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Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

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Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#271

Can't help but notice the announcement aligns with Apple's WWDC this week. Wonder it'll take a bite out of Apple's PR.

Might be the other way around: Apple's event overshadows this one, and Microsoft quietly acquires GitHub with many being none the wiser.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#272

This seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub’s biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub). You see, whether or not it’s justified, some projects invariably will leave GitHub simply because it’s Microsoft . And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where…

Why would investors care? It's a payday for them.

Current investors are going to be bought out in cash or MSFT stock.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#273

What a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do thi…

If you cared this much today you shouldn't have put your code on GitHub yesterday :/.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#274

I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github. At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This…

what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change. as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.

As I also replied to a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17222045):

It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#276
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing. I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.

It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected. Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.

Perhaps modifying code is out of the question, but consider how many juicy credentials / private keys etc must be tucked away in all those private repos...

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see developers ditching GitHub with the acquisition for a perceived conflict of interest. It's really easy to change your remote. I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.

Changing the remote doesn't migrate anything in the issue tracker, merge requests, webhooks, pages or wiki

I seem to remember that under the GDPR, vendors have to make data exportable. I wonder if people could use that for GitHub issues and the Wiki.

GitHub pages is super easy to move except for getting users to know the new domain.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#278
post #16

Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ? If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet. As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use…

Search in Windows is horrible too.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#279
post #176

This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terr…

If it’s any consolation, Apple Music is terrible on iOS and MacOS as well.

True, but Windows users would find it odd if an app didn't suck. It has to match the overall Windows experience.

Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see developers ditching GitHub with the acquisition for a perceived conflict of interest. It's really easy to change your remote. I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.

This is also why I put my documentation in markdown files in the repo instead of using the Github wiki. I knew it would save me hassle later.

Wikis on Github are cloneable as normal repos: just use project.wiki.git instead of project.git in the clone URL.
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