This is a wake up call. Too many things are relying on Github right now.
Microsoft was part of the PRISM program. If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks. What if in some very specific cases you download dependencies from GitHub and they give you a different version with malicious code?
It's the NSA. They could be smart enough to only deploy those attacks on production servers were nobody is going to manually review npm packages.
They could also do it regardless of whether or not Microsoft owns them or whatever favorite acronym authorizes them, or whatever. I've never understood why people love freaking out about this stuff. If the NSA felt like spying on you, pro tip, they're gonna be able to do it. If you care about keeping your shit secure, it shouldn't be on the internet at all.
>If you care about keeping your shit secure, it shouldn't be on the internet at all.
If only we lived in a world where this was practical.
I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned about privacy this way, or to take issue with the possibility that this acquisition could make it easier for one to be spied on or surveilled. However, we should also cautious that our tin foil hats do not grow too heavy.
Maybe in theory it is safe, but implementations are often not safe.
An oversimplified way to see this is that your software runs on an OS which runs on a processor.
Your processor is backdoored (Intel ME and equivalent), your OS is backdoored, the entropy for your crypto is backdoored (Intel RDRAND instruction), your crypto algorithm implementation is backdoored.
So there are infinite resources for them to hack you at any moment for any reason. You have already gave them the keys to everything.
> The NSA is not god, they can't break 2048-bit TLS encryption no matter how many computers they have.
2048 bit TLS encryption? You mean 2048 bit RSA encryption? Also what source do you have that says the NSA can not crack a 2048 bit RSA key? Last I checked that info was non public and there is no definitive, credible source saying whether they can or can not crack 2048 RSA keys.
Yes I meant RSA key, sorry. My source is that 2^2048 is an enormous number and the time estimate for a desktop computer to crack it is in the quadrillions of years. Yes, I know the NSA has higher computing power than a desktop computer.
Whenever I read these kinds of posts on this website I think of Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove. (The crazy SAC commander who thinks the Russians are plotting to steal Americans' precious bodily fluids).
I understand that people don't trust the NSA/US government. And they shouldn't: the US government will always put its interests above yours and mine, and above those of allied countries.
At the same time, this stuff is bordering on parody. Very few of us (maybe none of us) need to worry about "the NSA MITM-ing our NPM packages". If you're that paranoid then you shouldn't be using github, NPM, or non-local dependencies. And of course you should be reviewing everything manually.
I didn't mean that this is going to happen. I wanted to give an example of a potential threat. My idea was to show one of many problems with centralization and relying so much in GitHub and GitHub SSL certs.
Maybe we can start signing our commits to increase security giving the potential threat. The same way that after the Snowden revelations we started using more and more HTTPS.
We can also think of better ways of sharing/releasing open source code. Debian has a pretty neat system with keys so it's pretty safe to install software from their repos [1]. Maybe there is a better system to be develop than just grabbing whatever from GitHub[2] and running it in your machine.
There's definitely a need for a better system. Some would argue that we have package managers specifically to help solve this problem. Yet, for many developers who just want a "good enough" install system without thinking or working at it much, curl-and-exec gets the job done.
That so many people aren't thinking about security at all is a sad comment on the state of software engineering. But perhaps inevitable, given our cultural history of favoring freedom over security.
> I wanted to give an example of a potential threat.
I really don't like this line of thinking. It's the same one used by news organizations to plump up their stories, or by politicians to make an improbable threat seem more real. In both of those cases, I think the long-term effect is to cause the public to think that very rare events are a lot more common. The result is not a culture of wariness but a culture of fear.
I'd much rather people present "worst-case potential threats" instead as "likely potential threats."
In security many things are "potential" threats. Just being unlikely doesn't mean that the threat doesn't exists. For example, a guy found a potential threat in rails[1], and rails developers dismissed his findings as unlikely exploitable. Then the guy go and hacked GitHub to prove that the issue was real[2][3] and that even the best rails developers were vulnerable.
OK. Let's not talk about potential threats. That's the language of fear, control, and paralysis. It's the language of liars and demagogues and exaggerations.
Let's talk about risks and goals. The language of opportunities.
An approach of `curl | bash` takes a needless amount of risk to accomplish its goals. It can do far too many things, of which it actually needs to do a small subset. It offers a lot of opportunity for bad things to happen to seize the opportunity for the things we want. Maybe there are ways to do the same things, to get the same ends, without taking on so much risk.
Good question. The specific problem that I'd like to tackle is sharing code as safe as possible.
The happy path is that you have some code to share and I want to get it exactly as you wrote it.
Right now the current issues with just using GitHub to share your code are the following:
1. GitHub app gets hacked and let's someone else do a commit (like the rails hack mentioned above).
2. GitHub employee modifies files in prod servers.
3. GitHub cloud provider gets hacked
4. State actor with lots of resources MITM GitHub.com domain and internet traffic and you fetch something else.
I think all this problems could be solved if:
1. Git enforces that all commits must be signed.
2. There is a decentralized list of usernames and keys.
This feature doesn't exists in git but it would be great if you could run `git clone`
and it rejects the cloning if not all commits and tags has been signed.
But what If someone hacked GitHub to add a commit and she or he signed the commit. We need some kind of CA to only accept signed commits from the right people.
So there should be a fixed list of committers allowed in the repo and git would have to enforce that as well.
Then you have the problem that if all public keys are stored in
GitHub then you almost get back to all the problems again of GitHub getting hacked. It would be great to have as many copies of usernames and public keys as possible. Something like a blockchain would be a good fit.
To recap, by having a decentralized system of users and public keys, and making
git validate that the commits are signed and from the right people, we could have a much more reliable way of sharing code.
Additionally, we could have an "audit" system on top of all this were users can review code and mark it as "good". Then if you have a repo with a tagged version that has 5 reviews you can hope that it's pretty safe to run that version. Because it's a single system of usernames, you can check who are the reviewers.
It might be a bad idea to `curl | bash` a script from an stranger but at least you remove the risks of your code being delivered by a third party.
> To recap, by having a decentralized system of users and public keys, and making git validate that the commits are signed and from the right people, we could have a much more reliable way of sharing code.
I can see that you've put some thought into this. I can also see you don't generally spend most of your time thinking about security. This is not a bad thing! Most people don't!
But it does occasionally show up in sloppy thinking about system design, such as when you reflexively conflate a commit being signed by a key with a commit being from the person who is expected to own that key. It means you didn't stop and think about how to integrate rapid key revocation in case of compromise, or how to rotate keys over time.
Or how social review systems tend towards unreliability, as reviews are left by those who are not experts and users trust aggregate numbers from such. How meaningful is a 4.5-star average from five reviewers on a cryptography library, if the reviewers are five random people whose expertise you know nothing about and are ill-equipped to judge?
Well hello there, I'd like to share a story with you.
I'm the maintainer of butterproject.org and have been maintaining popcorntime.io for a while, we had there 2 issues with GitHub a few years ago, both related to (unfounded) copyright claims on the butter and popcorntime code (we absolutely own the right to every single line there), when we tried to make our case we were ignored once and asked to 'keep things quiet' by side channels the second time. Most likely, the mpaa, didn't want us to exist and GitHub complied with shutting down our repos and sending a cese and desist to all our 800ish forks (at a time where we were trying to transform BitTorrent media streaming into a viable business plan).
Maybe it's time we build our core infrastructure on something else than companies that act irrationally when threatened to be sued ?
popcorntime was strictly confrontational, and was blatantly illegal. "Transforming BitTorrent media streaming" can be a good goal, but doing it illegally will cause you to be shut down. Remember grooveshark? They tried the same thing -- to create a legit service that disrupts and industry. But there's a reason they failed and spotify succeeded, and I think it's because they partnered with existing companies instead of tried to act in direct opposition.
They now have access to private projects so can use that to help create exploits to closed source products that are hosted on GitHub or use it to create their own products or patents.
Fact? How do you define whether Microsoft is hostile? What are your criteria?
Look, I hated Microsoft in the '90s and '00s. I was there. I grew up in a world where IBM dominated the market though. They've both changed. The market has changed and both of these companies had to deal with that.
The reality is that nowadays people pay with their privacy instead of with currency for a product; they are the product. Does it matter much who owns the product (independent US company, big player like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple?)
The most recent is a month or two ago when I upgraded my motherboard and cpu and my retail Windows 10 deactivated and I was unable to activate it myself, so I had to contact support. "Support" was rude and insisted on invading my privacy by remotely accessing my system to do "something". It took several days of exchange and they treated me like a potential scammer and I even had to send scan of receipt to prove that I indeed bought a motherboard. Utter scum.
I agree with the concern around too many things depending on Github for real time builds and deployment.
In regards to MITM, that can happen regardless of who maintains the repositories. If an NSL is issued, compliance is mandatory. A gag order is included. AFAIK there are no large organizations that would fall on that sword.
It is on the individual organizations that utilize public resources to do proper certificate and checksum validation, along with code diff reviews to reduce the risk of tainted packages.
Your intention is correct, but your details are not (as are the OPs). Microsoft share's it's SSL certs with the entire planet. Microsoft protects it's private keys and does not share them with the NSA.
The NSA forges Microsoft's SSL keys, they do not need to ask for them.
> And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.
It’s a fair point but I still cannot read this without thinking of someone saying “yeah I did some things in the past but I’ve totally changed I promise. Look, for the whole past week I’ve been really nice to people haven’t I?”
The MS of today has massive skin in this OSS game. They've been contributing to the Linux kernel for years now [0]. They've got over 4000 repos on GitHub. Many projects are actively developed on GH. As an example, the VS code team solicits contributions on GH [1]. It's hard to say what kind of resources have been invested in .NET core and the open source compilers (Roslyn) and the CLR. Substantial resources.
If you told me 5/10 years ago about these developments I would have never believed you.
I don't think it's fair to reason about a (40+ year old, 100k+ employees, public) company's behaviour as if it has a mind. It doesn't.
The new Microsoft only exist in markets where the old Microsoft have been pushed to the fringes. In the markets where Microsoft still have the ability to set the rules their behavior is even worse then the bad old days when they still believed the windows market could grow(as anyone trying to get a telemetry free copy of windows10 can tell you).
What we are seeing now is Microsoft reacting to being kicked out of several markets by going back to the embrace phase in an attempt to regain some of the ground lost from Balmers failed attempt to secure a foothold for MS in the mobile and web framework markets.
If they had really been about embracing open source and open standards we would have seen them do something useful for Linux like releasing a version of excel for Linux or opening up the protocols outlook and exchange use to talk to each other, but that kind of openness was never on the table.
What i would expect to see with github is that if/when ms decide they want to utilize their investment for profit is a heavy integration with the azure environment in the form of CI hooks designed around azure api's to the point where other CI platforms become 2nd degree citizens in the ecosystem and i would not be surprised if a github account becomes a add on to an office365 subscription rather then a stand alone product.
> If you change the leadership and change employee incentives, it might as well be a different company.
Exactly. Which is why the idea of "trusting" a corporation, or treating them like you would a human being on any level, is ludicrous. They're a plane crash and a stock dip from becoming a totally different entity.
A person is a midlife crisis[1] or a railway accident[2] away from being a totally different entity. There is no absolute trust, just risk assessment and reevaluation.
[1] I thought it was just a cliche until I saw it happen to someone. She went through some things and upended her whole life.
But incentives are still very much in the hand of shareholders who have been rewarding and continue to reward Microsoft's predatory stance on the market (including its continuous abuse of patents against open-source projects like Android and Linux).
It may sound like a harsh statement, but exactly because corporations are not like people, they seem to be harder to change, in my opinion. I'm not saying Microsoft can't change, but it's easy to forget that the main goal of any corporation is profit, specially when it's so big.
I think the profit motive is exactly why change happens.
As soon as a company realizes it can make more $$$ with new strategy B than their original strategy A, then boom -- changed. (Sometimes you have to get rid of the old believers, but that already happened at Microsoft.)
If you look at MSFT's stock price, it's ~tripled since Satya became CEO, after being stagnant for years. He seems incredibly committed to open-source -- because in the long run it will ultimately be more profitable for Microsoft, no?
> I think the profit motive is exactly why change happens.
I agree. They don't actually care about open source it's purely because it's profitable to their business. They'll close it without caring if it's not making them enough money or good will.
But I still hope this works. As long as maintaining open source projects is profitable to Microsoft then it gives incentives for other FLOSS projects to show that if such an anti open source company as Microsoft is willing to embrace it then there's good reasons to join in.
> He seems incredibly committed to open-source -- because in the long run it will ultimately be more profitable for Microsoft, no?
I think it's just because in the short run Microsoft ran a very high risk of getting pushed in a corner.
They are embracing what's hip most of all to improve their image, especially so as to be more attractive for talented technical people.
The "Windows everywhere" vision is not pursuable at this time, so it makes sense to let some things go and focus on what can get you the most money right now (cloud, IA, individual profitable products and services).
And maybe, just maybe, surreptitiously spread your patents everywhere... =0
True, but you can say that for any company. At least in this case, you can consider their past 5 years, see what moves they make and what statements they have released, and judge whether their words and matching their actions.
I'd argue that the incentives of a company who made their fortune and moat on deliberately incompatible lock-in OS/software are permanently broken, so I agree with you but come to the opposite conclusion.
The thought that Satya Nadella, who joined Microsoft in 1992 and then steadily climbed his way (in extremely fierce competition) to the top would be a better, more moral person than the "old guard" is kind of funny.
He's just younger and less out of touch than Gates (and particularly Balmer). Many people seem to mistake ascribe this aspect of him (more in touch with modern tech) with some higher moral standards etc than e.g. Gates/Ballmer. I don't see why he should be any less fierce/brutal.
(1) Make it easy for alternative OS to run on Surface/Windows-certified devices: Both x86 and ARM.
(2) Support OpenDocumentFormat in their office apps. Still remember how they corrupted the ISO certification process by creating OOXML (which is just a wrapper over binary blobs produced by MS-Office)
> OpenXML on the other hand, is a high-level specification which describes the high level envelopes used to embed binary objects which are included in the content. The content itself contains the binary code which can call any function in any Microsoft library and has all permissions of the person opening the document.
They'll do it the day they think it's profitable for them to do so, as their public company status obliges them to do, unless their shareholders vote otherwise.
He consistent and have a good track record for years.
It feels just like yesterday that Microsoft was spying on windows boxes. In my mind, everyone has a "Days since last accident" counter in their head, and Microsoft's number is quite low.
Its worse now. Grub-efi cant boot Windows 8.1+ directly. It instead boots Window's Bootloader which then handles all of the bootable windows partitions.
It looks okay if you only have one Windows in your boot options but once you have two you realize you have two bootloaders.
Sell the majority of their shares to other people and behave very nicely, doing things against their short and medium term interest, for 15 years.
That's about the minimum, given their track record.
In the meanwhile we can give them increasing credit, if they do behave nicely, but it's absurd to believe that they've suddenly become a good company and that they'll stay like this for the next decades. I have a hard time believing that anyone not payed by them could think so.
And by the way, they have yet to reverse the decidedly un-nice things they have done with Windows 10 in the last years. Allow everyone to disable the telemetry and to better control the updates, and then we can start the 15 years count. Oh yeah, and maybe also stop astroturfing, that's another extremely un-nice thing that they clearly started doing only recently.
There would be nothing wrong in discussing with the people, if they paid people to do so while stating in every message that they're being paid by Microsoft it would be perfectly ok, but that's very different from what they're doing now.
These things make it clear that they're still motherfuckers, just less then they used to be.
Several key pieces of Edge are open source, such as Chakra Core, which is the JS engine (like Chromium's V8), and more are expected.
The argument IE6 was that the web grew too stagnant with a single dominant web renderer. If we all agree that the Web is a better place with multiple competing web renderers, why wish the death of the Edge renderer when it and Firefox are all that are standing in the way (and barely by latest metrics) of forks from the KHTML/WebKit/Blink family dominating?
This is just ridiculous. The other points may/may not make sense but drop direct-x for vulkan? What? It'd have made more sense to make Direct-X open source than just dump it like it's useless. It's not like windows drivers for GPUs don't support vulkan.
Direct-X has had a history of being the superior graphics API to OGL. Now, VULKAN evens things out a bit but just dumping so much of RnD for nothing doesn't make sense
But to summarize: OpenGL was the standard before D3D was created. D3D has been a step behind OpenGL in features and performance up to about D3Dv7. Then the OpenGL ARB screwed up, with Microsoft among the members (some hypothesize that Microsoft were attempting to sabotage OpenGL).
Think this is the only other alternative for cross plat guis if you don't want to pull in non-.net stuff like qt or electron.
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
It is, but a lot of people want that instead of a desktop and the work necessary to maintain that. I don't think my toaster is crappy just because it can only make toast even though I could use an oven which has more capabilities
but particularly msft it would seem. Many of the larger oss projects are maintained by companies who either make money off the products or are funded by the other things they work on
I'd believe them if they open sourced Windows. They could still keep their web platforms (Office365, Azure, etc.) closed but it would be a huge statement to open up Windows 10.
(Never going to happen, not just for philosophical reasons, but I'm sure legal reasons too)
I think the biggest issue would be the audit. Recall that NT started out as part of OS/2 which is owned by IBM. I suspect that Edge/IE has similar issues, because it was evolved from NCSA Mosaic it probably has legal issues preventing it from being open sourced.
I know for a fact that the ZIP component of the windows shell would be an issue as that is definitely licensed to Microsoft instead of being owned by.
Friendly reminder: this is the same Microsoft that "empowered" skype and once called open source a cancer. Its the same Microsoft that ruined open document standards and started the browser wars.
I wouldnt be surprised to see next years release of "Github Pro Platinum with Minecraft 3D and Windows Store integration"
For those looking to move, https://gitlab.com is an excellent open source alternative that can easily import all your github projects. https://gitea.io is also available and runs on as little as a raspberry pi.
There are some really good arguments as to why we should be worried about Microsoft so can we please stop ruining them by using this complete misquote as a component.
This comment covers it well:
> This is disingenuous. He was referring to the licensing model of certain open-source projects, where the introduction of a single line of code coming from an open source project would require the whole of the Windows stack to be open-source, effectively "contaminating" the rest of the stack. To this day this is still a problem to many companies and legal department must carefully review the licensing of the libraries used by their devs.
I think this is a case of "it doesn't look good, but the more you think about it the less bad it looks." There's a kernel of truth in the unfortunate wording. GPL (certain versions) is problematic if you want to keep your related code closed source. When I interned at Microsoft, you had to get approval from legal to use open sourced code specifically for copyright liability reasons.
I'm sure Ballmer also disliked Linux for other reasons, but this line makes for an ambiguous example of it.
Given that Microsoft has been pretty enthusiastic about tools like VSCode and Linux support on Azure, I'm personally cautiously optimistic with Nadella at the helm.
But in fact, copyright is the cancer. There is no way to disable copyright. Even if you put something in the public domain, copyright will reattach itself and future users can be legally denied full access to it. Copyleft is the cure for copyright. It's the only cure we know.
Except that GPL comes with its own set of restrictions and it forces these restrictions on every bit of code it touches. LGPL is a bit better but I find the line confusing and blurry often. Many people do not believe it to be the cure at all.
Many people don't understand what they're talking about. Those restrictions you talk about are purely to stop copyright reattaching itself in the future.
Anyone who uses copyleft really wants to declare the following: "This is not copyrighted and derived works shall never be copyrighted." That is not possible with current copyright law. Copyleft is the only way to get that.
GPL is not about enforcing restrictions, it's about doing what's necessary to neutralise the damaging effects of copyright. The fact that is uses copyright to achieve that makes it one of the greatest hacks of all time.
This fits pretty well with Microsoft calling Linux a "cancer".
(Note that you also have to carefully review licensing of libraries used with proprietary licenses; that's not a problem caused by open source unlike the quote wants to imply. Proprietary licenses also tend to "contamine" a project and make the entire project non-free, so that is not specific to open source either.)
It is a misquote. See above. He was talking about Linux not open source, and specifically about the licence that Linux has chosen to use.
It would be entirely reasonable to find it an objectionable comment nonetheless, but please find objectionable what he actually said, not some alternative version.
> In November Munich city council decided to revert to Windows by 2020 with all systems being replaced by Windows 10 counterparts.
> Reasons cited were adoption and users being unhappy with the lack of software available for Linux.
> A report commissioned by Munich and undertaken by Accenture found the most important issues were organizational.
> In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD, wherein it is claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter.
> Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich.
It's not clear-cut in the sense that Munich's IT landscape was and is fragmented which made and makes it very easy to blame IT problems on LiMux. But that doesn't make me believe even for one second that Microsoft didn't lobby their way back to Munich. Here's a little story from some years back about Microsoft's lobbying efforts to prevent usage of ODF as a standard in the UK:
Shortly before the official announcement of the end of LiMux, Microsoft's German headquarter moved to Munich [1]. It's also estimated to cost about 89 million € to return back to Windows [2 (german)], including 24 million € for "external consulting".
So, hypothetically of course, if Microsoft subtly let the new Mayor Dieter Reiter know that they will only build their new headquarter in Munich if Windows was to replace LiMux, then what about this could not be considered as Microsoft killing LiMux? Sure, they didn't directly pull the plug, but that's semantics.
May be of further interest to German-speaking folks in Munich: there will be a discussion about LiMux on 11th June with former Munich mayor Christian Ude and others.
I just finished moving all my 20+ repos over from github and deleted all of my github accounts. Feels good actually. I'm glad to see gitlab getting good attention. I bet all of the people behind gitlab are feeling pumped/anxious/excited right now! ^_^
I hope you are right and I hope Gitlab folks are happy. But also note that it just became easier in many big corporations to sell Github to senior management, because you know, "nobody got fired for choosing Microsoft"
Erm, while I agree Skype wasn't the pinnacle of chat software pre-MS acquisition, I believe OP is referring to their absolute butchering of the consumer client[0].
Anecdotally, I stopped using Skype for iOS shortly after it was changed because it went from a solid, reliable internet-calling service to probably the most buggy / laggy interface I could have expected.
You're totally off your rocker. They undeniably obliterated Skype in every possible way. Literally, it is an absolute abortion. Look on ANY community site about Skype, you will see its 95% livid rage to this sorry excuse of an app (including me, I actually used Skype for everything, now I'm forced to use the old version which hopefully isn't deprecated). https://www.reddit.com/r/skype/search?q=new+skype&restrict_s...
Seeing GitHub acquired, I can’t help but imagine that Gitlab would go that route sooner or later. Their free offering is even more extensive than GitHub’s, and I don’t think there’s visibility into whether their revenue from paid plans is enough to offset that.
Since becoming backed by a major player is both a blessing (cash reserves to fuel the free offering!) and a curse (drive to increase shareholder value could go against longer-term community interests), I have mixed feelings about this trend.
Slightly tangentially, Gitlab has nearly caught up with GitHub and is arguably ahead in some ways feature-wise. I’m happy having built my small agency’s workflow around it.
I enjoy being able to drop a dotfile into repository root and have the product tested and deployed by CI to (in my case) AWS S3 or EC2, or get an email report if something prevented that from happening, after subsequent commit. On my roadmap is Terraform integration and having the automation provision all resources, but even in its current state I don’t think I can overstate the difference it makes, especially with a smaller team of engineers.
Some features of Gitlab at the moment are objectively inferior to GitHub’s implementation (simpler protected branch model with no way to mandate signed commits comes to mind), but many others appear stronger (issue tracker & boards, milestones, merge requests, the above-mentioned CI).
Feel free to give me a shout if you’re considering moving your business to Gitlab and I’ll share my experience.
> Seeing GitHub acquired, I’d speculate that Gitlab will go that route sooner or later.
Bingo. It's bizarre to hear people stampeding to GitLab when they're subject to the same financial and revenue pressures as GitHub or any other business. Somebody's paying for those servers and bandwidth and that somebody is expecting a return on their investment.
Whatever happens to Gitlab, you have the option of hosting the open source edition yourself. If they get acquired by Oracle in the morning, a fork could conceivably rise to take its place.
> The whole _point_ of Github was that you didn't have to host anything yourself. Just create an account and, bam, off you go.
So, just like gitlab.com?
> On top of that, even if you did want to host Gitlab yourself, it's "open core", not open source. You'd lose a ton of functionality.
That functionality is geared towards enterprise. If you are one, you should be doing your own risk evaluation. If not, you're probably fine with the open source edition.
I hear that again and again but GitLab is so massively complex now, that I don't think anybody without a company of at least 10 full time employees will be able to maintain and reasonably extend it.
The difference is that Gitlab has publicly stated, from the beginning, that the goal is an IPO:
> Stay independent so we can preserve our values. Since we took external investment we need a liquidity event. To stay independent we want that to be an IPO instead of being acquired.
This is such bull. They are backed by Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures who would vote with their preferential shares to sell GitLab for $7.5 Billion dollars without question. They're in the exact same bucket as GitHub except no where near as successful.
There’s no way Gitlab is turning down multiple billions of dollars like GitHub. They likely burn even more money than GitHub since their free offerings are bigger.
travis-ci has a pledge to keep their open source free tier always available. I don't know how much they stand by it but theyve said it on twitter and their plans page says "Always free for open source projects"
IMO being open-source isn’t such a minor deal, because it alleviates the worst-case scenario should Gitlab ever get acquired: if theoretical new management removes or changes price tiers, you can spin up your own on short notice. That management could reduce the effort put into maintaining their CE product or take it in an unfavorable direction and cause a fork, but the immediate damage is avoidable.
One possible caveat is performance. While I haven’t had to deal with this personally, some people reported that Gitlab can be a bit slow to run[0]. This doesn’t matter much if you use their hosted solution (if they have cash now, they can solve it by beefing up their hardware), but could result in higher than anticipated costs of running a self-hosted instance.
[0] Speaking of anecdotal evidence easy to find on HN and elsewhere. I’m yet to see any performance benchmarks comparing self-hosted versions of Gitlab and GitHub Enterprise (the latter starting at about $2500 per year) on similar hardware. It could well be that Gitlab is the fastest product for its maturity and feature set.
I still see Microsoft's predictable behavior in 2018. I have a friend who owns a Surface, and I was thinking it would be useful to put Linux on it (it was older ARM hardware). Well you can't, it's a Surface RT and Microsoft not only locks the bootloader but it also only runs Microsoft approved apps. That's their endgame whenever possible. Apparently people didn't like having fully locked down computers and they discontinued the product, shocker.
The Surface RT was discontinued in 2015, and was manufactured in 2012. Is this an six year old anecdote?
Sorry, but these days I feel like there are more anecdotes involving the Surface RT to prove that "Microsoft hates Linux" than there are actual Surface RT devices still in active usage, but yet people still eat this stuff up.
> That's their endgame whenever possible.
Their "endgame" was six years ago and hasn't come back since..?
You still see Microsoft's predictable behavior in 2018 by looking at a discontinued product from 2012-2014? I think that's evidence that there has been a shift, and support for Linux has improved significantly since then.
Of course, if the user's motivation for using Linux is in protest against Microsoft, this won't matter, but for those who work in multiple platforms, Microsoft seems to have the most comprehensive vision of computing: not tied to any particular technology or license but fully integrated and interoperable. This is a good attitude worth supporting, even if you might object to some of their other policies. We're moving toward the era of ubiquitous computing where there's a single ecosystem with multiple technologies powering an integrated whole.
Long time Linux user and it is still my preferred OS, but I never understood the hypocrisy of the MS hate in Linux. Normally it is written on an Apple product running OS X and a VM of Linux for a server.
Over the years Apple's laptops are the number one laptop at Linux conferences. As a whole Apple has been the biggest enemy to open source even though they have had some good open source projects. MS has had several years showing that Linux and Open Source makes business sense just like most of us have been saying for years.
It doesn't have to pretend, it is a full computer that is intentionally crippled by the vendor. Apple doing it to doesn't make it any less despicable. These stupid strategies turn perfectly good computers into landfill.
Windows apps are NOT compiled for ARM though. It would take emulating the entire x86 processor arch on ARM to allow this to run normal software on it or the original devs porting / recompiling with ARM in mind. A lot of old windows software is only available in original binary form and the source is long gone.
"Despicable" is pretty questionable. I still use my six-year-old iPad almost daily. That's certainly a longer lifespan than I've ever gotten out of any PC or a Mac, and the reason is probably because it isn't a full-fledged computer.
Once I'm finally tired of its now anemic performance and replace it, I can probably plug it in and use it as an SSH viewer for journalctl or something, so it can still be of some use.
Some of the people in my family would have never used a computing device if it wasn’t for the iPad. Many people can do like 70%-90% of everything they ever want to do on computers, on an iPad. It’s not really that crippled.
It is as a full computer as an iPad, and was never meant to be more. It has a dumbed down version of Windows, has ARM architecture and was lacked down from day one.
Why aren't people pissed that they cant install Linux on their iPhones and iPads?
That's because you don't appreciate hardware design. Its understandable that you might be confused because of the presence of x86 compatible hardware. There is no such thing as "ARM Laptop". All ARM devices choose their own ARM processor implementation integrated with a custom motherboard with an undocumented firmware design. Not to mention custom drivers for all of the I/O. You can't install any OS on any random hardware.
You can install Linux on ARM architectures. It's commonplace that people install it on low end ARM laptops (and yes, those definitely exist in the 2-in-1 market). Also what do you think a Raspberry Pi is?
No, you can maybe install and boot Linux on SOME arm devices. Furthermore, installation and booting does not guarantee full operation of all attached peripherals. Only those devices that have the blessing of the manufacturer will work properly with Linux. There is no expectation that any random ARM device will be able to install and boot Linux. I would invite you to read up on the topic. ARM hardware compatibility is absolutely nothing like x86.
I have a Surface RT too that I love for couch computing. It didn't cost much and I continue to get a lot of use from it, but the fact is it is not fully supported.
If you're wondering why they bought GitHub, it's here:
> Second, we will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services.
This is it.
At one time Microsoft used to dominate enterprise software development in certain areas (most of the east coast in the U.S.) to such a degree that it was almost impossible to find a non-.NET developer job.
Their biggest failure was TFS. At one time all .NET shops used it. But then git crept in and the rest is history.
Microsoft is going to sell a lot of enterprise hosting accounts. Look for the on-premises installations to go through the roof, especially.
> it was almost impossible to find a non-.NET developer job.
Mostly agree with the points, but I think it was always just as easy (if not easier) to find an enterprise Java based job than it was a .NET developer job.
> Their biggest failure was TFS. At one time all .NET shops used it. But then git crept in and the rest is history.
TFS certainly used to be a horrible product, and I still hate working with TFVC. But Visual Studio Online, their cloud version of TFS, really is a fantastic product, and even let's you host Git repos. The CI and CD features are extremely powerful too.
This is probably the most important reason. Microsoft is doubling down on cloud, and they are willing to do anything to get ahead in this game. This is the sole reason why stocks are going up for Microsoft.
I don't think they will. They will most likely want to replace Team Foundation Server with GitHub Enterprise. There might not be a special AWS image anymore but a lot of developer teams rely on the on-premises variant of TFS.
Honestly, I hope not - over the years, TFS has turned from a turd into something good - Visual Studio Online, Microsoft's hosted version of TFS, really is a great product. It lets you use Git for source control and provides excellent backlog and CI/CD features - I don't often get evangelical about a product, but it really is a joy to use.
I am a GitLab user and have been for about 2 years now. With that being said, I think this acquisition makes a ton of sense strategically. Microsoft has really been trying to change their identity from being a stuffy close-source corporation to an open company that developers can rely on. And they have done pretty well at this. They open sourced .net, run MS SQL on Linux, and have released the WSL (which would have been unfathomable a decade ago). They also moved their VCS over to Git for Windows development.
GitHub, however, has a business issue of not making money. I think with the resources that Microsoft can provide GitHub can continue to build a great product and tap further into Microsoft's enterprise user base to make sales and release more features that customers want/need.
Congrats to everyone at GitHub for this momentous acquisition!
It's a great move for both, and as a developer I like the opportunities this creates for tooling and productivity. Good to see those two dev focused organizations team up!
Why did GitHub become unprofitable? Did they spend too much money hosting open-source projects, compared to what they made on private repos? Maybe the lesson is that free hosting never works.
I have been looking for a source to that claim (not the first I have seen) and haven't found one (either for or against profitability). Does anybody have one?
To your very good post you forgot to add that majority of large corps with lrge projects scramble at the moment to move and delete off of their source codebase from GitHub so that Microsoft programmers dont get access to their repos and secret souce.
I just don't understand this take. How many of those companies run Windows on any of their devices? Either you trust Microsoft or you don't. If you don't trust Microsoft, you have bigger problems than them owning GitHub.
Part of the reason we trusted GitHub with our projects and our code was they were a neutral party simply providing a service.
Sadly, being bought out by microsoft completely removes their neutrality. Whether they will abuse the trust of having complete and total access to every private repo and all of the code inside or not remains to be seen. But I certainly don’t view GitHub as neutral site anymore. Sadly, from a business perspective, GitHub just isn’t rational when they’re owned by Microsoft. Even less so when we’ve seen how blatantly evil they have been in the past. For us, at least at this point, it will be better to bite the bullet now and move sooner rather than gamble. As someone else here said, even good community oriented companies are only a rough quarter away from shady business practices.
I truly hope they don’t kill off GitHub, it’s been a truly amazing space and I really hope it works out for the devs who work there — the ones I know are amazing people and true believers, I really do hope this works out well for them, they deserve it. Now off to start the long arduous process of migrating everything to GitLab :/
Why will they kill of Github? They just shut down their own repository website (Codeplex) and moved all their code to github. That's perhaps the most misplaced fear I've read here.
Plus, from what I've read, MS was perhaps the best possible buyer of GH - and no, a federated distributed model was definitely not a possibility given the huge sums of investor money involved.
They don't need to literally kill, they can just make many useful features internal to Microsoft developers, or make some features that are free now subscription-only.
The real question everyone should be asking is whether Microsoft is trustworthy, cognizant, and honorable enough to be the steward of such a major player that facilitates a large portion of open source software.
This has me very concerned for the open source community.
Why were you not concerned previously about an unprofitable SV startup holding that central position?
GitHub wasn’t a non-profit. This was always the endgame for them. They were losing money to acquire a userbase that would be sold when the time is right — just like WhatsApp and numerous other big social SV plays.
Who says I wasn't? And I know Github wasn't a non-profit. You make quite a number of assumptions with your statement.
The difference for me is that I was supporting Github (by paying) to be an independent company, warts and all. If their goal was to always sell specifically to Microsoft, I would have voiced many concerns very early on. I would much rather they had sold to Mozilla or another in the open source community.
How would Mozilla afford this? Anyone in the open source community? The selling price of $7.5B is huge. Red Hat’s market cap is only 4x what GitHub sold for.
I am not feeling extremely concerned, since every developer has almost or exactly an identical copy of the repository in at least one location, and can push that entire repository to another location with two commands. This would probably be the most difficult genie to put back into a bottle.
The issue is with the issues, which are not cloned together with the repository (and pull requests, while there's the trick of using --mirror to also clone the pull requests, the comments aren't cloned).
There probably is, and if not, someone will have created one. But even then, "every developer has almost or exactly an identical copy of the repository in at least one location" is false for issues and pull requests; while nearly every developer can be assumed to have one or more "git clone" copies of the repository, few will have any copy of the issues and pull request comments.
I don't think GDPR comes into this. You could probably make the case that the issues you've posted yourself are personal/identifying information but github have no obligation as far as I can see to allow you to export issues and comments created by others as well.
I think the bigger question is that even if Microsoft is headed in a more trustworthy direction now, there's no knowing if they'll stay that course in a decade when there's a new CEO. Things shift.
I can definitely see why this would be a desirable acquisition on GitHub's side. They were bleeding money. I can't blame them.
> Microsoft isn't the same company as ten and twenty years ago.
It's not because you had one positive experience with one small part of MS that it means the whole company's culture has suddenly reversed to be philanthropic or something.
I've had more good experiences, I mentioned that one because it's such a stark contrast, not because it's unique.
Microsoft is hardly philanthtropic. I'd say it acts like a fairly enlightened bigco these days, that's very different from around y2k. My experiences are such that I did report that bug, I'd never have bothered doing that 20 years ago.
It's not one positive experience, but it's a sequence of them that shows that Microsoft is lead differently than it was in the past. Yes, this is one incident but personally I've witnessed many others that show that Microsoft isn't the same company it was 10 years ago.
"Microsoft isn't the same company as ten and twenty years ago."I notice this as well. But I am trying to figure out how Microsoft will manage GitHub. Is GitHub going to be a standalone company within Microsoft or a significant part of its enterprise division?
What folks here are not talking about is how Microsoft handles LinkedIn after acquisition.
Exactly. A big concern for enterprise customers (that often drove them to Atlassian over Github) was the fear that Github was "just a startup" and might disappear at any moment and the lack of integration with existing enterprise tools. If MS can put together a comprehensive platform here that doesn't cost an arm and a leg they could dominate this market.
The real story here is that nobody wants to host their own services and nobody wants to spend time/money even integrating various hosted solutions. The success of Atlassian and this acquisition confirms that people want to pay a flat monthly fee and get access to a bunch of highly integrated, quality services. The web continues to drive the creation of highly centralized platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google) and it doesn't look like IT development market is going to be any different.
That's a fair point in that I was unaware they had IPOed as many years back as they had (I had thought it more recent). It was partly a joke. But I have worked with people of a Fortune Xty company mindset that didn't consider vendors unless they were also Fortune Xty +/- Y companies, and yet some of them used Atlassian products despite being outside their usual Y margin, which I found fascinating.
Those enterprise customers are probably already using Visual Studio Online, which already gives you the best of both worlds - Git for source control, superb backlog and CI/CD features, and ADFS authentication.
IMO, for private repos, VSO is far superior to GitHub.
> We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open
> Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
Which one is it ? Those statements are just contradictory .
It's obvious that they will bring all their stuff into Github as it has become a central piece for MS Engineers and has become strategic for them , either to optimize engineers productivity or just to better sell their products and Azure/Visual Studio Services Package.
Meaning whether or not you like MS tools , you will get some "Open in Visual Studio" button , send in "Microsoft Team" buttons etc... and probably more stuff like this that most people didn't wanted in the first place.
Even if you interpret the second one as "new buttons to advertise Microsoft products", it doesn't damage a developer-first stance or independent operation.
Moreover, GitHub has already partnered with dozens of other companies for its Education program for instance [0]. This already compromises independent operation, and displays ads to thousands of students, "whether or not they like these tools" (your words).
MS will integrate Github with MS Ecosystem ( Azure , .NET , VSTS etc.. ) as described in their slides.
From this point there is two possibility
A - They open every single new API they use as well as UI/UX API so other providers can integrate themself to Github
B - They don't open (or partially) those new API and Azure/MS Ecosystem will be the de facto providers for every single stuff that is possible in github. You will end up with a "Open in [Insert Microsoft Products]" buttons and you won't be able to change that , third party providers won't be able to appear here as well. Github would have never done in the first place because they were independant , now every single stuff they do will have to be linked one way or another to MS.
I'm excited by this. I feel trapped between Google who will give everything away in exchange for spying on me, and Apple who will respect my privacy but shake me upside down with the most ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics. I'm glad someone as powerful as Microsoft can play the underdog role and provide a viable third alternative.
Windows laptops that run Linux well enough for development. VS Code. I now develop on my PC at home using the same workflows that I use on my fancy pants work MacBook.
I have a lot of faith in this acquisition. My software team is growing fast and we have so many little problems that feel like they should be solved at the GitHub layer but the solutions aren't there. Microsoft will fix that.
>I feel trapped between Google who will give everything away in exchange for spying on me, and Apple who will respect my privacy but shake me upside down with the most ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics. I'm glad someone as powerful as Microsoft can play the underdog role and provide a viable third alternative.
A third alternative of spying on you while also engaging in ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics? Microsoft is the worst of both worlds.
Microsoft let's you pay for Windows 10 and will still present you advertisements in the start menu. You also need to explicitly opt-out of telemetry in all their open-source software. So it's the worst of both worlds.
We can assume Microsoft's motivation is money, they have a long history of selling professional solutions to development teams, I'm a developer with a team on GitHub in need of solutions, and I have money. It's Microsoft's to lose.
I think you're mistaking your blind hate for my blind hype
> I think you're mistaking your blind hate for my blind hype
I don't hate microsoft, and I've shown no hate in my comment. I'm pointing out that you can't expect all your problems to be solved because of an ownership change. Caution and skepticism will serve you better than wishful thinking and hype.
You say you've shown no hate yet you reply to my support of this acquisition with a comment that quickly dismisses my enthusiasm as misplaced hype.
Now you provide advice when I didn't ask you for any. I don't know you. You don't know me and you certainly don't know what will "serve me better" as readily as I don't know that Microsoft will fix all my problems.
If you've found stability in your world view then good for you, it takes all kinds. Skeptics and optimists and more. Spend less time putting others down and more time melting in the pot.
> I have a lot of faith in this acquisition. My software team is growing fast and we have so many little problems that feel like they should be solved at the GitHub layer but the solutions aren't there. Microsoft will fix that.
I'm pretty strongly opposed to the petty naysayers and partisan Microsoft bashing, and I'm definitely firmly embedded in the Microsoft camp from a toolset perspective, but I'm very, very far away from holding the belief that Microsoft will for sure fix the bunch of little things that bother you. On the contrary, despite the near complete 180 in culture under Nadella, lack of attention to fine details, making things "just work", the "little things" in technology.....this is where Microsoft is still just......terrible.
This isn't to say everything is terrible, several teams actually have seemed to change in this respect. Power BI would be a fine example. But many, many more have changed very little, if at all. Skype, MS Office, SQL Server Management Studio (and the T-SQL language), and many others are either horrendously bad, or depressingly so much worse than they could be with some serious, well-intentioned and honest effort.
A lot of this could perhaps be excused by much of this being legacy code, but then you see brand new products, like the abomination that is Microsoft Teams, or consider that 90% the problems with Skype could be fixed with a rewrite of the UI. I continue to believe that much of the shortcomings wouldn't in fact be particularly hard or expensive to fix, and I think the investment would pay off handsomely for Microsoft in the long run. But I see no good reason to believe that there is any intention to fix any of it. I don't know if it's a blind spot in Nadella's vision, or some fundamental underlying principle (maybe it's not considered "strategic", which is probably technically correct), but I think I'm at the point where I've lost hope any of it will change.
What's my point? Microsoft, despite it's dramatic turnaround from a cultural perspective, still has plenty of flaws, with no good excuse. For user's sake, let's hope that these flaws aren't in areas that the future success of Github will rely upon.
No company sweats the details. It's basically a massive money sink for no perceivable upside.
People used to think that Apple did, and now there's a post every four weeks about how bad Apple's QA is because there's a bug if you post an obscure character in a language used by < 1% of the world's population.
Google's customer support is famously useless, and Microsoft has a ton of bugs.
At some point someone will find a mythical company which cares about the little things that bother us, but that will probably happen shortly after the AI singularity shows up.
Interesting. Do they do it to precisely the same level? As in, all software organizations, and all individual pieces of software, have the same levels of bugs and usability?
If that's the case, would it also be safe to presume that compared to Github remaining independent, under Microsoft they will (or will not, as the case may be) release the same new features, on the same timeline, with the same number of bugs, etc?
Can you give any examples of these "little problems" ? I'm sure there are many people on here that would like to solve them, if they only knew what your problems are !
> Once the acquisition closes later this year, GitHub will be led by CEO Nat Friedman, an open source veteran and founder of Xamarin, who will continue to report to Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie; GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath will be a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting to Scott.
This was one of the main outcomes I was hoping for in the last HN thread on this acquisition. GitHub get the strong CEO they were hoping for, and one with solid credentials with interacting with the development community.
More tech consolidation under Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple flat out sucks. It doesn't empower developers in the slightest to have a small number of giant companies own everything.
Yet they have numerous defenders on this site, all the more peculiar considering those companies' collusion to avoid paying market rates to developers. The preference to be a sharecropper on their plantations is evidently strong, for no very clear reason.
And let us not forget the EU's efforts to support incumbents and deter new entrants, with their complex, vague and punitive regulations. These also receive much approval here; perhaps a fruitful field for study by some enterprising psychologists!
If you want to develop software for Microsoft’s Linux distro/kernel (Azure Sphere for IoT), you must use Windows 10 + Visual Studio, https://seeedstudio.com/productDetail/3052
> To use MT3620 Dev Board for Azure Sphere, you’ll need a Windows 10 PC with the latest Windows Updates, along with the Visual Studio Tools for Azure Sphere (which will be available for download from Microsoft). These tools will include application templates, development tools and the Azure Sphere software development kit (SDK). Terms: This development board can be only used for prototyping, it cannot be built into a product for commercial distribution. It cannot be re-sold or used as part of a production environment.
Dear Microsoft, since IoT is one of the “next big things”, it would be nice to use Microsoft Linux ARM kernel with open hardware (no terms of service for hardware resale) and open software (e.g. use open-source Linux dev tools with the Azure SDK).
Microsoft has been setting a very (almost unthinkably) different course since Ballmer departed. Bash on Windows, Visual Studio Code, as well as other seemingly genuine commitments to open source. It's wonderful that competitors like GitLab exist, and today is probably a great day for them, but I'm willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on this one - we won't be moving.
I wonder what people would have thought if Github had just disappeared instead of selling to Microsoft? I mean I understand some concern, but this can really only be a good thing for Github in the long run. It isn't like Microsoft was producing a competitor and just bought them to kill them. Honestly, I like this better than Amazon or Google buying them.
The reason this happened is to get a payday for the investors. I'm happy they invested, but when you look at GitHub it is a utility, not a commercial enterprise and should be treated like public transport rather than like an oil company.
It's clear and clever that Microsoft changed your vision about open source to make more money. It's ok as the society that we live are moved this way and its good for us.
The only thing that scares me its the power of those all big companies to buy all other companies. We are tending to have a monopoly and strict visions about computers and all the philosophies involved in it.
They do seem to be trying to reassure people that they're not gonna mess this up:
> And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.
> [...]
> Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.
> [...]
> Most importantly, we recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform.
Of course they are, have you read all the HN posts on the subject? People literally called them "fundamentally reprehensible."
It's not too much to say that they more or less only have upside here - if they can more or less keep their hands off GitHub's community and mindshare while expanding its capabilities and services, it'll be one more notch in their belt of "See? We're not Gates or Ballmer."
The phrase is still valid, but it is unclear that it applies to the current company. Companies do not have minds and are not people. They do have inertia, but if you change enough of the people then it's fundamentally a different company. MS is certainly different than it was 20 or 10 years ago.
MS was fined by EU for monopoly practices in 2008 and 2013. It is currently in a case against Spain when it made it harder to dual boot with Windows 8's UEFI systems.
The year is 2018 and Windows still ships with a single navigator, only supports NTFS and does not know that dual-boot is even a possibility.
Yes, they got way better at PR. They could get away with bad PR before when they were leader, but now that they have serious competition from everywhere, they are trying to win people away again.
If they meant "open source" I have to imagine they would have said so. "Remain" is the key word there. Github is already an open platform with an API and plugin system. Github is not already open source, so it can't remain so.
More generally, cloud is the key. MS is using O365 as a lead-in to Azure and Google is using G Suite the same way. GitLab currently has built-in support to pump your CI pipeline to Google Cloud and comes with some hosting credits. That would be the obvious next step for MS. Introduce one-click deployment to Azure Container Service. I can also see VS Code in the browser for your GitHub projects, but that would be brand halo, not a money maker.
Not affiliated with the team, but I feel compelled to plug https://gitea.io/en-US/ here ... such a lean alternative to GitLab, I was really happy to find it. Runs just fine for a couple of dozen users on a rather whimpy virtual server.
People keep mentioning how "Microsoft changed" due to VS Code, the Linux subsystem, .NET Core.
I say that they are the same company, only with different cash cows.
Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
"But Mom, some of the other companies are doing it too", well yeah, but some of us don't have double standards, in spite of what you'd think and that doesn't absolve them of anything ;-)
Brilliant marketing campaign though. They needed it I guess, but it's getting obnoxious.
---
That said I'm glad that after the acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility.
Nobody here is claiming proprietary code is inherently bad (some people definitely do, but not in this thread), they're just saying it makes a poor example of Microsoft embracing open source.
You're asking why releasing an open source debugger has anything to do with embracing open source because there are closed source companies that are also making a debugger?
> You're asking why releasing an open source debugger has anything to do with embracing open source
I don't even understand what that means. It was never Open Source, it was part of the IDE(s). Microsoft released an update package for their IDE(s) on NuGet which JetBrains used before their native debugger was ready.
If Microsoft are to be shamed for keeping their IDE's debugger closed source then JetBrains should be equally shamed, both have closed source proprietary IDEs.
> how is embracing a closed source for-profit company anything to do with embracing Open Source?
Truly embracing open-source with .NET core would mean that, yes, even a proprietary product could make use of it. A debugger is extremely core to having a language being open-source and artificially limiting it to your own products is the exact opposite of 'embrace'
Also, JetBrains does have an open-source debugger in their community versions, but this is not what the debate is about.
By that token Richard Stalman doesn't embrace open source. The Linux kernel isn't open source. Anything that is GPL is not open source, because you can't make proprietary code from GPL code.
GPL spells this out and gives you the source, if requested. It does not make any restrictions as to on what platform you can use it or anything like that. Microsoft released .NET Core under a permissive license which does allow integration with proprietary code and then specifically limited use of the debugger to their own products. Even other open-source projects, beside VS Code, cannot use the debugger. That is everything that the GPL is not.
This is like if Stallman released Emacs under the GPL, but kept the Elisp interpreter proprietary.
My problem is; if you're going to pretend to embrace open-source and then limit a core component this arbitrarily, you're not embracing open-source, you're still the old org afraid of competition.
My understanding is that the debugger is an adapted version of the closed source Visual Studio debugger. Visual Studio isn't open source, and is a paid for product.
It takes time to break things out from inside a larger closed source project...
Yep, I really dont understand why there are Microsoft fans.
Like I understand if you bought an Xbox, but I dont understand if you are a programmer.
Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.
As a developer Microsoft has treated my far better than any other corporation pushing an agenda. Amazon seems kind of apathetic towards any one developer or group, Google and Apple can be down-right hostile in their policies or support. Microsoft has by far hosted the most events that I have access to, ranging from global developer conferences to user-group meetings.Their tooling and developer support has always been forefront in their strategy as well.
So it's a little disingenuous to say only technology consumers should have positive feelings for Microsoft. Plus, making money & helping programmers are not mutually exclusive; Coupled with their business strategies (good and bad) this has always been MS's strategy to grow and profit from their markets.
As a former windows phone user and .NET developer who is currently a mobile developer, Microsoft definitely treated mobile developers worse than any other company.
They killed what small progress they’d made on their ecosystem 2 times, simply because they got bored and decided they didn’t like the technology stack they’d previously mandated and supported. They deserved to get buried in that space.
Meanwhile Apple have kept what is essentially the same technology stack for the past decade. Sure there’s been some pain, but almost all of it had some purpose that moved the development of apps forward.
As someone who also developed on windows phone I really disagree with this portrayal. Microsoft did not change the stack on account of "getting bored" with the tech.
Looking back on it, they took on an extremely difficult problem having a completely new marketplace and platform against competitors with tremendous amount of pre-existing traction.
There were clearly some pivots towards universal windows compatibility, and possibility of android compatibility as well. Nobody argues there's a ton of tactical failures and the net result was a loss, but I wouldnt conflate the mobile endeavor with something half-baked nor disregard to developers
None of what you said actually justifies this to a developer. Microsoft may claim "developers, developers, developers" but when it came to mobile, they screwed the platform not once but twice.
Trust has two main dimensions in my view, compassion and competence. Microsoft was not competent enough to have a surviving platform in the face of iOS or Android... even though they had roughly a 8 year lead.
I appreciate that Aws is apathetic a bit. The other way to put it would be unintereste or removed or unbiased. They aren’t that helpful, fine. That’s what we get paid the big bucks for. I’ve worjed in the Msft ecosystem...never again, no thanks.
I was one of them, and Microsoft treated me very well.
Windows Phone was an amazing platform. I’ve also developed for iOS a lot. Visual studio + expression blend was way ahead of apple’s xCode. Every single piece was much better: language, libraries, compiler, debugger, emulator, UI designer.
The platform is now discontinued so I no longer develop for WP. Meanwhile, most of the skills I’ve obtained working on WP7-8 apps apply to other XAML-based platforms, i.e. WPF, WinRT, and UWP. Fortunately for me, Windows is not going from desktops any time soon.
> Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
Just want to point out that Github was also a "for-profit" company.
I was never terribly fond of GitHub either. I disliked how they somehow became synonymous with open source, and I dislike how people have focused on GitHub rather than software freedom. I also wasn't a fan when they decided to step into politics.
I think self-hosting is a better choice for almost any organisation. Remember, 'the cloud' just means 'someone else's computer.'
The problem with self-hosting is a lack of visibility. Like Sourceforge before them, you basically need to host your project there for anyone else to notice it.
Of course you don't need to host it all there. Just mirror enough that it gets you the "visibility", while keeping everything else on your own servers.
Then again, there's inertia. And inertia always wins.
The interesting bit is that is about to get tested out with GitHub. Yes, of course, Skype target audience was network locked and not that savvy, but, the open source community does seem a tad bit different breed.
That doesn't make sense. If they buy the competitor, why would they tank the business which is now their own instead of gaining the combined revenue and market share?
"Buy and trash competitor" isn't a real strategy. When an acquisition fails, it's usually poor management or vision, or just a lack of synergy in the first place, not a purposeful tanking.
There are two ways you create value for your employer:
1) creating value for their customers
2) maintaining the moat that prevents other people from creating value for their customers
The former is constructive, the latter is destructive. They both contribute revenue.
I haven’t done a full scale analysis of Microsoft, but the argument I would entertain is that Microsoft primarily sells tools for companies and individuals to built moats around themselves.
#2 doesn't work unless you can also provide that value, so it is still constructive. You cant keep customers from using something if you have no such offering yourself to compete with.
The original poster claimed it was "destructive" which doesn't logically sound like a way to build a lot of value, especially to be one of the top 10 companies on the planet, at the very least without clarity on what they are supposedly destroying. From the votes and other comments, I'm clearly not alone in wondering. You had your chance to enlighten us but went with juvenile retorts instead, ultimately only really proving that you don't know either. Thanks for playing I guess.
Exactly. It seems people around here are brainwashed. They are incapable of thinking objectively. You are so naive if you think Apple or Google or Facebook are not for profit!
Look at how much data Google has on every single one of us.
MSFT is going through a cultural change right now. It was the case for Google, to make money the had to be an advocate of open source. They didn't do that because they are good-hearted or anything else. It is just like geopolitics. Hit your opponent from the weakest point. And Microsoft weak point was open source at that time.
But the point is neither MSFT, Apple, Google or Facebook does not care about developers or customers. They want to make money. This is nature of corporations. Instead of nagging and being short-sighted we should embrace open source collaboration by MSFT and should hit them when they don't respect customers.
The expression "for profit" is indeed inappropriate.
However, with the understanding of what the poster meant, it does make sense. We're talking about the company whose racket produces 10$ avg for each Android phone sold.
I'm talking especially about those FAT patents, which are against the spirit of patenting (independently of being in favour or against patents).
I understand that big companies are big and internally conflicting, however, I see a radical conflict of interest between their newfounded open source responsibility and their ruthless business attitude.
>Look at how much data Google has on every single one of us.
What about the data Microsoft has on you? Their Windows 10 OS is basically a data funnel right to their servers. They operate a tracking based search engine that also builds profiles on people. And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.
RHAT is about making money too. They do a good job of it.
Unlike Microsoft, however, they can't seem to make GUIs where the font metrics are right (eg. can you read the text properly or does the text overlap or end up being too big or too small for the space?) or scrollbars.
Linux is a winner for server apps but on the desktop it seems to get worse over time, not better.
>Linux is a winner for server apps but on the desktop it seems to get worse over time, not better.
No, not really. The problem is too many people (like you maybe) associate "Linux desktop" with "Gnome (3)". That's false; there's a bunch of different DEs for Linux. Just look at Xfce; it isn't getting worse. KDE seems to be getting no worse too.
I do not associate it with Gnome3 but I have to ask (as I am not longer a desktop Linux user), do they still rewrite every system utility every couple of releases? Back when Fedora Core was a thing, they rewrote the GUI utilities every couple of releases, without actually improving them from what I could tell. And despite installing a binary distribution, they insisted on writing these in Python with bindings to the in-fashion GUI library (typically GTK). This meant the utilities were dog slow and generally very poor. Why not write a compiled binary? Didn't make sense to me.
I don't know, because I never used Gnome much, and have avoided Gnome3 like the plague. Fedora is very much a Gnome-centric distro, so of course it's going to be like what you say.
At home, I use KDE, so of course they're not going to have system utilities binding to GTK. KDE is Qt-centric, so most stuff there is most likely in Qt-flavored C++. Xfce is GTK, but it's known to be fast (I use it at work and it's quick), so I seriously doubt it has system utilities in Python.
Honestly, I think all your complaints are really about Gnome3.
No, they were aimed at the system utilities eg. system-* that present UIs. They weren't tied to a DE (but did use a specific windowing toolkit like GTK+); I am not talking about the control center or Kontrol system - I am talking about the system-* UI packages which were all Python written, with bindings to GTK+ and ran horribly.
> but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.
What a strange criticism. Of course Microsoft is a for-profit company and they're doing this to make more profit - no one is of the delusion of otherwise. They didn't spend $8b out of the goodness of their heart.
However, one way you make money is to do and make things people like. Here's hoping Microsoft will recognise the value Github can provide and they do right by it. I'm cautiously optimistic.
I think many people forget that the word free in free software means free as in free speech, and not free as in free beer. There's no issue with a for profit company selling free software so long as they adhere to the license. It's not quite the case here, but I think too many developers forget that making money is why people start business and why people work.
That doesn't make them an ethical company. Oracle makes a pretty good database. Google makes a good search engine. All of those companies have serious ethical issues and I would not want any of them as the steward of the largest body of open source code on the planet.
A federated or independent solution is the only way to go for infrastructure like this.
Their developer tools are pretty good for their own platform (but JetBrains actually makes great cross platform tools, some of them are proper free and open source, VSCode is playing catch up). Their C++ stdlib implementation was sucking balls for decades. Their (the dev tools') scriptability was horrible. PowerShell is nice, but it came too late, and it was too server focused.
C# is okay, MS has great teams and people, but they are still very much run by the bean counters.
MSVC's stdlib is still a headache, just see the /std flag[1] which only appeared in msvc2017: you can either have C++14 with some C++17 features, or C++ "latest" which means 17 and missing features.
EDIT: just noticed the article says it was also added to 2013, but my 2015 doesn't support it so idk.
I can conceive PowerShell being good as a scripting language, but as a day to day terminal? That would my hell. And the fact that they are forcing so much on it in win10 doesn't help.
They do produce some great things sometimes, I agree, it just doesn't average out as positive IMO.
As with every other big corporation, including Apple, Google etc. the problem isn't making money, which is perfectly legit and fine, the problem is the "western" economy system which requires, or even encourages, any rogue behavior aimed at maximizing profits at any cost.
A company expecting returns for its investment is a thing, but one who buys startups only to destroy them to stop the development of competing products, or engage in legal battles to eliminate competition, is a totally different thing.
Most of us criticize the latter, not the former. Unfortunately there's no legal way to prevent a corporation to become a creature turning anything including its integrity into profits, because being an ass in this context brings money and money buys favorable laws.
Not "always." I started working with Microsoft dev tools in the late 80's and early 90's after Borland's sun began to set (in no small part because MS poached a lot of their best people). There was a time when MS was the developer's best friend, and tools like the early versions of MSDN gave unprecedented access to information that previously had been very hard to get (raise your hand if you ever paid over $100USD for a manual from IBM). Of course back then the FOSS community did not exist, and the alternatives were old line players like IBM, Digital and Sun. Things are different now. My major concern is not that the company is somehow still evil in a Ballmer-esque way, but rather that their focus on enterprise customers will inevitably lead to changes in the core Github offering. We'll see.
I dislike Microsoft a lot. But Apple, just as much. People will take a dump on Microsoft while in the same breath fawn over Apple for identical behaviour.
They're all as bad as each other. Yep. Google included.
> Yep, I really dont understand why there are Microsoft fans.
I definitely agree. Anything Microsoft-related, or even Google-related, is a no from me. Just from a product standpoint, most of there products inherently aren’t that great. And you get that feeling when using their products, a feeling of “oh, this must be a Microsoft product because it feels very corporate.” Plus, there approach to design is subpar — it’s like there’s people out there that actually like Google’s Material Design?
> Like I understand if you bought an Xbox
I have an Xbox, and I just noticed advertisements on the dashboard that are non-gaming related. I also think I saw this when using a friend’s Windows-computer, they have advertisements within their operating system. It’s just bad.
TypeScript and Visual Studio Code are both really nicely done open source projects. There is a fairly significant group of .NET developers out there, and that's largely open source today.
Sure, Microsoft is ultimately out to make money, but they're doing a fair bit to "help programmers" and only making money from those efforts indirectly.
Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos? Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have. It starts to go downhill? Just push your repo to another Git host. Yes, you'll need to figure out how to port some of your workflows, but it won't be an insurmountable pain.
That's why the "extend" phase is there in the embrace/extend/extinguish strategy - to make it an insurmountable pain to migrate elsewhere, after first having lured the users in with the "embrace" phase. Letting it play out is just what they need to move from phase 1 to phase 2.
But "extend" hasn't happened yet. There's no need to cry foul until it does, because until it does there's no evidence of anything nefarious going on. "Embrace" on its own is perfectly normal and acceptable behavior.
Vendor lock-in is an important concern regardless of who owns the platform you're being locked into.
The idea is that stuff like issues and PR comments (the added value a social coding site like GitHub provides) are the extend around pure git source management.
So what do you call TypeScript !? They now bought the site where 99% of all free NodeJS packages are hosted. A few years ago NodeJS didn't even work properly on Windows, and was growing at exponential rate, taking market share from the Microsoft ecosystem. So what happened in the last few years ? Many developers now code JavaScript/NodeJS using TypeScript on VsCode. And their code is hosted on Github.
So you're saying anytime a new technology gets embraced by anyone it's time to jump ship? That's ridiculous. Should we be abandoning email because Outlook exists?
Edit: Actually, I don't think the idea of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" even applies to buying out companies. The idea behind that phrase applies to technologies, not companies. You can't "extend" GitHub with proprietary tech, it was never an open source technology in the first place.
If Microsoft starts extending git with new proprietary features that only work with GitHub, _then_ it may be time to start being concerned. As of now though, I don't see how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" applies to this situation in the slightest.
GitHub is to git as Outlook is to e-mail and as Internet Explorer is to the web.
As for how EEE applies to this situation: The situation is consistent with an EEE strategy currently being in the "embrace" phase. It's also consistent with a "embrace, be nice, create win-win outcomes" strategy, but that is not usually Microsoft's modus operandi.
Unless they disable the APIs migrating to another platform would take a couple of days to hack something together. Disabling those APIs would also break a load of tools people already use for management so they would be shooting themselves in the foot.
GP gave you a very good reason why this is different than historical Microsoft EEE[0]:
> Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have
There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced; it uses git at its core. Comments, issues, and wikis are convenient, but relatively simple to implement.
The main value in Github is the de facto community status it has, which it earned by being an open community and good steward of open source projects. The worst MS could do here is shoot themselves in the foot and ruin that value (which they just purchased for 7.5B) by driving developers to other platforms (who will make it all too easy to switch).
I think the M&A teams at MS must have seen this possiblity and have a different plan in mind for Github. Think dead simple (one-click) Azure deployments and integrations. And if you want (or need) that functionality for a different cloud provider, you'll just have to build it yourself on a different site.
> There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced.
Integration and workflow. Thanks to the various gubbins available in the marketplace[0], CI/CD goodies, hooks into communication and project management tools and so on, for a lot of people migrating away from Github would mean losing access to enough little convenience things that actually it's not feasible for a large organisation with not great process change management techniques.
They can't really "kill" it as in destroy it, but the biggest contributors to that project were all GitHub staff. MS will most definitely redirect any staff efforts to VSCode instead.
Yea, but if you maintain that mentality, that affects your thoughts, affects behavior, affects 'crowd' behavior generally (all those agree), is perceived as such from those you predict about, get it? Affects all those who disagree too.
2 sides, same coin. You assume chaos, they see you assume that. They shape their narrative to fit their perspective with this data in mind. That rationalizes the behavioral pattern from their end, which continues the cycle.
Not saying I know any better solution, just that it's annoying as fuck to actually change when everyone keeps assuming you won't, and treats you as such. Chaos is probably going to happen even if there's a general mutual trust that springs forth. Can't control chaos.
When you see a fox entering a chicken coop would you also say the same? Microsoft will most likely gut GitHub, not as badly as Oracle would have done it but they will.
This said, Free Software Devs should never have trusted GitHub in the first place.
How is it spying when they present you with a full screen detailing data collection with the option to turn it off, and have several blog posts providing details.
> Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
It's not much of an excuse, but all tech companies do this.
> Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
Didn't they give Windows Mobile one hell of a run? Like they tried for a decade and finally admitted defeat? And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.
You actually can’t turn it off, and they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected. You need an enterprise version to disable as much as they will let you, and even then, they still force quite a bit of collection.
"This article describes all types of diagnostic data collected by Windows at the Full level (inclusive of data collected at Basic), with comprehensive examples of data we collect per each type" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/windo...
Below “Basic” is the “Security” level, which only enterprise can set. It’s a subset of Basic, but excluded from the disclosure. They refuse to say what that sends.
>> they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected
Seems like refusing to disclose what is collected would run afoul of GDPR. The law requires that "categories of personal data" be disclosed, and also that Microsoft's European customers have a right to a copy of their personal data. Are you claiming that Microsoft is not or does not intend to comply with GDPR? Or perhaps there is some other qualification implied; such as this only applies to non-European customers? If so what is your basis?
>> And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.
Likewise. I know they neglected the Linux client (which I used to use) for years and then replaced it with some new browser based thing. This 'ruined Skype' claim has been made several times with each Microsoft buys GitHub story. What exactly do people have in mind when they claim Skype was ruined?
The new UI is absolutely counterintuitive and badly designed. The Linux version is now based on Electron and requires a ridiculous 400MB of RAM just for the login screen. It subjects the CPU to ridiculously high loads, ca. 10 times higher than before when idling (easily saturating one core periodically). It starts to jerk and studder when the chatlog reaches any realistic length, making it unusable with more than 200 to 500 messages in the visible history. The Windows 10 client, which seems mostly identical, cannot get audio from any of my microphones.
> The Windows 10 client, which seems mostly identical, cannot get audio from any of my microphones.
I see. By all accounts the Electron based client is garbage. I use the 'classic' Skype client; a.k.a. Skype 7. It isn't based on Electron and works great for me with two different mics. So I guess I've missed out on all the fun with the new client.
Telemetry and analytics is a spyware. Let me give you an example. Let's say that Windows collects information on which applications were run and how much time they were used. Now let's say there is a competitor to Microsoft that uses Windows with telemetry option.
Even if the data is anonymous, Microsoft can filter it by range of competitor's IP addresses. Then by stuyding the list of used applications they can learn: how many employees the company has, how many of them use IDE (i.e. are developers), how many use Excel (marketing people), how many use social networks and chats (managers), how many man-hours they spend on development, how many DBAs are there, whether anyone works overnight or on weekends, when they have vacations etc. Now tell me it is not a spyware.
And by the way Google has similar powers because they have advertisement and analytics scripts installed on most websites, so they can spy on their competitors too.
UPD: looked through an article [1] and understood that I underestimated Microsoft. They even collect user account identifiers and hardware details. Microsoft knows about your computers more than your sysadmin.
You do realize that by posting that link, you contradicted yourself? How many Microsoft be spying on you if they write articles detailing what data is collected?
If you don't like data collection, then don't use Windows 10. Plenty of Microsoft tools work on macOS and Linux. But don't accuse them of spying on the user when they have made efforts to be transparent about it.
"Data collection" is implemeted not only in Windows 10, but also is backported up to Windows 7. So basically it is now in every supported and regularly updated Windows installation.
Also I remember that detailed articles about "data collection" appeared only after it was shipped and caused some negative reaction. While publishing an article is a good idea, it is unlikely that everyone will read it. A better idea would be to display a popup for Windows users saying something like "Hi there! We are going to look what programs you are running and what else do you do at your computer to improve your experience. Hope you are fine with that.".
Technically it might be not a spyware, but if the user doesn't realize that their actions are being tracked, it still would look like a spyware to them. Or should we better call it a "trojan" software? A definition from Wikipedia says "In computing, a Trojan horse, or Trojan, is any malicious computer program which misleads users of its true intent." and Windows telemetry program matches that definition.
For example, in an article about "basic" telemetry [1] they mention that full command line of an application can be recorded, potentially including any private data and passwords.
What you said makes no sense. Talking about doing something is the same as not doing something?!
There's a reason the GDPR requires explicit opt-in: companies are expert at making their spyware look harmless and know that most people won't bother to change the defaults or won't understand what's happening.
No, what I was disputing was the claim that what Windows 10 collects is spyware when Microsoft makes it a point to ask you what data you want to share (if any) and then has several posts written describing in detail what they collect and how to turn it off. Spying implies the company is doing it in secret, and yet here we are talking about and referencing public documents that describe it. That is not "spying".
I'm really not sure here but I was under the impression that they had started doing the full screen detailing data collection thing after they had gotten caught doing it without it?
They made it clearer and easier to review and change, but data collection was always toggle-able in Windows 10. A lot of people just hit "Express Setup" and then were surprised when the defaults were full collection.
The Privacy Panel in the new Settings applet for example has always existed.
It was not toggle-able. You could only opt out of an ill-defined subset of an ill defined set of collected data, including, but not limited to all user inputs performed on that system. You would know as much if you had read the material published by MS on this. Only with the recent update do they offer a tool with which to inspect at least part of the actual data sent to MS. There is however no proof that the data shown in that tool is complete (even though I believe that they truely intend to show everything - despite their traditionally pushy methods, they are not Facebook).
> Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Have they not killed Nokia or ruined Skype?
I don't think one can say they killed Nokia. Nokia's phone business was basically doomed after Android gained traction, and Microsoft just helped the company to pivot by overpaying for that part of the business, while leaving Nokia with everything that actually was making money.
They killed Nokia twice! First by forcing them to use Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone, or whatever it was called) when it was clear to all they needed to go with Android, and then by actually buying it and killing it when even Microsoft couldn't refuse Windows Mobile was going nowhere.
> First by forcing them to use Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone, or whatever it was called) when it was clear to all they needed to go with Android
There's no way that Microsoft bought Nokia to concentrate on making that tiny hardware subdivision profitable (MSFT's market cap is $700B+ and they bought Nokia for $7.6B). They wanted a hardware platform to promote Windows Phone. For Microsoft, the dying entity in need of a Hail Mary was Windows Phone, not Nokia.
Nokia basically held onto Symbian for a bit too long. They had a massive chance with Meego; they weakened it slightly pre-Microsoft due to mismanagement, but killing it in favour of Windows Phone was the actual Nokia's death sentence.
Nokia had Maemo/Meego which wasn't on par with Android at that time wrt the software ecosystem, but with some investment in development could have killed it pretty easily: thanks to native code a device could offer the same performance using slower CPUs and less RAM, or be a lot snappier with the same hardware. Given due time, manufacturers and users would have noticed. As probably did Microsoft. You can have a full desktop Linux running in 1GB of RAM, full HD screen etc. but most Android users throw away old cellphones because 1 or even 2 GB RAM aren't enough anymore thanks to Android Java dependency. Maemo/Meego would have eliminated that problem completely.
> with some investment in development could have killed it pretty easily: thanks to native code a device could offer the same performance using slower CPUs and less RAM, or be a lot snappier with the same hardware. Given due time, manufacturers and users would have noticed.
Windows Phone was native and extremely performant on even low end hardware. Microsoft dumped millions into development and couldn’t get traction. No way Maemo was going to displace Android.
Manufacturers literally do not care about anything except selling devices and are uninterested in performance except as it relates to bigger numbers that they can advertise with. Users consistently chose Android over Windows Phone demonstrating that their priorities did not align with picking the phone that would still be snappy in two years.
Nokia’s phone business was doomed. Even if they’d pivoted to Android devices they’d probably have still failed because that’s such a tough market with so much competition willing to sell phones with no margin.
I really liked the Maemo and Meego phones that got released, but your scenario would not have happened. Nokia's DNA was not in software development, and they couldn't really compete with Google on that.
Furthermore, Nokia wouldn't have shared a successful OS with others like Google did if they had one. That meant all other manufacturers were going to stay with Android, and I greatly doubt that they would've succeeded in building the whole ecosystem alone like Apple did.
> Nokia wouldn't have shared a successful OS with others like Google did if they had one
But that was exactly the plan. When they cooperated with Intel to build Meego, the resulting OS was available to all other handset manufacturers and there were test suites in the work for vendors to be able to claim Meego compat, just as with Android.
The Meego OS was actually quite solid and very nice to develop for. Its major problem was the unwillingness of most app developers to support additional platforms besides Android and the Iphones. Just as with Windows Phone.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Nokia's plan to make Meego open-source but keep their own UI layer closed? I may be misremembering things as it was a while ago, but there was some catch to keep Nokia the main player.
As for the adoption among developers, it never had a wide enough release to even start with that. N9 was available in limited countries only, and after Nokia's WP announcement.
Skype is pretty awful for calling phones. The user interface has become a mess and is difficult to use. They are constantly making it more difficult to call phone.
You absolutely can't be serious. The new Skype is an unrelenting abomination... just look on ANY community site and you will see the utter livid rage for "new skype". It's truly horrible in every way, it removed every setting and feature that was good, the UI/UX is one of the worst things ever. https://www.reddit.com/r/skype/search?q=new+skype&restrict_s...
I think this was a better outcome for Nokia. They didn't make their own components like Samsung does, so they'd probably now be in a position similar to HTC and Sony. They would have faced years of painful, expensive downsizing instead of a (retrospectively) good payout that assumed the liabilities too.
Android was really hated by middlemanagers at nokia. Android was eating Nokia's lunch in mid-end phones, and managers lost their sales bonuses. When Nokia went to talk to Google and Microsoft, Google gave the "here's the deal everyone gets" and Microsoft "we'll do anything for you".
Finally Nokia managers were full of hubris, and believed Nokias was still the center of mobile, and so important it to change the course of industry by Adopting Windows Phone.
>When Nokia went to talk to Google and Microsoft, Google gave the "here's the deal everyone gets" and Microsoft "we'll do anything for you".
This is a well regurgitated lie that I see posted often. If you would like the truth about what really happened I suggest you read Operation Elop.
According to a source present, Google seemed to really want Nokia to join the Android world. The company assured that Android can be customized more than Nokia understood, especially compared with Windows Phone. Even if Google was criticized continuously for having Samsung, HTC and Sony Android phones differ from each other too much, Nokia would be given leeway to create its own user experience. Google saw that Nokia differentiated from these competitors in that it had a global area of operation. Nokia would be able to create better local services and user experiences for network providers and customers, one person present remembers being discussed. The Nokians also noticed that they had been living partially with misinformation. Nokia could continue with Android with its own maps side-by-side with Google’s maps. The same applied with the app store. Nokia’s music service as well as ovi.com could continue, as long as the phone had Google Play.
The discussions continued at a fast pace after the first visit. Google seemed to really want Nokia.
Some constraints were set by the Open Handset Alliance behind Android, OHA. Unlike Windows Phone, Android is not controlled by one company, rather by an alliance of 84 companies which is led by Google, where the members are able to use Android in an equal manner. Google was in a difficult position. By giving Nokia special privileges, it risked its relationship with other manufacturers. The reactions would be difficult to predict. Creativity was needed.
As the negotiations proceeded, a solution was found. Google offered Nokia, among other things, plenty of say in choosing the direction of Android development. By directing Android development to align with its own competitive goals, Nokia would gain some advantage, even if the changes would be available for everyone at the same time. Now Nokia was interested. Android and Nokia had an area where their interests converged in a brilliant way: Developing countries. If Android could be made to work on cheap hardware, Nokia would be best at getting in through in developing markets. The arrangement was enticing. Google would secure the position it was dreaming of in smartphones, and Nokia would become part of virgin Android markets. The precise details remained hidden, but Nokia was able to learn that Google worked Android into clearly cheaper models than Windows Phone.
Another flexible point of Android was in its predictability. Nokia wanted to publicize the new software features earlier than when the phones go into sales. The reason was brutal: Nokia was more solid than its Korean competitor and needed more time to build a phone. If the information about the new Android features was available earlier, Nokia would have enough time to get them in the first wave, like the others. Google was willing. It promised to make the publicizing of its plans earlier and to release the source code to its partners. The solution would have been useless for other Android manufacturers in relation to Nokia, but would not have broken the OHA rules.
Google made a substantial offer regarding distribution of income. Nokia would have gotten a portion of the income from Google’s search engine, app store, and other services which originate from Nokia phones, and the terms would be in relation to Nokia’s influence in the ecosystem. We don’t have information about precise percentages, but at any rate, Google’s promise was quite exceptional, considering that Nokia would still have been able to keep its own services in its phones.
Contrary to what Nokia has claimed, Google was ready for concessions. It was ready to flex as far as it could in the framework of OHA, and even then some more.
Then some big money stepped into the game, as well as the mysterious Nokia employee with the name Rahul Mewawalla.
I don’t believe the engineers spent thousands man-years developing in-house Symbian, then significant time working on (mostly) in-house Maemo, then some day they said “screw that, let’s throw away everything we’ve developed and move to Android”.
Nokia had and released their own version of Android [0] which probably sped up the negotiations with Microsoft. Likely done by a completely different team vs. the Symbian people, though somone else probably knows more of those details.
> acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility
Credibility of what? He's a Microsoft employee, being paid by Microsoft, and has made a ton of money by selling his company to Microsoft. Follow the money and you'll find nothing but allegiance to Microsoft and it's corporate goals.
For the record - I don't think MS is as nefarious as people here are insinuating, I'm just pointing out facts that people seem to overlook.
Funny story about him. He wanted to get a Job at Microsoft and wasn’t hired because he didn’t have the qualifications. Then he built Xamarin and made it a great C# open source tool to build apps. M$ really loved it and bought the company. Now he’s leading GitHub. That’s awesome.
Microsoft does have a dark history, it’s also a huge company and Terry Meyerson (windows lead) was an aweful leader.
Things definitely changed. Satya knows that they need the developer mindshare, and that means to go where the developers are.
I hate windows as much as anyone, but a lot of their products are top notch. God I love vscode and Typescript. Just only use their OS products and you’ll be happy.
Not sure about the job part being about Miguel, but it's certainly not true about Nat. Nat interned at Microsoft in 97 and I was his manager. He did a great job and was well liked. I don't think he ever applied for a full time position after graduating as I would have heard about it.
I think it's just that he wanted to do something Open Source based, rather than what Microsoft was doing at the time.
I am much more unhappy about the quality of their operating system. They had decades to turn it into a user friendly simple system like macos is, and failed every single time. It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable and the first thing when you run windows update is to put back the games and other crapware that I do not need on my devices. Is there any hope that Windows UX gets once something good or should I just give up hoping?
> It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable
Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle.
Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.
Windows 10 has plenty of flaws that are worth pointing out, but using ridiculous hyperbole doesn't add to the conversation in a productive way.
> Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box.
There's a large gap between 'usable' and 'good'.
They destroyed the consistency of their interface (combined desktop/mobile anyone), and added a lot of cruft that literally nobody who's used Win 7 needs.
Yes there is. I have no problem with people saying Windows 10 isn't good, even if I personally think it's good. The "goodness" of an operating system is pretty subjective.
I do have a problem with people calling it barely usable, which is a much more objective (and incorrect) statement.
Arguing with developers about the gaping maw between “tolerable” and “good” is an uphill battle. I’m starting a support group. We meet at a bar. Want in?
> Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle.
Ditto for dozens of Linux distro's.
> Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.
What other things have they installed that is difficult to find out about? How about all the spying? Some game you don't use is the tip of the iceberg.
I'm not sure how Linux's viability as a desktop OS is relevant to Windows being usable or unusable.
I have no idea what else they've installed, just like I have no idea what MacOS or Linux install. They're all black boxes to me. I see no reason to think Windows is any worse than it's competitors.
I assume by spying, you are referring to Windows 10's telemetry. Personally, I think concerns about it are overblown and calling it spying is misleading at best. It's for diagnostic information. You can set it to only send basic diagnostic data if you so choose. I am in favor of companies collecting diagnostic information about their products to improve them.
Yeah just like Ubuntu, FreeBSD + XFCE and a bunch of other systems. I need something solid, featureful and simple as macos is, that has _great_ UX and I don't feel like fighting against the OS. Good example is when to update feature in macos vs windows is. One is pleasant, co-operative and feels right, the other is disruptive and I need to disable basic stuff not to lose some unsaved work. Just a great example how UX matters.
I don't really care if you choose MacOS over Windows. Plenty of people do. There are good reasons to. I even agree with you on some of your points.
My contention is that you implied that Windows 10 does not even meet the low bar of "barely usable" when you said that you have to delete half of the OS to make it barely usable.
That is a lie. Windows 10 is usable out of the box without any modifications. Saying otherwise is spreading misinformation, which I don't support.
For me it definitely does not meet the bar. It might be because I work as a systems/software engineer for too long and I have extremely low tolerance to have a subpar solution running in "production". It is ok if you just open a Outlook client and mostly use Excel + Word + PowerPoint, this covers huge amount of the user base.
> the same company, only with different cash cows.
I think having different cash cows does change a company. If it's in their interest to be a good steward of VSCode, Typescript, Github etc then they're more likely to do it.
I think consolidation is actually as much of an issue as which company it is, the more consolidated, arguably the less direct incentive for intercompatibility and open standards. That's more of an issue here because GitHub is not open-source, so unlike the other examples the developer base has nothing to fall back on.
On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.
> On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.
That's not the same though. I host my (company private) code on Github. I can use React or Kubernetes without giving any access to Google or Facebook to my code.
Nokia was struggling long before Microsoft came along though. They saved it for a little bit, but there isn't much you can do with a company that got so far behind it's competitors. Samsung, HTC, Apple, Motorola, etc were all light years ahead of Nokia even before Microsoft got involved.
Funny that the things you mention all happened under Steve Ballmer too...
Ahead in what sense? Apart from Apple and Google, everyone was behind. The fact that HTC and Motorola adopted Android didn't do much good for them in the end, and in hardware and market share Nokia still had the lead at that time.
There was no real chance Symbian had in the post iPhone world.
Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well.
> Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well.
You misremember things quite badly. Nokia was the clear leader in all phone segments, smartphones included. At the peak they sold just over 50% of all smartphones in the world. Of course they would try to hold on to that. They were better in software than their hardware competitors (Ericsson/RIM/etc), but of course that didn't amount to much when the field was upended by Google and Apple.
As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do, and even gave him a bonus for achieving it.
>As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do
Did that include having secret negotiations with Steve Ballmer that the board was unaware of? For a true accounting of what really happened you can find it all in Operation Elop.
I only know that because I have one of their awesome scales (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales). I was shocked they were Nokia when I found out about them. They're absolutely awesome, highly recommend them.
Skype was terrible before they got it. Had to make the config XML file on Windows readonly and remove the obnoxious advert placeholders. Skype 7 still works alright with these removed (although uses mind-bogglingly high amounts of RAM).
The Metro version no longer supports copy/paste formatting properly (no timestamps), destroys {code} annotations, does not show alerts properly, does not actually send messages you type into the Windows 10 popup alerts, does not auto scroll to the bottom of a message list, does not let you set your status to AWAY.
The web.skype.com also has broken copy/paste but is better than the absymal Metro version.
The iPad version is probably the most usable (but not tried copy/paste on it) and the Android one is mostly alright when it lets you log in, although still a bit clunky and non-responsive (blatantly a web app in a native wrapper).
I run OOSU10.exe on all my Windows 10 instances to turn off the spyware and run PiHole at home to try and limit the insane amounts of data leakage from all my devices (TV, iPads, Android phones sending buckets of telemetry home, Windows PC and Macs) - it's insane.
Interesting to see this purchase though, but I wanted to say that Skype is getting worse and worse - bring back MSN Messenger which had more features than modern Skype!
You haven’t been using GitHub for open source then.
The best part of GitHub is the social part and that’s not currently replaceable. Also good luck migrating issues and their history of comments and PRs.
Issues and comments can already be migrated, github has a simple API and all the other services have import tools. It's not hard.
The social part is not that big of a deal, its just because everybody happens to already have a login. Other than that, what's the big social hook? You can have the same exact discussions on the other source code sites, all of which have more features too.
And they're still pulling the same old tricks of vendor lock-in with DirectX. Microsoft's PR team likes to pretend they've changed since they gave a few concessions, but the reality is that they made those decisions solely because they were losing competitiveness. .Net core was because everybody was jumping ship to Linux due to the Kubernetes bandwagon. VS code was because the "Electron text editor" market was already filled with cross platform competitors.
Some people get offended when for-profit companies turn out to be not neighborly or friendly or human beings.
I like to look at it from the perspective that they are a for-profit public company and are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and they have every right to do so.
Therefore, any plans I make regarding GitHub will not rely on them being friendly and kind-spirited in any way. If they turn out to be great, I'll just be pleasantly surprised.
If that works out good for you, great. I know that GitHub has every right to do what they think is necessary to maximize shareholder value.
But I don't have to agree with their decisions.
I don't trust Microsoft for pretty much exactly the reasons the parent listed.
There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.
> ruined Skype?
Its still pretty popular. It was crap 5 years ago, but now its on par with the other big messaging apps.
>There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall.
Who knows what would have happened to Nokia's Device division without Microsoft's involvement, but one thing is certain - Windows Phone exclusivity solidified their demise. At least Nokia got 7 billion for their troubles, though.
>They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.
There's a difference between trying everything and being incompetent and constantly rebooting your platform and expecting a different outcome. As for Google sabotaging their platform - Microsoft was already doing a good job of it so they didn't need help from Google. Also, Google did have a couple of apps on their platform I believe, but let's not try and blame another company for the demise of their OS when they were ultimately responsible.
I've worked in several offices around 2013 where people happily used Skype like IRC: everyone was in a list of ~10 channels and occasionally sent private messages to coworkers. Instead of building on this, Microsoft kept pushing its unpopular business chat app (Lync) and made sure that Skype was only useful for consumers (obnoxious birthday notifications, the "snapchat redesign" etc.)
Skype could have beat Slack to the punch. Instead Microsoft lost both the business and the consumer market.
It isn't a good marketing campaign. This is just going to scare a ton of projects off of GitHub. I also imagine a ton of private companies (e.g. Google, Apple) are going to be moving their repos elsewhere if they are already hosted on GitHub for fear of Microsoft looking at their private code, which they WILL do.
companies that get acquired are probably required to move their private repos off of github. open source projects in the process of open sourcing or using a private repo as a staging area for the open source code are ok
No, Microsoft did an incredible service to all Nokia shareholders by buying the sorry handset business which had already failed in the market at that point.
You can blame Microsoft for not resurrecting a dead carcass but that's another thing entirely.
Nokia is doing quite fine manufacturing telecoms infrastructure.
What exactly is Microsoft alleged to have done wrong here? It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code.
Furthermore, I'd see Microsoft's reply:
> I'm not aware of any deliberate copying of the Lerna code, but let me dig into it now and call all the devs on the team to be sure. If there is, we should definitely give correct attribution, so I want to investigate. [...] I checked with the devs, and nobody's aware of any code coming from Lerna. If we inadvertently used something without credit, I really would like to know so that I can fix it.
> It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code
Unrelated to the rest of the discussion, I just want to clarify that MIT License != 'Do Whatever You Want' License. MIT requires attribution and maintaining the copyright license on existing code. Yes, if you don't adhere to the license's terms when copying code, it is stealing.
I know, which is why I wanted to clarify precisely what Microsoft is being accused of (I may have worded it poorly). The tone I was getting from OP (the Twitter discussion) was that the code taken was something Microsoft did not have any right to use in the way they did, not something that could be solved by attribution. "stole my code" may be strictly accurate (as if you don't follow the licence, you don't have a licence to use), but I feel like it doesn't clearly communicate the problem, especially with comments such as "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited.
To be clear, I'm not saying using MIT-licensed code without attribution is acceptable, but I feel that there is a qualitative difference between this and using code you couldn't use under any circumstances, or silently incorporating MIT code in a commercial product.
> The tone I was getting from OP (the Twitter discussion) was that the code taken was something Microsoft did not have any right to use in the way they did, not something that could be solved by attribution.
> "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited.
Attribution alone doesn't bring it into compliance. The copyright notices have to be preserved too.
Also, the rewriting of commit history, if true, sounds more shady than mere "Oops, I dropped the license and copyright texts".
MS claimed APIs are copyrightable. MS strongly pushes lock-in in markets where they have strong presence. It shows they haven't changed enough to trust them with anything.
Proprietary software used to be Microsoft's cash cow. That it is turning to different cash cows is actually a good thing for open source.
Companies have to make money, and originally, Microsoft made money just by selling proprietary software licenses. In these conditions, open source is their enemy, and they have to fight it. Now they do a bit of spying, a bit of cloud, a bit of hardware, etc... which mean they can cut open source some slack and focus on other evils.
Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
This is small compared potatoes to the sort of thing Microsoft used to pull before. Microsoft spent years in the courts and narrowly avoided some very drastic government intervention and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. That doesn't happen because someone might not like the new Skype UI or really misses flip phones.
Why should I care that they "killed" Nokia. (It still sells products, by the way.)
Nokia, isn't a person. It's another corporation. Patents racketeering...this is literally only going to be fixed with legislation. I'm all for it. There is no such thing as a corporation that won't chase every dollar that it can. That's what they do. Want to stop patent BS? Remove the incentives through legislation.
To be really frank Nokia killed itself in the after math of the iPhone. But that was long time coming. When a company which wasn't even your prime competitor an year or two back, out innovates you to the graveyard, you really were setting yourself up for something like this for a while.
Literally every for-profit desktop OS vendor has "spied on users" by the definition you're trying to use. Including OSX and Ubuntu.
>Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
So Google boxes Microsoft out of the phone market by refusing to support any of their services on Windows Phone. And Microsoft is the bad guy for leveraging their patents against vendors selling Android phones? Satya Nadella would be looking for a new job if he weren't leveraging their patent portfolio. End of story.
>Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
See comment above. Nokia is dead because they couldn't get a handful of table-stakes apps. Primarily because of google.
Skype... well that was just fumbling the ball, but it wasn't for no-reason. The way Skype was originally architected wasn't going to scale. That was by no means nefarious in nature though. Github has no fundamental flaws that I've seen that they would require them making significant changes.
You must be referring to the time Microsoft reversed engineered YouTube API's and blocked ads in their unauthorized YouTube app. They had no right to reverse engineer proprietary API's, they had no right to block ads from being played and they had no right to create an app for an IP they didn't own.
>And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering?
You should look into the Microsoft vs Barnes and Noble case[1] as well as review their detailed patent racketeering practices at Groklaw. Additionally, the Chinese government made Microsoft expose all of their patents that they wouldn't allow companies they were shaking down to see and, well, they were full of old, obsolete and prior art ridden patents - be sure to look those up too.
That’s fine, at first blush at least, as long as they stay out of my way.
But their MO is to buy up companies people like or love and run them into the ground, then replace them with a Me Too product that is just enough different that getting out is challenging. To the rest of us that’s indistinguishable from destroying the competition and reducing options.
And here they are buying a company people like, having recently killed off others.
This tiger has the same stripes. When it eats your remaining arm, try to remember people told you so.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that come Monday morning all the reasonable critiques are buried at the bottom of the page and all the GitHub + MS love is upvoted to the top, hyping up all the "amazing business synergies".
Multibillion dollar mergers like this are huge things, especially for with a big player acquiring a smaller beloved brand like GitHub. Makes one wonder how many of those leaks over the past week were planned to get the hate out and pave the way for a "cleaner" coming out like what we're seeing here.
An independent player just got gobbled up by a major one, once again the tech world consolidates...
---
EDIT:
Perhaps HN is just having issues, but right after I made this comment and checked the thread ALL I saw were critiques. HN must be quite happening this morning... anyways, in response to /u/mcknz, some critiques:
EDIT 2 - I'm probably wrong here, I see the comment now I claimed was deleted, I most likely just misplaced my reply.
~~I actually made this as a reply to the most upvoted MS + GitHub love posts and it looks like that comment was removed and I was placed onto the main thread. The title of this story also changed a couple times too. The current neutral one "Microsoft acquires Github" is the original I think, but for a bit it was changed to something a bit more pro MS.~~
~~I wonder if we'll get a story in a couple days about what was happening in this thread...~~
It's like that super rich kid who really wants to hang out with you and your friends so bad and he's kind of nice, but just a total dork. So then he has his dad buy the abandoned lot everyone plays wiffle ball in and forces you to let him join your team. And it's like "Oh yeah sure Microsoft....come on and play... yeah sure we were just about to invite you..."
To be fair, those were the Ballmer days. I'm not really worried about GitHub becoming malware or falling into disrepair; that's beside the point. GitHub was the Romulan neutral zone of the internet, and now we've lost that.
It's interesting strategy. Even in their corporate merger photos, I can't help but sense how deliberate Satya's and Nat's clothing choices were. Regardless of the intent, we are being told a story.
I see it as a play for information. They have LinkedIn, now add the technical information from github and you gain some insights into potential people to hire.
It is different because there is plenty of popular options and you can as well encrypt your data here on any cloud hosting. And for email better example would be GMail due to market share.
This is mostly anti-corporate, anti-monopolistic, anti-cloud, and anti-surveillance ideas. Windows, the development environments, etc is a monolithic platform that has very little in terms of customization due to it's structure and prevents competitive integrations. Think of all of the WMs for Linux, or any other modular component in Linux. Linux provides extensive competition, and Microsoft is seemingly attempting to drag people into an all inclusive "developer" network that prevents anyone from doing anything outside the walled garden of their systems in a meaningful way. LinkedIn accounts are going to become Office365 accounts by their own admission when it was acquired. Governments, small businesses, etc are moving to Office365.
Between LinkedIn, GitHub, Skype, and Xbox, their focus on developers is increasingly looking more like a "we want to see what developers do, how they spend their time, and data-mine them so we can tailor our experience better towards them, and assimilate them into our Borg hivemind". If you're fine with data-mining for these purposes, we're going to have to agree to disagree.
WSL is mostly just a means of getting more Linux users to convert to the Big Brother Borg by providing them useful tools so they don't have to install Cygwin.
For those asking why it's bad for a company to make money, you are missing the point. You can monetize GitHub (and it is), without selling over to another company. Even if GitHub is not profitable, that's just bad business management and pricing that needs to be fixed. You can monetize software while making a competitive platform. This goes to the MBAs approach of "blue ocean strategy" over a "red ocean strategy". People are afraid of competition, and want the comfort of knowing someone else has made those decisions for them. I do not, I want competition in technology otherwise we'll get to a stagnant technology development system. It's already theorized by WSJ analysts and defectors from Google, etc, that Silicon Valley is devoid of all ability to innovate, and they are investing and going elsewhere.
Microsoft went from selling a product (Windows), to selling a product (Windows 10) that serves mountains of advertisements. Xbox is guilty of this as well. Telemetry, despite people's claims of the privacy screen, has an upper bound on the amount you can opt-out of (some telemetry, even in Windows 10 Enterprise, is not opt-out).
From a security perspective, even if the data is silo'd off, this also provides many issues as individuals who are highly skilled in cybersecurity will end up needing access across services (especially incident responders), and they become targets for massive troves of data access and breaches.
Microsoft is still attacking Android device handset manufacturers with lawsuits (but not Google), for Android's uses of FAT file systems, etc. Microsoft is inherently still acting as patent troll against open source.
There are accusations of open source plagiarism (not certain the credibility):
GitHub already has issues with pseudo-accounts. You can create a profile that showcases forked repositories that you have not contributed anything to and throw up a neat avatar and it looks like you are a coding god. Not to a skilled developer who understands Git, but to an HR recruiting representative who knows very little in a small business it takes about 5 minutes to create the equivalent of an Instagram fake coding lifestyle.
And I'm really getting sick of the "Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are just as bad, get over it" whataboutisms. Yes they are. It's possible to oppose all of the above.
Well, I kinda trusted Github to be good actors with the things they centralized while Microsoft is almost the epitome of reasons why centralization is bad and why you want to carefully keep control over your process.
When was the last time Github was fined for having abused a monopoly position? It was 2008 for Microsoft. EU charged them with more than 1 billion dollar for their abusive practices.
An investigation is ongoing in Spain since Windows 8 UEFI's practices made competition harder.
Microsoft is still Microsoft. Breaking standards, making interoperability harder. It won't be 6 months before github starts having VS-only or windows-only features.
When Microsoft sets it mind on buying a company, they're willing to pay almost anything. Remember when they wanted to pay $45 billion for Yahoo only a decade ago?
Companies that are exploring the option of selling to Microsoft know this quite well, and they exploit it to the fullest.
That included the Alibaba (including the percentage sold off since) and Yahoo Japan stakes. It would’ve made them good money buying Yahoo at that price.
Interesting, where are the financials for GitHub available? What sort of deficit were they running?
I think the answer would be 'a company without a history of ruining things one loved' -- my recent experience of Microsoft is very negative too (though I've seen some awesome tech demos of their's).
GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.
Tell that to Youtube. Youtube has never made a dollar in profits. Did Google destroy it as soon as they acquired it in 2008?
No: Google is propping it up as a loss-leader and incentive to sweeten the deal by bundling their other more profitable services.
We can expect Microsoft to do the same thing: Github will still lose money, but it will integrate with VScode and Azure and OWA and they'll offer on-prem installations for enterprise customers who are already paying for those other profitable services.
> GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.
GitHub no longer needs to directly turn a profit now that it is owned by Microsoft. They just need to use GitHub to increase their profits from Azure (or any of Microsoft's other money makers). I don't think they need to make drastic changes to GitHub for that to happen.
How do you envision them forcing^W encouraging use of Azure, or other MS paid offerings, through GitHub?
I can see that working if they don't meddle with GitHub for the next decade, and keep it running well; then people might be convinced to try MS's other offerings.
Maybe Heroku style "run this project on your own Azure instance now" (perhaps GitHub does this already?)? Is Azure's rep good enough to pull that off?
I haven't heard anyone say anything bad about Azure that can't be said about AWS, GCP, or whatever IBM calls their cloud hosting service.
That is exactly the kind of feature I think they will implement. They will probably add more support in Visual Studio and VSCode for GitHub as well, although their support is already pretty good as far as I know.
They can also throw paid GitHub features in with their Office 365 package, like they currently do with Skype. That would further consolidate companies on the Microsoft platform by ensuring that they don't have to leave it for code hosting.
It would be great if companies like GitHub would figure out how to earn money. I love more diversity in companies and not just a handful of them dominating and being insanely profitable. The only good thing I see about acquisitions like this is that there will be a few employees with enough money to care less about their future and build something new and interesting. At MS, Google, FB, etc this will not happen.
So investors were going to keep sinking money into Github forever?
As far as competing with the entire industry, everyone competes with everyone and does business with everyone....
Netflix and Amazon Video compete but Netflix hosts its entire infrastructure on AWS.
Apple and Samsung compete, they are involved with lawsuits but Apple is still one of Samsung's largest customers.
Apple and Google compete but Google pays Apple $2 billion a year to be the default search provider on iOS. Apple also reportedly uses Google Cloud Platform for some of its iCloud hosting.
Amazon and Apple compete selling media and streaming boxes but Amazon Prime is on IOS devices.
Microsoft Azure and AWS compete but it is just as easy to deploy to AWS using VSTS as it is to Azure.
Microsoft and Google work together on Angular/Typescript.
Amazon hosts Windows VMs,SqlServer RDS instances and supports VS Code.
If they could afford it they would kill it off in favor of Bitbucket (probably name it BitHub), stagnate development of services, lock it into Bamboo build envs.. Hating MS with a passion, i still prefer MS to have bought Github.
Atlassian is “only” worth $15B. GitHub was sold for $7.5B. Not sure Atlassian would want to effectively merge with GitHub since they certainly don’t have the cash to buy it.
Only on HN / in San Francisco would the federal government (if I understand you correctly) be preferable to a technology company which has been a key player in the PC and internet marketplace for decades. I’m not trying to lionize M$, but come on - a Public Utility? As if the government doesn’t already burn enough cash....
Having been to the GitHub offices and having dined at their in-office restaurant, and having gotten drunk at their free bar - the answer is an asbsolute no regarding me funding then via donation. I’ll continue to fund the Linux foundation, and continue to run my own git server, and continue to enjoy the fruits of VC funding, but donations for GitHub? Insanity. I would for sure be happier if they reached profitability on their own, but that was pretty clearly not in the cards.
As for Wikipedia, I feel similarly, except Wikimedia runs a fairly tight ship, and lacking a corporate product offering (or market) means I’m much more happy to donate. They don’t run in the deep red intentionally, which is the key difference. Also, GitHub is extremely easily replaceable (and we -need- diversity in code hosting for FOSS), whereas Wikipedia is not quite so replaceable, and diversity in open encyclopedia platforms doesn’t help anyone...
That's a nice idea and all, but was there ever any path to accomplish it without asking everyone invested in GitHub to take an unforced L?
GitHub was a startup, and that comes with certain expectations and constraints on their future. But, for some crazy reason, avoiding GitHub wasn't a particularly popular position to take a week ago. People who understood the business realities of Facebook dunked on normal people for getting duped, then went around and complained that everyone should just submit to network effects and get on github.
For me, it's not about whose the bigger scarier influence, or who does more evil. It's just based on how practically I see either turning out.
=Microsoft Acquisition=
For a few months to a year, everything is mostly the same, until new features start happening. It starts with something like annotations on particular regions of code, with say all the annotations for the codebase stored in an extra file "git_annotations.tla", which is some zip file collecting together a bunch of random undocumented xml that changes constantly. These annotations are tracked semi-competently by VS Code and MS team enterprise tools, being updated to deal with source changes with each commit, but ultimately just showing up automagically in either the web view, VS Code, or associated enterprise tools. These annotations will start out as minor unimportant things, not even really worth porting to other editors, but will increasingly be abused for code review in enterprisey contexts. People who try to just edit things from the command line or their editor of choice will be constantly breaking other people's annotations at random times since they don't update that file, so file renamings, moving, etc won't be tracked properly. MS provides some xcode/sublime/atom plugins to provide partial support for some other editors, which prompts web developers to adopt them in droves so they can add gif tooltips to comments. At no point is there a great enough reason for anyone still using github to switch, so slowly the remaining open source projects there start making use of these features, and so contributers need to start using the appropriate MS tooling to ensure their commit doesn't break the annotations (or just use one of the supported editors).
=Google Acquisition=
Github user profiles are now linked to a google account. The webclient works better in chrome than other browsers. The webclient is renamed, rebranded and redesigned every 2-4 years by someone looking for a promotion, but ultimately in a way that doesn't affect people just using git from the command line. Github possibly gets a few additional features to support internal usage with Google weird mono-repo lifestyle. Google tries unsuccessfully multiple times to integrate Github into yet another failed team messaging platform or whatever, but again in ways that only affect the webclient. Google more successfully does some data analytics stuff based on searching and indexing all of that code now sitting on servers they own, and this is almost but not quite profitable, but close enough for them to leave it alone and get distracted by something else that's shiny.
To me, neither seems ideal, but all of the annoyance of the google stuff seems avoidable by just using separate accounts for separate things, as usual.
This is how I see things playing out as well. GitHub starting to behave like the MS Office suite is something straight out of a nightmare. I hope so much that we are wrong.
Is that last one sarcastic? Because with Skype they finally tossed the 15-20 year old client with a slick (and lacking in features) electron-like app. Better to start fresh than try and maintain the old shit.
Anyway Skype is a non-issue, it's lost market thanks to pretty much everyone making a chat app / competitor, notably Slack.
Here at GitHub, we’re excited for what this acquisition means for the future of software development and open source. We’ll remain focused on putting the developer community first and will stay an open platform to continue to serve developers in all industries.
There has been so much excitement from both sides during this process. Our shared values around empowering developers across the globe made this a natural fit
> Our shared values around empowering developers across the globe made this a natural fit.
Please. Do you have to start spouting corporate bs right away? I'm happy you guys got your payday but Microsoft and GitHub 'shared values' are so far from each other that I sincerely hope you won't end up regretting this deal in the longer term.
I'm glad you have been so excited during this process, however mine dropped to zero just yesterday. Fortunately, in contrary to most markets dominated by your current owner, this is not a monopoly and we've got plenty of alternatives.
It read like a standard run-of-the-mill press release you would expect from a big corporation. Btw, the word-stem 'develop*' appeared 31 times. Reminded me of the old famous chant...
This doesn't seem okay. I don't feel good about this acquisition. I used to associate Github with open-source, now I'm going to have to associate it with another proprietary software from Microsoft and that breaks my heart a little.
"Developers are the builders of this new era, writing the world’s code. And GitHub is their home.", doesn't feel like home anymore. :(
When Microsoft acquired Skype, there were a subset of accounts that essentially became un-useable for close to 2yrs. There was a sub-sub case where if you had a Skype ID that was an email (not a username) which was also a pre-existing Microsoft email, your profile became unreachable and passwords could not be reset either. This is from personal experience and validated with a half dozen other people in the same sub-sub-case complaining online. Support just gave the same boilerplate response - reset your password. It is honestly shocking there was no review that a certain cohort of very similar accounts had suddenly and permanently stopped logging in. Honestly inexplicably given the size of the acquisition.
That was when I finally dumped Skype and moved fully to FaceTime/Duo/WhatsApp/Messenger. Thank goodness for competition.
I adore GitHub. My children and I wear their tshirts, we brandish their logo on our laptops and phones. I hope Microsoft doesnt half-abandon this post-merger integration.
Same thing here! I thought I had gone crazy until I started interacting with more more people online that had the same exact problem. Honestly, it became an obsession to figure out for me because I started feeling stupid not being able to figure it out...turns out there was no way out of this corner case!
Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Think about the magnitude of dysfunction for a post-merger integration to only partially succeed despite this price tag!
I can hardly imagine what level of dysfunction is possible in an organisation as large as Microsoft. I have only worked in small companies, less than 30 employees, and my mind has already been blown.
Fair enough w/r/t the company size...but...how is it I dont have these types of authentication issues in the Google universe, or Facebook Universe? It isn't like I need a separate login for Youtube vs Google Sheets vs Google Drive vs Duo vs GChat. It suggests that it can work if the organization tries to do it correctly.
I'm a GitHub employee and spend most of my time contributing to the Git project.
I've always been very happy about how GitHub supported my participation in the community. Sometimes what I do is directly useful to GitHub, and sometimes it's a matter of keeping the project healthy for everyone. It's always been about contributing, and not trying to control.
Microsoft started contributing to Git about 2 years ago, and in the last six months, we've seen them increase their contributions. From what I've seen they've taken the same approach: give developers the resources and freedom to figure out what the project needs and improve it. I'm excited about some of the performance work they've been doing (e.g., fsmonitor integration, graph optimizations).
So I'm optimistic about this with respect to Git. I think it will mean continued support for the project. And I do feel like Microsoft "gets" open source in a way that most people never would have believed 5 or 10 years ago.
Sure, MS visual code is open but as a few players get more and more power we all become subject to their whims and not them to ours.
MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment, or will it’s data be useful to MS for those ads?
What sort of integrations can we expect to see with other MS products that encourage a more closed ecosystem?
This may all seem alarmist but with so many companies having so much power this sort of behavior get through unchecked. *For example, MS hasn’t changed all that much: they still force device makers to sell Linux at a higher or equal price to Windows so people won’t jump ship.
The only recourse people suggest is “well then don’t use it” but what options do employees have when higher ups mandate technologies? What about most users who just go with the wind and just let these snowballing large companies skate by? It all makes me very sad...
I am wondering how good their Deep Learning-based code analysis tool prototypes are, if they can identify bleeding edge code in private repos already...
It’s understandable that a lot of people are mad at microsoft. It used to be the big bad wolf vs open source. Where the open source side would go on and on about how much more value it provided and how in then end Microsoft would fail horribly and GNU/Linux would rule. And at some point along the way Microsoft just jumped on the wagon, suddenly chanting the same pro open source slogans, fighting the sameness cause. But no blood was spilled, Linux didn’t destroy Windows and Microsoft never seemed to tank. It left a void in many people who are just not ready to accept that Microsoft judges only on their actions today is a huge supporter of open source software. The zeolots wanted to beat them, not convince them.
It's a global step backward for Open Source Software.
Microsoft was always hated because of their closed source software and now they hold the principal Open Source bastion.
Github helped so many Open Source Developers get their projects out of shadow, thanks to the "star" system, news feed... and sometimes this could change a life (like me that created a startup on top of an open source project that became successful on Github).
I feel ashamed now to work on Github, a platform that is, today, owned by Microsoft, a company which I do not support their philosophy and culture.
For me it's a day of mourning and I pry Microsoft to not touch at what makes Github what it is today.
Issue body:
Microsoft open sourced Xamarin after acquisition and it was good for community. Open sourcing Github source will benefit open source community. Github was not open source for its own reason and it could be same reason why Xamarin was not. Now that Github acquired by Microsoft, would this event be an opportunity to re-consider the reason?
I get it, its the way this industry works. Build up a solid product, grow the user base, continue to lose money until you sell the business and cash out.
I'm not against the company or the founders making money. This is America after all. What is disappointing to me and others in the open source community is that we have zero say over something that we helped build.
This sale to Microsoft is just another reason why we need something new, a new system that can be owned by individuals and not corporations. I would love to see something where the developers and users actually have a stake in what happens, and can in turn profit from it as well.
Never "ours" in any legal sense of the word. I said in my post I can't blame them for selling, its how our system works. I'm just trying to think towards the future and how "we" can do it better next time.
I think some skepticism is a healthy thing to have, especially with multi billion dollar acquisitions. It's a little surprising to me that there's been so much kool aid drinking in the open source community over this and a lot of "disappointment" with those who are not also drinking the kool aid.
At the end of the day, Microsoft, a huge billion dollar corporation, bought GitHub because it thinks it'll help its bottom dollar. And sure, of course I can see the business sense in the deal for both parties, but it's yet to be seen if it'll actually improve things for end users.
My two cents are they'll leverage the acquisition and get free marketing by moving Github to Azure. I'm less worried about them doing some 90's Microsoft chicanery (they've shown a real willingness to invest in dev goodwill in the past 5 years) than inadvertently letting Github fall into disrepair, by understaffing and shifting focus even more to the Enterprise offering.
I'm going to let things play out before judging. They might ramp up investment in the main Github platform, or open source Github because they're not relying on it as a cash cow.
I'm actually happy about this acquisition. For everything that all the 13 y/o "hackers" say on Reddit, this will hopefully be a great thing for the wider community.
It's hilarious to see people kvetching about lock-in here when probably 90% of HNers are working on projects locked into AWS or something else in their stack.
I don't understand this. To me it looked like Github never much strayed (or progressed) in terms of functionality. It stayed a git repo management tool and that was it. It is obviously what people liked about it: it stuck to a single function.
They had so a huge role in popularizing git IMO, they secured some room and ample time for (non-overbearing) experimentation. Their issue tracking was very basic, and there could be so much work done there they could subsequently sell as something additional to core git repo functionality. Or they could improve code review tools etc.
I am afraid this is what will also happen to StackOverflow eventually with their attempts at Documentation, Jobs and now SO for teams. It looks like they are trying to compete but in the end it might turn out being them signaling their willingness to potential buyers by "moving in the right direction".
It is not the fact that it's Microsoft, it's the fact that the finality is almost always acquisition. I always looked at SO and github as an alternative to Linkedin's walls of enumerations, as a way to speak to other developers instead of HRs, and now it is not so for Github.
A bit of interesting trivia: back in 2008, GitHub's founder (Tom Preston-Werner) declined to work for Microsoft when they bought his previous employer, Powerset:
Precisely because the FOSS community is so worried about this acquisition, there is a lot to win for them, and if they manage to keep improving Github in the perception of its users, that is a trust and PR victory that would be difficult to attain otherwise, and it would help institutionalize their renewed, positive vision on open source. It can honestly go both ways.
It is no surprise GitHub got sold; look at the investors and you know that they invested to sell later. We were worried about cloud repositories already some time ago, even started our own project (gitstorage.com) to be prepared whatever happens (we are totally relaxed about the GitHub takeover). It could have been worse. There are other companies with lots of cash that would have worried me a lot more.
One interesting thought was that whoever owns GitHub can feed the open and also the closed source into their AI machine to learn how to code properly. IMHO the terms of service of GitHub allow that because AI is not considered a third party. This could have some significant benefit keeping in mind that good code tends to rule the world; and Microsoft understands how to use AI and has the actual means to do something like that. This is speculative, maybe one day the history books will tell us what was the main driver for this transaction.
Today, I decided to move to GitLab. Thank god there is an alternative. I won't give one penny to Microsoft since I remember all the deceptive methods they used to retain their market shares. Their CEO was in the company when all of that happened so don't come and tell me that things have changed.
This feels like Slashdot from 10 years ago. I thought the anti-Microsoft sentiment had dissipated, but clearly that’s not the case.
I was a Microsoft focused developer through the bad years and even I thought they acted horribly against Netscape. They ended up paying a billion dollars for it and we’re forced to change.
I wasn’t a fan of Ballmer either and thought MS had lost its way. Windows Phone started off nice but they just couldn’t get enough developer interested.
Maybe that was the wake up call. If you don’t have the devs and you’re a dev-centric company, you’re doomed.
In comes Satya Nadella, along with Scott Guthrie and other internal proponents of open development and the company has very demonstrably changed its stripes in the last five years.
I judge companies on current behavior and Microsoft seems to be doing far more right than wrong.
>I judge companies on current behavior and Microsoft seems to be doing far more right than wrong.
This isn't about behavior. This is about product management. As a reminder, Microsoft's current products include TFS (and I don't mean just TFSVC) and Teams.
I really hope this acquisition is good for the developer community. Also, I can’t help but notice the fact that Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of GitHub, had turned down an offer[0] from Microsoft 10 years ago and today they’ve announced the acquisition[1] by Microsoft. They really have come a full circle. Good luck to the team at GitHub!
Time to migrate off Github, folks. Microsoft has a long, long history of destroying every company they acquire. For the latest example, see how Skype is being run into the ground. There is a prevailing state of mind at Microsoft that if they own something they should be able to do anything with it. And so they will. It's only a matter of time until Microsoft starts putting their proprietary crap into Github to make it better integrate with their enterprise offerings. Free users will be neglected and things will get broken for them. For any respected open source project, it's irresponsible to depend on Github at this point. The sooner you get off it the fewer problems you'll have later.
> Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
Does this mean we'll see some sort of VSCode-esque IDE built into GitHub's UI? Or perhaps exposure of VSTS to people who previously weren't aware of it?
Github has been losing the battle in the enterprise world to Gitlab. The latter has more appealing features to enterprise users. So this acquisition in some sense a great opportunity for Github as well to enter enterprise under the wings of Microsoft.
Microsoft doesn't really want github. What they want is Electron.
Say what you want about their Windows and Office divisions, they put a lot of effort and resources into their development tool side. Being able to direct the development Electron, the way a lot of desktop applications are being written in 201X, is a clear advantage to them commercially. They also have the ability and resources to solve some of the problems that have plagued Electron/NW like resource use and distribution.
What will happen to the github site itself? Not a whole lot. That's all pretty stable. More likely it will stagnate since they won't really know what to do with it.
I'm guess it's the external community culture they want to keep. GitHub has been looking for a new CEO since last August, and one of their other guys had actually taken over many of the duties in the interim.. They have had some high profile scandal/dramas(with one coinciding fairly closely with last August CEO search...). I'm guessing any internal culture related to that stuff as well as not making money is probably on the block.
My main consern is what will happen to projects hosted that MS would consider questionable repos, such as rootkits for consoles, open source drivers for their own proprietary hardware.. I expect a lot of data to be purged.
Just please don’t let the UX ‘experts’ inside Redmond butcher it like they did Skype. Keep them away! If they were any good at their jobs they wouldn’t be turning out so much crap and parading it as a great thing.
the evolution of this acquisition over the past two days has been interesting. Its even more interesting in the context of say, gitlab importer state metrics in grafana..beware, the importer metric is under heavy load and sometimes doesnt
Reports of migrations to other sites are real, and Microsoft sees a risk thats legitimate enough to issue a presser. Its going to be hard to head off a github exodus at the pass because git itself is open source and there are numerous alternatives that can quickly and easily (some with no more than the click of a button) spirit the github userbase --which is what Microsoft arguably wants in order to legitimize its cloud/open source push-- away from them.
https://sourceforge.net/ even released a special tool to migrate you away from github. Certainly some of the more business minded users will argue this acquisition from Microsoft is a "good move" but the fact that this is the second presser microsoft has thrown out regarding the nature of its merger in less than 5 hours reflects a pretty sincere push from redmond. Microsofts historic legacy of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and outright hostile action to crush open source and startups in general is a pretty insurmountable.
I'm wondering what this will mean for Atom and VS Code. Wondering if MS will continue supporting that, considering that VS Code seems to be a more pleasant experience at this point.
i'm torn about this. on the one hand, microsoft is profit oriented, but so was github. and github was under certain pressure to make a profit, which is optional under microsoft, as they have other revenue streams which can be used to cross-finance a small, money hemorrhaging github.
but why would microsoft buy a money-losing company? either they think they can turn it around
- maybe because they can use their own, cheaper hosting infrastructure -, or because it's a ploy to reconcile a mostly microsoft-wary developer community with their new "not so evil as before" image (we all remember the microsoft under gates and ballmer and the damage it did).
the question that remains is: can we trust them to continue to run github as we know (and love?) it? it's not like the company hasn't improved tremendously in the last years, but the windows 10 update and privacy debacle has shown they're not above suspicion.
for me personally, i'll probably continue to use github, as i use it only for non-critical hobby projects anyway.
for important work i'd rely on a self hosting gitlab/gogs/gitea instance. i know it's not the same, as the barrier-to-entry for potential contributors is higher and the added sysop work is a pita for most people. but that's the price to pay for a healthy, robust open source community.
Perhaps I missed in the other comments, but is anyone else here shocked by the price tag? That is an outstanding amount of money to pay for Github, certainly a very large premium.
Wow $7.5 Billion, a nice juicy sum for a company that has influence yes, but very limited profit potential, considering that developers (despite earning well) seem to be v reluctant to part with their cash - juding by anecdotal evidence of numerous comments here, expecting everything to be free and moaning about piddling costs such as Sublime Text licence. Wonder how Linus Torvalds feel? The sellors should send him a small percentage in gratitude for making them billionaires.
This is not only for extend their profits but also to protect. Imagine what it meant to Microsoft if another of the big five would have acquired it. Just think of Amazon and a deploy to AWS button.
Now that would be how to to show people you mean it. By making themselves liable to being forked, they would be convincingly committing to doing a better job than anyone else as judged by the community.
I don't understand why everyone is so against this, this means Github is going to become more useful and tools will be extended. Microsoft knows developers better than many of the other companies. Perhaps it would have made more sense to be a joint venture company between Google/Microsoft/Apple/Linux Foundation? I don't know? I think this is the second best alternative to that.
But I talked about MS PR team before, and I can already see it at work everywhere. Here, the first HN links were not warmly welcomed, so we had another one published, then another one published, until one with a positive top comment for them is here.
Also plenty of comments to defend them by using vague positive things like "they did good things recently" or "they like open source".
If you go on reddit you'll see the same is happening.
The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.
I had this debate for the last 10 years, and everytime there are persons to say "maybe this time they changed", and everytime use something like "Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake".
The problem with a PR machine is that it never get tired of repeating the same story, while we do. And people eventually listen to the PR machine anyway. That's why it works. Not because it's clever, but because of human nature.
I've been watching MS for the last 23 years. So I'm not oblivious to history. ;)
And granted that's how PR works, but the problem with carrying distrust to defend against it is that is eventually makes one paranoid.
Personally, I aspire to objective reevaluation at the current point in time.
In 2018?
Microsoft historically did terrible things to open source, Balmer was an asshole about casting it as us vs them, and they still have substantial legacy OS and Office revenue streams to protect.
At the same time, their cloud business is rapidly growing, they've realized the only way to compete there is to embrace open source, and that's beginning to permeate the rest of the company. Largely via promoting someone from the dev / server / cloud business as CEO.
It doesn't have to be astroturfing. Repeatedly exposing HN readers to the same news would be a good way to gradually increase positive opinion until a desirable threshold is reached ("the first positive top comment").
Suppose it isn't more likely, that it is just random. All Microsoft has to do is pick the one article that has a positive opinion at the top and promote that one.
I won't ever really forgive MicroSoft until they give us back "Clippy".
In a marketing atmosphere dominated by Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Watson.... how can MicroSoft continue to ignore the original and much beloved assistant A.I?
I had a serious dislike of MS under Ballmer, and every single one of your examples in that post was under his reign. But the argument that "they used to be bad, so they still have to be bad" is just silly. Ballmer may have screamed "developers" on stage, but he was the one who lost them - which cost them dearly (mobile, cloud). Shareholders and the board pushed him out for that reason, so the new management had no choice but to sail a completely different course - which they did. It's no accident that their new CEO is the guy that was heading the Azure division, which is effectively selling Linux.
But yes - it's still a company that will act in it's own self-interest, as any company will, and right now, that aligns pretty well with playing nice with the opensource community. That could change - in the future, so some caution is always a good idea (but that's the same for Google, Apple, Amazon, ...), but today, I have little issues with MS's attitude today towards opensource. Tomorrow, we'll see.
That said - I don't mind them buying github and I like that people are actively looking into alternatives, github is simply too big imho, and too many things just expect git = github, which sucks too.
Did windows 10 stopped shipping ads and spywares ? Or orce update (and sometime locking my PC for 30 minutes then erase my grub for even more fun) ? Did skype turned back great, and P2P again ? Did they revoked their abusive patents ? Did they start to adopt open standard for new products ? Did they quit the Business Software Alliance ?Did they stopped shipping root TLS certificates from dictatures so that they can basically intercept any of my communications ?
Bitlocker sends you private key to microsoft (and questions about it, said they were to be trusted, but you could request deletion individually if you wanted):
> The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.
I realize that Atom is fully open source, but I'm a little concerned that this puts VSCode and Atom under the same roof. I feel that those platforms are where the innovation in text editors has been recently, and can't imagine that MS will fund two products that compete directly with each other and that without that direct competition, they won't work on improving either.
Besides GitLab, is it also worth looking into Bitbucket free tier? I am just curious where the trend will go as far as porting of projects goes? I am guessing a lot of BIG NAME devs are going to jump the ship.
One thing Microsoft failed to comprehend is that if you want to be all buddy-buddy with open-source community then don't go out and buy the condo they are renting in and lay out new rules.
People seem to be making a big deal about this. What is the controversy surrounding microsoft acquiring github? I mean, it's one big, evil corporation taking over another, so what's the difference?
Not trying to troll, I just don't know the negatives from this. I have a github account and want to know if there's a valid reason to move it.
As an engineer I'm a bit puzzled that github was valuated 3 times less than linkedin.
Yet I haven't done any real analysis, neither I know if business data of X individuals is valued more than hosting Y projects, probably from an ad + data gathering perspective it makes some sense but still I'd love to hear a more in depth analysis on this
The beauty in all of this is that you still have the power to continue make use of github, or you can chose another provider if Microsoft doesn’t meet all of your needs. In contrary, as a business decision this was a good move for Microsoft. Now they can invest in integrating Azure and people can deploy directly to Azure.
Today, I decided to move to GitLab. Thank god there is an alternative. I won't give one penny to Microsoft since I remember all the deceptive methods they used to retain their market shares. Their CEO was in the company when all of that happens so don't come and tell me that things have changed.
I will be curious to see what competitors of Microsoft, who host projects on github (google,facebook, etc) do. Where previously Github was an unbiased host for open source projects, now being under the umbrella of MS, other entities might see it as clashing with their corporate policies.
In all these years, GitHub didn't make a single penny as profit
Like most "successful" startup companies over the past decade, only way (for investors) to make money was to make the company a "product" that would be sold to the highest bidder
Why is anyone surprised that GitHub would be sold ?
Unrelated to all the other aspects, 4 times markup over the last valuation is quite an impressive markup for a loss making company.
Of course the brad name, mind share and userbase are worth a lot, but that much? I reckon they must have also talked to some competing bidders, like Google.
Well, not that easy for a larger project to switch to another platform. I work for ArangoDB and as silly as it sounds but leaving the street and investor cred of our Github Stars behind is not really an option, kind of a lock-in is also there on Github
Microsoft wants monthly recurring revenue from services. They could care less in the year 2018 if you run Windows Server or Debian or CentOS or RHEL on an Azure VM, if you're paying $250 a month for it, they're happy either way.
With Microsoft's proven record of "obeying the law" by suppressing free speech in China, what does the future hold for dissident sites hosted on Github that resulted in the world’s largest DDoS attacks?
Microsoft the cash cow, please milk in your own yard and stop messing up with FOSS land, you have been evil, and that's hard to change, just leave FOSS alone.
You lost the OS war, from cloud to the phone, just get over with it.
If Nat is at the helm this may end up turning all right.
Anyway, I'm moving my personal repos to Gitlab and strongly considering moving my team's repos too. Specially considering that our bill will drop to $0.
If Microsoft wants to make Github better, it needs to improve the search functionality and maybe add a "related libraries" section when you're looking at a particular library.
That's odd. If you think GitHub was trustworthy before and it isn't anymore now, you've been proven wrong, because your dear GitHub has just sold you to Microsoft.
So Microsoft will gain access to thousands of private projects and will be able to use this knowledge in its own products. For so much knowledge acquired they got it for cheap...
I look at SoureForge's fall, and of all the possible futures for GitHub, is this really that bad? GitHub has been on a track to sell and/or monetize more aggressively for years. Of everyone that could afford GitHub, Microsoft has the money on hand to spend a bit of time figuring out a sustainable business model that doesn't run everyone off, and has doubled down on buying developer good will in the recent years.
My more personal take is: if you hate Microsoft's track record, you should have every other big software company at least as much. Were there really better realistic possibilities for GitHub?
HN prefers the original headline according to the guidelines, unless it's extremely poor/clickbaity. There's also been about sixty or seventy threads submitted with "Microsoft is acquiring GitHub" in the past day, so leaving it as the original makes it clear this is the official announcement post.
Will be moving everything over to some different server this evening. So damn happy that that's easily possible with the decentralized approach within Git.
TL-DR: Push GutHub Enterprise sales through existing Microsoft sales channels, and push Azure and related products to GitHub users.
The first doesn't matter to me. The second makes me think everything from "Add a .azure.ci.cfg file to your GitHub project to trigger builds, only $X/metric!" (not so bad) to "Advanced issue management available through MS Project 365 integration, please ask your project admin to subscribe to Office 365 to unlock!" (please, no...)
A large part of GitHub's appeal to the open source community was that all features were available for free to open source projects. If Microsoft wanted to make more features available for free to open-source projects, then Visual Studio Team Services would be a much, much different product, and Microsoft wouldn't need to acquire a platform that directly competes with their current product line.
It seems that lately Microsoft has been making decisions that are in line with computer science. Hope that continues, since their monopoly sets the direction of the desktop and servers, perhaps we will move toward a more secure environment.
Its ironic that the three men in the first picture are as uncomfortable and edgy as the developers are.
Can someone explain why this merger is bad, beyond the usual refrain "Microsoft is evil"? I mean, I rally want to understand what the fuss is all about. It isn't like all our repositories are locked in some proprietary GitHub format and now we are at the mercy of MS. As is happening, people can always migrate elsewhere, and there is always going to be an elsewhere.
Are people upset that they have to take the pains to migrate due to Microsoft's involvement? In that case, it begs the question why is it bad at all. Currently, with my trouble understanding this, it seems like a knee jerk reaction, like disgruntled Americans talking about migrating to Canada post Trump.
I've always maintained that Open Source is less an ideological movement opposed to capitalism than it is a different sort of contract for capitalist interactions.
Of course, it was inevitable that in order to survive Microsoft would adapt its business to utilize the kinds of interactions fostered by open source.
Acquiring Github represents the first attempt by Microsoft to own some of the culture of open source.
Microsoft is still very far behind in several key ways that the Github acquisition won't fix. But the acquisition signals a willingness to move in that direction. Some of these are:
- The "Microsoft account" is a hugely complicated mess, far more complex and unwieldy than a google account. This is a serious miss and it's not rocket science. Look at the places where users are having to reset passwords all the time, getting failed logins, incomplete profiles, etc. Those are major warts that should not exist.
- Microsoft should push hard for adoption of PowerShell on unix/linux, and if it fails at that task it should adopt bash as the main shell for Windows, sunsetting cmd.exe and PowerShell.
- Microsoft should figure out a way to provide integrated X Server (and next generation variants of X) support in Windows. There is a big opportunity to one-up OSX by doing this in an open way.
- Microsoft should offer all of the "pro" and "enterprise" features of Visual Studio free to all developers and should provide high quality command line based tooling to allow for seamless integration with other open source development tools.
- Microsoft should simplify and fix code signing and make available (for free) all tools and utilities and infrastructure for trusted software distribution across multiple platforms.
- Microsoft should make firm committments with respect to any APIs or Azure services in terms of life cycle, EOL committments, etc. This would be a big differentiator with Google.
- Microsoft should fully open source some of its products that are duds, such as outlook for ios, and let the community make them awesome.
I think the edge just means CDN edge locations. There’s been a trend towards making edge locations smarter (via Lambda etc), so you can sometimes send dynamic responses straight back from the edge, ie quicker than always deferring to the big data centre for dynamic stuff. Previously computing on the edge was restricted to fairly simple caching of static responses.
In some fields, 'edge' has long been used to refer to devices running in the real world - such as IP cameras and IoT devices that gather sensor data.
I used to work for a company that worked with security cameras, and they always used terms like 'edge analytics' to refer to software that's running on each individual camera as opposed to running somewhere central, like on the DVR the cameras are connected to or a server.
From what I've seen in Nadella's presentations at various events and conferences recently, he's using 'edge' in the same way. Lots of MS presentations about the intelligent edge have included things like training a neural network on Azure, and then pushing it out to IoT devices and phones so the NN is running on 'edge' devices and just transmitting results back to a central server.
Another way to think of it: if we were looking at a tree, servers/the cloud would be the trunk, the internet would be the branches, and edge devices like cameras, various IoT devices, and phones would be the leaves. They're out at the edge of the tree, interacting with the world.
It's the current hot buzzword. It's CDN++, where not just static content gets distributed but web applications get sharded/distributed around the globe to the nearest node to the end user.
Given the earlier statements that they "balked" at $5 billion, I'm guessing they wish they'd bought in earlier. I had figured with their CEO troubles, Microsoft might've negotiated a lower price.
Economics is not a zero-sum game. Just because the company is making money doesn't mean that you are losing something.
Github has been underwater for years, would you rather it be propped up by a big corporate sponsor that can subsidize its losses, or run out of money and die?
I expect to move, because I also do not trust microsoft, but I am not moving yet until I see what they do with it.
>If you are too late, you might not get your projects off without paying fees.
This thinking belies a misunderstanding of how Git works.
There is no way they can prevent a person from pushing to another repo and recreating whatever workflow they had on Github.
Remember that github is not just git hosting. While I cannot envision a future in which they'd actively prevent you from export/crawl out your own data, migrating your workflow is not as easy as changing your remote.
It's like a bunch of anarchists woke up to find that Kushner just bought the apartment building they were squatting in.
Github wasn't a Robin Hood scheme. They were never giving their finger to the man. Their goal was to make a lot of money, failing that, sell for a lot of money. We are lucky Oracle didn't buy them at least.
Given how many employers/recruiters want to see a GitHub account, I expect to see a lot of future LinkedIn integration.
I’m so tired of this trope. It’s like nothing Microsoft does is ever enough for people to realize that there is enough new leadership that isn’t doing this nonsense.
Is there any evidence in the Nadella years of MS doing this in the way they used to do this in the 90s?
Nadella has worked at MS long enough to have been there when the company was all-in on SCO vs Linux.
He's been there since 1992. That means that if he was so ethically challenged that he could sit through that without piping up that I have very little hope that there is a real and sincere change happening. Most of what I see is just very clever PR whilst under the hood not much has changed.
They just got a lot smarter about keeping their nastiness out of the public light. The reason why the 'trope' gets trotted out is because this could very well be the part where Microsoft finally gets to 'embrace' the open source world where they can hurt it for real. Keep in mind that nothing comes close to threatening Microsoft at its core business as open source software does.
This comes down to your definition of “core business”
Open source (LibreOffice) has never seriously threatened office for professionals so much as maybe google docs, and even then not so much. And they’ve made great moves towards subscriptions so that’s going strong.
Windows isn’t threatened so much by open source unless you talk about either Apple or chromebooks. Again, less about open source and more about the web.
They’ve already lost developer mindshare to open source culture. So they responded apppropriately by open sourcing their entire .NET platform, and actually using a useful license like Apache, not some murky custom commercial nonsense.
How do you suppose they’re going to start hurting the open source world? I’m all ears, especially given they’d have to sue companies like FB and Google.
Just because Nadella was there, it doesn’t mean he ran that operation that sued SCO. Otherwise that would’ve come out.
Plus with personalities like Bill Gates, they would clearly override any dissent.
So a new CEO and the established culture just automatically changes?
It’s not just that MSFT did what they did, but they established a culture that was cool with it and even came up with the ideas. How do we know they are no longer doing that? It’s not like they openly admitted to what they did in the 1990s...
What crown jewels are these? Windows? Office? Edge?
They're trying, they see the writing on the wall, it's foolish to not see that they're trying. I think it would be equally foolish to just whitewash away the sins of the past.
There isa definite change of tone in the modern Microsoft, but remember that they're still doing a lot of sketchy things. The ongoing patent trolling, or mandatory telemetry in Windows are examples.
Isn't that the usual course of a corporate acquisition? One business buys another, they make an announcement, nothing will change, and a year later the old thing is completely gone. Happens in all sorts of industries, it's not just Microsoft.
You're right on the first point. They aren't comparable. GitLab is a community driven, open core product that is far more powerful than GitHub. GitLab has an extremely robust CI system built in. In addition, you can even use them to create private Docker registries, which I find useful for creating my own private CI images. Plus, they have a better security model (5 tiers), wildcards for branch protection, and tag protection. I'm sure there's other places that they differ, but before you disparage a company, please be informed about who they are and how great their product actually is.
Why do people say "X and Y aren't comparable" and then proceed to compare them? :)
I'm not (only) trying to be pedantic here -- I'm just pointing out the loaded language. In both business models and product recommendations, people use the word "comparable" to justify their conclusions, rather than to explain their comparisons themselves.
It is all about framing a decision for a particular use case at a particular price point.
I guess you could say I'm the kind of person that can't help but notice that modern communication seems to be fraught with this pattern: let's state our conclusions without much justification and then choose our language minimize the "rationality" of alternatives. I think we can do better, as a community.
Part of it is due to an alternate definition of comparable, which is "of equivalent quality; worthy of comparison", as opposed to "able to be likened to another; similar". It's being used as shorthand for "they aren't equivalent", and then they go to justify that assessment.
I get your point though. The form and structure of the language used, consciously of subconsciously, often conveys quite a bit more information than the words themselves impart. Sometimes this is meant to communicate or subconsciously sway the reader, sometimes it's leakage of the writer's mental state.
Exactly. With this definition, the phrase "compare and contrast" makes much more sense. The point here was to leap frog the fact that GitHub and GitLab have very comparable feature sets, and instead highlight the things that GitLab has that GitHub is totally missing.
I find the argument that Gitlab is community driven a joke. They are not. And they never can. The community edition can never be ready for more than git hosting.
We were recently evaluating it, and found that basic needs like code reviews are not covered. And their hiding of LDAP Integration (luckily the extended community stepped in and duplicated their module) is a joke.
I don't get your point. GitLab has basic code reviews [1, 2] and LDAP support [3]. LDAP support is better in EE than in CE but that's expected. What is missing for you?
Not only can you do community-driven project development with Gitlab but the core product itself is also open source and community participation is encouraged. See:
#2 in Hackernews "GitLab sees huge spike in project imports" I see no reason to trust Microsoft, all they are really doing is trying to buy out any opposition as is what they have always done. Microsoft rips off developers and pays bloggers to say nice stuff about them. No thanks, not now not ever
Microsoft was part of the PRISM program. If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks. What if in some very specific cases you download dependencies from GitHub and they give you a different version with malicious code?
It's the NSA. They could be smart enough to only deploy those attacks on production servers were nobody is going to manually review npm packages.