Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy

Post by thearn4 » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC

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…

Post by sangnoir » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

ethanwillis wrote: post #83

bobjordan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 U…

To be fair, you have to have a high level of technical maturity to understand the Microsoft stack. The intricacy of Microsoft's software and philosophy is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of MCSE basics most of the concepts will go over the typical code monkey's head. There's also Satya Nadella's enterprise outlook, which is deftly woven into every email he sends. His signature draws from the Steve Ballmer…

Post by tedajax » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

SiempreViernes wrote: post #92

jdormit wrote: post #89

> “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, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. This shows an astounding lack of understanding, both of Github and of git itself. Github was always owned and operated by "one corporation" - now it is…

The platform is pretty clearly github, a binary on a disk isn't a "platform". And any scientist is far too busy with the interesting stuff to set up a git server, otherwise they would be a sysadmin.

Post by PretzelFisch » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

gpantazes wrote: post #23

jarfil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem lies in the comments and issue tracking, which are not stored in git. Sure, you can clone the repo, but you can only take the wiki with you, the rest would be lost.

So what I'm hearing is the solution to this migration problem is to also store the entire issue tracker as a git repo alongside the real repo and wiki repo? Git repos for all the things! (Seriously, I think this solution would fit right in along with the way Wikis are handled)

Post by kuon » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

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…