How about the alternate reality where GitHub is desperate to monetize and/or is acquired by a company that is... don't think it could happen? Let me tell you a little story about SourceForge...
What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
11–20 of 228 posts
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#12The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me. Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted) There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same co…
Windows 10 is really recent though.
That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it.
And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus has done for the world is incredible.
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#13Assuming GitHub was actually losing money and couldn't fix that problem quickly enough it's fair to assume they had to sell, and it's reasonable to believe there aren't that many companies who could have bought them if you think an understanding of the domain is important, then you're really limited to Facebook (user surveillance, adverts), Apple (bad at software, not developer friendly), Google (user surveillance, adverts), Microsoft (history of extinguishing things) and maybe Oracle (very hostile).
Regardless of who GH sold to they'd be facing a ton of negative reactions. Microsoft's actions recently make me thing maybe they're actually the least bad as far as their dealings with developers go.
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#14On a slightly tangential note, my company has a massive Yammer install (200k+ account) and I always wonder if people can discuss in yammer group about replacing Office by G Suite, without triggering anything. This is kinda paranoid, but I am still astonished that a company can essentially put all its communications, roadmap, and so on on another company platform. Even if you do not compete frontally, at some point, t…
Related - Slack is also widely used as a communication mechanism in many large companies. This seems fine but I wonder how attitudes would change if Slack got acquired.
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#15The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me. Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted) There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same co…
>The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me.
Are companies people?
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#16TLDR; the 90’s happened. Delete your github account because Microsoft is evil. I’m surprised this article got this far because it really doesn’t add anything unique to discussions that are already happening.
not all of us witnessed the 90's..
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#17It's not like GitHub was the perfect open source place anyway. The platform itself is not open source in any way and it has been plagued by a few scandals.
'i've deleted my account' seems very pedantic and most of the arguments brought up are rather old. However, i do agree on the skype thing - man it got bad after MS bought it.
Don't think any company that can afford to buy another company for well above 1.5 billion (i understand the worth of GitHub in 2016 was around 2 billion) has a pristine past.
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#18Not commenting on the acquisitions rumors;
> The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases, for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was detected.
IIRC the main reasons this was done are (i) due to the complexity of porting P2P code across many platforms and (ii) for resource consumption on mobile devices. These are hardly edge cases.
Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#19Re: What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub
#20Microsoft used to be bad (M$) but if you haven't noticed you can now run Linux on Windows and sql server runs on Linux. We're in the twilight zone bro; all bets are off.
Running Linux on Windows solely benefits Microsoft and Canonical, not the Linux community.
We're not in the twilight zone, we're in the zone where Microsoft realizes it's more profitable to leech off of others' efforts.