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Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

nature.com

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Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#61

Post by Fomite »

rjsw wrote: post #42
Fomite wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the stable of the pointer. From a paper of mine: "The code and simulation results are available online at https://github.com/mylabname/ project." That's in print . In another paper, I expressly cite a GitHub repository as the source of the data used in the analysis. Pointing to data in papers is the way most of the scientists I know use GitHub - because it's relatively stable, not tied to an institutio…

What is wrong with an institutional account ? We used university FTP servers for many years to host software created by research projects at that institution. I work on an international standard, we are moving our repository in a couple of stages from being hosted at Sourceforge to being hosted directly at iso.org. Reference data in this standard will also be Maybe the research funding agencies should start providing…

Because in the past four years I've been at three different institutions, and those accounts go away when I leave.

Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#62

Post by Fomite »

dmos62 wrote: post #41
Fomite wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the stable of the pointer. From a paper of mine: "The code and simulation results are available online at https://github.com/mylabname/ project." That's in print . In another paper, I expressly cite a GitHub repository as the source of the data used in the analysis. Pointing to data in papers is the way most of the scientists I know use GitHub - because it's relatively stable, not tied to an institutio…

It should not be complicated to move the repository somewhere where a search engine query with "mylabname/project" would find it. As a side note, it would be nice to see scientists stop using git for dataset management. There are alternatives that are considerably better adapted to managing data.

The thing with git (and GitHub by extension) is that it is "good enough" for many use cases, and relatively painless to get up and running.

Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#63

Post by newfoundglory »

yodon wrote: post #58
randomsearch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Why don’t scientists use modern tools like GitHub, instead of these crap bespoke ones? They shouldn’t waste their time duplicating effort.” “Why are scientists using inappropriate tools? These are for commercial use only!” In practice, GitHub works fine for collaborative code projects and sharing data over the next few years. If you’re looking to store large amounts of data over long periods, you’re right. If GitHub…

Not cool to insert fake quotes as if you are quoting the person you’re responding to.

I think it's a pretty normal shorthand, especially when readers can see for themselves that you aren't quoting them.

Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#65

Post by mjw1007 »

ggg9990 wrote: post #55
bonesss wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's blindingly naive to think that, on any meaningful timeline, a company like GitHub wouldn't be mining their userbase for trends and capitalising on them by selling it to third parties... There's nothing shady about using corporate information and user metadata to provide value to others, but you have to imagine that MS owning that data set is highly similar to MS buying it from GitHub. Up to the minute an…

Except that selling data to third parties has never been Microsoft’s MO. It’s always been about getting fat checks from the worlds largest companies’ IT departments.

The whole github purchase is premised on the idea that Microsoft have changed their ways in the last few years.

So it isn't safe to assume they aren't changing to a more Facebook/Google-like data-selling business model.

Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#66

Post by a-dub »

tbh i think this article was pretty poorly conceived and written. was this an intern summer project?

the complicated topic of open science, open data and reproducibility goes way beyond whether venture capitalists or a large public company are footing the bill for a fashionable place to host code publicly for free.

Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#67

Post by sorokod »

lotia wrote: post #38

Seeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony. They have profited greatly from locking up access to academic papers in their most prestigious journals. The article includes the following tweet: “Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code. I hope that expert coders in #openscience have a viable alternative to #github,” tweeted Tom Johnstone…

Does the publishing platform invalidates the message?

As to a corporations changing their ways, they do it all the time to accommodate their changing view on profit maximisation.

Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#68

Post by rjsw »

Fomite wrote: post #61
rjsw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with an institutional account ? We used university FTP servers for many years to host software created by research projects at that institution. I work on an international standard, we are moving our repository in a couple of stages from being hosted at Sourceforge to being hosted directly at iso.org. Reference data in this standard will also be Maybe the research funding agencies should start providing…

Because in the past four years I've been at three different institutions, and those accounts go away when I leave.

I presume that the departments or project groups you worked in are still there.

Re: Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

#70

Post by eeZah7Ux »

ToFab123 wrote: post #13

"Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code" That was already the case before Microsoft purchased GitHub. So why did they start to use it in the first place, if they had this concern?

> That was already the case before Microsoft purchased GitHub. So why did they start to use it in the first place, if they had this concern?

For the same reason many people use GitHub (or facebook): network effect.

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