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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

#81

Post by r00fus »

beefsack wrote: post #42
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually had exactly the same experience with my Pebble. I got it out of casual nerdy interest and was sure I'd use it for a couple of months and then pack it away. Having notifications and basic functionality on your wrist is surprisingly useful though, and I used that watch until it broke (after Pebble went under unfortunately). I've got a Ticwatch E on it's way as a replacement.

Pebble was nice - had one but its uncanny how similar the Palm Treo analogy goes - I loved my Treo till I got my iPhone. I loved my Pebble till I got my Apple watch.

Stuff the old ones do better (even today) but the Apple replacements are all that + constant years of OS upgrades and a stronger app ecosystem.

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

#83

Post by woah »

staticassertion wrote: post #72
rqs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The idea that open source involves “handing over ip on a platter” is what’s stupid here. The vast majority of open source code is developed on the job. The fact that it’s open source means that the developer can take it with them when they leave and possibly even get some name recognition from it. If it was closed source, the developer would be handing it over on a platter to their employer, never to be seen again.

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

#84

Post by caymanjim »

phoenix24 wrote: post #37

if it's about developer love, then next acquisition target for Microsoft should be StackOverflow.

Stack Overflow was founded by Joel Spolsky, who is a Microsoft veteran from their era of peak dominance. I suspect it's a passion project of his that he'd like to hang on to, but he's also pragmatic and everything has its price. And it's profitable. I wouldn't be surprised if someone bought it. I can envision synergy between Stack Overflow and GitHub. Satya Nadella seems to really "get it", though, and I don't anticipate any dramatic changes to GitHub, or to Stack Overflow should they take it over.

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

#85

Post by berti »

bad_user wrote: post #46
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??

> I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site? For open source projects of multiple contributors, yes, because that's where the community is, along with all relevant traces, e.g. issues, comments, PRs, all linked to their user's accounts. I've seen people here suggest that GitLab's import tool is pretty good in importing the history of issues. It's also a copyright lawsuit waiting…

It's more than that too, workflows, CI, release process are all built around GitHub (your release artifacts automatically show up on GitHub when you push a tag right?). GitLab doesn't even have "releases" in the GitHub sense; their closest equivalent is the "tags" page hidden in a submenu and it only allows you to attach some Markdown text to the tag. Issue tracking the feature: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/41766

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

#86

Post by bad_user »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #57
bad_user wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site? For open source projects of multiple contributors, yes, because that's where the community is, along with all relevant traces, e.g. issues, comments, PRs, all linked to their user's accounts. I've seen people here suggest that GitLab's import tool is pretty good in importing the history of issues. It's also a copyright lawsuit waiting…

Aren't a lot of open source communities based around IRC channels or is that old hat now? I remember back in the day IRC was the place to be for Debian. Ditto for when I was doing stuff with Perl.

Well now that you mention it, in the communities I care about, IRC was replaced by Gitter (https://gitter.im/).

Which is also linked to GitHub accounts and repositories. Ironically, Gitter was bought by GitLab and open sourced, but they haven't changed the implementation to allow for chat rooms linked to GitLab repos. At the glacial pace it is evolving, it wouldn't be unfair to say that Gitter is probably relying solely on OSS contributions at this point.

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

#87

Post by psyc »

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'm not seeing the problem.

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

#88

Post by hardwaresofton »

staticassertion wrote: post #71
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?

Yeah except the implication is that it's at the expense of other players, not that they want to simply join the ecosystem and contribute things that everyone can use with low barriers to exit -- the antithesis of open source. Some companies just join, donate hard work and earn good will without the expectation to cash in with their platform play.

No one has a problem with any company trying to improve it's relationship with any population of consumers it serves, but Microsoft seems to still be trying to create walled gardens and get developers in then make sure they don't leave.

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

#89

Post by megaman22 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #82
phoenix24 wrote: post #37

if it's about developer love, then next acquisition target for Microsoft should be StackOverflow.

Would be interesting but I don't think SO needs the funding / resources as badly as GitHub does.

Considering they keep bailing on new features that could make them money at an astounding rate, I think that's accurate.

The SO documentation site thing was gone before I could think about using it.

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

#90

Post by arthurfm »

With Google recently investing $20 million in GitLab [1] and helping them migrate from Azure to Google Cloud Platform [2][3], what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab?

Move their repositories back to GitHub, switch to BitBucket or something else entirely?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c...

[2] https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando...

[3] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/

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