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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

#101

Post by DoreenMichele »

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…

Seeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony.

1. Pointing fingers at someone else as The Bad Guy is a common tactic for diverting attention away from one's own behavior.

2. If Nature is not positioning itself as open source, then they aren't really doing anything ironic. There is nothing inconsistent with not being open source yourself while calling out a threat to open source stuff.

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

#102

Post by scruffyherder »

Good thing GitHub wasn't just one company ready to sell out at a moment's notice.

Why the hell are people centralizing everything on a single place? The whole point of the internet is open protocols, open end points that can host anything.

Host your own build your own communities!

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

#103

Post by bobbytherobot »

org3432 wrote: post #19
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?

Now the whole data set in GitHub, the metadata, being able to analyze all the projects may not be as open since it can conflict with other microsoft products, such as LinkedIn if you're looking for candidates, or possibly AI training data.

Microsoft products already conflict with Microsoft products.

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

#104

Post by IanCal »

Fomite wrote: post #60
IanCal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[disclaimer work for related company - Digital Science] It's really worth getting those things into a system that will give you a doi and participate in an archive so that content should never be lost. Figshare is one, zenodo another (I think but can't find on a phone that the data is archived). A doi, if versioned, can ensure people see the actual version you used. It can be pointed somewhere else if the provider go…

I've been consistently unimpressed with the offerings in that space.

Curious what's missing, iirc you can set figshare to automatically pull from GitHub on a release. Seems pretty low requirements for free long term archiving and fitting into the common workflows with DOIs

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

#105

Post by ufo »

sangnoir wrote: post #93
ethanwillis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bravo on deftly treading the fine line between fanboi-zealotry and sarcasm: I couldn't tell which it was until the very end...I hope.

It is an old copypasta

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/to-be-fair-you-have-to-have-a-...

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

#106

Post by bobbytherobot »

mjw1007 wrote: post #65
ggg9990 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair point.

I'll counter that with if we are using history as an indication of future actions, then selling off personal data has not been Microsoft's course of evil action. Suppressing competitors, sure, selling personal data, no.

Having dipped my toe briefly into the world of collecting and selling personal data, it is a rat-race way to try to make large sums of money. It is an absolute grind. I personally have a hard time seeing why Apple or Microsoft would decide to move away from making windfalls of money through direct purchases. Many startups fall into selling personal data because they can't crack the nut of getting people to pay them.

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

#107

Post by IanCal »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #36
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…

Well, it still has a higher chance of being alive than other common alternatives. From my experience, any url put in a CS paper has a very high risk of being dead just a few years after publication. It seems that once the research grant has run out and the researchers have moved on, noone takes on the responsibility of ensuring that the web page is kept alive. Domains and hosting plans are not renewed; universities r…

[disclaimer, work for Digital Science]

There are various services for this. Figshare and zenodo are two major ones where you get dois.

Figshare is archived with CLOCKSS so if it goes down all public content can be maintained and dois redirected. I think zenodo may be the same.

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

#108

Post by IanCal »

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.

These very regularly change.

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

#109

Post by woah »

pdkl95 wrote: post #59
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…

The problem is not any particular hosting service such as GitHub, it's that the pointer in your paper ss relying on a single point of failure. There was a bit of drama several years ago when Megaupload was seized and shut down; various small/free projects lost access to the only copy of some of their files. Like your paper, important documents had evolved in forums, which linked to the file hosting service for files…

Sounds like a labor-intensive version of ipfs

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

#110

Post by Something1234 »

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…

You're going to have to go in depth about what makes the Microsoft stack so beautiful. From the outside it looks likes it grown without a benevolent dictator to keep it in line, and there's way too many wrapper layers
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