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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

#81

Post by n4r9 »

amelius wrote: post #73
icelancer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature is also not an Open Access or Open Science journal at all, and furthermore, does not require authors to publish all of their data for replication purposes. It's incredibly hypocritical. If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature .

> If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature. True, but perhaps the thinking goes: we'll publish another paper in an open journal, so we can have our cake and eat it too.

When I was an academic, the thinking was: if I manage to publish in Nature then I might actually be able to get a postdoc when my current one / PhD runs out. Otherwise I'll go open.

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

#82

Post by moogly »

jarfil wrote: post #12
masonicb00m wrote: post #10

The cool thing about git is it doesn’t matter what happens to the platform. You can take your repo and push it somewhere else if you don’t like how Microsoft runs the show. Given how Microsoft took Github’s idea with Atom and ran with it to make VSCode, I wouldn’t be surprised if Github improves under Microsoft’s rule.

The problem lies in the comments and issue tracking, which are not stored in git. Sure, you can clone the repo, but you can only take the wiki with you, the rest would be lost.

Won't GDPR legislation force GitHub to make that exportable?

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

#83

Post by ethanwillis »

bobjordan wrote: post #71
mattmanser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already use GitHub in visual studio. MS didn't have to buy GitHub to integrate with it. Pretty much the best that can happen is GitHub will now get worse as MS puts in functionality to do with their tools. The worst is they really fuck it up like they did with Skype.

There is not much to be gained by defending Microsoft. But from my view, my appreciation for their tooling is highly correlated with my own technical maturity. I spent about a decade primarily Mac, ran several Linux servers and developed from my Mac environment. But in the last few years I have switched to surface book and a windows development environment. It does not totally suck. Especially, now that I’ve got an U…

To be fair, you have to have a high level of technical maturity to understand the Microsoft stack. The intricacy of Microsoft's software and philosophy is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of MCSE basics most of the concepts will go over the typical code monkey's head. There's also Satya Nadella's enterprise outlook, which is deftly woven into every email he sends. His signature draws from the Steve Ballmer speeches, for instance. The .NET guys understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to understand the depth of these software stacks, to realise that they're not just boilerplate - they say something deep about CRUD As a consequence people who dislike Microsoft truly ARE idiots - of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the FUD in Bill's anti-consumer catchphrase, "Embrace extend and extinguish," which itself is a cryptic reference to how Microsoft ruined consumer computing.

And yes, by the way, i DO have a Microsoft logo tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the MS fanboys eyes only. And even they have to demonstrate that they love Microsoft's stack as much as I do by showing me their MS certifications beforehand. Nothing personal kids.

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

#84

Post by detaro »

moogly wrote: post #82
jarfil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem lies in the comments and issue tracking, which are not stored in git. Sure, you can clone the repo, but you can only take the wiki with you, the rest would be lost.

Won't GDPR legislation force GitHub to make that exportable?

It's already exportable through the API, that's not the problem.

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

#85

Post by Applejinx »

gaius wrote: post #8
Fomite wrote: post #2

"During the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, for example, researchers used the platform to share and cross-check daily patient counts." Pretty sure this is referring to the lab I used to work in. Honestly, I'm not particularly worried about the buyout - pretty sure the chances of them just scrapping the whole service are slim, and "GitHub disappears" seems equally as likely burning through VC cash as it does ow…

the chances of them just scrapping the whole service are slim, and "GitHub disappears" seems equally as likely burning through VC cash as it does owned by Microsoft. Right, the people who should really be worried are VSTS users. And GitLab users funnily enough. They are VC backed and will have to exit too, and everyone’s looking at them now. The least worst thing that could happen is bought by Atlassian and folded in…

Not everything has to run by capitalist rules, least of all open source (which Git is). We live in a society and subsets of that society can set up their own rules, and are.

It's more a matter of the mechanics of it all, and that part is indeed interesting. However, venture capital is not the final arbiter, any more than Microsoft is.

FWIW, I have not bailed on Github and have no specific plans to. What I'll do, is back up all my repositories to physical read-only media just in case of ridiculous catastrophic scenarios: under normal circumstances, even if Github's plug got suddenly pulled as a big gotcha to open source, my local repositories would not be deleted. If I have local git repositories, I can put them elsewhere.

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

#86

Post by mariodiana »

From the article: "Others are hopeful that Microsoft’s stewardship will make the platform even more valuable."

Perhaps I missed it, but nowhere in the article were any of these hopes articulated. I may lack imagination; so, can someone tell me how Microsoft can make GitHub more valuable? I don't mean how they can use GitHub to make more money for themselves, by selling "enterprise-level" support, or by making their development tools better. I'm asking how GitHub is going to be made more valuable to people who currently are not using Microsoft products.

Any ideas? What exactly is there to be "hopeful" about?

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

#88

Post by prepend »

The beauty of all this is that people can simply run their #openscience in Github and gitlab and bitbucket and (hopefully) their own gitea instance running on a $5/month digital ocean instance.

It’s funny that this is a complaint about a company controlling a centralized resource because they worry. But any centralized resource has this risk. Did they think Github would lose money forever and subsidise infrastructure in perpetuity? I think it was a situation of users being oblivious to risk and then murmuring because the externalized risk they ignored is now more apparent in a smaller risk.

So maybe these jarring events are good, because it helps us realize that many users are stupid and don’t assess data risk well. Luckily for us Github was really principled and Microsoft is a good fit for a PR/biz perspective. So the risk didn’t hit.

Having these discussions now, so scientists learn to push to multiple public repos (or universities run their own instance for a few thousand a year), rather than rely -falsely- on one source.

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

#89

Post by jdormit »

> “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, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK.

This shows an astounding lack of understanding, both of Github and of git itself. Github was always owned and operated by "one corporation" - now it is owned by a different one. And "the platform" isn't Github - it is git itself! If this neuroscientist is so concerned about the acquisition, he can just set up a git server for himself and his colleagues and start citing that URL instead of Github.

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

#90

Post by Demiurge »

lucb1e wrote: post #72
oaiey wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is the number two cloud vendor. When they violate the privacy of their paying customers, they are dead. And no, telemetry is about privacy but not the same as reading the data/code itself.

> Microsoft is the number two cloud vendor. When they violate the privacy of their paying customers, they are dead. Perhaps it's different for paying customers, but I do have evidence of them scanning my OneDrive about ten year ago and them reading Skype chats about a year ago. I bet if someone uploads the OS X source code to OneDrive, or perhaps a private Github repository, the good parts of its design would somehow…

Perhaps it's besides the point, but core osx is open source as Darwin and XNU, and I don't see much value in them. NT hybrid kernel is extremely well designed, and there is an ecosystem built around it. It is extremely unlikely anyone at Microsoft will find anything aiding in Office 98 compatability online...
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