Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 366 posts

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

#151

Post by shakna »

tallanvor wrote: post #140
gear54rus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates. I'm not a fan of the telemetry either, but they do have it all documented now, which is more than, for example, most phone manufacturers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-le…

> Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates.

They didn't exactly help themselves, firing their QA team, and using their users as the test platform.

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

#152

Post by watwut »

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.

Realistically, if Microsoft wants to be profitable on that investment, they will have to make changes to earn more money. Which will alienate developers looking for free good repo.

Even if they plan to keep good will support for strategic relational reasons, that good will is easy to go away with strategy changes.

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

#153

Post by zaarn »

iamtew wrote: post #67
kumarvvr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is with identity management. Maybe a universal identity provider is required.

You could just GPG sign your commits, then you can know for sure where the commit is coming from.

Anyone can create a GPG key and start signing commits.

GPG does not solve identity, it requires additional networking (like WoT or TOFU) before it can begin to function as an identity tool.

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

#154

Post by megaman22 »

megaman22 wrote: post #108
djsumdog wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a page out of The Dictators Handbook: > First, politics is about getting and keeping political power. It is not about the general welfare of "We, the people." Or I guess here, 'we the developers.' I don't think Microsoft is at all alone in this spot. Github got a huge payout from this. It benefited them. We don't think of them as a Microsoft style company, but they made the same decision we might have seen…

Oculus is vaporware, right? I don't see anything that encourages me that whatever thing they were aiming at will be a thing?

If I'm wrong, I'd like an example of something that justifies the hype

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

#155

Post by kurtisc »

tallanvor wrote: post #140
gear54rus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates. I'm not a fan of the telemetry either, but they do have it all documented now, which is more than, for example, most phone manufacturers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-le…

There's a middle ground somewhere around 'not re-downloading updates every time they fail' and 'not disguising Minecraft as a security update'. A lot of the annoyance at the updates is with how frustrating the implementation is.

Microsoft aren't the only company that need constant security updates: I've never seen any complaints about Chrome's.

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

#156

Post by pmontra »

caymanjim wrote: post #80
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 us…

I have some customers with repositories on Bitbucket. The reason is the pricing model for private projects.

On Bitbucket you pay for developer and have infinite private projects.

On GitHub is you pay for private projects and have infinite developers.

If one company has many projects and few developers, Bitbucket is cheaper.

I also have small customers who don't even know what a repository is. I self host with gitolite (I don't need a web interface, only push and pull) and give access to the most illuminated of them to a self hosted Redmine server for managing tickets. I write documentation in Redmine's wikis.

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

#157

Post by mjburgess »

woah wrote: post #83
staticassertion wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a very contemporary development. Open source was originally hobbyist, research or academic.

Often, it was "programmer solve thyself".

Businesses have only been employing significant numbers to work on open source projects for the last decade.

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

#158

Post by yellowapple »

bad_user wrote: post #123
djsumdog wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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

Google has since replaced WebKit with Blink in Chrom(e|ium), and the projects based on Chromium have been following suit. Even Qt is switching from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine, which is Blink-based.

Granted, Blink is a fork of at least some of WebKit, but still.

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

#159

Post by amelius »

some_account wrote: post #100
iaml wrote: post #93

Earlier 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…

> 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.

I find it hard to believe that an audience of developers can't point their browser to a different url, or search for your project using Google.

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

#160

Post by nikofeyn »

Robin_Message wrote: post #126
nikofeyn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

none of that makes any sense. c#, f#, and vb.net all target .NET (and thus the CLR) and are interoperable. they are also cross-platform with .NET core.

and saying “most open source modern OO languages ... target the JVM” is not accurate. if you mean modern OO JVM languages, then yea, of course, but that is satisfied analogously by the .NET languages.

the c# and f# compilers, .NET core (libraries and framework), and core CLR (the runtime) are all open source and cross-platform. there isn’t anything closed about it. i don’t know what you mean by “closed microsoft bubble of open source”.

why do the .NET languages need LLVM or JVM implementations to be useful? again, that doesn’t make sense.

Post reply on HN