I’m going to be a bit contrarian to “the sky is falling” posts on HN and say: I think Microsoft is handling this really well.
1) They’ve acknowledged the skepticism around the acquisition.
2) They’ve expressed their commitment to keep GitHub an independent platform (like they did with LinkedIn.)
3) Nat Friedman, although I was not familiar with him prior to this, seems like an ideal candidate to run GitHub.
This, overall, is giving me a more positive impression of Microsoft. Now what remains to be seen: Will they follow through on these commitments? Will they continue to listen to the community?
1. What is happening to Atom? I have tried VS code and don't really like it due to the difference in how the 2 systems are designed to work (Atom being more "plugins are king", VSCode being more "kitchen sink included by first-party"). I'd hate to see my favorite editor lose it's major backing. If MS makes a commitment to continue to develop Atom, or they work with someone else to "transfer" development over to them in a way that's not half-assed, it would go a LONG way toward solidifying the trust they are trying to build (at least to me).
2. How will other companies who are hosting on GitHub react to this? Will Facebook/Google/Apple start pulling their code from GitHub? Will we go back to having to learn how to contribute to each project individually?
There's definitely major benefits for diversity in this area (meaning not having the vast majority of projects on one platform), but I'm hoping we (as developers in whole) don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
GitHub has by most accounts helped bring in a renaissance of open source software. It's never been easier to contribute to FOSS at any level, and I'm hoping we don't lose that as everyone diversifies where they host their source code...
> Will Facebook/Google/Apple start pulling their code from GitHub?
For these companies who owned GitHub hardly plays a role. They want to attract developers and go wherever the crowds go. If there is mass migration to mercurial-superhost.com they will follow. It's just an outlet.
The question is more relevant for companies and communities who built their infrastructure on it and might worry for good or not so good reasons.
Bigger tech companies not only do not host important private source code on Github but won't even host on outsourced physical servers. Where I've worked (incl. well-known names), information that we wanted spread to the world could be hosted on trusted external systems (trust still mattered to keep it from being "edited"), but non-public info was always hosted inside a physical building that we owned watched 24/7 by human guards we employed.
Long before the acquisition, we've been hosting important stuff in private GitHub repositories. Including having strategic discussions in those private repositories.
We've also done a lot of that stuff in public too. Some might say a bit too much, given that we've had things leaked and/or misinterpreted w.r.t product direction in the past.
I still agree with your point, but I believe more of this sort of thing is happening. Lots of stuff that has no real reason to be private is just being open source by default.
> Long before the acquisition, we've been hosting important stuff in private GitHub repositories. Including having strategic discussions in those private repositories.
Wow! I am very surprised by that. Is that an officially allowed policy? Or is it something that is "don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness"?
Yes, it's absolutely an allowed policy. When we made .NET (Core) open source, we meant it. We still use email like any other org, but whenever we're working on our product we try to keep discussions on GitHub. It's also made collaboration with other teams far, far easier.
I assumed that Microsoft has security policies to ensure that all confidential information (e.g. non-open-source code and strategic discussions) is stored on infrastructure controlled by Microsoft.
The company I work at is very careful about keeping our intellectual property on our infrastructure, and I am surprised that a larger company like Microsoft doesn't have similar policies.
Microsoft aims to make most of its money in the immediate future by convincing every major business in the world to let MS host that company's email, internal documents, spreadsheets and powerpoints on Microsoft's office365 servers.
It would be highly contradictory for MS to take the position, as a matter of policy, that it is too risky for them to ever place confidential business data onto a third party cloud-hosted SaaS system, because that is precisely the risk they are asking every one of their customers to take.
Similarly, if you have concerns about putting your company's source code into GitHub now, you should be equally concerned about putting your company's prerelease annual report on the office365 onedrive.
My company is concerned about that as well. We don’t use any cloud storage from Microsoft or anyone else, and we self host Exchange and SharePoint servers.
That is a good point though, it’s becoming more and more inconvenient for a company to self host everything. Microsoft does stand to benefit from everyone becoming more accustomed to relying on 3rd party services in the cloud.
Better is relative - especially in one metric: many eggs in one basket make that basket exponentially more attractive to evil actors. Bigger attack surface and whatnot...
Flipside (pro-cloud pov): if the work to protect one egg applies to all eggs, then cloud providers will always hypothetically be able to spend more on security due to economies of scale
Essentially, choose your vulnerability: cloud provider single point of failure or in-house lack of resources
> I assumed that Microsoft has security policies to ensure that all confidential information (e.g. non-open-source code and strategic discussions) is stored on infrastructure controlled by Microsoft.
It depends on how important the code is.
I don't imagine MS will ever move Office or Windows to external servers, but a lot of other stuff is fair game.
Not entirely true. Microsoft puts (almost? Yet to find anything that isn't) all our code on VSTS which is accessible remotely, without VPN. I've checked in a (very very minor docs) fix to the Windows code base from my Android phone over LTE.
That's amazing. Contrast that to my friend who works on code at Apple that's so guarded that he can't even access it from Apple HQ. He has to travel to his office in an unmarked Apple bldg several miles from HQ (in an unmarked van) and access the code from inside the bldg. Any attempt to work on his code outside that bldg, on the Apple employee shuttle for example, will result in immediate firing with possible criminal charges. Admittedly, that's not the usual Apple employee, but the contrast between that and Microsoft's, which may as well be hosted on a set of Chinese night market DVDs, is LOL-worthy.
and yet, which company released an OS update with an open root account with no password, patched it in a way that broke file sharing, then a couple of months later released an update with another password bypass bug? Hobbling people with security theatre isn't begetting good or secure code.
This sounds proportionate if a state might go after the code. For example phone encryption might be a big prize for the Chinese or even American government.
Microsoft actually hand over OS code to states regularly for certain contracts so I figure they don't need to protect most of thier code like that.
I disagree. Phone encryption should ideally be open source-able and it's security should rely as entirely on a device specific key as possible.
I think this makes more sense for a secret project (e.x. the next iPhone), but honestly as a security person it seems overkill for anything outside national security responsible code, like state sponsored malware.
I also find it strange that the code is apparently somehow accessible outside that building (see the fired comment). If this was anything beyond security theatre, it'd be on an airgapped network and that wouldn't even be a concern (as the employee wouldn't be able to access the code from their laptop). Seems excessive for very little gain.
I wouldn't take SiVal's comment as ground truth. I think it conflates rules for general employees with rules for his friend, and mixes it with a dash of unfounded hyperbole (criminal charges?).
The code isn't available outside the building unless someone takes it outside, which they make clear is not only a fireable offense but might qualify as criminal. They made it quite clear: If you're in crunch mode, don't be tempted to just take a bit of work with you to get a bit more done on the long shuttle ride.
Fair enough. I obviously don't know your friend or his project, so I can't with certainty say anything about his situation. I viewed your post through a critical lens because the details given didn't match my experience or the experience of any of my old colleagues, and you are a second-hand witness.
If I was an intelligence agency, I would do the trivially obvious thing and only use "unmarked cars" when I didn't care about being spotted, and an actual nondescript vehicle the rest of the time.
> What's the difference between an "unmarked car" and a "nondescript vehicle" ?
Unmarked police cars often have multiple radio antennae, flexible lights, and even government plates, they simply lack explicit police markings and light bars.
Yeah, which is hosted on Azure, a data center that Microsoft owns and employs guards for, and secured behind our standard corporate authentication. :) (Source: I work at Microsoft, near the VSTS team.)
> Yeah, which is hosted on Azure, a data center that Microsoft owns and employs guards for, and secured behind our standard corporate authentication. :)
Way back when, Microsoft used to host a bunch of auth servers for banks. A friend of mine mentioned an armed guard in front of the data center for that particular service.
I've worked on teams at MS where there was a (non-armed) guard checking everyone who got off the elevator, but before I joined MS I was once left alone in a room full of computers open to the Windows source tree, wearing my "do not leave guest unattended" badge.
The only thing a VPN would do in this case is hiding that you're even accessing VSTS and providing modest proteaction against MitM attacks. You still have to use 2FA to log in, and the code you access is still logged.
VPN puts you on corpnet. And yes, I'm well familiar with our various account protection techniques (I work on the token server) - I was calling out that some companies trust their systems enough to make it remotely accessible, not saying it's a bad thing that I could be productive on the bus ride home.
As an owner of several Google org repos on GitHub, I can vouch that this is definitely true. Only open sourced code goes into GitHub. Private repos are only used for staging purposes thereof, i.e. getting a release of open source code ready prior to the world visibility bit being flipped.
We would definitely never store our proprietary code on systems run by anyone else, regardless of who runs/owns them.
Ah, I think that's how it's always been. What's the difference between me running my small company out of Azure, and keeping the source code in GitHub, now that Microsoft owns it?
Nothing changes immediately for any of us, to me the biggest concern is what happens after those roadmapped projects have run through. What goes next on that roadmap, and will it stick to the principles I love about GitHub, or will it start to veer into Microsoft's territory?
Oh, it's a stock thing? It makes more sense as Wall Street slang - in terms of the technological landscape, one of those companies is so obviously dissimilar to the others that the phrase makes little sense.
The acronym was coined in 2013 to describe the best-performing tech stocks at the time. Microsoft's resurgence hadn't really happened yet. The acronym was so convenient that no one's updated it except to add Apple (which didn't require a change in pronunciation).
I see Big Four (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) more often than FANG although that is obviously confusing on Wall St where that phrase usually refers to the large accounting firms. Apple is excluded because it is a hardware company not a software company although sometimes it is subbed in for one of the others, depending on who is using the phrase.
"For these companies who owned GitHub hardly plays a role. They want to attract developers and go wherever the crowds go. If there is mass migration to mercurial-superhost.com they will follow. It's just an outlet.
No-one's going to join a company because of which front end to git they use. It's more a question "do Apple/facebook etc want Microsoft to have all of their private source code to look for exploits/rip off/hand over the government etc etc"?
First, as pointed out elsewhere, the Apple/Facebooks of the world already aren't putting their private repos on any external service (perhaps they rent iron on a cloud, but certainly not SaaS).
Second, this is the same business model as Office 365, and I'm not aware of that raising any particular eyebrows outside of the fairly limited crowd that can't trust anyone. If you're cool with entrusting your email to Microsoft, your source code is not a great leap.
I could be wrong but my perception is that Atom is losing market share to VSCode all on its own– new devs are much more likely to adopt vscode & no growth ~= decline for an editor. Couple that with the fact that no one pays for Atom...
IMO They don't need to "kill" atom, they just need to wait a couple years, at which point it will just Yet Another Editor down the list with TextWrangler et al., if the next Atom doesn't come along and hasten its decline even further.
This sounds entirely anecdotal. I haven't seen any significant exodus from Atom to VSCode among people I interact with. It seems like folks moving from other editors are about as likely to choose Atom as VSCode, and the things that used to lead to people choosing one or the other (i.e. performance, VSCode only opening one project at a time, the stupid huge icon bar in VSCode, etc.) have been resolved...Atom is now reasonably fast, VSCode can open multiple projects and you can close the stupid bar. I tried them both and ended up with Atom (and vim, where I actually still do most of my work, but new JavaScript projects are in Atom).
Atom still has more plugins, or did last time I looked (which was, admittedly, quite a while ago), and I think the ecosystem is a good indicator of how many people are actively using something.
The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey [1] puts VSCode at almost double the number of developers compared to Atom (34.9% vs 18%). You're right about the package count: atom.io lists 7654 packages, compared to 6802 at marketplace.visualstudio.com, many of those being color themes (some seem generated and machine-published, too). That said, workflow for extension authoring in VSCode is amazing, the community is very much alive, and sometimes it almost feels like there's an "extension for everything". Quality may vary, naturally.
Wow, that's surprising. VSCode is not just (far) ahead of Atom, it's the leader on that survey. I'll have to give it another look. Last time I used it, it had far too many annoying characteristics.
I picked up emacs in 1993 when I first got my hands on a unix system, and it was the only thing there that made remotely any sense. Fast forward to 2018, I'm still using emacs, and the upside is I haven't had to learn anything new in the intervening 25 years.
I very much share the sentiment and I’ve been using Vim (recently Neovim) pretty much exclusively for the last ~20 years. But VS Code “just works” to such an extent that I’m seriously tempted to use it.
This was me basically 100%. If you're doing JS development, VSCode gives you so much out of the box it's hard to bring myself to even attempt to configure Vim to do all that, even if it is ""totally possible."" I miss the advanced text manipulation capabilities from vim (along with a few other things) but the upside of VSCode is just too great.
Fellow Atom user here. According to Lee Dohm, Open Source Community Manager at GitHub, "Atom remains key to GitHub. Our product roadmap is set, and the team will continue all of their work." [0]
A product roadmap is set until it changes. "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further".
Besides, Microsoft has enough PR skills to avoid unpleasant announcements about redundant products for a while after an acquisition they know to be worrying.
Until they aren't. I really don't see MS putting work into two code editors that are in direct competition with each other. I'm sure they'll let the dust settle for a while, but Atom will vanish from Microsoft's product list. No doubt.
I actually really like Visual Studio Code, I could imagine a great product coming out of the marriage of Code and Atom. I could also imagine infighting killing Atom, but I’ll try to be optimistic.
The really nasty changes always seem to come at the beginning of the second fiscal year after acquisition. So meet me back here in 18 months and we’ll talk.
Obviously Microsoft doesn't want or need two open source editors. I think the smart move would be what I call the Adobe strategy.
Github should announce that Atom has become an Apache foundation project. Github then says it will provide x number of developers for an initial three year period. Probably won't make everyone happy but it should defuse most of the angst.
You joke but, for the vast majority of projects, it's kind of true. It's gotten to the point where, if it's not out of incubator, I have a really hard time convincing any one of my colleagues to put any time into projects hosted there.
I've got a few friends that are still very involved in the Flex community which is now at the Apache foundation. Adobe if I remember correctly is still funding staffers to work on Flex many years later. I believe Flex is either the second or third most successful project at Apache in terms of downloads.
I talked to the flex team a couple of years ago - and they did not think this was possible. I wonder how complete it is. At the time they said though Actionscript claims to be ECMAScript it is far from Javascript in very fundamental concepts they are based on such as inheritance and encapsulation (AS) and closures (JS).
Funnily enough, this was my immediate concern, followed by Electron generally. It actually prompted me to go all-in on Vim: I've used Vim in terminals for a very long time, but never found a graphical Vim that I liked. Happily, I've now found Oni, which provides a VS Code-like interface around Neovim: https://www.onivim.io
Git hosting and the associated tools are replaceable, the strength of GitHub is the network effect, so we'll have to see what happens. Regardless of what happens, we've progressed a long way from Subversion and BugZilla, so I don't mind if projects move to a more diverse set of modern hosting. Personally, I'll put my own public repositories whereever the community goes.
Since they said Github will remain independent, so Atom will, I think. Maybe I'm too optimistic but when I think about VSCode's business model, promoting Azure rather than selling the editor itself, they have no reason to kill Atom. They might be integrating Azure with Atom.
While i'm confident that Atom will not "die" any time soon, if MS pulls the team that's currently working on new features and reassigns them, then at best it's going to be a large blow to the project.
A fork won't have the same team working on it, a fork won't have the same domain knowledge over the internals, a fork won't have the roadmap or what was currently planned and how to do it, a fork won't have the same unified development effort (if MS "kills" atom, FB won't be the only one picking it up, there will absolutely be others that won't like the direction FB is taking, and now you don't just have Atom, you have AtomFB, Atom2, NuAtom, etc...)
It won't be that big of a deal at the end of the day (it's not like there is a shortage of competition in this area), but I would be much more on-board with this if MS handles Atom well.
Nuclide (https://nuclide.io) is what FB uses/develops internally. I think even if the original team departs, they are going to be just fine. They could hire the original team right away if needed.
The way I see it, it's not worth the risk of Facebook forking it and essentially getting control of the community of developers who are using Atom. A better way to do it IMHO, as other people in the thread mentioned, is just integrating Microsoft products like Azure to promote their enterprise offerings (where they make their money).
Eventually, though, they might want to allow an easy transition to VS Code in some way to cut redundancies but doing it too soon would anger too many people. Atom seems to be losing market share anyways.
I'm curious if Electron will get a boost of some kind now. Considering how famous/notorious it is, MS could get a hell of a lot of goodwill here if they invest in the tech.
(consumer) Skype is famously Electron based. Microsoft has already been investing heavily in the project and I think we will see them double down on their commitment now that they own GitHub.
More likely, they will make the new, NEW Windows API essentially Electron. Instantly Electron apps run better on Windows because each app doesn't have its own browser runtime taking ip disk/RAM.
Or a common API where it uses Chakra on Windows and V8 everywhere else, until someone plugs in Webkit or some other engine for other OS'. Wishful thinking :)
My biggest concern is that the FBI has turned Microsoft into a "one-stop shop" for its National Security Letters, which at one point represented 40 percent of all the requests Microsoft got from the FBI.
How will Microsoft/GitHub handle such secret requests? Will Microsoft even sue the DoJ to stop it - or will they settle again the moment they obtain a small compromise from the government?
Contributing has always been different for each project and I don't see any real benefit by using github regarding that topic.
Biggest hurdles normally are:
- big chunk, own branch, small chunks?
- Contract to sign?
- signed commits, unsigned commits?
- changelog file?
- patch via mail?
- extra review tool?
...
In the end it's always a git push. Github only makes it look more beautiful.
> I had the impression VSCode had the technical superior plugin system
From my very limited exposure to VSCode's plugins, it seems they are a lot more limited in how they can change the editor's behavior compared to elisp code in Emacs[1]; if Atom plugins are similarly flexible, then I'm not sure you can say it's (strictly) technically superior if you can only implement a small subset of what you can do in competitor's system. At most it's better at some tasks and worse at others if this is the case.
[1] I didn't say "Emacs plugins" since there is no distinction between user-written elisp code and core editor elisp code and you don't need to create any plugin project or such, which I think makes for a much more organic and pleasant customization experience.
Technically superior could mean in this case that a rogue plugin does not affect the core editing experience. Having a fixed extension API, if the API is well done, could provide that.
You lose flexibility, you gain stability, discoverability, speed, etc.
And more relevantly to GitHub, they still use Azure and VS Code and Surface computers and XBoxes and keyboards and etc. etc. etc.
I don't expect Microsoft, as a company, "to go around snooping competitors' source code any more than they are going to go around snooping competitors' email" or Azure infrastructure or code editor or putting loggers in peripherals or any other tinfoil theories.
I _do_ expect some companies to reconsider their policies in light of the acquisition and decide that other options make more sense for them for numerous reasons, including but not limited to not wanting to hand (even more) money over to a competitor for a service they don't necessarily need Microsoft to provide to them, or if they suspect Microsoft will significantly change the existing ToU/ToS in ways those companies would rather not deal with.
I don’t understand your comment about Netflix using AWS. AFAIR, Netflix is a reference customer for AWS. Every re:invent is full of Netflix people. Care to elaborate?
> There's definitely major benefits for diversity in this area (meaning not having the vast majority of projects on one platform), but I'm hoping we (as developers in whole) don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
Perhaps tooling can help with this. Github, Bitbucket, and Gitlab (and I presume some of the lesser used solutions out there) all support some type of forking and pull request model, even though that's not core git. An abstraction layer atop that can hopefully obviate a hard dependency on one platform.
> 1. What is happening to Atom? I have tried VS code and don't really like it due to the difference in how the 2 systems are designed to work (Atom being more "plugins are king", VSCode being more "kitchen sink included by first-party"). I'd hate to see my favorite editor lose it's major backing. If MS makes a commitment to continue to develop Atom, or they work with someone else to "transfer" development over to them in a way that's not half-assed, it would go a LONG way toward solidifying the trust they are trying to build (at least to me).
> 2. How will other companies who are hosting on GitHub react to this? Will Facebook/Google/Apple start pulling their code from GitHub? Will we go back to having to learn how to contribute to each project individually?
> There's definitely major benefits for diversity in this area (meaning not having the vast majority of projects on one platform), but I'm hoping we (as developers in whole) don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
> GitHub has by most accounts helped bring in a renaissance of open source software. It's never been easier to contribute to FOSS at any level, and I'm hoping we don't lose that as everyone diversifies where they host their source code...
I started with sublime, went to atom, went back to sublime, and finally moved to vscode.. trust me you can't go wrong. It has everything and extensions.
I am however using this as an opportunity to rely on any one single place less.
I'm in the process of mirroring my git repos on GitLab, and trying to think of a way to signify that both the GitHub and GitLab repos are "canonical", and that issues/PRs/contributions can happen at both.
Because having one as master and one as slave is exactly the problem i'm trying to solve here.
I want both to be master, so that users who are comfortable on both platforms are willing to make contributions to the codebase, so that any one service/system going down won't stop development, and so that as the "community" migrates around different platforms they can always find the full version of the software.
Recommending simplifying a process to the point that it no longer solves the problem it's trying to solve isn't helpful.
Sorry if my comments haven't been helpful. But I don't think the problem you're trying to solve is tractable. I'd be very interested to hear of a solution that doesn't rely on locking and is immune to conflicts.
You might fake it (and meet your stated goals) by maintaining a true master behind the scenes and syncing to two public slaves... (ie, forks you treat as peers, each with a "master" branch) but that still leaves neither of them truly "canonical" -- a designation of authority that would apply to the place where you'd resolve conflicts given simultaneous commits.
If anything, that comment makes it clear to me that they're staying mobile because they don't implicitly or explicitly trust any of the current providers.
I think if they implicitly trusted someone, they'd just migrate to them immediately - why wouldn't you?
The reason you can trust Atlassian a bit more because they have more narrow focus on dev tools so less chances that they could become a competitor. Unless you’re developing another (git/bit)(hub/lab/bucket)
Yes same here. I’m really surprised by all the Microsoft hate as if we were still in the 80-90’s. MS is one of the biggest open source contributors nowadays.
It's also really weird how people idealize GitHub. Did they forget GitHub was not a non-profit association, they were losing money, they deleted users repositories on their own, they had management issues, and people have been waiting some features for very long, specially open source maintainers? Also GitHub "forced" a lot of organizations to migrate somewhere else when they changed their pricing model[1].
Moreover, although I agree Microsoft is making efforts to change [1], pro-Microsoft partisans make it clear much of this is due to the new CEO. What one CEO does, another can undo. GitHub's bus factor is now 1.
I would much rather have seen them go public. They were losing money, but not, last I saw, at a rate that was absurd for building a SaaS business. Is there some reason to think they couldn't have gotten into the black? And if so, is there some reason to think Microsoft will let them burn cash forever without getting anything valuable in return?
Previously, GitHub's success depended on GitHub serving their customers and users. Now it depends on the notions of some guy in Seattle. Some guy whose job is, at least by market cap, 99% focused on other things. It's reasonable for customers to worry about that.
I think the biggest thing suggesting they couldn't have gotten into the black is the fact that they had been looking for a CEO for 10 months and still hadn't found someone. I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't find anyone, perhaps they were just being picky, but it certainly didn't look good.
Or it could be that the board has been looking to sell the company for that period and nobody wanted to come on to be the CEO for 20 minutes before being replaced by somebody from the acquirer. Hard to say.
You're acting as if the opensource initiative in MS of late is down to Nadella and nothing else. It's much more a case of market forces changing and an acceptance of opensource within corporations.
If they are merely yielding to market forces, then that's not much of a comfort. Github was a leader in this, and Microsoft's customers have a strong bias toward followers and laggards.
I completely agree with that as a general principle, and I don't disagree with anything you've said outside of this quote. But are you suggesting that Nadella is going to leave Microsoft anytime soon?
Buses are not big respecters of stock price, and what goes up can come down. Microsoft's numbers could get squishy for a number of reasons unrelated to open source efforts, and a revenue dip could either mean a new CEO or some quick cuts to things that aren't producing a lot of short-term profit.
GitHub's success as an ongoing concern was based on their investors willing to keep giving them more money or alternatively the public market giving them more money until they could become profitable.
We don't know how far they were from being profitable. But even unprofitability is not a big problem these days. E.g., Okta IPOed in the red with explicit plans to keep losing money for the foreseeable future.
Github was making over $200m/year, and was poised for strong growth in enterprises as they got with the times. I expect they could have gotten to GAAP profitability whenever they needed to. But they should have kept spending on growth to maximize market share.
How does being profitable and IPOing stop a company from being an acquisition target (see LinkedIn)? Just like the private investors could be swayed by a tempting acquisition offer so can public investors.
The only way that you guard against being an acquisition target is to remain private and not take money from outside investors.
Even with best intentions from both sides, acquisitions don't go well in a lot of cases.
It's quite common to have the following scheme:
1) nothing significant happens for 1 to 2 years, the big company slowly integrates the smaller one.
2) historical dev/ops starts to be tired of the heaviness of the processes and all the politics going on in the big organization. After 3 to 4 years, they start leaving, and knowledge begins slowly to get lost.
3) new features are slower to be pushed in production, often with major regressions.
4) after 5 years the service is becoming more and more unstable and/or is not evolving anymore.
5) after 7 to 10 years, the product is killed-off or put in limbo.
Yeah, but most of that happens whether or not your product is acquired or not. Acquisition may, and often does, accelerate the process, but almost every application eventually suffers from loss of focus, feature bloat, and changes within the industry. Those that don't tend to stagnate completely and get replaced when someone re-invents the wheel from the ground up with a few improvements. I mean, forget that happening to GitHub, that will probably happen to git in 10 years or so.
> MS is one of the biggest open source contributors nowadays.
Really? For its size? It seems like Google, Apple, and Facebook are all much more productive in OSS. The only open source Microsoft product I'm aware of using is VS Code. To my understanding, they haven't open sourced Edge, their JS engine, their compiler, their word processors, or really anything else of note. I guess I can give them a little credit for .NET Core, but would that even have happened of Mono hadn't existed?
I stand corrected, thanks! I still have a sense that they are rather less proportionately open source than those other companies, but less so than before.
Skype for Business is really, really bad on MacOS. Half of the time i'm trying to use it, messages don't get sent with an error message. Sometimes they do get sent but i still get an error message.
Skype on MacOS tends to get stuck in some loop that eats my CPU. So does MS Excel. MS Excel also had other, very annoying issues in the not so distant past.
Sure, as a MacOS user i'm maybe not that important to MSFT, but the quality of some of their products is surprisingly low.
No i had a different issue. I think it was after hard resets when excel goes "do you want me to restore the stuff i had open before?"
I would ignore this for a while (since plenty of other apps would also start up again) and then wonder what is eating my CPU. Surprise surprise, it's an Excel message box.
but what if we don't use outlook - not everyone does. this is at the fundamental heart of the problem with Microsoft (Apple is just as guilty, btw). It is the "hey, we have a nice ecosystem - everyone should use it" viewpoint. As a developer and consultant - I will decide which tools are appropriate and best for the job at hand, not something dictated by corporate marketing. Skype has gotten much worse since Microsoft acquired them. Every time I start Skype I have to update it and its not as stable as it once was, especially on OSX
And now Microsoft is going to solve all those problems? This'll be interesting to see how it plays out, but all of these issues are not confidence inspiring.
> Nat Friedman, although I was not familiar with him prior to this, seems like an ideal candidate to run GitHub.
Nat Friedman is a legend in the open source community. He founded Ximian in '99 with Miguel de Icaza, who both meant a lot for the Gnome community (e.g. via products such as Ximian Evolution) and Mono (FOSS .NET for *NIX). They got bought by Novell where he also got a top position. Nat has been busy with FOSS for a long time, and he _believes_ in it.
Some verification on the above plus other details can be found here on Wikipedia [1]
As a final note, "I’m not asking for your trust, but I’m committed to earning it." is very humble, professional, and clever.
He is the perfect transition guy, who is likely going to be replaced in a few years time when MS decide they want to capitalize on the money they spend on a un-profitable but popular service.
Which is a pattern we have seen from their takeover of hotmail and more recently with skype, where they also waited a few years before starting the transition from independent brand to a sub brand under one of Microsoft estates.
What you are going to see when MS is done integrating the leadership of github into MSFT and Nat have been replaced by a next phase CEO, is that githubs CI hooks will become more and more symbiotic with azure, and the a lot of the documentation tools offered will hook directly into office365 tools, which will require a synchronization of accounts with MS other SaaS offerings.
I think everyone can agree that Microsoft is going to push Azure very hard once they start sinking their teeth into GitHub-- that's not surprising.
However, I'm very skeptical about the idea that GitHub is going to somehow become an Azure-only walled garden. It makes little sense business-wise. The entire point of buying GitHub was to acquire an audience that they are aware is not necessarily interested in Azure or their stack. Forcing it on them will only cause them to leave (there is plenty of competition in the code hosting space now), which will in turn reduce revenue. I give MS enough credit to know that the only way they succeed in this space is to provide value, not vendor lock-in. This is true now, and it will be even more true in 5 years when other big companies inevitably start following Microsoft into this space and competing for market share.
If they wanted to just sell services to people already using MS products, they already had VSTS for that.
I’ve seen many acquisitions commit to 2) only to slowly walk back from that “in the interests of operational efficiencies”. And next thing you know you have to change over to using a Microsoft account to log in...
Having seen a big Microsoft acquisition from the inside, I can also tell you that this dynamic occurs:
Microsoft is a gigantic organisation with very good working conditions. This leads to people with very long tenures working in highly defined and specialised roles within the company. Career development does happen, and is actively encouraged by Microsoft, but you're usually moving into a role which is just as niche as your last.
When a major acquisition occurs of a smaller organisation, it's usually done with a promise of keeping independent leadership and a degree of organisational separation. However, as middle-management staff rotate out of the smaller company naturally, the roles that they vacate are very attractive to Microsoft employees who want to have a bit more of that start-up feeling, and a slightly wider remit to make change.
So through a kind of organisational osmotic pressure, even if the leadership of the acquired company remains independent, the middle ranks of the acquired company become permeated by life-long Microsoft-ers. None of this is particularly bad - I just want to make it clear that Microsoft's definition of independence is not everyone's definition thereof.
I actually just made a bet with a friend on whether or not they'd switch GitHub over to Microsoft logins. My strong bet (that I put money behind) is that they won't. They're specifically acquiring this to win over developers and community, and they should hopefully know from the Skype transition how much negative perception that granted them.
Their absolute best bet is to sit on GitHub, feed it money, offer the paid features as an additional perk for MSDN subscribers through an account linking method, and call it a day. The developer goodwill they can buy being a good steward of GitHub far surpasses any other value they could extract from it.
Microsoft has you use a Microsoft account to sign into Windows itself; I think they will merge Github in somehow. They might be trying to win over developers, but they'll want to cross-sell to MS ecosystem developers as well.
Starting with "any existing Microsoft account is now a valid Github login". Then maybe "you can more easily use VS (or VS Code) with Github and deploy to Azure, if you use a Microsoft account with Github" and "you can merge your Github account into your Microsoft account". Then "all new accounts on Github are Microsoft accounts, you can no longer make a separate one".
Whether they go all the way to "there's no such thing as a separate Github account anymore", not soon, but probably one day - they've been trying to centralize accounts between all their services for years and years, haven't they?
It's already trivial to host on GitHub and deploy on Azure using Visual Studio Team Services - in your deployment pipeline you choose github as your source repository instead of the built in git repo that's part of VSTS. It works using web hooks just like every other CI/CD tool.
On Skype, when they migrated to MS accounts, I’ve lost 2/3 of my contacts list and tried contacting support but they wouldn’t admit it, blaming me with a line like “you must be having another Skype account”.
After several retries to talk to them and maybe get somebody more technical on the line, I just gave up and being disappointed I simply gave up on Skype altogether – thankfully it has fallen out of favor at work too.
Skype has been a monumental fuck up and just thinking about it on a thread about GitHub being acquired makes me sad.
Yeah, we went with three years (after close of the acquisition). If we didn't have a timeframe, I'd never get paid. :O I'd be inclined to pay my friend back if it happened sometime reasonably thereafter though.
...which one year is a Microsoft account, the next it's live.com, then msn.com, then passport.com, then outlook.com. And what about that 20-year old MSDN account, which was always associated with Hotmail? You can login but it hangs on some obscure error message. Googling suggest to associate with a non-Hotmail address, but that one doesn't let me access MSDN subscriptions. Next forum suggestion: create a VisualStudio.com login and link with Live.com... but it still doesn't work. Several support emails later, I just need to delete all existing associated MSDN email accounts and start over with my work email address. I just wonder how long until I need to migrate again to the next email/login-flavor-of-the-year. Maybe I'm just an edge case?
What would be wrong having a Microsoft account to log in exactly? They aren't getting any more information from you then they have currently purchased. I remember when I had a YouTube account, a blogger account and a Google account and I am glad I just use one google account myself.
Because it’s an indicator of a loss of independence. And if you went through the Skype changeover you’ll know exactly what a fiasco that change to a Microsoft account was.
You mean from 2011 when Microsoft had totally different management and business model? I don't see the Steve Ballmer Microsoft has much bearing on today's Microsoft.
Also it wasn't the Microsoft Account change as much as the they had the weird MS Store or Local account sign in options. I removed the Store sign in and only used local and had no issues. Am I missing something?
Jesus Christ. Is everyone here a teenager? Microsoft in the 80s might bot be a valid comparison today, but something that happened 6 years ago is barely yesterday. Institutions do not change that much that quickly.
Microsoft 15 minutes ago isn't the Microsoft of today is just as true a statement and one just as vacuous.
I'm closer to 50 and certainly not a teenager. Yes, Steve was the issue and his style was old fashion. There is no going back once you open up the shed. Why do people continue to want to punish a company for their past when their present has been so good? To keep punishing them and not rewarding them for their good deeds?
P.S. I thought the whole anti-OpenSUSE movement was also plain old stupid.
So Windows 10 isn't leaps and bounds better than Windows 7 or Windows 98???? Seriously Windows 10 is the first Windows I have ever actually liked. I got my OpenSUSE terminal open and using ranger and my other terminal programs working in Windows (At work I have to have Windows due to many issues on one computer)
> Forcing their shitty updates, (and restarts) at the most inconvenient times
Weird I have a pop up that says there is an update coming and when do I want to schedule it....
>Putting adverts directly into their OS (which people pay for by the way)
Didn't care for it and I hit the disable on 3 switches
> making it impossible to permanently and easily turn off telemetry
They did push out an update over a year ago that makes it so you don't have to use the tools that were out since 2015. Telemetry was specific for Inside program and beta but I certainly see why people were freaking out. I looked at what was being collected and it seemed fine for me.
So you haven't been getting the Candy Crush Saga, One Office trial, et al. games/software installed to the top of your "Start Menu" after every major OS update? It's only 2 clicks per app. And I'm sure it's part of why the last big update took 2 hours to finish (with only a warning, this may take a while... good thing my deadline was the next day and not in 2 hours... still ended up being a very long night, since the update broke other things). Also this last major update (Content Creator?) bricked a bunch of PCs... I had to do a "system reset" with USB stick to get things moving again.. but I'm still getting BSOD about once a week since then.
What about them mucking up the Spectre/Meltdown patches which bricked a bunch of PCs? In my case I wasn't bricked but I had to rollback a patch.
What about re-enabling of disabled services (e.g. Firewall, Defender) after some updates?
Going back a couple years ago, what about downloading/pre-loading Windows 10 on Windows 7/8 computers, without the user asking first? Can we forgive them for that? It used up several GB of space and burned sometimes expensive bandwidth? Happened to my laptop while I was traveling, I only noticed after I started getting low disk space warnings.
If I had a real list of the all the actual problems I've ever encountered with Windows, Windows 10 is definitely approaching Windows ME levels of incompetence.
Maybe some of us are just having more issues because we have unique hardware configurations which don't play well with Microsoft's newest foray into OS experimentation. Or perhaps our expectations are too high?
On my evil list Micrisoft is better than Google and Facebook. But worse than Github. If I heard Microsoft was buying Oracle I'd be dancing in the streets.
Microsoft accounts are a trainwreck... I've got at least three or four of them all with the same email address, and despite years of effort to link them together and consolidate, I still have to use all of them to log into different services and access different resources. The permissioning on things like Azure and VSTS doesn't make a lick of sense.
I began the process of creating an Azure account recently and somehow the Canada region was selected. The system locked my email address into Canada even though I already have a US region live account with the same email address. Since I don't have a Canadian zip code, I can't submit billing information and complete the provisioning process. I was willing to try Azure for a new project, but now I'm not because their accounts are such a mess. I talked with a project support technician for Azure who actually understood the issue but was unable to resolve it suggestion I use a different email address. I know I could, but on principle I won't.
I'm actually really excited about MS+GitHub, but have to agree the account situation sucks.
Google kind of managed to force most accounts together. ;-)
In the process it seems they managed to seriously undermine their new, really really nice social network by using the same name for that and now me and a few others have a nice social network all to ourselves :-\
I've felt similar. There's been some impressive innovation from MS in the dev space recently: VS Code is a pleasure to use, Azure wasn't quite as intimidating as AWS can be (but who can blame them, AWS has a lot more legacy). Windows 10 was pleasant to work with, telemetry issues aside. Things are shifting.
In fact, I think there's a strong 'once a criminal, always a criminal' mentality that takes a healthy skepticism to an unreasonable level. At least with the benefit of the doubt you can be wary of what Microsoft's intentions really are, but I don't think it's productive to go 20 years into the past and pretend that absolutely nothing has changed since, and rehashing everything from that time as if it only happened yesterday. It's an unreasonable standard and if nothing else, it presents the self-fulfilling prophecy where you're only satisfied once you've found proof that Microsoft today hasn't changed at all. So you've practically doomed GitHub to fail post-acquisition because you've already decided it _will_.
I'm not sure why you'd want that. So on that level I hope that Microsoft doesn't betray the gigantic community that has built around GitHub, which itself has taken open source to a whole new level. It's an appeal to emotion, I know, but I just don't see the value in being straight up negative in the light of recent evidence that suggests the contrary. You would never hold yourself to such an unforgiving standard (unless you wanted to sacrifice yourself on the altar), so it's better to give it a chance instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
(Secretly, I'd love it if they, for example, rethought the pricing strategy and offered free private repos the same as every competitor does.)
That said, it's a little worrying that tech is continuing to consolidate around the giants.
> It's an unreasonable standard and if nothing else, it presents the self-fulfilling prophecy where you're only satisfied once you've found proof that Microsoft today hasn't changed at all.
That's a good general point; if you find you dislike someone's POV or behavior, and you're not simply being tribalistic, you should be thinking along the lines of, "what do I want this person / group to do differently?"
Microsoft has been embracing and extending Git for a while, and now they have bought captive users who are going to use whatever Microsoft tells them to use just to keep their code on Github and avoid a difficult migration.
They clearly have greater ambitions than increasing Visual Studio sales. For example, what about forced integration of LinkedIn with personal Github repositories?
I'm not sure what these facts are based on, but to make something clear, 'embracing and extending' is practically the definition of open source and how you contribute. 'Extending' here is a synonym for contributing. Embracing is good, extending and improving is good. You just put Microsoft in there and suddenly it's not. It's stupid.
So in all that, you're waiting on the extinguish step where WinGit comes out and blows away Git, Github, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. etc. etc. because you cannot possibly maintain a modern git repo unless you're running it on Windows. Only MS are building Linux based cloud infrastructure so it's not even loyalty to their past anymore.
Never mind the fact that 'extinguish' blew up in MS' face and their attempts to monopolise the internet ensured they never would. Firefox and Chrome are direct products of that particular power grab, so is the shitty reputation MS has, so is the existence of Edge to get away from the Internet Explorer branding. Why even bother trying all of that again?
Okay, this is my greatest concern with Linkedin and Github. For many (most?) dev job applications, not having a 'ticks all boxes' profile on both sites means pass on initial callback; and now MS controls both. What they purchased for so much $$ is industry branding mindshare.
I really can't think of a better large tech company to buy GitHub (Which has been closed sourced since creation and I don't know why people are so scared). Now Oracle would make me put on my tin foil hat on immediately and deleting of my account.
Not steal source code, but platform companies have been known to use their insight into platform user metrics as a source of competitive intelligence metrics. Knowing which private repos are large and active is valuable info.
What if? What if I run an operating system project, IDE project, email client, etc.? MSFT is going to steal or shutdown every type of software that competes with one of their products?
The amount Microsoft would have to lose - in courts and public trust - if they were to abuse the private sensitive data held in their systems - would massively outweigh any benefit they could hope to achieve from that information.
They're still in business. Numbers look good. They also have advertising and telemetry on paid stuff that people would usually assume doesn't sell them out like free, ad-driven services. Windows, Office, and Xbox are valuable enough that customers will tolerate quite a lot before leaving.
>"What if?
What if I run an operating system project, IDE project, email client, etc.? MSFT is going to steal or shutdown every type of software that competes with one of their products?"
Doesn't add up to me.
It doesn't matter.
The "what if?" is enough to cause a chilling effect. This will be the effective death of GitHub. I'm certain projects that are all-in on the platform will stick around out of momentum. But yesterday was the last day anyone would ever consider starting a new major project on GitHub.
Yes. Financial stability and conflict of interest are two orthogonal issues.
The worst case scenario with Github closing the door, assuming no heads up, is that you'd lose your issues and PR. You have your git history on a bunch of machines (your devs + you should really have a dedicated backup).
The worst case scenario with Microsoft having visibility of your "closed" source code is that they take a peek at it and implement a better faster more integrated version of them in their own product competing with you, or heck even copy/paste your code. What can you do about it? How could you prove it? Remember, they can afford orders of magnitude more number of lawyer hours than you.
Yes. 100% yes. Microsoft didn't care about their reputation for a long time. They currently do, at least a little, but that could change back.
Github was losing money, but that's pretty typical for SaaS businesses. I have no reason to think they couldn't have gotten to break-even. And if the can't get to break even, I have no reason to think Microsoft will subsidize them indefinitely.
I still think Microsoft had the lion share of the programmers mind with Virtual Studio? I am guessing it really has more to do with emotional response to the name MS then anything MS has done in the past 5 years.
I use Bit Bucket because I knew they were making money and were solvent and I knew GitHub was just waiting for a big pay day. BOY was I wrong with the timing and the amount.
> And if the can't get to break even, I have no reason to think Microsoft will subsidize them indefinitely.
This fits perfectly with their developer system with Virtual Studio, VS Code and Azure. I can't see how this isn't a great buy for them and their ecco-system.
That's not just a scummy breach of trust though, that's a blatantly illegal breach of trust. Source code is a trade secret. Copying it without permission is corporate espionage. People would go to jail if they tried. You are asserting that Microsoft's intentions are criminal.
I would argue that the case here is quite the opposite.
Github is loved for a variety of reasons, small & large decisions that are influenced by how profit-oriented the company is. And how willing they are to annoy their users to squeeze some more "profit" and/or data out of them.
What's the evidence that Github was loosing money? Their first (and only, AFAIK) round was with Andreesen Horowitz for $100 million, many years after they had already become the go-to host for open source projects. Before that round the company was bootstrapped with personal funds.
Contrarily, all I've seen is people making quantified statements of support.
What I haven't seen is a moralistic rejection. Microsoft tried to kill Windows gaming, they tried to kill Linux, they tried to kill Firefox, and countless other things. Their operating system design is nearly abusive and even their open source development (tracking, licensing) has been lined with traps. I want nothing more than for them to disappear, and if them buying a $7B company which ends up with 0 users is one step on that path then I absolutely support it.
It has nothing to do with whether they promise they won't do bad things _this_ time, or whether they claim they'll be independent (they're clearly not independent - Microsoft now owns Github).
Treating large companies as Manichean monolithic entities is unhealthy. Microsoft like every large company has bright spots and dim spots, good leaders and bad leaders, good ideas and bad ones. They're complex and so your relationship with them should be, too.
As an argument, this comment is terribly myopic and naive. As a mirror it's fascinating.
Companies exist to make profit. As long as that is their purpose they have no interest in me as a person and I shouldn't have an interest in them as a large group of individuals. If t would be called an abusive relationship of it was real humans. It would be like a pimp and his lady, he has a genuine interest in her as longnas she is earning money, none when she doesn't. I know USA says that legally speaking corporations are people but I don't believe it for one second.
Huh? If you mean "gaming on Windows", I can't imagine how that could possibly be true, and if they tried, either nobody got the memo or they did a really bad job at trying. PC gaming has always been defacto Windows gaming. If you mean "Windows Games", that's still a thing, they're just integrating closer with their XBox platform, which makes perfect sense given that XBox is integrating closer with Windows 10 from the other side.
> they tried to kill Firefox
So did Google (they're still trying). So did Apple. Are you holding grudges against either of them?
> Their operating system design is nearly abusive
Heavily subjective. Windows has had its regressive moments, but overall it's consistently been more usable than anything on the market. 95 was a joy, 98 was a joy, XP was a joy, Vista was bad, 7 was a joy, 8 was bad, 10 is amazing. Compare that to MacOS* which only started competing with OSX and peaked at 10.5 (Leopard) and has been basically going slowly downhill since, with regressive behaviors, hostility to anyone that doesn't want to live in their walled garden, hostility to legacy software (many Windows XP programs still run perfectly with explicit compatibility settings, meanwhile OSX barely supports apps that are built for 3 major releases back-- that's only 3 years of support) and deprecation/removal of core OS APIs with zero intention to replace them. You want abusive? Try developing on a platform that competes against its own developer community and keeps APIs private for competitive advantage. Try developing on a platform that strong-arms you into paying yearly fees just so you can deploy applications that work out of the box on client machines. Comparatively, Apple has been much more hostile to developer communities than Microsoft ever has.
> I want nothing more than for them to disappear
Clear indication of an unhealthy long-kept grudge. Even if Microsoft has done all the things you claim, you don't really have a moral high ground if you're sitting there rooting for their failure. You can feel free to not use their products, but to want them and all of their customers to fail because you don't like what they've done in the past isn't really a "moralistic" viewpoint, it's just brooding.
...and you're going to have to move past the brooding if you want to make it to Acceptance.
You are getting triggered by GP. And ironically, you are doing exactly what GP was doing but against Apple.
>Windows has had its regressive moments, but overall it's consistently been more usable than anything on the market. 95 was a joy, 98 was a joy, XP was a joy, Vista was bad, 7 was a joy, 8 was bad, 10 is amazing. Compare that to MacOS* which only started competing with OSX and peaked at 10.5 (Leopard) and has been basically going slowly downhill since, with regressive behaviors,
What you said about Windows is also true about macOS. There have been some regressive behaviours in the recent past but overall macOS is no more inconsistent than Windows 10. You might quickly point out about "plain text passwords" in macOS but if you look at the macro scale, Apple screws up not much more than Google or Microsoft or Amazon etc. Amazon has fat fingered systems shutting down half of the internet. Microsoft has managed to create updated which wipe out users data or fail spectacularly on certain popular SSDs. If you want to really roast companies on "regression in software", the whole of silicon valley will fall like a house of cards.
>hostility to anyone that doesn't want to live in their walled garden,
Not true. macOS is very permissive otherwise things like Little Snitch, Alfred won't exist. You cannot compare with iOS because Microsoft no longer has a competing product.
>hostility to legacy software (many Windows XP programs still run perfectly with explicit compatibility settings,
Different design philosophy doesn't mean it's wrong or hostile. By that same metric, Linux can't be arsed to give a stable ABI. Windows gives a damn about legacy, Apple doesn't and Linux is some whole another shit. And why is this really a problem in macOS? Most of the devs upgrade software to run on latest OS and really don't have problems.
>meanwhile OSX barely supports apps that are built for 3 major releases back-- that's only 3 years of support)
Exaggeration. A lot of stuff from Snow Leopard days still work on High Sierra. Most apps still have support from the time of Mavericks. 5-8 years is a long time in technology and is a very reasonable balance between future of software and past compatibility. And honestly where does the line end? If you want legacy, why don't you ask Microsoft to support software from the 80s out of the box?
>deprecation/removal of core OS APIs with zero intention to replace them
Examples? Only profound one, which directly impacts user that I can think of, is the changes in PDF handling in preview.
>Try developing on a platform that competes against its own developer community and keeps APIs private for competitive advantage
Every company does? Google, Amazon, Microsoft? Google and Microsoft have their own set of productivity apps for platforms just like Apple? They are also closed source, have private APIs which only they have access to.
>Try developing on a platform that strong-arms you into paying yearly fees just so you can deploy applications that work out of the box on client machines.
Not on macOS. Again, iOS is not the point of comparison. Compared to Windows, macOS is no more restrictive. Tons of developers sell mac software using fastspring and deploy updates using Sparkle framework - thus completely bypassing the mac app store.
>Comparatively, Apple has been much more hostile to developer communities than Microsoft ever has.
I don't think so. Apple may not be very proactive compared to Microsoft and Google AND it may not be as permissive as the former but calling them as "hostile" is too strong of a word.
IRONICALLY, you are railing against Apple on pretty much the same logic as GP was railing against Microsoft.
I agree that people are overreacting, but I think the overreacting is good for git in general. It helps smaller players (Gitlab, etc.) to break the monopoly of Github, and reverse the wrong conception a lot of new developers have that git == github. Remember git is supposed to be decentralized? In reality it's actually centralized on github, and github is becoming the single point of failure on the developer world, which is not great. (Google actually has an internal mirror of github[1] for that reason)
[1] It's only for public projects with a license that doesn't prohibit Google from mirroring it, and only for projects Google depends on.
> It helps smaller players (Gitlab, etc.) to break the monopoly of Github
Or do the opposite. If Microsoft decides to make private repos on GitHub free, I can see VERY big issues for other players. I suspect more people use GitHub alternatives for cost reasons, rather than ideological ones.
Microsoft currently offering free private repos and them acquiring GitHub may be quite telling. I don't think people fully realize what kind name recognition GitHub has, on the Git hosting space.
When Microsoft shutdown their competing product to GitHub, I think they had like 200 active users. Compare that to GitHub, which had millions of active users. Maybe this is the same with private repos. That is, the number of paying GitHub customers is an order of a magnitude more than free VSTS customers.
I really think Microsoft wants what Amazon has and if they can funnel GitHub users to their cloud service, this acquisition will become a no brainer. Plus, the data that GitHub is able to gather from issue conversations, code reviews, etc. may well prove critical for ML/AI research, that can help Microsoft develop intelligent software tools.
Ok, but VSTS isn't GitHub. GitHub's UX is solidly above its competitors, and I would tend to agree that the primary reason for looking elsewhere is price.
It is a single point of failure for devs around the world. Remember the attack on Dyn DNS? Thousands and millions of devs stopped working because GH was down.
People who have known Microsoft and struggle with their tech and unfair practices in the 90s are skeptic because we have seen this movie already.
How many "new Microsoft" have we seen already?
"Will they follow through on these commitments? Will they continue to listen to the community?"
No and no. Microsoft is not in the business of making good software, it is a PR firm, an awesome marketing department with tons of experience in shady practices, and the bare minimum dev team to make Windows somewhat competitive.
Microsoft is a big company with a big NIH syndrome. Github is antinomic with their culture.
I too was around in IT in the 90's, but I have a different take.
To me Microsoft under Nadella have changed substantially. they're more open and more collaborative. Sure they want to make money, but that's a given for a corporation.
As to NIH, well I was at KubeConEU and the Microsoft engineers on the Microsoft stand were running Macbooks, and the Microsoft Keynote speaker was running an Ubuntu desktop, so it maybe isn't quite as cast-iron as it used to be.
What is baffling for me, is how worried some people seem to be. If you understand the Git hosting space, you would know Microsoft tried to compete with GitHub and failed miserably.
It is quite clear the value that GitHub provides is data and there is ABSOLUTELY no way Microsoft would want to disturb this. In fact, Bitbucket, GitLab and others should be concerned that Microsoft might treat GitHub as a loss leader and provide private repos for free.
I think Microsoft can really help GitHub in the Enterprise space. Imagine GitHub being able to offer GitHub Enterprise for free for the first 10 users. Imagine being able to discount GitHub Enterprise heavily.
I guess the question is who will hurt the most. Will this hurt non microsoft products more or less. Microsoft might want to funnel people to their cloud and sacrificing tfs might make sense.
I'm looking into Bitbucket right now, actually, and "unlimited private repos" is the first selling point listed on their pricing page (https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing). What I haven't been able to discover yet is what they charge for public repos, which are all I care about.
I cant understand this policy from Atlassian - if they arent going to try and become the next default OSS Git repo service on the back of this aquisition they need to fire their strategy team.
People should get to know who Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President [Scott Guthrie] is. GitHub will be under his watch and all these years he has done nothing but wonders for the developers and the brand.
Folks tend to forget about Scott Guthrie (and Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, Scott Galloway and a few other unsung heros) and the change he seeded within MS's DevDiv about moving to a more open culture back around 2005/6.
Don't know about that; I worked for DevDiv in 2008-2009 and it was the most spectacularly dysfunctional island of not-invented-here inefficiency I have ever seen at any point in my career. They imagined the tech world to consist of Microsoft at the center, where all the smart people were, surrounded by an ecosystem of ISVs, all of whom wished they could work for Microsoft instead if only they were a little bit smarter, and then, out on the fringes, the barbarian wastelands of pain and misery, where incompetent nobodies struggled with trivial legacy projects involving esolangs like COBOL or Python or Ruby. A more self-absorbed computing culture I have never seen, utterly incapable of recognizing, much less learning from, any "innovation" generated outside its own walls.
Perhaps they've improved since I left, but the number of dev-hours I saw being squandered on a daily basis just fighting with utterly stupid limitations which only existed inside DevDiv's idiosyncratic tooling would have funded a good hundred startups full-time if they could have been put to some practical use.
Oh listen I recognise your pain. I've known a few good folk who headed off to Redmond back in the early to mid 2000's only to return shortly thereafter completely disillusioned. I think Guthrie was well aware of this problem and began to slowly turn things around bit by bit.
Just to tack on a convenient anecdote...apparently the original ASP.NET MVC code was written by Guthrie....on a flight, this is the earliest evidence I can find of this:
I cannot agree more. Scott Guthrie was the key decision maker regards the Apache license for asp.net MVC and the whole open sourcing of .NET Core. He runs Azure and is therefore interested in the GitHub community.
> People should get to know who Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President [Scott Guthrie] is. GitHub will be under his watch and all these years he has done nothing but wonders for the developers and the brand.
People should get to know who Corporate VP + Chief IP Counsel [Erich Andersen] is. GitHub will be under his watch and all these years he has done nothing but wonders for the developers and the brand. "During this time when customers are rapidly adopting #AI solutions across industries to solve important problems, Microsoft is helping to protect those investments by offering #AI patents as part of #AzureIPAdvantage" [1]
#AI #AzureIPAdvantage! Isn't it wonderful that Microsoft is protecting developers from the patent troll ecosystem? From the likes of Intellectual Ventures and Conversant/MOSAID, Myhrvold and Gates? Why look at what Microsoft has done over decades past? We should look at what Microsoft is doing now. People should get to know just how reformed-from-evil Microsoft is.
All it took was a few companies LESS trustworthy (Google, Facebook, Uber, et al) to come into the public conversation. Microsoft has been downright benevolent in comparison to some of these companies.
Is just making GitHub better worth $7.5 billion dollars for Microsoft? It will stay independent for this pile of cash? Why they bought it? For prestige?
For me the answer is that it can't be independent for long as it was (with VCs on its back was it ever?). It will gain Live login, maybe they will integrate it so you could login with your GitHub credentials to your computer if you so desire. But that's hardly worth billions.
Maybe the better thing would be what others suggested - setup a non-profit that would run GitHub and all those big companies could put something in the jar. Certainly less than what was paid. But I know it can't work, VCs want their exit.
For me it's a same game for GitLab. Current situation probably will accelerate GitLab's burn rate so prepare for the next acquisition.
1. "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. "
Above means - More revenue for MS.
2. "Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences."
Briefing above ppt here - MS will report Github revenues as some part of Azure. They are looking for growth and diversification of income sources. Linkedin and this acquisition are steps in that direction.
Let’s not forget that Github came out of rails which was/is a rather SaaS oriented community, and struggled to build out an enterprise sales team that could deliver and market the on-site product to large corps. Microsoft has sales channels into almost every enterprise in the world and can sell a lot more github installations than github could by itself. Github is simply worth way more inside of Microsoft than it was outside.
> Github is simply worth way more inside of Microsoft than it was outside.
I don't think you can call it inside of MS while you are also highlighting their strength of sales channels. It would be described better that way if MS kept it solely for internal purposes
Integration can refer to better interoperability, not just dependence.
Think of a large, non-tech company (i.e. development is a "resource" and not a first class citizen) that already has an Enterprise license for Office 365, which handles their emails, Office apps, and Active Directory for authentication. Microsoft could sell Github Enterprise as a one-click install that spins it up on Azure and hooks into the existing O365 AD for user management. No long procurement process, vendor has already been vetted (Microsoft), same privacy/compliance validation as your O365-hosted Exchange server, etc. Devs in these environments just went from an uphill battle to get Github approved for hosting repos to Github becoming the preferred solution.
And the inverse is true. Microsoft makes some incredibly good development tools. Traditionally, they've been limited to a Windows only model. But they've been making a lot of strides in making their traditionally Windows-only stuff cross-compatible. And Github is a really good channel/brand to try to get that software in front of users that may not have otherwise ever even looked at that Microsoft tooling.
Within my finance circle, there is big discussion on why Microsoft did an all-stock deal and the substantiated rumour through the grapevine is that the $7.5billion acquisition was Microsoft's way of releasing a chunk of stock without having to go through the public market. Read what you will of it but interesting viewpoint nevertheless.
4) Will they break the trust model of enterprise and private repositories, similar to how they broke the security model of connections in Skype after they purchased it?
5) Will they merge multiple accounts into one account, even though the user wants them separate, similar to how that was done with Skype and other services?
> ... even though the user wants them separate ...
Which "the user" is this? The same user that uses GitHub's OAuth as single-sign-on credentials for other partnering sites like TravisCI, etc? If I was in the MS ecosystem and already had an identity that I could re-use (and didn't already have a GH account), I'd probably use that, just like those who login to various websites with their Google, Facebook, Amazon, or even Twitter SSO identities. I don't see how expanding SSO to Microsoft accounts would hurt anyone.
You may not see why people would want separate accounts, but many people do. Sometimes the accounts are for different legal entities, such as work, personal, and for helping a charity. It is not correct to arbitrarily merge those.
Also, there may be different pay structures and packages used to pay for the services for each of those accounts. Hopefully, you can see how merging these can create far more work for the user, even when there are many cases that have negative benefit.
I'm glad they're doing this. If anything the only ones misbehaving are the skeptics making claims they'll likely be disproved over. Also has been noted if they had issues with this happening they should of never used GitHub to begin with. I guess devs are religious about git hosting platforms aside from text editors and programming languages.
> If anything the only ones misbehaving are the skeptics
Well, it's not like the skeptics' skepticism is not unfounded. Microsoft has a long, bloody history when it comes to open source software and this "don't worry about the past, trust us, we'll be different this time" position by Microsoft isn't enough to convince us.
I could be convinced, but it will take a LOT of time and good behavior by microsoft. Action speak louder than words. There has been nothing but words up to this point.
> There has been nothing but words up to this point.
I get your point, but come on, there have been a lot of 'actions' over the last couple of years. This only detracts from your argument. We've had .NET Core, visual studio code, the improvements on Git, WSL and more.
None of those are meaningful contributions to existing platforms/projects that MS does not own outright. They're throwing code of the wall. MS's contributions to git are very light.
> But one could argue that those contributions to git are just to further MS's interests.
Of course they are! Everything a corporation does is to further its own interests. Most (large) companies don't contribute to open source out of the goodness of their hearts.
> Everything a corporation does is to further its own interests.
This is a common misconception. It's a close cousin of the "increase shareholder value" school of thought, which has widely (and correctly) been called "the world's dumbest idea": https://www.google.com/search?q=the+world's+dumbest+idea
We exist in a complex society. It is everybody's job to maintain that society. We do that through things like voting and paying taxes. But also through making the world better directly. Companies that only do things they perceive to be in their immediate pecuniary interest are essentially parasitic. And, at least sometimes, are rightly shunned for their self-centered behavior.
If Microsoft is trying to grow up and be a good corporate citizen, I applaud them. But if they are, as you say, only putting on a mask of neighborliness because that's their plan of the moment to fill their pockets, then there's no reason to welcome or trust them.
There's a difference between putting on a mask of citizenship because it's profitable and actually caring about the world beyond the size of one's wallet. Confusing the two requires confusing the meaning of "their own interests".
Is there, though? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I don't believe in the idea of "trusting" a corporation at all, because their default behavior (especially for larger companies) is to only care about the bottom line. Once you accept that everything a company does is for their own benefit (even if their actions happen to also benefit others) and learn to take each action at face value, I find it easier to evaluate the consequences of those actions.
The idea of trusting an entity that is designed to try to take your money seems silly and futile to me.
Your argument here is tautological. I'm not saying that one should never use that analytical model, just that there are other ways to do things.
Companies don't act on their own or have beliefs. Only the people that make them up do. The company does need to turn enough profit to sustain itself, but beyond that, it's in large part up to the people who make it up. One of the thorniest problems in investing, for example, is the principle-agent problem, where people act in their own interests.
In America, that's mainly thought about as CEOs and executives serving themselves, not investors. But that's a cultural thing. In Gemany, companies are much more focused on all sorts of stakeholders. That's also often true in America with small and medium businesses, especially ones that are family owned.
Companies are hopefully designed to do whatever the stakeholders want them to do. Sometimes that's serving somebody's rapacious greed. Sometimes it isn't.
But someone that acts only in their own interests is not trustable. You give trust to people as they demonstrate that they are concerned about your interests. Thus far, I've seen zero evidence that Microsoft has genuine concern for anyone else's interests. And they've had a history of acting against other's interest in a stifling and illegal way. I don't trust them.
The Linux Foundation is a joke organization that companies use to push their own agendas in the name of "linux and open source", when in reality very few members actually care about it. It's a 'badge of honor', nothing more.
If you need further proof, observe that Oracle is on the list. There's not a company on Earth more hostile to FLOSS than Oracle. And yet there they are, and a "platinum" member at that. Lol.
Doesn't the OIN secretly sell some of its patents to non-members and non-licensees? Sounds very strategic for the companies involved and this can lead to some serious consequences for any company who is targeted by an OIN patent.
The linux foundation is nothing better than a PR front, they have members like Allwinner and VMWare who straight up refuse to stop violating the GPL license of the linux kernel, and face no consequences.
Which, one could say, is what open source is all about right? Get people or organisations motivated to improve upon code and share this with the rest of the community so they can reap the rewards as well. No one expects anyone to do stuff only for the greater good. The greater good is the best result of open source, but it isn't the motivation.
This is a serious question. How old are you? I'm wondering if you were a developer during the 1990s when MS was at its worst. I was and I still harbor deep hatred for all things MS. I wonder if the rest of the "skeptics" are coming from the same time period and those of you who are saying our concerns are unfounded are from a younger generation.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I am turning 40 this year. I was also around for the terror that was Microsoft in the 90s when they were competing with Oracle for "company most desperately trying to kill open source".
I had a similar deep hatred for MS.
In the 00s I spent time as a video game developer and I was forced to use MS tools. And honestly, their developer tools were pretty good. Although I still didn't trust them, I respected them (or at least certain divisions within MS).
In the 10s, I've been mostly doing web stuff. Over the last couple of years I've started using VS Code, and it's actually a great editor and MS seems committed to it and to contributing to some other open source projects.
MS does not strike me as anywhere near the same company they were in the 90s as Gates transitioned out and Ballmer took over. Nadella seems to have a vision for MS that's much more in line with what developers actually want. (The irony of Ballmer's "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" is palpable.)
I wouldn't consider myself an MS fan, but I also don't view them as the devil they were then. I'm not totally sure what this means for github yet, but I am willing to wait and see before I grab my pitchfork.
Development on the MS side was just fine in the 90s for many people. If you were an open source developer in the 90s, maybe not, but then again, OSS in the 90s was pretty broken for _everyone_.
> if they had issues with this happening they should of never used GitHub to begin with.
I think it's reasonable to say that people understood that there were tradeoffs in hosting code on a site like github.
Since it had become a popular site, the gains from the network effect outweighed the more theoretical risks, at least for the short term...
Then they should own up to that decision and realize that what they did not only helped github to be so dominant but it also actively worked against viable alternatives.
Choose more carefully next time? Maybe firefox instead of chrome? etc.
The first two points are pretty mucht after the textbook of 'dealing with bad publicity and lost trust'.
We will see what Nat Friedman does but Miguel de Icaza did have a bit of a falling out with the gnome community and started Xamarin where the developed a closed source IDE that didn't run on Linux. So a bit of a 180 he did there.
I think the whole situation of consolidation into titanic unanswerable powers is horrible, but I can say this for Microsoft and its intentions: If the situation was that GitHub would inevitably be devoured and consolidated into something, I can think of worse devourers (by at least a small margin). Amazon. Facebook. Bayer ;D
I preferred Github to be an independent thing, and I wonder if the world's changed to where you can't have independent things, you can only choose your master, and you can't actually choose that either. If it's that, could be worse.
Ask some of the Gnome developers who were around when Nat and Miguel did mono as the open source C# vm and tightly integrated it into gnome over a lot of disquiet what happened next.
Nat is a great PR guy, no doubt about that. You may have no issue with his previous behaviour at Gnome when founding Ximian with respect to open source commitments etc. - but you should know about it and decide for yourself.
One of the things I like about HN is that we don't traffic in innuendo. And I don't think this is the right time to begin. If there is something you want to say b/c it's relevant, then say it; if you are afraid to, then share links to the controversy. But to say we should know about something that you can only allude to is not the right way to do this.
I think to describe this as innuendo is not entirely fair.
It's all there in public, easy to track down if you want to.
I /really/ don't want to summarise it because without a complete understanding of it I will be unfair to someone. It was big and controversial and resulted in serious schisms in the Gnome dev community. Nat and Miguel's company Ximian was bought by Novell who had a software patent deal with microsoft. There was a lot of trepidation over mono because of microsoft's software patents. Miguel de Icaza founded gnome and had those halos. Ximian employed many prominent gnome developers. My understanding is that mono is now not a dependency of Gnome and there was a reasonable amount of rancour about it.
If I post links I'm tacitly endorsing their analysis - which I don't want to do.
With the knowledge that Nat and Miguel essentially spoke as one from being joint founders of Ximian and there wasn't any dissent from other Ximian/Novell employees, useful search strings might something like:
"gnome mono controversy"
"gnome mono patents"
"redhat gnome mono"
I'd also suggest looking for prominent gnome developers from those days and see what they wrote about it in blogs and mailing lists and so on. I think it's entirely reasonable to check someone's reputation, especially when they advance it. The fact that you can and it might well check out as honest, solid, trustworthy and that they are a person of integrity is really, positive. Please note how careful I am being to refrain from besmirching anyone's reputation here.
They could be angels, this can still be harmful to devs. We could still be concerned about all of tech consolidating under 4-5 anticompetitive companies
On that basis alone, not sure how anyone can cheer this acquisition
GitHub wasn't making anywhere near enough money to account for all the investment they took on, so they had to sell to _someone_. Better MS than Oracle.
Skype had the same situation/skepticism. And MS basically engineered it to be irrelevant.
Linkedin? It maybe ok now, but to see who in the network clicks on you and more recruiters... at a prime membership of $30/mo? With the same opptys as Indeed? And with more spam and solicitations? Aside from Linkedin being on the edge of being another FB+Tinder.... Well, I think we see where it's going by year end of 2019. Wouldn't be surprised if it gets engineered into irrelevance too.
As for these new managers like Friedman: they'll will hold the FOSS torch for a year, get frustrated by internal politics and leave likely.
MS will likely listen to the community, but it's to exploit them into MS products, mainly Azure. And of course the community will be smaller than today. No way MS would abandon MSVS/TS--much like Oracle: too much invested and a good size community.
Google and Facebook have tons of private repositories hosted on GitHub. I'd imagine it would be illegal for Microsoft to look into them but Microsoft being such a huge company, this acquisition could easily make Google and Facebook nervous.
If Google and Facebook have critical code they don't want external companies to view, it is almost certain that code is hosted on-prem or somewhere not like github.
It will be interesting to see which companies strategically move out of github after this acquisition.
...look into / lock / delete them. This gives microsoft the ability to all but stop work at companies who use private repos who compete with them, and/or delete critical repositories. Hope those companies have backups.
Yes, Microsoft will use their new power to block Go development by deleting their repo, or grind the thousands of Facebook employees to a halt by blocking the React repository.
Maybe replace the go repo to a redirect to .NET Core.
What? You really imagine that they would delete private repositories belonging to competitors, to attempt to gain an advantage? If Microsoft did that they would be sued so quickly, and for so much it would be unreal. Additionally, there would probably be criminal charges. I just can't imagine a world where this is a possibility...
I can. Microsoft has been spying on anyone willing to hold them accountable, and have plenty of blackmail material at this point. They are huge, politically connected, global in reach and have 0 scruples. I can't imagine that they wouldn't somehow use their position of power over its competitors, as it has in the past, to thwart them and force them further into the Microsoft system.
Microsoft was described by people who claimed to have seen it as having a terrifying and frightful appearance, with diabolical physiognomy, clawed hands, and eyes that "resembled red balls of fire". One report claimed that, beneath a black cloak, it wore a helmet and a tight-fitting white garment like an oilskin. Many stories also mention a "Devil-like" aspect. Others said it was tall and thin, with the appearance of an agilist. Several reports mention that it could breathe out blue and white flames and that it wore sharp metallic claws at his fingertips. At least two people claimed that it was able to speak comprehensible English
Microsoft, the boogeyman, coming to delete your repos.
Agree. I for one am excited about the future of GitHub under Microsoft. Happy for Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, Mark Otto and all the early employees.
It is sad that Hacker News, once a community for hungry entrepreneurs has digressed into a hipster, anti-corporate, anti-capitalism community.
>2) They’ve expressed their commitment to keep GitHub an independent platform (like they did with LinkedIn.)
>3) Nat Friedman, although I was not familiar with him prior to this, seems like an ideal candidate to run GitHub.
Nat seems like a decent candidate for GitHub CEO, but i'm having trouble reconciling Microsoft's commitment to keeping GitHub an independent platform with their installing a new CEO. that's not really how "independent" works.
I'm not saying it was a coup, but it's definitely not just a coincidence either that the new CEO who takes over at the same time as the Microsoft acquisition is a Microsoft employee.
If Microsoft weren't acquiring GitHub, would they still pick Nat to be their new CEO?
I'm trying, but I can't see your point. Company A doesn't have CEO. Company A gets acquired by Company B. Company B thinks it's a good idea for a company to have a CEO, and so provides an employee to take that role in Company A. It's not complex, not a coincidence, and absolutely not something that we should be worried about. It's striking that out of all of this, the new CEO is what you're worried about.
it's not a problem, it's fully what i would expect to happen in an acquisition. and like i said, Nat seems like probably a good choice for CEO. but it doesn't square with a commitment to keep GitHub independent from microsoft. if microsoft is appointing a CEO for GitHub, that's not independence by any normal or sane definition of the word "independent".
"Microsoft made a good decision when they appointed a new CEO for GitHub" and "microsoft is keeping GitHub independent" are not compatible statements.
I believe you're making two assumptions, one of which is untrue, and the other isn't necessarily true.
The first being that it's a better indicator of independence to have no CEO than a Microsoft appointed CEO. The number of good CEOs that have experience running companies with hundred-million valuations is very low, as GitHub themselves experienced for months. Without a good CEO, chances are GitHub goes under (somebody needs to push the Azure integration, etc.), so Microsoft didn't really have a choice.
The second assumption is that Nat will necessarily run GitHub from a Microsoft-first perspective, as opposed to a GitHub-first perspective. This may be true, and it may not. I believe this is what they were referring to with regards to "independence".
Please clarify if you're not making either of those assumptions, and if you are, I'm happy to discuss your justifications. :)
Edit: Perhaps you just have a feeling, given Microsoft's history, that they will sink the boat, and you're trying to justify it through anything that you can find that is concrete. Personally I don't believe that GitHub will stay a completely neutral shrine of perfection, and my only justification is my feelings based on history. So if that is the case, I completely agree. The idea of appointing a CEO where there is none being non-independent, though, is clutching straws IMO.
It doesnt matter how well Microsoft does anything. The damage is already done. I highly doubt there will ever again be a major international project started on GitHub.
So I’m kind of depressed about this. I loved GitHub enough that I paid for a subscription without needing it and have all of my public work on it and my investment in OSS is quite significant.
People saying that it is easy to migrate don’t know what they are talking about. GitHub isn’t just Git hosting, but a social network of open source developers and projects. You can’t migrate stars, issues with comments and the history of PRs, all linked to the profiles of their authors.
And sure you can self-host GitLab, I pushed for it at my previous employer and works great for on premises deployments, but it’s not the same for OSS if the community you care about isn’t there.
That said I am glad to see Nat Friedman as the new CEO. This gives me some hope for its future.
> People saying that it is easy to migrate don’t know what they are
> talking about. GitHub isn’t just Git hosting, but a social network
> of open source developers and projects. You can’t migrate stars,
> issues with comments and the history of PRs, all linked to the
> profiles of their authors.
Every single for-profit company works their ass off to build a "moat" around their business and to create switching costs, even if they boast that you can "just take your data and leave."
It is not an accident that it is difficult for non-trivial projects to "just leave GitHub." That is by design, it is part of how it grew to become the 800 pound gorilla, and it is part of why Microsoft bought them.
He made it pretty clear that there wasn't a moat that he needed to forge but rather the missing the community, that's not really something that anyone could build a tool to transfer...
Absolutely, as people who try to leave Facebook discover. It's easy to download your data from Facebook. Not so easy to keep in touch with people who have moved "keeping in touch" to Facebook groups and messenger.
Indeed. And while it might seem that pointing this out is setting impossibly high standards, companies encourage communities for soley this reason. It's debatable weather the advantage of companies pushing community is worth this cost, but its something to consider.
While you certainly cannot migrate the community, I recently learned how comprehensive the import tools are for gitlab. They will import PRs, wikis and a bunch of the metadata from Github and even try to link it all up to Gitlab accounts if the same public e-mail addresses are used by your contributors on the two services. No affiliation, and I don't even use the site today, but I would certainly consider recommending it to open source projects I am involved with in the future.
One should consider the alternatives. It’s not like Github was going to be run like Wikipedia. It was going to be a Google/Oracle/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft purchase, and to be honest Microsoft is the least scary in that bunch.
GitHub wikis are a git repository of markdown files, easy to move. Pages are markdown too AFAIK but issues are difficult to move. That always bothered me. I've got some customers with accounts on Bitbucket and GitHub. They manage their issues there. For the others I use a self hosted Redmine server.
You make a good point about the just-move-to-Git[whatever] being the entrenched social aspect of many repos! I can't imagine if, say the day comes when developers flee GH en-masse, it will be at all easy to retain the discussion history behind repos.
>People saying that it is easy to migrate don’t know what they are talking about.
You're right in a lot of ways.
A personal detail is that I've developed a bad habit of searching "github <project name>" when I need to find something. As if any project worth its salt is on github.
I'm changing that habit, I even started sharing my projects between github and gitlab over a year ago.
I have been familiar with Miguel's work since the good old GNOME and Mono days (pre-Microsoft and even pre-Xamarin) and familiar with Miguel and Nat's work since the Xamarin and Microsoft days and I really must say that GitHub could have got somebody far far worse on the executive level than Nat (and ScottGu above him, ofcourse, due to the same kind of personality).
Nat can be best described as a OSS geek gone CEO, and thus I can't imagine a better executive within Microsoft to lead GitHub besides him. In fact, when I heard the first rumors and Chris not wanting to run operations anymore I immediately thought of Nat to run GitHub when Microsoft was crazy enough to buy it.
What nobody is really commenting on is how huge of an opportunity this is for Microsoft to reinvent itself in the eyes of the developer community.
If Microsoft can somehow manage to gain trust from Github users, which is very possible and desirable for them, it will make Azure more compelling in many ways than Amazon as a cloud computing platform.
After Amazon's acquisition of Cloud9, Microsoft is the first big company to try something really bold and inventive in cloud computing. Github can prioritize making code deploy to all clouds AND make it especially appealing for customers to choose Azure, as there will exist amazing opportunities for end to end product optimizations here. Seems really smart for me, and given that Microsoft is really hell bent on changing people's negative opinions about them, they have all the right incentives to make Github even more awesome than it already is.
> What nobody is really commenting on is how huge of an opportunity this is for Microsoft to reinvent itself in the eyes of the developer community.
My opinion of Microsoft isn't based on whether or not it owns Github.
My opinion is based on other aspects of their behavior, such as:
- Do they force mainstream Windows users to provide telemetry data to Microsoft?
- Do they threaten Android developers with lawsuits regarding violation of unspecified patents?
- Do they use OS upgrades as an opportunity to reset opt-out telemetry gathering.
- Have they recently used dark UI patterns to trick users into installing Windows 10?
- Do they make telemetry collection opt-out (and non-obvious) for the .net CLI tools?
Any meaningful reinvention of Microsoft would involve (1) stopping those kinds of behaviors, and (2) making a compelling, public argument for why we should never expect those behaviors again from Microsoft.
The negativity comes from MS being MS. Many here have seen what they did in the past and what they do to this day. They have lobbied so hard in Munich that they are going to abandon Linux and go back to Windows. Great open source love all around!
Also, as long as Windows, Office and Azure are closed, I cannot take all this "we love Open Source" stuff seriously. It is a big tech-marketing and recruiting vehicle, but nothing more. I am not saying, they should open those, I am saying that they are not an OS company and therefore should stop pretending.
Their sales is doing what sales does: try to find a method to sell licenses. That has nothing to do with company philosophy but the percentage the sales person get. That is capitalism but nothing special to Microsoft.
And Limux was a troubled child anyway (users, it organization and political leadership all along).
I would have loved Limux to succeed, but unfortunately it did not.
On a serious note though, they deserve all the skepticism coming to them. I know they’ve been working in the last few years to revert their status as OSS public enemy #1 but remember, this is the company that said the GPL is cancer.
Let them earn our trust. Keep the pressure, stay vigilant and be ready to change vendors.
Depending too much on Github and Azure (because you rely on their integration), instead of depending too much on either Github or Azure, is a clear risk increase that most users should avoid, not something "awesome". The only amazing opportunities are for vendor lock-in.
Integrated CI backed by Azure (with paid options for non-OSS projects) could be a positive outcome of this acquisition. Done right, could be a good gateway to get OSS devs experimenting on Azure.
More viable competition on cloud hosting is definitely a good thing for society at large.
While Microsoft has a lot of nice marketing and really good PR, they are still a corporation that makes money off selling SQL server licenses and office suite and increasingly by harvesting your user data.
Microsoft is addicted to your data. They siphon it off whenever they get the chance, often times by default and without your knowledge or consent. Even their cli Linux tools have """analytics""".
This will never change, no matter what slick marketing materials they produce, what PR fluff they have, or shills that shill for them.
The simple fact is I cannot trust Microsoft, especially to not touch code in my private repositories. I am sure they just want some "metrics" and to do some "analytics" on all the private data held in GitHub.
To use GitHub now, is to trust the same company who works hand in hand with the government and the NSA to make sure you stay insecure and known to agencies who just want to run some "metrics" and do some "analytics" on you.
just a friendly reminder most cli tools you use today that run primarily against a cloud service publish analytics explicitly or implicitly.
you can’t trust MS to not read your code? do you trust amazon to host your binaries? or database? or google cloud? or do you trust no one and rent your own cage and keep it locked?
aws has an entire cloud for US gvoice. they work hand in hand with government requests. google is very tightly coupled as well. do you host entirely on foreign providers?
Where is the profit in the """analytics""" you're speaking of? I do not forsee a marketing firm being that interested in all of the ways I can fat-finger shell commands.
I lived through Microsoft's dark ages, when the victory of open source was still hanging by a thread. The reason we're seeing a softer Microsoft is that they lost, they were forced to change. And the open question is what they learned in the process.
On the other hand, they're producing pretty decent software these days; dotNet Core, TypeScript & VSCode just to name a few solid projects. Open source, no less; imagine that back when monkey boy was running the show, literally.
But then I keep hearing about shady Linux licensing deals and endless privacy intrusions over in Windows land.
Tricky indeed, I think I'm going to leave my code in there for now and give them a chance to redeem themselves.
> And the open question is what they learned in the process
They were the biggest corporate sponsors to open source and also Linux kernel in the past few years. They acquired github, the biggest place for open source devs to meet and contribute code, and promise to keep it independent. How open of a question is this really?
Your positives are more closely linked to your negatives than you might think: Microsoft's open source projects are actually working to bring those endless privacy intrusions over from Windows so you can enjoy them on other systems as well – .NET Core and VS Code will collect and send your data to Microsoft by default, without bothering to ask for your permission.
Core tells me very clearly right on the command line that it collects usage stats, and which env var to set to disable that. The only identifiable data it sends is a Mac hash. The whole thing is developed in the open.
I really fail to see why people are (that) upset about it.
I recognize this isn't an opinion that will resonate with many, but I find it offensive that Github praises and benefits so much from open source, yet is not open source itself. This has bothered me for many years.
Now this post from Nat, talking about how open source literally changed his life and made all things possible (which I agree with), bothers me even more. How can you say such things when your actions are so completely opposite? The hypocrisy is appalling to me.
Don't misunderstand, I do think Github has done great things for open source. However, it's time for them to either practice what they preach (open the code) or else we need to move to gitlab of gitea or something else.
I'm actually a bit optimistic that MS might open source github in the long run. It's a long shot, but they have really been incredible with how much they have opened up. I'm more optimistic now with MS at the reins.
GitHub has helped to maintain git itself for years, in addition to creating and open-sourcing libgit2, a massive engineering effort, which ironically, GitLab is built on.
> a massive engineering effort, which ironically, GitLab is built on.
Perfectly normal use of FOSS; I'd say, not ironic. If GitHub wanted, they could have kept the work to themselves and avoided others benefiting from it.
FOSS is like people coming together with their own bricks and building a cathedral for everyone. There's little point in participating if you either don't want others to pitch in or don't want others to benefit from it.
> GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business.
Had Github been bought by an foundation operating outside the confides of the market, then such statement would have been believable. Microsoft will naturally use Github maximise its wealth, thus when disagreements arise then Microsoft will put its will through.
It is of course easy to imagine ways Github could be used by Microsoft, fore instance mere access to valuable user data, strategic focus on integration with Microsoft products or sigle sign on with Azure, Github, LinkedIn and Skype.
I work for Linkedin, MS is very respectful of our independence (sometimes in puzzling ways).
It's kinda painful and annoying to read about all the negativity and tinfoil hat theories but that's the price to pay (I guess) and we'll see what happens. Microsoft has every interest in playing nice with the community and everything to lose from trying to do anything hostile to it.
> It's kinda painful and annoying to read about all the negativity and tinfoil hat theories but that's the price to pay (I guess) and we'll see what happens.
That's the price for being a deeply un-ethical company for many decades.
I'm saying most complaints I'm reading here have no basis in reality. Microsoft felt negatively in the past about OSS when it felt an existential threat from it. In the past few years the work of many inside Microsoft helped shape a new vision of OSS inside the company and it's pretty evident to anyone that's not trying to be blind that things have changed.
So yeah, let's talk about telemetry, or Windows updates, or patent threats. Every business makes decisions, some good, some bad. We might not agree 100% on which ones are which.
We're in the business of creating software and not running charities, we all do what's in our best interest trying not to be too evil, there's plenty of good folks and also plenty of assholes in every big co out there and all the negativity doesn't help the good ones pushing for the right outcomes.
I'm sympathetic to your point about large organizations having a mix of employees with different ethical standards.
In this particular case, as CEO Nadella is fully responsible for allowing the various nasty practices I enumerated above. (I tried to only list those which happened under his leadership.)
This is why I'm not persuaded about Microsoft's general trustworthiness by either of the following:
(a) Outsiders referring to Nadella's leadership of MS, or
(b) Nadella himself suggesting that people judge MS by its recent behavior.
For the last 20 years or so, Microsoft lost a lot of mind-share. They are good at developer tools and GitHub provides them with the venue for the community. Unless Microsoft sees amazing value on the Community platform of GitHub they would not have spent $7.5 Billion on it. They do realize developer brain-trust is the long game they need to win, and GitHub fits that strategy.
> 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.
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. Will this be an option?
2. What is Microsoft’s position on EU upload filters for copyright screening of code uploaded to Github? Has Microsoft taken a public position on this issue? Does Microsoft currently use upload filters for open source code screening?
It was a pleasure but gitlab and bitbucket have continued to improve and I've expected some sort of exit for a while. I appreciate everything the Github team has done, but barring some crazy improvements from Microsoft I think my feet are firmly planted on the GitLab train.
How has gitlab "continued to improve"? They are getting worse. Do you have statistics on their uptime or their performance? Because in my own experience, gitlab.com is going from bad to worse. Their API increasingly returns 503s and timeouts. Their UI is increasingly returning a stale state. One pushes a branch and they say it doesn't exist. One does a git pull and it takes so long one is used to going off and putting the bloody kettle on. They don't know what they're doing. I don't have the time or inclination is to collect demonstrative evidence, but it'll take something to say they are "continuing to improve"!
You and GP are talking about different things. As you say, Gitlab.com has been deteriorating and has continual performance issues, however Gitlab Core (the OSS project) has made big strides in the last year in adding features like excellent CI/CD integration, issue boards, merge request templates, web based IDE for quick edits, etc. For teams of people working together, these tools are really useful and important, less so for big community or solo projects.
Unlike Github, you can host Gitlab on your own server, to get whatever performance you're willing to pay for.
It's not fear. It's experience. Having to keep an extra OS and software patched and up-to-date (often times different to the rest of your SoE because it's different software) and keep it safe from real-world threats takes a lot of time and context-switching to do well.
Hosting anything well takes up a lot more effort than the $100+/month we pay to GitHub and even the $7/month I pay personally.
We're using gitlab and are quite happy with it. Of course we migrated from an internal git hosted solution, so having a web based anything is novel. We did take the opportunity to re-gigger our code base. Git is great but its not supper at having nested Git repos...
What is surprising is that one of the younger members of our team really equated "Git" with "GitHub". I think the brand is so strong, but now "Github" by microsoft makes clear github is not git..
+1 for the outreach. They definitely lost control of the announcement, since it got out yesterday.
The nice thing about it is, everyone who keeps their Git repo up-to-date (and who has the transfer.fsckobjects setting set to true) has a complete copy of the Git repo. And GitHub provides APIs to pull other stuff. I think the hardest thing to move would be sites on GitHub Pages.
So, since I can pull out relatively easily, I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt.
My interpretation is that transfer.fsckObjects just checks that all of the fetched objects are properly formed and contain no broken links. I cannot confirm whether or not this fetches any extra objects from the remote; this is the first time I've heard about this feature.
I remember watching the "screencasts" (they were gifs back in those days), of Nat working on Beagle [1]. Sadly it's a dead project now, however, it shaped my attitude as a developer - how can I write software that _helps_ people.
I am really excited to see what Nat and team bring to the table
There are a lot of users on here who either don't remember Microsoft's hostility to Linux and open source or who want to bury their head in the sand. 3 words are all you need to know about Microsft - Linux patent racket: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3042699/open-source-tools/... .
As far as I'm aware nothing has changed. A leopard never changes its spots.
I read a lot of comments claiming that MS "used to be a bad actor" but, of course, they now "care about developers and open source". Developers, they say, are the very lifeblood of the new Microsoft. "We respect developers."
I work on Windows 10. It is normal for me to have many programs open while I do development along with dozens of web pages containing information I need. Days worth of "state" are stacked on the screen.
Every few days Microsoft reaches out and REBOOTS MY MACHINE, losing my work. My various linux boxes all have uptimes listed in YEARS. So next time you think Microsoft cares about your work be sure to thank them for random reboots.
After all, a Microsoft 'update' is MUCH more important than your work. You're "just a developer".
Microsoft cares about Microsoft, not your work. Expect the same attitude to slowly, eventually, take over Github.
You'll need a Microsoft login. You'll be hosted on its server farm, requiring a login. You'll see Microsoft-branded forks of software, prioritized in github searches. You'll see a "Microsoft Git GUI" as the required interface for push/pull. The Microsoft Git will use incompatible hashing from the open source version (it's called "embrace and extend"). Microsoft Git repository communications (e.g. git://github.com) will only work with a Microsoft Git GUI over a Microsoft-login connection.
Oh, and that option is only available on the "professional" version of Windows. We poor open source developers use the "non-professional" version that comes with the machine and THAT won't let you turn updates off.
So again, Microsoft is a corporation dedicated to making money. My time is only worthwhile if Microsoft can make money. So, naturally, in order to keep them from destroying my work I have to BUT an "professional" version.
"Nice place you got here, be a shame if anything happened to it."
The belief that Microsoft will help open source is simply naive.
Yes. I know. The point is their attitude. Someone, somewhere decided that the default reboot policy would be good for Microsoft. Apparently the effect on developers was not worth considering. They didn't seem to care that you would wake up some morning and find that 4 days worth of work disappeared and that your virtual machines won't boot because they changed your hardware settings.
Ubuntu pops up a window telling me that updates are available. Apple does the same thing. You don't have to be destructive "by default".
You can be certain that Microsoft will "just know" that a Microsoft login "adds value", that cloud-hosting Github "adds value", that SHA-256 is better than SHA-1 for git hashes, that a Microsoft GIT GUI is better than a command line, and that a Microsoft protocol is better than a git:// protocol. Slowly, but surely, the Microsoft attitude will make github into a Microsoft "product".
If Microsoft REALLY wanted to help developers they would fix the money problem.
Open source needs a way to get grants so people can attend conferences, pay for servers, pay for bandwidth, etc. (not salaries). But grants require accounting. Accounting requires accountants. Somebody, somewhere has to "manage the money", keep the books, and clear the receipts. Otherwise grant organizations and the federal government won't give grants.
So if Microsoft REALLY wanted to help open source developers they would hire a few people to manage grant applications and grant money management. Then we could apply for a grant, the money would be held by this non-profit.
We're programmers. If you can think of it, we can do it. But it takes
someone who has the motivation and the time. Motivation is easy
to find but time is not. Because Time is Money (as I'm sure you've
heard). So the real issue is open source funding.
I've spent the last 18 years trying to get Axiom funded.
I tried the NSF. They will not fund Axiom because there is a
"competing commercial product" (aka Mathematica).
I tried the Air Force (AFOSR). They cannot give grants to open
source work because it requires financial tracking. Somebody has
to managed the funds and the receipts. When I was at City College
I did get a grant but they have a Provost (who took 55% for "support").
In order to handle accounting open source needs an "accounting
office" with professional, certified accountants. I approached several
companies (e.g. IBM, TI, etc.) with the idea of "donating a certified
accountant or two" to an organization that would "manage open
source grants" with services like funds management, receipt
clearance, taxes, etc. That way an open source project could accept
grant money. So far, nobody wants to donate people. I think such an
office could completely change the whole open source funding issue.
I've tried setting up donations for Axiom. The idea was not to pay
people to work on Axiom, just to support things like setting up a
conference or paying to attend a conference. I was the only donor.
Open source is not free. I estimate that I spent about $3000 per year
on things like travel to attend a conference and paying for hosting
services. I now have the Axiom server under my desk on a $1200
dollar computer. In order to ensure Axiom runs everywhere I have
to buy computers like the Apple (used to be a non-Intel processor),
the PowerPC, a Windows machine, a Linux machine, etc. It all adds
up to a lot of money.... not to mention the cost of books to keep up.
Oh, yeah, and my time is written off as "free".
I'm a GitHub employee (previously a founder of Easel S12 and Flagr W06) and work now in the Product group on the Marketplace. I'm excited to see Nat's commitment to developers and our community. This news doesn't change our resolve towards building a platform that allows our Ecosystem to thrive.
We launched Marketplace just over a year ago and continue to heavily invest in it. We want it to become the place that any entrepreneur in the software space is able able to grow their own successful business. We're just at the beginning of that journey.
Looking forward to what's to come and to seeing more developer tools thrive on our Marketplace.
Good to hear. Still, I have these memories of Facebook buying Whatsapp for too much money and first saying it will be impossible to integrate both platforms. Surprise, surprise, later they did find a way to integrate.
Microsoft paying 7.5B for something that looses money every year ? And not having any problems with that ? What will the shareholders say ?
Well, I think that's the point. They want to monetize the enterprise edition better. Combining GitHub's product with Microsoft's cabal of credit-card-ready existing purchasers. Microsoft has built a community of developers that expect to pay for dev tools, which is rare.
So, they can have the existing product operate as-is, and Microsoft can make money by moving their legacy high-paying consumers to something better.
The shareholders see potential. I also think there are many ways for Microsoft to make money from Github. But that means changes the general Github user will not like (ads ? higher fees ? tracking ? killing atom ?). My point is that the 'Hello, Github' implies nothing will change.
Microsoft destroyed Skype something I used for ten years but don’t anymore. I.e. I forgot my password and mistakenly chose a fake birthday in my first attempt to reset my ten year old Skype account. Well doing that triggered authenticate your age by giving us your credit card number... what? Horrible consumer UX it’s all about milking Skype for all it’s worth and was worth. Facebook voice messenger works just as well and no credit card needed.
> I’m not asking for your trust, but I’m committed to earning it.
Love this line. I had followed Xamarin when it was independent and I get a strong feeling that Nat wrote this himself and it's not just a PR speak. I am cautiously optimistic about GitHub going forward.
Anybody else think that StackOverflow would be Microsoft's next purchase?
A profitable, developer focussed business built using Microsoft stack.
I don't know how much sense it makes for Microsoft to be making money through selling job ads, but if they're gonna take over all the tools that developers use then SO and the SE network seems a good fit.
I'm not sure it would make sense. While it's built on the MS stack, it's a somewhat toxic community with no clear business value. Even as a Q&A site has too much history and too much baggage.
The blue banner area at the top of GH pages tells me to click on a blog posting to learn more. So I do. And then I get to a microsoft page that has as its banner area an information box telling me that merely browsing this site means that I agree to the use of cookies for analytics, personalized content and ads. Really, GH? Do you really want to direct your users to a page with that warning? Were you doing the same thing to me already, without warning? And will GH be doing similar harvesting of information?
And what about gitlab ...? Maybe they want my money more than GH does...
Worked at Xamarin as an intern before the MS acquisition. So not too long, but enough to get a coffee downstairs with Nat at the coffee van. I also joined his all-hands. Great guy who has a great attitude towards open-source and has a positive leadership style. I was skeptical of the Xamarin acquisition, but MS open-sourced and made the platform free for everyone. Nat knows how this MS stuff goes, and I think he's a perfect fit to preserve the core of Github.
I wonder what is in it for MS if "GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business." and "GitHub will retain its product philosophy." stay true. Do they make money off of it? Get information (that turns into money) out of it?
I was in the room at the Paris Solutions Linux when Nat did one of the first demos of compiz and XGL. It was a weird feeling because it started as a demo of benign desktop features, and it slowly transitioned to the awesome window transitions we've all come to know. Like many technological advancements, its effect on the short term had been largely overestimated (the fancy animation, transparent windows and cube desktop are almost forgotten), while in the long term, it was the first of many steps in the modernizing of the Linux graphics stack.
I have nothing relevant to add, since I don't really know Nat or how good he'd be leading Github (but I'd guess pretty good), I just thought it was a fun anectdote.
Those were some heady days in the Linux desktop world and I remember them fondly. I remember seeing those demos and being blown away, and then furiously trying to get it set up on my box to blow the minds of my buddies. I think we were all trying to be first!
Right, make it about the person instead of the company. Put someone in charge who will turn the public (just look at te top posts in this thread vs earlier threads). Nice move, Microsoft.
People in an organization are usually not evil. It's the organization as a whole. And I'm pretty sure that this CEO has someone and their business with priorities in his neck. It's scary how easily it seems people here move on after seeing a face with a good reputation and a CEO sticker even though they'll still have to dance to another's wishes.
I'm curious if there are any unforeseen legal implications in having the world's largest software company acquiring the private repositories of a massive number of smaller software companies, including independent competitors to MS.
MS now has the capability to not only snoop on smaller competitors' IP but gain visibility into their dev team composition, work habits, pipeline etc.
This acquisition smells like something that could get litigated to hell and back, though I'd assume they've already prepared for that
I understand that Microsoft has handled some software they've acquired badly (Skype), but is the Microsoft of today not vastly different from the Microsoft of that day? I don't think this will be the downward spiral that some people think it will be. Time will tell though.
My primary concern is that I worry about an inevitable merging or linking with LinkedIn. As positive as my experience has been interacting with GitHub, it's been equally as negative interacting with LinkedIn. I worry that MS will see GitHub as the code management platform, and LinkedIn as the customer management platform.
It's important to me that my GitHub account and my LinkedIn account are allowed to be 100% separate. I don't want people able to hunt me down like that.
Almost everything? Aside from keeping an updated resume I've never had a single job come from it, nor anyone I know. As far as networking it's useless too. It's just recruiter spam and people you never met adding you to their network. They also did the whole MITM attack on your e-mail's contacts a few years back.
None of that is Microsoft's fault though, it's been useless for a while.
That's, like, your opinion man. Most of my jobs and most of my friends jobs have come through (or discovered thanks to) Linkedin. Before becoming an employee I used the site to find cofounders, people to interview for product feedback, check the background of possible hires...
You don't use it or like it, fine. Linkedin has created economic opportunity for so many, it's kinda ridiculous to dismiss it out of hand.
Ah, I did not relate that use of the word employee to becoming an employee of linkedin. Fair enough. Still, unadulterated hype by employers of companies with questionable ethics doesn't hold a whole lot of weight in discussions like these.
If that's the reality you like to live in more power to you, but mine is not hype, is my personal experience, stuff I lived through. Can't you accept that someone's experience might be different than yours?
My experience with linkedin: Countless emails suggesting that someone has 'added me on linkedin' when I never made an account, they clearly bought a list and kept on spamming it over and over again.
A website that leaks data like a sieve, one failed attempt after another to create a sense of community, utterly meaningless endorsements and competency system.
On and on. I really wonder what the draw of linked in is, I would never use it as a decision in whether or not to hire someone and I think it is one of the worst possible experiences on the web.
And that's before we get into it now being a Microsoft subsidiary, another major strike against it.
The sooner linkedin goes away the better, it's been ripe for disruption for many years.
I'm pleased that Microsoft has opened up, changed and grown so much in recent years. Congratulations to the entire GitHub team for making such a wonderful community and set of tools easily available, and for their successful acquisition. It will be fascinating to see where this goes - who would have imagined that a former heavyweight of proprietary software would achieve such a transformation?
I must ask the question now, though - is it time for a non-profit Github-like open source community with integrated source control / tools? Could that even exist due to the costs of running such a thing, and is it necessary? For example, it would be like if The Apache Foundation ran GitHub.
Or should we look into things like git over IPFS (or something similar) and try to go decentralized?
I have wrestled with the for-profit / not-for-profit conundrum my whole life, and I still do. Obviously, running such a utility / community costs money, so it is good to have one or more healthy companies supporting it. It should mean good things. But ultimately, both GitHub and Microsoft are primarily for-profit entities (although I know they both do a tremendous amount to support the not-for-profit space).
Perhaps Microsoft could even be the one to set up such a non-profit... like.. "The Microsoft Foundation for Open Source" or something similar. Knowing that the organization owning and managing such a utility and community is a non-profit - good or bad?
EDIT: ..perhaps like they have done with the .NET Foundation?
Am seriously pissed at this. MS has been slowly acquiring all the tools used for my business, its like surround and siege warfare. Skype, Linkedin, now GitHub..
The time horizons on these kinds of acquisitions are 5 years out. In that time you`ll log into Windows 20, single sign in to Skype, Linkedin, Github all re-branded, all re-written code, with messed up ELUA and a shitty product.
Dont believe todays fluff and BS, the end game is many years out.
Microsoft might contribute to open source now and again, but their business model is actually worse than it was when everyone hated them. Now Microsoft is a surveillance machine like Google and Facebook, but they've also got enterprise captive audiences using their telemetry packed cloud and OS.
All this good will because they developed a telemetry packed browser-based text editor or finally started providing a not-dog-crap shell environment is stupid. Their binary editor is licensed like Chrome, who builds VSCode from source?
Both Google and Microsoft are doing a hell of a lot of embrace and extinguishing and I think that pattern will continue unnoticed as long as they keep devs happy with silly gimmicky pro-developer products.
There's a lot of talk about people leaving github for other platforms. If there are actually doing it, it seems like a short-sighted move. I understand why people who lived through the earlier years of Microsoft are skeptical. Microsoft did a very good job of earning a lot of ill will.
But things have changed. Microsoft's primary focus seems to be is Azure and everything they do needs to be looked through that lens. They need developers of all stripes using Azure. So they will do everything to attract all developers. It's in their business interest.
I would guess that the acquisition will not affect Github in any detrimental way. I would argue that developer good-will is a more valuable commodity to Microsoft now than in the years past.
More happy users of Github => more happy developers using a MS product => more developer good-will => more developers/decision-influencers that might consider a MS cloud product (like Azure).
I hope GitHub doesn't change much. It works well. It does basically one thing and they've never tried to do more than what they are. Microsoft used to have their own code repo and they shut it down. It was mostly used for .NET projects if I recall correctly. Microsoft to be honest has done a lot of good lately. I love VS Code. It's the best editor I've ever used. So I'm hopeful, but changes like this are always scary. Announcements are usually full of promises that seem to be shortly broken.
1. Late 90's/Early 2000's, Microsoft's implementation and inclusion of CDRW/DVDRW functionality native to the OS eliminating competition from smaller companies that had pioneered the technology and was selling their software to Windows desktop users.
2. Late 90's/Early 2000's, Microsoft's implementation and development of Active Directory which not only rivaled Novell's Netware flagship product but also went against RFC's put forth by the larger community that rivaled OpenLDAP. Because of the desktop shares and users already on the Windows NT platform put thousands out of work and nearly put Novell out of business.
3. Early to mid 2000's, Microsoft moves away from already found vulnerable MSCHAP, MSCHAPV2 authentication protocols in favor of the MIT Kerberos protocol for all network authentication of users and systems in Active Directory.
Not only did this put those companies out to pasture and eliminate a large amount of revenue but the idea of stealing and idea is very bad tact. Reverse engineering code to gain a larger market share is not only dishonest but plagarism and illegal in schools. Why should the free economy play by a different set of rules?
People wonder why Microsoft has a bad reputation, the three things I have witnessed over the years in conjunction with the snatching up smaller companies and parting them out make me and I am sure many others very skeptical of their desire to snatch up the worlds largest source code repository.
@natfriedman, thanks to come public and sharing with us. To summarize in one word: transparency. That’s what GitHub community expects from the platform and you are the key person to drive it.
Microsoft has been increasingly open to the whole open-source idea, which is great. But coming to the point, please, understand the following concerns:
1 - There is without doubt a conflict of interest and trust issues on Microsoft hosting thousands of private repositories, where some potentially compete with Microsoft commercial interests;
2 - There are concerns that the platform would become a exclusive marketing weapon in the hands of Microsoft, eventually killing the spirit of openness and free competition.
3 - The developer community fears that Microsoft see them as “potential clients” and therefore as target to its products. The developer community doesn’t want to be monetizing neither be bombarded with Microsoft products ads.
4 - GitHub has always been a community driven and community centered platform. What will be the role of Microsoft as it changes from “one more user” to the owner of the platform?
5 - What is now business model of GitHub and how entangled is it with Microsoft?
More than ever, and more than anything else transparency will be the key for the success of GitHub. I wish you lucky on the new task.
What I really love about this is that M$ realize the product's users are tightly wound to the brand's identity, and are hostile to M$'s. They know they're buying a "lifestyle brand" and that they have to keep it hip and unencumbered by a corporate behemoth or it'll become worthless.
When the new CEO has to make a public personal appeal to the users to keep them from jumping ship, that says something (though I'm not sure what that is).
I feel the same way about people who unironically write M$ to be honest. It's a counter-brand they've elected to champion, and more power to them.
That said, it feels lazy and deeply mired in a Browser Wars-era IRC discussion about wether Netscape Navigator or Lynx is the way forward. Or any other, equally tedious, period of paeolithic tech history.
Microdollaroft have been pretty well behaved recently, especially with regards to their developer stuff. Heck, I'd even argue forced updates to a desktop os used by huge swaths of non technical users may not quite be up there with Hanz Fritzel in terms of taking people's freedom away.
But then I generally don't have an ideological standpoint on which operating system, text editor or source control I'm using as long as I can get work done, so perhaps I'm just a bit of a weirdo.
In the end as long as companies people traditionally dislike try to make money, there will be people who traditionally dislike them there to remind everybody about the time a previous CEO said something egregious or they attempted to build a monopoly of some description (aka being a very successful business)
The good news is it's nearly time for my spongebath here in Longhorn Vista carehome, and my new nurse is a former Microsoft CEO trying to make ends meet. Nobody had the heart to tell him Google weren't destroyed, so he's been unsuccessfully trying to use Bing to find a new job. Good strong hands. Bit excitable. Throws the furniture around more than strictly necessary.
Minecraft is evidence in my mind of Microsoft being a reasonable corporate overlord. They could have fought modders and killed off java, but instead have been continuing development on it. I think they have gotten to understand the value of existing communities and maybe how not to accidentally destroy them.
For all these companies with the free time to migrate repo hosts on the same day, get back to work and make something worth your focus.
"Linux, Git, node and Kubernetes" putting Kubernetes at the same level as Linux and Git... Not a pre-crafted commercial message from M$ at all guyze lul
I often tell the story about the first program I wrote (at 8) and how I got beaten by good old flesh and blood.
I don't tell people I was a developer at six... I wrote a program... semantics matter here.
The photo got me... The fake over done smile, the "I had a professional take this" pose. The Hoodie. It just smacks of being over produced to try to fit in.
> I’m not asking for your trust, but I’m committed to earning it. I can’t wait to help make the GitHub platform and community that’s special to all of us even greater.
Im not calling you a liar but I already don't believe you.
and also issues of people being removed from projects _by GitHub Management_ because of political or personal opinions expressed in other forums that were unrelated to the open source project?
Let's trust a startup that accidentally blew up their database and lost all sorts of data, as opposed to Microsoft. At least the other complaints about the acquisition make sense.
The issue is that I've been hearing that phrase at every interview from every candidate, on a lot of blogposts and presentations. It's a cheap and uncreative way to get under someone's skin.
I suspect you’ve been hearing it a lot because more and more people are starting code while very young.
I’m certainly not the best coder in the world, but I was “coding” in Logo (for example) from a very young age. Lots of kids are interested in computers and the barrier to entry is pretty low.
Yeah, but they are not 40 years old interviewing and writing blogposts now. anyway, it's a lame thing to say, as nobody cares when you started "coding". what do you want to achieve by saying that phrase?
Huh? There were computers with built-in BASIC around 40 years ago, like Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, TRS-80, and more, I'm sure. There were magazines with program listings you could type in. Or do you think that labeling kids noodling around with BASIC as "developers" is too tongue-in-cheek?
You must be trolling or an idiot. When did I say that there weren't any computers 40 years ago? I just said that a lot of programmers brag about coding since they were X years old. They're trying to prove something. The amount of times I heard it makes me think that coding in the 80s was more popular than football.
This is accurate, and a sign of the times. My 7yo enjoys programming Lego Mindstorms, and my brother was messing around with redstone circuitry in Minecraft by 8. The barrier of exposure to engineering concepts keeps getting lower.
Well, you did put coding in quotes yourself. 6 year olds are not developers, saying otherwise is insincere and gives off a bad vibe right from the start.
Or tall. Or thin. Or young. Why the emphasis on what one looks like, rather than something deeper, more meaningful, like background, circumstances, class?
There are plenty of poor thin white young tall people out there strugging like most people in life.
I think what bothers me about this announcement is that _anyone_ owns Github; that is, a tech giant with a lot of influence in the software world owning the largest repository of code in history. Something feels wrong about it. I'd be as uncomfortable with it if Google or Facebook or Apple owned it.
Most people are thinking of this from the GitHub perspective, but MS Office is bigger, and random document editors could benefit a lot from smarter, easier version control.
That's just one example, but I'm honestly most curious if any ideas will go from GitHub to other products.
> PS: I’ll be doing an AMA on Reddit in the next few days, I hope to see you there!
It's a bit of shame that that's the location of choice for hosting an AMA. The AMA subreddit is good, but it's trapped in the toxic cesspool that is Reddit overall.
That depends on what subs your subscribed to, or filter from /r/all, there's a lot of positive, creative stuff on Reddit. Here's my filtered list from /r/all (most of the awful crap is USA politics, and all the anti-Trump subreddits, at least the pro-Trump people stick to the one sub): https://gist.github.com/ryan-allen/18e0e0ccbe34e81b7a0b96d11...
I agree, and MS also has some pretty good OSS chops these days. But Github itself is closed source. This is something that I think needs to change, or Github needs to disappear. There are good OSS solutions now that we need to make grow.
I also rely a lot on Github and don't want to move, but I'm going to bite the bullet if they don't open up. I don't like the hypocrisy, and I don't want to be an enabler anymore.
Can somebody change the title to "GitHub is joining Microsoft and a former GNOME developer will become the new CEO" or something like that? "Hello, Github" doesn't say anything...
Really want git? Hire a CM mgr/team to manage your code. Been that way before 2010 (yes, it did suck). Doesn't matter if it's done in-house or out-house.
I wonder if MS went all the way to pay people to comment and vote on HN stories and comment. It would make a lot of sense for them to do. I wonder if HN has any protection against this?
I’ve heard it all after this acquisition was announced. Microsoft is evil, Microsoft will never change, Microsoft is that and this, Microsoft will destroy GitHub.
There are people who see a monster when they hear Microsoft but I bet ask them how they’ve been hurt by Microsoft and nothing will come up.
Is our bias towards Microsoft stoping us from seeing the great work they’ve done in embracing Linux and open source software.
Tell me it’s not a big change, and departure from the old Microsoft.
I think my main concern going forward would be a diaspora of open source projects.
One of the neat things about Github is that a ton of open-source projects can be found there. Regardless of how Github operates going forward for individual users, I would be surprised if projects like Facebook's React or Google's Angular remained on a platform controlled by Microsoft.
Those are only two examples in a sea of OSS projects, so maybe the impact will be smaller than I think.
The main platform where open source takes place is now owned by a company that thought of open source as a form of cancer, vocally talked against it in a disrespectful manner for no reason, promoted fear/uncertainty/doubt campaigns, and even to this day continues to troll companies with patents.
That is not a great place to be in.
Personally, I think everyone should just move their projects somewhere else before Microsoft starts forcibly herding developers their way.
An open operating system does not only have advantages
An open operating system can mutate. With Windows 2000, however, all services are from a single source. This saves time and thus money. More information at www.microsoft.com/germany/windows2000
Honestly though, Microsoft was beat into submission here. Developers and applications (in general) are moving to Linux. Microsoft has no leverage. Sure, buying GitHub may be seen as obtaining leverage, but I think it's clear that you can't strong-arm FOSS sustainably. Free and open is built in.
You are right. Right now Microsoft sounds the same as a politician after losing the primaries, forced to endorse the candidate they competed with and criticized.
We know well though, that when there's a new election, all that happy friendship BS will be over and we will see their true colors again.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO said: "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"
That is a direct attack to open source licensing and open source software.
Microsoft had to take that back after they were beaten in the market and lost popularity among developers.
Now it's plan B: govern open source projects and infrastructure and put them to the service of Microsoft interests. One way of doing that could be simply mismanaging them and setting them for failure.
That article is written using very inflammatory language -- I am very wary to take it at face value, because an author using this kind of language is very unlikely to deeply analyze what Ballmer actually said. Furthermore, this was said two decades ago. Take it with a grain of salt.
A lot of people do not have a perspective on how greedy Microsoft was.
Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world today, not by gathering in circles and singing happy songs. The guy was a monopolist.
They wanted everyone to use Microsoft Windows, code in Visual Studio, do their office work in Office, browse the web in Internet Explorer, have a Microsoft e-mail, chat using Microsoft services, and you get the idea.
And a lot of that was possible by having Windows preinstalled in new computers, and bundling software with Windows, like Internet Explorer. You could argue Apple is similar, but I do not think Apple is interested in a monopoly of the size of that planned by Microsoft.
I wasn't expressing my own opinion on such licenses; 'viral' is accepted terminology for licenses like the gpl that require derivative works to use the same license.
However, if you would like an argument, then yes. Or, rather, I think it's morally ok for people to make software under any license they choose, including licenses that allow big companies to use their work. Personally, I use bsd-3 for most of what I write, and I support other people who do the same. I also bear no ill-will to people who use gpl or apache or mpl or what-have-you.
"Viral" is a term normally used by opponents of licenses like the GPL, which is probably why the parent had a negative reaction; it's not a neutral term. (The neutral term is probably "copyleft".)
> I think it's morally ok for people to make software under any license they choose
Yes, you can make your own software under any license, GPL has no control over you. But it's not ok to fork a GPL software make internal changes and sell it like you wrote it.
If that applied to linux, no hardware vendor would be contributing to linux.
This all sounds good and nice. The question is how much real power he has in Microsoft hierarchy? I mean, if some Microsoft VP decides to violate any of the promises Nat Friedman makes, what would be his options (besides the obvious one of resigning)? How much power he has if Microsoft decides to change direction and force GitHub to do something they didn't want to do?
Who wants their pull request comments to be used as metadata for Microsoft to benefit from knowing what each software developer under the sun is working on at any time? Didn't we just face the same abuse of leverage personal data from facebook? I will privilege my communication either private or professional by refraining to use both github and facebook.
"Please remove all data you have on me. I do not consent with your privacy policy. I don't give permission for your organization to use any kind of information you have about me."
I do hope that this works. One major concern I have is being badly burned by using Xamarin when it was a couple of years (4?) old. I hope they don't do that to github. Xamarin wasn't very elegant back then when those guys started it - it was a horrid hack. That makes me worried.
The emphasis I've seen on "still be able to code in your choice of language," leads me to think there will be some caveat to doing so. E.g. they'll put the windows ad spyware into peoples' code repositories like sourceforge or something else...
I really like what Microsoft did in the past 2-3 years on the open source side and I keep my fingers crossed hopin they will do a good job with github too :)
its good as it will spur a bunch of new GitHubs and innovation in that space. It is like a business case validation for investors. For example like Cruise acquisition spurred more self-driving startups. The times have changes and it isn't 90ies anymore when MS could buy/develop some soft and extinguish all competition in the related area.
Today? Rest assured, they have been very, oh very slow, for a long time. Their Twitter status feed and post mortem dialogue ad infinitum is proof enougb. GitHub has nothing to worry about just yet.
I'm using another service for my private repos, as github's pricing structure for a single dev is seriously uncompetitive.
I wanted to move my public / open source repos for a long time. Now I finally I have the opportunity to do so without getting into discussions at an interview on why am I not using github.
For people such as myself, I don't know what Microsoft / Github can do or say to convince otherwise.
Remember, these costs add up quite easy. Why bother if I can get the same features for free?
But it really depends on how you view it. I felt I got better value by supporting an open source project I like on patreon (Godot) than spending my money on this subscription.
Some single developers are perhaps a bit spoiled. Other professions need offices, stores, work trucks, thousands of dollars in physical tools that they'll need to maintain and replace as they wear out. We need a computer and have the option of a $7/month subscription to perpetually-updated professional tools. $7/month doesn't cover the printer paper most professionals go through in a month. Software developers need a computer and that's about it, and some apparently find $7/month "uncompetitive" because that fee didn't come with sufficient feel-good about charitable giving or something. All the software and professional services I subscribe to as a single developer don't add up to the cost of maintaining and fueling the van my A/C repair guy shows up in, so I have to disagree that they add up quite easy.
This was the company that would (allegedly) start acquisition talks and then after they learned what they needed during due diligence they would back out of the deal and create a competing product. (Unfortunately, I don't know the words to search for any articles.) So, while I, personally don't think they would, I also wouldn't take the risk. FB employees looked at people's private details; if you can, someone will do it at some time.
I think it’s the gh-pages branch on a private repository.
If you look at Nat’s account right now [0], he doesn’t even have the telltale “GitHub Staff” badge, probably because his hiring is contingent upon the deal closing.
So he’s definitely not an admin at the system level, which just makes him a normal account.
Other than being the biggest developer-focused company in the world? Having an extremely complete set of developer tools that can integrate with github? A cloud computing service to deploy apps?
Do you think Github wasn't "money focused"? I'm sure you felt mighty smart making that comment, but businesses are by default focused on making money. HOW you make the money varies, but the final goal doesn't.
Honestly, can you think of a smarter move on the part of Microsoft than making Nat Friedman (a veteran of the Open Source community) CEO of Github? I completely trust this guy to do as good a job as can be done of guiding Github forward as a product and a platform, now that the venture capitalists are no longer in the picture.
Why not? I was programming on a Commodore Plus/4 at the age of five. I got my teeth into this industry by hand typing from magazine articles programs that done nothing more then making the sound of bird tweets, but it taught me A: the basics of how a programming language works, and B: how to debug to get around the inevitable typo in the magazine.
Hopefully MS can reign in Github's ridiculous remote work policy. Github's product velocity has been effectively zero for the past few years, and remote work is likely part of why.
He is not representative of most developers, first (wealthy and corporate-politics resistant), and tries to present himself as one, second (how he introduced himself).
This means Github will be handled by non-developer who tries to pretend to be a developer. This means he lies, conspicuously or not. In both cases I cannot see him as smart enough and self-aware enough.
Given that, I think github will be mishandled and I also think I would be better off somewhere else.
Ah I see. You want a CEO that also has a developer role at the same time.
You are one of those that think running a company is a BS job and anyone could actually do it, so in your would it would make sense to take someone that was shipping code during the last sprint and just give him the CEO role of a 1 thousand, 300M$ revenue company.
In my world that would be completely stupid and reckless. Nat was coding full-time just a few years ago and move to leadership roles recently, so that's exactly what we need to run GitHub: someone that actually knows how to handle large organisation, and someone who knows what being a developer means so he can make sure GitHub is going in the right direction.
I don't even know why I am arguing with you though, you are clearly just doing some level condescending gate keeping, so it's not like anything I say has any impact.
"Hey everyone, I am Nat. I joined the dark side, now I am being rewarded for it as a future CEO, woohoo! I hope you are as happy as I am! See ya later!"
Many of us were given a choice to join MS but didn't.
Come on, I still see the deformations in our industry caused by MS, Oracle and similar companies and nothing of the bad deeds was undone (nobody is going to resurrect progressive businesses/ideas they killed off). Instead we have Bill playing a philanthrope and getting admiration by outsiders and Satya being the jobesque face of "new MS", with Windows 10 fun. I worked for their main competitor and another company that was eaten alive by MS, and they tried to poach me as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221527
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286