231–240 of 588 posts
Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.
The reality is npm was in a bad place and in a land of not good options, this strikes me as the best possibility. I’d rather have GitHub control this and be able to give the resources to npm than a company like Oracle or Amazon or even Google or Facebook to own it. In a perfect world, some independent entity could fund npm out of gratitude but at the same time, consider how poorly npm as a company was run for YEARS and the general lack of direction.
So yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic this won’t be fucked up by GitHub — but I understand the concern.
As for those worried about Microsoft embracing, extending, and extinguishing. Lol. Even if that was the goal (and I truly don’t think that’s the ethos at all any more), Microsoft is laughably incompetent at achieving that sort of strategy. Google and Amazon have the EEE under lock right now (Facebook too — let’s be glad Zuck didn’t buy this after we saw what happened to yarn), but Microsoft can’t even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure.
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I installed Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on an older machine just now. The MSFT of today is definitely a far cry from the MSFT of yesteryear. Such a thing would have been unheard of 15 years ago.
Embrace, extend, extinguish?
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Sleez'n their way into our hearts. I can't say I really blame them, but god I hate it all.
What does a trustworthy Microsoft look like to you?
Recently I installed win10 pro and was appalled at the way I had you jump through hoops to NOT have a m$ account, not to mention the blatant adware. And this was win10 professional.
It certainly reminded me that m$ is a long long way away from where it was in the 90s and early naughties.
So, a good start would be a stable and private os without all the adware and telemetry.
PS: I use gitea instead of GitHub these days. Nor do I use vscode, but sublime text, for the same reasons: too much telemetry that cant be disabled permanently.
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I can't even come up with a scenario of how MS would realistically do so? Sure, making GH actions easier to set up with Azure than AWS seems plausible, but also strikes me as somewhat benign. Banning python from Github? Requiring \r\n for NPM packages? What's the move you're afraid of?
One question GitLab's CEO (sytse) is rightfully asking is whether the ability to trace code from npm back to the repository will be available to competitors. If not, less competition is bad for users. I still think this is good news, given where npm is coming from, but it's certainly not risk-free.
Until we come up with better trusted federation protocols there will be natural monopolies, but that doesn't mean they get unchecked power. We have laws for that.
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What does a trustworthy Microsoft look like to you?
I’ve been a developer for nearly 25 years. I’m not sure if there is anything MS could ever do to regain my trust. Unfortunately this seems to be the way of large tech companies. At one time I thought Google was the best thing ever (don’t be evil). Now I find that I view Google in much the same way as I do MS. A huge corrupt behemoth that needs to be broken up.
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no, this is microsoft "embracing" (buying control of) a huge point of centralization in a software distribution ecosystem, positioning them to have greater power over a huge number of developers.
Microsoft turned their reputation around in recent years with developers but I wonder how long it will last.
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Safari.
Care to explain? Safari has one of the highest standards compliance of any modern browser [0], which IE famously did not. It has been argued with various success [1] that Chrome is the new I.E., due to "Chrome exclusive" web standards. [0]: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-11.2/chrome-30/... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070595
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Safari.
Care to explain? Safari has one of the highest standards compliance of any modern browser [0], which IE famously did not. It has been argued with various success [1] that Chrome is the new I.E., due to "Chrome exclusive" web standards. [0]: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-11.2/chrome-30/... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070595
It's a weird world where webdevs apparently ideally just want everyone on the 6 second old version version of Chrome. I totally get it -- it's an absolutely rational stance but it feels a lot like how devs felt about IE6 at the beginning.
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I do not consider the largest distributor of proprietary, closed-source spyware (Windows) owning the fastest growing open source package manager to be a good outcome, personally.
It depends on what the alternative is. When NPM starts running out of money to run the service what would happen? More VC, but only to a point and the firms would be increasingly be influencing NPM to make money by any means(probably not good for anyone but the firms). Alternatively a cash strapped NPM fails to invest in security and availability of the service leading to widespread outages or worse a large scale sup…