Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

bloomberg.com

251–260 of 366 posts

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

#251
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now that you mention it, in the communities I care about, IRC was replaced by Gitter ( https://gitter.im/ ). Which is also linked to GitHub accounts and repositories. Ironically, Gitter was bought by GitLab and open sourced, but they haven't changed the implementation to allow for chat rooms linked to GitLab repos. At the glacial pace it is evolving, it wouldn't be unfair to say that Gitter is probably relying s…

While gitter generally is a good idea I have yet to land in a active channel. The partly abondened IRC channels often still show a lot more activity even when they link to their gitter in their meta.

Not my experience, it depends on the community you're talking about I guess. Here's some channels I'm on, all being so active that I have a hard time keeping up:

- https://gitter.im/scala/scala

- https://gitter.im/scala-js/scala-js

- https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats

- https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats-effect

- https://gitter.im/monix/monix

- https://gitter.im/http4s/http4s

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

#252

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…

>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.

You say MS/Google are winning because they have money to bundle their browser, and at the same time Firefox is rising because they made improvements to their software. That's a contradiction.

Personally, I left Firefox for Chrome because how unbearably slow Firefox is/was, something Mozilla seemed to ignore for a long time.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft doesn't care about the developers. It cares about having the dominant platform. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." (Adam Smith.) I don't trust benevolent people. I trust self-interest. I don't need to offer my undying allegiance to Microsoft - I can like them as long as they do things that benefi…

I don't trust self interest. Especially not in my butcher, brewer, or baker. Pure self interest gets you McDonalds, Bud Light, and Debi cakes. I consume exactly none of those things and have no desire to consume any of those things. They taste terrible, are bad for me, and the companies themselves are generally bad for their communities and the world. A good butcher, brewer, or baker is driven by craft first - care f…

You are conflating self-interest with greed. That is a great mistake in trying to understand Adam Smith. They are not the same thing.

Values, ethics, morals... are part of self-inrerst for lots of people.

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

#254
post #245

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..…

Buy a $5/mo VPS and self host your repositories? It’s really not that hard.

And spending how many hours a month maintaining it and applying updates and security patches and setting up monitoring and dealing with downtime?

The promise of these hosted services isn't the free storage/servers, its the maintenance of them.

We're running our own private GitLab server but we thought long and hard before doing it.

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

#255
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 know blockchain is excessively overhyped, but to my limited understanding this appears to be a good fit... Look at how cryptocurrencies work, a wallet is singular (i.e your identity), exchanges and mining pools are numerous and independent (hosts and services for git repos). The vital part to…

Yes, I think identity management/authentication/trust is a problem space that should be separate from version control, because it can serve so many other interesting applications.

By the way, I'm not sure if something like a blockchain is necessary here. You could use a simple public key cryptosystem, where your identity equals the public key, and you prove that you have that identity by using your private key in a challenge/response scheme, and you can also sign messages/commits/whatever by using your private key.

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

#256

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 mean, a big problem to me is that Github wasn't open source. It was a closed source, SaaS product that a lot of people depended on.

An open source, open identity, self-hostable platform would be a lot better. And, we're running into issues ourselves in trying to migrate, because running your own-self hosted GitLab isn't really good enough, we don't have the team to ensure the uptime we need, but I would feel comfortable if there were more hosting providers for GitLab than just GitLab itself. Just to get that extra redundancy.

On the other hand, I imagine that's something that could exist quite readily if GitLab shut down or got acquired. Someone could step forward and do the SaaS for all the companies that don't really have the capability to self-host at the same reliability at a pro.

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

#258
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…

I've always wondered - Do serious apps/products deploy directly from an IDE into AWS/Azure?

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does explain it. He wrote that “Git keeps track of changes in sets of files.”

That doesn't really explain it, though. "You mean like 'Track changes' in Word?"

Well, yes, that's kind of what it is, isn't it?

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

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust self interest. Especially not in my butcher, brewer, or baker. Pure self interest gets you McDonalds, Bud Light, and Debi cakes. I consume exactly none of those things and have no desire to consume any of those things. They taste terrible, are bad for me, and the companies themselves are generally bad for their communities and the world. A good butcher, brewer, or baker is driven by craft first - care f…

> Especially not in my butcher, brewer, or baker. Pure self interest gets you McDonalds, Bud Light, and Debi cakes. I consume exactly none of those things and have no desire to consume any of those things. They taste terrible, are bad for me, and the companies themselves are generally bad for their communities and the world. Whoever you do buy your food from has recognized there’s a portion of the market that values…

You've got it backwards. They are able to make a living happily doing their craft because there is a portion of the market that values their craft. They didn't choose their craft because they recognized their was a market for it. They chose their craft out of love of the craftsmanship.

Arguments like this fundamentally misunderstand human psychology. And this is why the economic model of the "rational man" is fundamentally flawed.

Post reply on HN