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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

#221
post #210
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That to me is what DotNet Core DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license. Same thing for most of the azure tools , you are only allowed to use them within Visual Studio. I don't really called that "all in open source" . It's gimmick to give C# devs the illusion of a choice. Try to build , run & deploy a C# app on AWS with Atom. You're gonna…

You've heard of Open Core, I imagine? That's what everyone does. Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core. And regarding your claim, you can do all of that, even with Vim if you want. You just have to build some scaffolding. After all, they can't be expected to implementing everything for everyone. More than that, they were actually nice and created LSP ( https://langserver.org/ ) and now…

>You've heard of Open Core, I imagine?

It's not "Open Core" if the core is not open. In this case a debugger is core part of a language. It's a very clear movement in order to keep C# devs within their ecosystem and guarantee revenue with Azure. They loose money here , they must get it somewhere else.

This guarantee a total monopoly over the .NET ecosystem , Rider is probably one of the only tools that tried to offer an alternative they are stuck with the exact issue of not being able to bring the debugger because of that hostile license policy.

>Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core.

I never talked about Gitlab and I don't care about them.

Don't be mistaken about MS , almost every move they do as a double intention behind it.

Just to name a few :

One MS engineer is core member to Webpack & Angular , why ? Windows Server dashboard is written in Angular , it's a critical product, they need some controller there.

One MS engineer is core contributor to Electron, why ? VS Code is powered by electron , it's a critical product, they need some control here as well.

One MS engineer is core contributor to Vue.js , why ? Azure is investing hundred of millions in China and Asia due to insane growth over the past 5 years, they need a good image in asia.

If you think MS has changed , you are delusional about the situation.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but because they're otherwise decentralised it would take co-ordinated effort and ultimately it fragments the community. What we need, if we want to solve this issue, is a federated network of servers which provide the functionality of github today.

Then I'm curious what kind of data would be shared on the federated protocol. Why can't projects be independent?

I think primarily identity and git locations.

I want stuff like the issue tracker/merge request dialog to be consistent across the federation (and of course for projects elsewhere in the network to be able to be the source for those merge requests)

I don't want an account on everybody's git{lab,hub,ea,xxx} instance I want a single identity that people can trust is me.

I want a way to discover and index other projects on the network. The same way that I often just go to github without knowing the name of a project just roughly what I'm looking for.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Watch is apparently the best selling watch (not just best selling smartwatch) in the world [0], with millions of users, and many copycats. Why shouldn’t it matter? Of course, there’s only so much you can do and make on such a small screen, and it is an accessory rather than a “primary” device, but that is another issue altogether, if one. I think it may even function as a motion control input for the rumored VR…

I can believe that it is the best selling watch in the world. People don't buy many watches, because they last a long time. Last time I bought a watch was 7 years ago, and it still works fine. It's probably got another 3 years before I need to change the battery. I think the last time my old man bought a watch was some time in the 80's or 90's.

> People don't buy many watches, because they last a long time.

Smartwatches can fix that problem. Obsolete in 1 year, battery failure in 2 years, incompatible with app ecosystem in 5 years.

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

#224
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interf…

I believe they paid in MS shares, so they could in fact shut down Github tomorrow and move on like nothing happened :)

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome's disabled using backspace as "back" button.

But really that's my only complaint!

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

#226
post #161

Earlier 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

> That to me is what DotNet Core DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license. Same thing for most of the azure tools , you are only allowed to use them within Visual Studio. I don't really called that "all in open source" . It's gimmick to give C# devs the illusion of a choice. Try to build , run & deploy a C# app on AWS with Atom. You're gonna…

>DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license.

People keep bringing this up as if it's some evil plan, not a legacy problem.

The debugger is based on Visual Studio's closed source debugger. Visual Studio is a major paid product. It's not simple to just extract an integral feature from a paid product.

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

#227

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 antici…

Spolsky certainly had a strong influence with his ideas and feedback, but I don't think he was ever very directly involved in the project - the main driver was Jeff Atwood. At least that's what I got from listening to the podcast, back in '08.

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

#228
post #219

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. Peop…

So you mean there can be no redemption, ever? Kind of a harsh perspective... By this logic Germany, Italy and Japan should have been nuked forever.

Sure there can be redemption at some point. But there must be some consequences too. Instead of just "Ok we're the good guys now". There must be the expectation that if you behave badly now it can make changing plans in the future harder. It takes time to regain trust. Right now it's nowhere near enough.

Let's see after more years if they can pull it off.

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

#229
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 popular…

This is in part some naming annoyance. Bitbucket let you once use your own domains for repos. Which was nice as you could migrate if you wanted.

The forks thing could be tackled. With a notification, something like I forked you. Or a code search engine which is clever enough to detect and link repos.

The user management gubbins, is the normal irritation of user management and access control.

The stars part is already a bit of a horror across all software - not knowing how to gauge the popularity and quality of a project. Nevermind searching for it.

I'm not the biggest user of these silo repos, but I do appreciate that thin barriers to entry, and improved usability or a good usability wrapper, is charming.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like gitlab is the "right" choice.

Maybe, or maybe there is an emerging space for a service that would count stars, forks, etc on all versions of a repository and aggregate the values. But I would hate another centralized service.

This could be a kind of git search hub.
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