which they usually put right back on GitHub.

I use the public GitHub many times a month. More importantly, every single job I've had for nearly the past decade has stored its code in GitHub. Not publicly accessible, and rarely at a private github.com account; every place I work uses a privately hosted GitHub Enterprise server. I wouldn't even consider using anything else, even though GitLab (and to a lesser extent, BitBucket) offer exactly the same functionality.

GitHub was groundbreaking when it arrived. Some people are having an emotional reaction and defecting to GitLab this month (for reasons that escape me), but GitHub has all the inertia. More importantly, GitHub has a vast community. It's just where code lives now.

I'm curious as to what sort of development you do or where you work that you're not a regular GitHub user. It's inescapable in every software company I've worked at since its inception, and as a consultant, that's a huge number of companies in nearly every industry. The only place I've worked in the past decade that didn't use GitHub was an all-Windows shop that used some horrible old proprietary revision control system whose name escapes me. Do you use git but not use GitHub (public or private or enterprise)?