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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

#91

Post by notveryrational »

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?

Nothing where they are going to gas all the developers or something. Nope.

It's more about priorities and intentions. Microsoft doesn't care about the developers. It cares about having the dominant platform. It recognizes that its image makes that difficult.

The GitHub acquisition: Microsoft didn't suddenly get more beautiful. It put on a mask. It will kill GitHub - or at least let it flounder - if that's what's best for its business. It will push Microsoft technology into the GitHub user base if necessary.

Developer relationships aren't an end in themselves - something Microsoft wants because its good. Developers are a means to an end, and its Machiavellian in its application of corporate strategy to achieve this end.

Microsoft would happily buy Ubuntu Canonical if they thought it would win them either a market advantage or a way to push Microsoft stack into the Linux userbase.

Some people probably don't have a problem with that. I do. But maybe I've got a chip on my shoulder from seeing this go badly so many times.

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

#92

Post by berti »

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.

IRC is a good substitute for being in the same room, but you still need more formal discussions recorded in issues and pull requests (the recorded part is quite important if you project is around for more than a few weeks).

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

#93

Post by iaml »

arthurfm wrote: post #90

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..…

>what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab?

Fork it and move on with their day.

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

#94

Post by some_account »

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?

Microsoft is forcing employees to use Microsoft tools when there are better ones to solve the problem.

Read that again and think about the culture they have at Microsoft, then think about the open source culture if it's the same. Do Microsoft embrace open source?

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

#95

Post by Latteland »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #88
staticassertion wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relationsh…

Almost every company works this way. They kind of are okay with the world growing but they want to help themselves in what they are really doing. Like hiring interns, it's mostly a way to get 'a really long interview'. It's not really about helping the interns to grow that much.

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

#96

Post by digitalzombie »

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?

I think the original comment is trying to convey is that perhaps developers should be wary of goodwill.

Microsoft have done this in the past. They actively eat the browser market share with IE and left it alone after being the monopoly in web browser. This forced Netscape to become Mozilla. They also tried to be the gateway and believe OS is the gateway for all program and was left in the dust with web app and web search engine. Their past modus operandi was always to stay a monopoly not to create a good environment for developers.

And I think it's a good thing to keep in mind because microsoft's past actions we should all be wary and keep in mind when we decide to do anything with Microsoft.

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

#97

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

taakd wrote: post #51
Rapzid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure used to bill themselves as the "open cloud". That's kinda gone from their marketing, but they are WAY more open than AWS.

Only OpenStack is fully open source and fairly feature complete, with a few dozen providers using the OpenStack platform. OVH, who owns the largest datacenter in North America uses OpenStack, they're actually one of the largest contributors. Red Hat & IBM both seem to be really pushing private deployments as of late for their larger clients that already own large DCs.

Knowing that OVH uses a piece of software makes me want to never use that piece of software.

They are the worst quality cloud provider, IMO.

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

#98

Post by ocdtrekkie »

blub wrote: post #74
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 busines…

I would definitely agree that corporations are amoral and will do what it takes to make money, I've made the same argument myself. But GitHub's primary value is lost if everyone leaves it: They would lose most of the value of their $7.5 billion investment if they did what many people are irrationally speculating.

I use GitHub Desktop for some things myself, but it's only slightly more capable than GitHub's web interface: Serviceable for basic operations, but probably not the Git client professional developers are going to rely on.

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

#99

Post by fjsolwmv »

nikofeyn wrote: post #69
iamnotlarry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Angular, Polymer,

Dart, Go,

Android,

Chromium,

Protocol Buffers, Java Guice/Collections, C++ Abseil

Plus a bunch of minor things

https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured

and stuff Google contributes to but doesn't lead.

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

#100

Post by some_account »

iaml wrote: post #93
arthurfm wrote: post #90

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..…

>what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab? Fork it and move on with their day.

You will not be able to easily move away from any dominant platform because it will be not just the code but the community you leave behind. Also it's quite possible that github will add CI stuff directly into Azure and if you start using that, there may be no other product to move to with the same functionality.

Vendor lock-in is a strategy that works even if you know its there. I'm building my code with the excellent CI stuff built into Gitlab today and I really don't want to move away from it because of its amazing ease of use.

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