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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

#881

Post by thomastjeffery »

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…

Most ISPs don't let you forward ports, so decentralization is difficult for most people.

Most people also don't have a server running constantly, so a centralized service is convenient.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#883

Post by carapace »

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…

And there it is. "Git" "hub" could be considered an oxymoron. The adoption of this proprietary closed-source veneer over git by FOSS developers has always been ironical to the point of farcical. Now the other shoe has dropped.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#885

Post by stuntkite »

EnderMB wrote: post #555
closeparen wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.

This was largely my thought behind the move. Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby, I can't see them wanting to switch things up from a tech perspective. GitHub is stable, and it's tech stack is capable of staying up despite some major DDoS attacks. If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams, and to finally resolve the issues that stop Wind…

Microsoft bought one of my favorite pieces of cloud software from a few years ago Deis[1]. With that they also got Helm[2] with the purchase. They are doing GREAT with Helm and are going in a different direction that looks super cool as they mothball Deis called Draft[3]. They are moving away from the OS company they used to be and betting heavily on cloud technologies and I think this Github purchase makes sense. Github has been stagnate for years. MS is embracing open source in a way they haven't before, and I think they are doing so in a way that is going to surprise people.

In NO way am I a Microsoft fan boy. I've been windows free going on a decade. I run Linux Mint and OSX as my primary desktop environments. Apple is burning me hard, the way the computing world is going to change in the next couple years, cluster technology is going to be at it's core and we are going to see some very different things grow out of it. I'm as shocked as anyone to see MS play nice with linux and especially contribute how they have to Kubernetes; which I think is the largest open source project in the world right now?

What if MS dumped resources into world class CI tools to go with Github? What if they made a Github open source module and would let you federate your content? I could see this being a really interesting thing. They could also screw us all, but under their current management I think they are getting ready to be competitive in an emergent environment that can't exist without open source.

[1] https://deis.com [2] https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/ [3] https://github.com/Azure/draft

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#886

Post by noah-kun »

autarch wrote: post #39

I don't understand how GitHub has been unable to become profitable. Anyone know more and want to share some details?

Does it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit.

Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#887

Post by 2bitencryption »

itomato wrote: post #877
closeparen wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.

I have lived and worked in SV for a decade, and still don't know a single "Silicon Valley hipster" developing with WSL or VS Code. I do know the power of analytics and control over prominent backend systems, and the allure of being "gatekeeper" with the power to extract value from integrations.

> VS Code

you don't know anyone using vs code?

in all the circles I know, it's the new de-facto goto for text editing heavier than notepad.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#888

Post by noah-kun »

jkells wrote: post #644

Perhaps an unpopular opinion around here but I see nothing but positives in this announcement. This move towards a "good" Microsoft has been going on for a decade, ASP.NET MVC was released as Open Source in 2009. Seeing where they're going with .NET core, VSCode and TypeScript makes me pretty confident they will be good stewards of the site. Microsoft had their own open source hosting solution Codeplex but closed it…

In case you haven't seen it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

TL;DR, Microsoft's known strategy is to feign goodness, then use the goodwill to kill competition, especially in the open standards/open source area.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#889

Post by indigochill »

bamboozled wrote: post #535
indigochill wrote: post #339

Heck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.

What makes you think the same thing won’t happen to GitLab? No one would’ve dreamed of this happening 5-10 years back.

I expect it'll happen to Gitlab at some point, but the beauty of self-hosted is that I can cut ties with the organization and continue using their software anyway because it's entirely running on my machine.

Which, incidentally, is just one reason I usually strongly prefer self-hosted options over SaaS. You're not signing a pact to become beholden to the business whims of a third party.

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