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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

#71

Post by bobjordan »

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.

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 Ubuntu logo in my taskbar. Actually, it’s awesome. Now, I’m running our production web app on python with gevent on windows server OS using IIS with a reverse proxy. Dead simple to setup. With windows server 2019 we can even use the subsystem for Linux in production. It’s just awesome while Apple only gives a damn if I’m building IOS crap. Did I ever think I’d be doing it like this? Hell no. But it works great. To me, people that bash anything and everything Microsoft tooling leads me to believe they have a lack of technical maturity.

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

#72

Post by lucb1e »

oaiey wrote: post #53
tanu057 wrote: post #48

To survive, GItHub must provide the way to encrypt private repositories so that they can make sure that files cannot be read by github employees. Would that be possible?

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 make it into Windows. Or perhaps something else that they can use, I'm pretty sure they'll check that out before making an acquisition offer.

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

#73

Post by amelius »

icelancer wrote: post #54
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…

Nature is also not an Open Access or Open Science journal at all, and furthermore, does not require authors to publish all of their data for replication purposes. It's incredibly hypocritical. If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature .

> If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature.

True, but perhaps the thinking goes: we'll publish another paper in an open journal, so we can have our cake and eat it too.

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

#74

Post by lou1306 »

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…

Nice idea, but more robust checksums would be better (especially for archives containing code).

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by beauzero »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #70
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?

> 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? For the same reason many people use GitHub (or facebook): network effect.

Yes and we will have to see how they currate that network effect while drawing corporate value.

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

#77

Post by mseebach »

Fomite wrote: post #25
saagarjha wrote: post #16

This article seems to have a very focused interest on data in GitHub repositories, as opposed to source code. I get that the article is aimed at scientists, but I don’t see the problem here: if Microsoft takes down your dataset just move it somewhere else. You’re not tied down with pull requests or comments like code repositories are.

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…

> That's in print.

In olden times there'd be an address you could write to for a copy of the code on tape. It's an old problem without an obvious solution.

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

#78

Post by SCdF »

I know a lot of people don't like n-gate and webshit weekly, but I think their slice on this was particularly relevant:

> Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

> A near-monopoly closed-source software company, fed up with trying to seem like a good corporate citizen by releasing source code of their worst programs, is acquired by Microsoft.

When you combine that with the concerns from the article:

> They fear that the site will become less open

(it's not currently "open" in any significant way now, bar that there are free public accounts. They don't even have a public f-ing bug tracker for site issues)

> Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code

(It was already owned by one corporation, the Github corporation. Now it's owned by a different one. It's not like GH was some kind of open source alliance distributed project or anything)

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

#79

Post by janwh »

The level of hypocrisy is beyond measure. If "Open Science" was a real thing already, nobody would care about Nature, Elsevier, et al. If there has ever been a danger to open access to scientific research, it's publishing conglomerates that provide little to no value — the exact opposite of what GitHub has been doing the past few years.

Before complaining about others, clean up your own act, Nature.

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

#80

Post by Bedon292 »

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…

Unfortunately most papers (that I have been involved with at least) have very specific size requirements and limits. Spending that much space on sharing the files is not something that can happen. Anything more than "[things] are available online at [URL]" is just going to take up too much space. (Although, from now on I might try to include two URLs)

Besides, if / when GitHub ever shuts down, you know people will end up going through and cloning every repo on the system and archiving them at some similar url. So everyone can just visit it at notgithub.com/user/repo instead.

Now, I agree that something like that would be awesome. I don't think its that easy to do. Its just not practical. GitHub / Lab are easy you just toggle a switch to make a repo public after the paper has been published, but other services may not be as easy. Especially trying to set up university urls, and keeping them private until after publication. For tech savvy people it might be fine, but not for all.

Maybe it would be better if universities either hosted their own git repos, or even banded together and hosted something as a educational service? Rather than a for profit entity being where it is stored.

The contact info for any author involved with the paper is going to be right there at the beginning of the paper. So IF something were to ever happen to the one link, contact is not going to be hard. Yes, there are risks, but it still gets the job done for the time being.

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