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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

#121

Post by wolfgang42 »

kuon wrote: post #99
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…

This is a bit unrelated, but I think it would be cool to have a decentralized way of making persistent URLs.

The one that seems to be gaining the most traction is IPFS[1]. /ipfs/ URLs are content-addressed (like git objects). As long as someone has a copy of the data somewhere on the IPFS network it will continue to be available, and if you manage to get a copy of the content from somewhere else you can try hashing it and make sure it matches. (And if it does you can `ipfs add` it and it will become available again, even if nobody who had an original copy was still connected to the network.)

[1]: https://ipfs.io/

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

#122

Post by mlazos »

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…

In addition to Microsoft’s evolving attitude toward open source I want to add that I’m surprised at that tweet because Microsoft Research is extraordinarily open and has contributed a lot of freely accessible basic research to society now and in past decades.

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

#123

Post by tejtm »

nl wrote: post #113
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.

I really don't get the hate MS gets for Skype. I used it before the acquisition and it was usually ok, and I've used it since and it's usually ok. I dont' like how I can't find some menu items because they keep moving, but this happened a lot before, too. Is it just that they didn't progress the platform? What - specifically - have they done wrong with it?

If you and I were in a group meeting, you would get an alert stating _you_ would not be able to use the good features on this call because _I_ needed to update my skype client.

Of course, only client available to me is the same exact version they bought years before as they never updated with features just bug fixes. You would have been used an unwitting tool as you helpfully mansplained how to overcome my version deficiency.

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

#124

Post by frogdog55 »

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…

It's not just Nature magazine. GitHub was a corporation before. Maybe not as big as Microsoft, but a corporation none-the-less. We're just moving from one company owning the repository to another one. Big Deal.

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

#125

Post by mikec3010 »

ethanwillis wrote: post #83
bobjordan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please don't turn hn into Reddit.

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

#126

Post by masonicb00m »

Fomite wrote: post #22
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.

To my mind, the actual problem is neither one of those things, but if Github is wrapped up into some new project. Many of the citations for Github aren't for software, but as a stable, open store for data. Which means if that URL changes, that link - in a physical paper - goes stale.

If you need stable links then buy yourself a domain or use a URL shortener that you can update. Might be wise to also provide content hashes of the data you're referencing in your paper.

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

#127

Post by Paradigma11 »

mariodiana wrote: post #86

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 d…

Free private repos come to mind.

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

#128

Post by hollerith »

will4274 wrote: post #112
lucb1e wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> evidence of them scanning my OneDrive Microsoft publically states that they scan OneDrives for forbidden content, like pornography (yes, all pornography is forbidden on OneDrive, not just child pornography). > 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 make it into Windows The OS X kernel is open source, and that's th…

>The OS X kernel is open source, and that's the most valuable part of the OS X source code

Uh, no.

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

#129

Post by someone454 »

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…

Or they remember the 90’s and early 0x’s. MS has made a mess of many a fine piece of software in their efforts to ‘integrate’ it with their other offerings.

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

#130

Post by Fomite »

rjsw wrote: post #68
Fomite wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some of the labs are - some of them have changed their names, or the PIs have moved on. But two of those papers were with my group, which has moved.
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