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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

#121
post #114

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…

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.

I wish they dogfooded on spinning rust and limited RAM.

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

#122
The difference between "the old Microsoft" (monopolistic, openly insulting/abusive) and "the new Microsoft" is like the difference between colonialism and neocolonialism.

- Colonialism consisted in annexing territory, forcing them to use your flag, sing your anthem, and work for you under penalty of violence.

- Neocolonialism consists into forcibly indebt countries, so they direct all their productive efforts into paying you a never-ending debt. A country can keep its flag, its anthem, its culture, can celebrate its independence day... but for economic purposes it is indistinguishable from a colony. This is done by gaining influence over those countries, so they act in the best interest of a foreign power: lobbying.

The idea of Microsoft is to allow open source to happen, but to happen in terms that are favorable to them. Like having people work with their OS, their tools, their APIs, their cloud, use their authentication services, etc.

This is achieved by gaining influence over the governance of high profile open source projects. Either by having their full time employees collaborate into an open source project, or by directly buying companies, like the case of Github. In either case, in the end, the idea is to obtain control over open source projects to steer them into a direction that benefits Microsoft.

As a mentioned earlier, the modus operandi is to either infiltrate projects or buying a company. When they've decided to acquire companies, the results are more aggressive and more visible, and are in my opinion not good:

- Skype: Linux version is largely unmaintained relative to other versions, UX is inferior.

- Xamarin: Standalone Windows IDE was abandoned, now you should use Visual Studio. Xamarin Studio for mac was rebranded Visual Studio for Mac. No Linux version is planned despite community requests.

- Minecraft: Java client development left behind with inferior investment, no feature parity with native Windows client.

- Microsoft R Open / MRAN: Encourages people to adopt a vendor specific flavor of R, and use vendor specific repositories, moving away from R and CRAN.

And for Github, I would not be surprised if it starts getting coupled with Microsoft products, like Azure, Visual Studio, etc... to the detriment of other tools.

Even if it doesn't happen at all, I am not over punishing Microsoft for what it did in the past. Without provocation, they attacked noble and altruistic developers sacrificing man years of their own personal time to the benefit of open source software, providing this generation with the tools they use today to put food in their table. Like the Linux kernel team. Microsoft called Linux and open source licenses "cancer". Never forget.

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

#123

Earlier 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…

> Firefox's share is dropping

Firefox's share was never very high to beginning with, because Mozilla doesn't have the resources to play the vendor bundled game that Microsoft and Google have been playing.

And now it's rising again, because they've made great improvements in Quantum and are on a roll. I use Firefox and it really is the best browser, at least for me. The only problem that Firefox has at this point is that its developer tools are worse than Chrome's, however they've been making improvements there as well and I'm sure they'll manage to win back the developers they've lost.

> Google's render can be found in Opera, Vivaldi, and others

You mean WebKit, which originated in KDE and then forked by Apple? It's not really Google's engine ;-)

Also Opera, Vivaldi and others are at this point completely irrelevant.

Mozilla is playing this game correctly. If you don't have your own rendering engine, you can't compete and you don't count. Which is also why Google developed V8 and then forked WebKit into Blink.

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

#125

The 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.

I never understood the Systemd argument in the Linux ecosystem. Sure, it may not be what everybody wants in the Linux ecosystem. But, that's the point of having so many independent distributions right?

Red hat is not secretly pushing anything on anybody. If something is better than Systemd, clearly other distributions will go that route and try to outcompete Redhat... No?

I see Redhat as the enterprise seller of Linux. They are catering to Enterprise needs and supporting where they go (even Systemd) what is wrong with that?

If you're mad that Debian followed RH's steps and adapted Systemd, then you should be mad at Debian not Redhat?

Disclaimer: I have no association with RedHat in any sense. Just trying to ask why Redhat is always blamed for Systemd.. I don't particularly enjoy systemd either.

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

#126

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.

Microsoft open source is inherently less valuable because it is all built around being closed source until recently.

So there is much less of a network effect which makes it less valuable. One example: most open source modern OO languages, e.g. Kotlin, Scala, target the JVM, and so are interoperable. Whereas C# is in a closed Microsoft bubble of open source. If it had an LLVM or Java backend, it'd be much more useful.

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

#127
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know that GitLab offers commercial add-ons?

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

#129
These threads are so funny — let me do a TL;DR:

- "Microsoft does this and that"

- "Oooo, that's not fair, Google has been doing it too"

- "Patents"

- "Oooo, that's not fair, Oracle has been doing it too"

- "Privacy"

- "Not fair, Facebook has been doing it too"

Predictable arguments that for the purposes of judging Microsoft are irrelevant.

Look, we all know that companies are meant to turn a profit. People are meant to survive too, but in society you don't get a carte blanche to act as you see fit in order to survive or make money.

When you do shit to others, some people will never, ever forgive you. That's just how society works. So you know, in case you're in management, might do well to consider the long term ramifications of the company's actions. That's just life, sorry.

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

#130
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cost to copy a repo over is low, but you lose all the social aspects. You don't copy over forks or stars. People who want to fork your repo and make pull requests need to sign up for a new service. Old links to your repo on GitHub won't work anymore.

I copied my personal projects to GitLab today and that was very easy to do but I'm not sure what to do about the GitHub version for the one that had a little popularity.

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