GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#421

Post by brownriceowl » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:13 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #226

bee_rider wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best. Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful. In terms of coolness…

> Even among tech people, they have good will Wait, do they? I mostly remember: - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality - Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as - Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc. - Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass It's the…

We have different ideas of what qualifies as tech people if we're talking about Liquid Glass, Siri, and Vision Pro

IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#422

Post by echelon » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:13 PM UTC

worik wrote: post #399

herval wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is certainly fumbling in recent years, and it's clearly behind in some games (Siri, AI in general, iPhones turning into a yearly snooze-fest). But of all the FAANG, I'd say it's the only one I trust, simply because they're not trying to sell my data and have a consistent stance on security.

> because they're not trying to sell my data Are you sure?

They use it internally for marketing and sales.

They also use it for their growing ad platform.

Can't let people find your app for free. You need to pay to defend your trademark and lead in a given app category.

Plus they've severed the customer relationship and inserted themselves as Mafia middlemen. They'll sell that to companies too.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#423

Post by ivanmontillam » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:14 PM UTC

meindnoch wrote: post #404

pjmlp wrote: post #84

I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over. Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads. .NET is now cros…

Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys ? Mwuhahahhaa. This gave me the good belly laugh I needed. For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for: - being the no. 1 enemy of free software - shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share - making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kil…

These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).

I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).

Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#424

Post by krainboltgreene » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:14 PM UTC

rickette wrote: post #119

Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft. Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.

Github Actions was announced in OCT 2018, the acquisition deal close was announced a few days later.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#425

Post by eastbound » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:17 PM UTC

meindnoch wrote: post #404

pjmlp wrote: post #84

I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over. Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads. .NET is now cros…

Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys ? Mwuhahahhaa. This gave me the good belly laugh I needed. For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for: - being the no. 1 enemy of free software - shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share - making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kil…

Microsoft is also LinkedIn, GitHub, Typescript, NPM (NPM! Where do you host your dependencies?), games and OpenAI.

I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#426

Post by lowsong » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:17 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #307

827a wrote: post #163

My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed. It is deeply concerning because all things point to realit…

> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive. NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product. YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product. Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental…

> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.

> Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.

These are great examples of insulting and invasive introductions of LLMs into already functional workflows. These are anti-features.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#427

Post by bee_rider » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:17 PM UTC

nobleach wrote: post #381

bee_rider wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best. Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful. In terms of coolness…

But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.

The joke was supposed to be that the “coolness peak” was incredibly lame. Haha.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#428

Post by QuantumGood » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:17 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #226

bee_rider wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best. Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful. In terms of coolness…

> Even among tech people, they have good will Wait, do they? I mostly remember: - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality - Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as - Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc. - Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass It's the…

In my business (partly home studio support), it's hard to support MacOS for new-ish users.

If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.

If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.

If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.

For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.

UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#429

Post by worik » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:18 PM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #177

throwaway290 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait Microsoft was cool at some point?

Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable despite its many many flaws.

> Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable

That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#430

Post by asveikau » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:18 PM UTC

Philadelphia wrote: post #419

asveikau wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.

Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.

I was around at the time.

Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.

Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.

By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).

Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.