Part of me is hoping this is in preparation of releasing an open source version of windows
GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
111–120 of 366 posts
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
That to me is what DotNet Core is, along with Asp.Net, Entity Framework many years ago, and everything developer related becoming open source. GitHub is just a signal to people who have been out of the loop, bloomberg and many linux developers. When I start dropping my apps on their systems, they might be surprised how well they run. https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/aspnet
People may or may not remember, but most of this started with ALT.NET movement, with a number of influential people and developer supported or created a number of projects. Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate. It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started p…
I remember ALT.NET, and I would not retroactively declare a success. What it did was push into the open the fact that the Microsoft of the day could not effectively handle having rival technologies on their platform, open or closed source. Their strategy at the time was to try to provide a solution for every single product category, to the point of maintaining various no-cost but proprietary tools and libraries just to fill gaps (most of which are now abandoned).
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#113if it's about developer love, then next acquisition target for Microsoft should be StackOverflow.
It already uses Microsoft tech so why not?
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#114Microsoft 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…
Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything
This is called “dogfooding” and all companies should do it. How can you sell to customers or understand customers if you’re not using the product yourself?
One day I’d love to visit SAP and see how they do their own vacations and expenses. It can’t be with their own software.
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#115The best case for GitHub would've been for Redhat to acquire them :-( Just feeling sad for what has happened. Microsoft is in it for business. Talking about "change of heart" for a company is bullshit. It's all associated with the business model one way or the other. RedHat would've been the best model. Imagine. Buying GH, open sourcing it, selling a self-hosted version of it for paid support....
Redhat? Company that is currently infiltrating every Linux distro with systemd bloatware? No, thanks.
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
Google is pretty much doing the same thing with Chrome. Opera has switched to its rendering engine and Firefox's share is dropping (after Google pumped tons of money in them and used their work to enhance their own offering). Gecko is barely on the map while Google's render can be found in newer versions of Opera, Vivaldi, and others. I mean if you go back far enough, Microsoft did this with IE. IIRC, they licensed a…
So Google is bad because they poured millions of dollars into Mozilla for Firefox development, but even so their own browser is still better and more popular, and the code is open for other projects to use. Which is a bad, evil thing to do and we want none of that round here!
And this is the same as developing a crummy browser, not sharing the code and not funding any alternate implementations, and leaving it stagnant for years.
Ok.
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
Google is pretty much doing the same thing with Chrome. Opera has switched to its rendering engine and Firefox's share is dropping (after Google pumped tons of money in them and used their work to enhance their own offering). Gecko is barely on the map while Google's render can be found in newer versions of Opera, Vivaldi, and others. I mean if you go back far enough, Microsoft did this with IE. IIRC, they licensed a…
Chrome is absolutely the new IE... it’s just in the heyday stage instead of the “ancient barely supported monster” stage that IE was in when developers began to hate it.
The need for greater variety in the spread of popular rendering engines is dire and real. Browser monoculture is dangerous and I refuse to use any browser that’s Chromium/Blink as my daily driver for this reason. I seek alternatives for sites that obviously haven’t been tested in anything else - if you can’t be bothered to properly service Gecko and/or WebKit you don’t need my traffic.
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 excelle…
As long as GitLab remains also deployable on your own infrastructure and not become a SaaS-only platform, I'll worry less about this.
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#119Earlier 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?
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…
As someone with no real stake in this deal, why should anyone care whether Microsoft kills Github or not? There are multiple alternative Git hosting competitors and switching costs are low.
Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
#120I 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.
To get the developers to help write obnoxious garbage like win10 which forces users into all sorts of things they don't want?
They want an undo button? It's right under their nose: stop with the bullshit auto-update that re-enables itself, document all telemetry and make a big button to disable it.
But they don't do that, do they? Any idea why? Spoiler: it's all fake bs again, take one flashy but insignificant step forward and take 3 covert snake-like steps back.