Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by dingo_bat » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 3:54 PM UTC

Something1234 wrote: post #110

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…

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

It's a copypasta https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/6qhyr3/rick_and_...

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

#112

Post by will4274 » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC

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…

> 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 the most valuable part of the OS X source code. It's not like Microsoft can import the OS X window styles. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

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

#113

Post by nl » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 3:59 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #57

bonesss wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See I hope that "expert" coders understand that 'git push' works even on non-MS controlled endpoints, and how to setup a damned wiki if need be... GitHub is stupid valuable for MS, and will make their dev tools offerings much stronger (TFS is a dog, bringing GitHub Enterprise into MS Enterprise support & sales cycle is gonna make a loooot of scratch). But the value of the GitHub community persists only so long as the…

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?

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

#114

Post by seba_dos1 » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:01 PM UTC

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…

All we need is for GitLab to implement a federated protocol for dealing with issues, pull requests etc. and then there's no need to worry. See https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub being worked on.

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

#115

Post by nl » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

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…

This is what DOI handles are for[1].

That system sucks (it's always going down, or the handle goes to some universities crappy DSpace system which doesn't work properly or something).

I'll remain grateful whenever I see a Github URL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handle_System

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

#116

Post by azangru » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

notimetorelax wrote: post #4

I don’t really understand why it matters that these are scientists. It seems that the scientist title is added only to give this article more weight.

Totally. Came here to say exactly this: the title of the article is needlessly and confusingly specific. It’s like saying that scientists are concerned about the declining US dollar value, or some such. There seems to be nothing unique about scientists who use GitHub as opposed to the rest of GitHub users, and their concerns are the same.

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

#117

Post by mixmastamyk » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

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…

With a few exceptions, the problem with MS has never been their technical chops.

True, they've moved from a malignant stance to a more benign one recently, but their disregard for privacy and partnership with government should still make folks pause to consider. And pause we do.

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

#118

Post by manigandham » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

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.

Github has APIs to export all of this. Some services have importers to rebuild the issues but at the very least the data won't be lost.

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

#119

Post by manigandham » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

Github is the least functional source-code hosting service. Everything from search to issues to wiki is sub-par compared to Gitlab and others. It's massively unprofitable and its main advantage is the large mindshare and community that keeps it around.

Microsoft with its rich resources can easily improve the platform functionality which will benefit anyone using Github, along with likely making several features free (like private repos).

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

#120

Post by alexandercrohde » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

jdormit wrote: post #89

> “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…

To follow up on this, the design of git is inherently open and free. The very act of checking out a repo is mere seconds away from pushing it to any other server or platform/service provider.

Thus, by the great design of git, there is no way to make it a "walled garden" like your email/calendar/facebook. Should Microsoft ever show any inkling of restricting content, moving thousands of repos to another provider would be trivial (i.e. I could do it in a day)