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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

#471

Post by acidburnNSA »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #404
acidburnNSA wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. It's not too crazy to have people behind major open-source efforts get their own VPS's and run Phabricator or Gitlab. With a universal login akin to OAuth maybe it's doable.

That's insane, not only do developers and maintainers devote a huge part of their life to major open-source efforts, now they are expected to spend more time and money setting up, admining, and securing their own private servers? That's a great way to destroy Open Source projects. Very few people would be able/willing to put that much effort into it.

I could envision pre-configured vps images maintained in the open by volunteers to make it more practical. They could have unattended-upgrades configured for major patching and the community could help migrate between major LTS releases.

It isn't ideal but it might be doable at least for some projects. Maybe devops people want new ways to contribute to open source too!

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#472

Post by simon_acca »

saagarjha wrote: post #459
simon_acca wrote: post #417

Ask yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github? I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github! Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, i…

> I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. You're looking at the wrong people. It's companies who are paying for GitHub.

And yet the article mentions losses, companies might not be enough

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#473

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

atmosx wrote: post #6
shmerl wrote: post #2

I guess it's time to move to Gitlab.

MS has had an 180 degree turn in policy since Balmer left. Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.

Honest question: do the still threaten Linux-related companies with suing for violations of unspecified Microsoft patents?

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#474

Post by neckardt »

st26 wrote: post #353
nyxtom wrote: post #197

It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Ma…

Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity. The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of…

I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.

The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.

That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#475

Post by neongreen »

obl wrote: 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…

As one of my pet projects, I'm trying to resurrect Google's Code Search (a fast search indexer that supports regular expressions).

It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#476

Post by nkoren »

Ouch.

So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.

To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."

Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#477

Post by brownbat »

joering2 wrote: post #454
timvisee wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although this doesn't directly have anything to do with open-source; look at what happened to Skype, LinkedIn, and other companies they acquired.

Did i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn’t changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.

Tech scandals from the archive...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9786545

But now they're partnering with Signal so maybe that's a good case about how things change over time:

https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#478

Post by sb8244 »

timvisee wrote: post #431
phantom_oracle wrote: post #390

I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why? Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software. Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle tha…

Although this doesn't directly have anything to do with open-source; look at what happened to Skype, LinkedIn, and other companies they acquired.

Microsoft is opening LinkedIn up to other tools while completely maintaining their goal of not sharing your data (Iframe integrations so no data is shared). They're expanding capability without selling out users

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#479

Post by testplzignore »

According to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.

I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.

I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#480

Post by dom96 »

obl wrote: 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…

I cannot agree more with this.

It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.

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