Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I assume
AWS, on the other hand, I found an absolute nightmare (though to be fair, I haven't touched it in 2 years).
So many nice products have passed on in acquisition either because users abandoned them or the acquiring party did. I'm not sure which would happen first here.
If GitHub is financially strapped and looking for a buy out, I hope they're exploring other options for funding.
Phones, people generally want what’s new. A 12-18 month old phone is not new.
OTOH, I found the Windows Phone operating system to be highly responsive and I was able to navigate screens more quickly than the previous iPhone or the current Android I have. The problem was that as third-place in the market, few apps were available for it, and those that were weren't being maintained.
Lack of free private repos is the main (only) reason why I don't use GitHub.
2. Their competitors (GitLab, Bitbucket) already have that offering.
3. I don't think they're interested in GitHub for its revenue, but for its strategic value. GitHub has to protect its revenue model by disallowing free private repos, Microsoft can afford to be more flexible.
4. They've already made similar moves. They acquired Xamarin, which was expensive, and made it free.
I have ~50 private on my account... Embarrassingly bad half-completed side projects mostly.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652
[1] https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...
Before anyone touts how much wider our reach might be for potential hires, can I point out that my little firm has hired people from the other end of Europe directly ("real" friend of friend etc). Oh and just in case you are wondering - we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.
we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.
... means that we do not discriminate unfairly. Do I really need to spell it out?
Linkedin is way way better than other job sites. For instance, Glassdoor doesn't even support basic keyword search. If you happen to track job ads for C programmers then you'd get all ads which may have a C character somewhere in their text, and forget abou searching for C++ because Glassdoor doesn't recognize the plus character. With linkedin at least basic keyword searches do work.
I think it's significantly worse albeit probably short of totally "screwed up". Just marginally worse in a lot of small ways that add up to a less useful, less efficient experience for me.
People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.
Obviously that didn't pleased people (see rating in Play Store), and they had to provide something for low/mid range phones, and skype lite was born (which is really good one).
Everyone I know is using FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. The only time I hear Skype anymore is people using it for podcasts. Obvious anecdata but it seems reasonable that services with better device integration (FaceTime) or social graph access (Facebook) would do better in the long run.
A standalone app would fix this, but there seems to be some strange internal agenda tying it to Chrome... Chromebooks I guess?
Skype used to be mainstream. It was essentially a cross platform iMessage & FaceTime, almost ahead of its time. It was also efficient in terms of network usage, being peer-to-peer for the most part.
Had it continued to be usable, it would still be mainstream and might have the place of WhatsApp today. Instead, we now have this garbage Snapchat-like UI, a server-based model that doesn't even work (it was supposed to "fix" the P2P model, but for me it's been way worse than P2P which always worked), and a shitty Electron client that melts your battery and looks awful (they killed a gorgeous - especially on Mac - native client to replace it with this shit).
They made some missteps, sure, but Skype was already a very dated solution.
Media uploads could have been solved by a server-based "media" service, while keeping the reliable & battle-tested P2P architecture.
As of currently, the server-based architecture is an absolute disaster, way worse than P2P.
I've been a pretty big Skype user in the past, and still use it a bit now, and it is actually so much more reliable now that Microsoft runs it.
With P2P it would sometimes take a bit longer (10 seconds?) but it would always work. When it wouldn't, it was because of a problem on either one of the endpoints, and switching network connections or rebooting the router fixed it.
With the current model it would just randomly not work (the client also sucks and sometimes hangs in an inconsistent state after the failed call attempts), without anything we can do - it's something with the software and/or servers.
I used to trust Skype calls to actually go through - now even if I see "ringing" I have no faith in whether it's actually ringing on the other side (and if it was, whether the call would actually connect once picked up).
That‘s still very clearly the same Microsoft where a gazillion layers of dumb middle management ruin everything[2].
[1] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/06/skype-redesign-iphone-app... [2] http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
I'm not sure if LinkedIn could be any less "screwed up" than it was when Microsoft bought it.
Still very much alpha but the idea is to have a clean UI and allow developers to write their own insightful articles for the community to read and reward the author with reputation. Like Medium but with more specific language, library, framework topics etc. Then use that to help recruiters who can't code advertise and source candidates for technical interviews. No inbox spamming free for all, they can only contact you when you've applied for a position.
I'd be interested to know what people think of this and if they have any feedback.
They also killed Danger Mobile.
Microsoft is more and more cloud and services, but they still have a developer mentality and they have done some good stuff with open source lately.
If someone is going to buy Github, Microsoft is probably the most friendly to developers. Unless Google or Facebook wants to go full altruist and buy for the credibility.
A lot of people would say Google these days... now that they're starting to move beyond Material Design 1.0 a lot of their products are becoming more visually mature and unique, along with their substantial investment in machine learning to make their software more personalized, etc.
Every time I run into an issue with Atlassian software, I find a JIRA ticket from 7 years ago. If they have a capable dev team, it's probably working on projects off my radar?
Examples include Apple, most of the enterprise hardware space, IoT/wearables, *aaS, the top 10-100ish cloud vendors, etc.
Even Microsoft is a hardware company now.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12742/latest-windows-10-versi...
This update has broken computers until the SSDs in question were blacklisted. For people who auto-downloaded the update after that, Windows "only" showed annoying and absolutely unhelpful error messages every single day since the 1803 release.
This is not an outlier, but a strategy: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2878026/microsoft-to-b...
Most features have a link to their respective documentation for more information.
I’m all for improvements, but I’m not even sure what I would want. At this point, I’m more worried any attempt at innovation would break the things I like about GitHub now, than I am excited for something new.
I use gitlab for all my private projects and don’t find it to be remarkably better in any way, and the UI always confuses me.
You can also open an issue directly in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
The only reason for this is familiarity. GitHub is the market leader now and I use it every day at work. It's a lot easier to get used to a new UI if it is similar to the one you are used to. I'm sure if everyone used GitLab at work everyday, it would be fine. The UI doesn't strike me as bad, just very different.
Well, I guess Gitlab would be happy about the new customers. If they're clever, they'll work on some tools to easen the transition.
From this perspective, Git has made some fundamental things right: Because it only functions as a decentralized system, it strongly reduces lock-in. In the case of Github, you "only" had to port over issues and pull requests. Imagine how great it would be if there was a standard way to save issues in a git repo[1] that was supported by pretty much every provider.
[1]: Such as https://pythonhosted.org/pyditz/
Now, what's also great (did I mention "shameless"?) about the approach used in SIT is that while you can use it with Git (and this is how I've been using it so far), it does not depend on Git's structures but just files -- so it can be easily carried over to whatever might replace Git in a decade.
I've just been thinking: If one manages issues within a separate git repo -- couldn't we also store pull requests this way? I've always been very impressed by how good `git diff` and `git apply` work together, so theoretically, one should just be able to store the result of `git diff master...HEAD` in a new issue. The rest sounds like a tooling problem...
And this is how it looks in SIT: https://imgur.com/a/UCFmbsZ
I think it would be bad because GitHub wouldn't be a generally independent entity, with no business interests besides making a product good enough that people will pay for it anymore. Currently, GitHub doesn't really have any incentive to care what tools and platform you are using, or where you deploy your code. To the contrary, they want to appeal to the widest audience possible.
This would all change if owned by Microsoft. GitHubs role would then instead likely instead be to channel users into other Microsoft products and services, especially Azure. Instead of functionality that benefits everyone independent of platform, it will be in their interest to add features that only benefit users of the Microsoft ecosystem. Azure CI, deploy to Azure, .NET integration, LinkedIn integration. I don't think this is the kind of platform most FOSS projects would want to use, certainly not me.
A large company doesn't make an acquisition like this without a business incentive. For them, it's driving people to their products. Maybe making the tooling in github for interacting with microsoft-y products a little bit better. Maybe adding whatever licenses microsoft likes to the front of the default licenses you can pick from when you create a new repo. Things generated by their editors going into your .gitignore by default.
I don't see any reason they'd acquire github and then entirely leave it alone.
Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.
https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...
Git was not developed as a clone of BitKeeper, it has a very different design (snapshot-based content-addressed filesystem, versus the SCCS "weave"). If anything, git was a (much faster) clone of Monotone, minus the heavy cryptography focus which made Monotone so slow.
Maybe it's different this time, maybe it isn't.
I feel that no big corporation should own GitHub, even if their investors feel differently.
CEO Nadella started working at Microsoft in 1992, but the executives who coined and lived the EEE phrase are all out. Is Nadella a sleeper agent? If not, what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?
I agree, it seems that both Gates and Ballmer have found new callings in life, which has left Nadella with pretty much control of the company. I remember almost feeling sorry for the guy when he took over, what freedom could he possibly have between those two? A lot, it seems in retrospect.
But I generally agree, I want my OS to ask me every time it wants to send a crashdump (or anything else).
1. Updates can introduce breaking changes.
2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes.
3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.
I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone willing to give up liberty for security will receive neither.
Forced updates may suck for you, but understand that it is you they suck for, not the vast, vast majority.
I think this largely was only true of the period between the internet becoming a thing and the smartphone becoming a thing. Nowadays there's phones, tablets, and chromebooks that serve the needs of those people better and in a more convenient form factor. Desktops are for people who do work, create stuff, or are hobbiests.
I think a lot of the reasons computers suck today is because of this idea that they need to cater to some strawman drooling moron of a user.
Doubt that. "Desktop" is defined by mouse, keyboard and display. A chromebook satisfies this. I have yet to meet a user who uses a smartphone instead of a PC to do stuff that are notably easier to do on a PC. (while having both)
I would also bet that every user would chose a keyboard over a touch interface to type text.
3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.
3. "Users have freedom to do what they choose unless it makes more work for me"?
Agreed, but this had only ever actually been true with free software.
Anyway, I can manage the limited telemetry via hosts and I can defer updates (which I will do from now on), but my biggest gripe is forced installation/reinstallation of previously removed apps and games. I run Windows 10 Pro and I end up with a few variations of Candy Crush games, Minecraft, Autodesk drawing apps, and others after initial OS installation and after every major update so far. This is while using an offline account, and even if I used my Microsoft account on this workstation I've never purchased/downloaded any of those apps in the past.
I get that "Pro" at this point means home power user, and companies should be using Enterprise, but Microsoft shouldn't be pushing any software back onto the machine once the user has uninstalled it. That's user-hostile and takes control out of the hands of the one person who should be in complete control of the system.
Once full, non-buggy support for Ryzen APUs arrives in Linux, I'm switching Windows 10 to a VM and going back to Linux on this machine as the daily driver OS.
If that is allowed to pass QA in Microsoft, then it kind of scares me what can happen if they were to acquire GitHub.
For god's sake, even Apple, the prime example of knows-better-than-you lets you never update, if that's what you really want.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/microsofts-bid-to-se...
I could even see that defaulting auto update to "on" is a good move too. If you know what you're doing you can turn them off.
I haven't adminned a windows machine since '98 -- can you really. Or turn off automatic windows updates?
As for any telemetry stuff, that should be opt in, and have a target server to send to, which you can point to your own box if you want to.
Microsoft today is different to Microsoft in the 90s though. In the 90s it was a software company that used embrace extend extinguish to maintain and extend its monopolies, but it wrote software and the software was the product.
Now it seems it uses the "user is the product" ala Google, Facebook etc. I'm not aware of apple doing that. Still I guess inevitable as companies penny pinch more and more.
I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.
Personally I'm not so much worried about Microsoft going back to Microsoft'95 but more about the fact that they, like most (all?) other big tech companies, collect more and more data and integrate more and more tightly into our lives. Still I feel that currently Facebook, Google and Amazon are all scarier in that respect.
If they've managed to change that much, then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft as soon as a new CEO steps in.
That's why I prefer Microsoft to stay away from the products and projects everybody loves. Furthermore, I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.
Microsoft has experience handling online code repositories and team services. Azure integration has the potential to improve deployment pipelines for many users. Microsoft has lots of experience doing things at scale, and can potentially find cost reduction maneuvers for Github. Visual Studio integration can bring more users to Github. Cooperate users are more likely to upgrade their existing agreement with Microsoft than they are to enter a finical relationship with a new company. Microsoft has just as much or more to offer Github as any other top 5 tech company.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/03/15/gvfs-for-...
Well, the world has changed and there is no longer any opportunity for a 90s Microsoft. So I'm pretty sure that unless the world changes back to the 90s, Microsoft wouldn't survive such a turn.
Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
Do they not spy on users of Windows 10?
> like most (all?) other big tech companies
"The other children are doing it" and then you're mother would say "that doesn't make it right". It's a child's defense no doubt.
But anyway, it's also factually not true.
Corporations only exist as legal constructs. I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just saying that it is always going to be the case that a business, any business, will work within the law and with lawful government because they ultimately depend on contract and property law.
Apple doesn't give a s* about your privacy. They claim to give a s* about your privacy. Those are different things.
If you want this to change you have to get involved with legislation to change the rules/law. That's the only option. None of them "care" about you or really anything, because they aren't human. Companies respond to changes in the law which bound the approved set of behaviors. That's it.
EDIT: I got the budget wrong. Changed that.
However, I highly doubt that government and enterprise purchases make up a large share of Apple's income. And consequently I'm convinced that news of a backdoor in iMessage would cause Apple way more financial damage than these things did to Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728294, https://www.scmagazineuk.com/skype-backdoor-missed-by-micros... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
And the more Apple doubles down on protecting its users, the bigger this financial incentive becomes. Of course that doesn't stop me from supporting better legislation (GDPR was a great start).
If "I lived through the 90s" was how I measured technology and companies, I'd sure as hell not be using Apple products - their technology was pretty terrible then, and the company was incoherent. Would any rational person say that the terrible tech and incoherence then translates to how one would accept what they produce in 2018? Some companies change, some don't (see: oracle). It seems a healthier approach is to measure the behavior and state of a company in the present.
Second its easier for people to grow to be better at their job than to grow into being better people.
I loved through the 90s and think that Microsoft not requiring Windows shows that the danger from the 90s isn’t the same today.
Now it’s cloud vs OS lockin.
So no, MS is clearly a bad steward for GitHub.
Satya Nadella has completely re-organized MS inside-and-out since taking the helm in 2014. It is a VERY different company than it was even 5 years ago. In March [1], Microsoft even went so far as to officially disband the Windows department and merge it into something called "Experiences & Devices".
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176220/microsoft-window...
It's MS only. It's more obvious in cases like Xbox, where MS don't support anything except DirectX. I.e. developers are forced to use it if they want to release for Xbox.
exFAT is an issue since it's a patented filesystem that MS pushed as a standard for SD cards. You can't freely use it (unless you just ignore those patents on your own risk).
ActiveSync doesn't have commonly available FOSS clients, so you can't use it on Linux easily. It's highly irritating (since it's widely entrenched in corporate environments). And etc. and etc.
What planet are you people on?
Lost your argument as soon as you said "spyware". It's like calling everyone you disagree with a "terrorist".
> Taking more control away from computer users than ever before?
Like what?
Like rebooting computers whenever they feel like it. Reenabling previously disabled options etc. Your head is in the sand but you don't have to live this way.
Currently it only works for MS platforms (Windows incl. ARM, xbox, embedded) but they might make it cross platform in some future. Technically the API is not that complex, i.e. unlike WPF it’s not that hard to port from the current Direct3D to Vulkan or GLES or Metal.
However, Github is one of my favorite services, professionally and for hobbies, and I really don't want significant changes. I also use VSTS (Microsoft's code+PM online service) and it is a beast. They don't need to be heavily intermingled.
They are however embracing open source in a manner that feels very sincere to me.
For the record, the so-called "spyware" is telemetry which exists only in the SDK for .NET Core and not the actual runtime that you would ship to the user with the software. It is anonymous data, completely open source so it really is only what they say it is, and the first time you use it it tells you how to disable it.
Doublespeak.
Not going to deny this, but that's really the reason I'm not comfortable with the idea of a MS owned Github. Microsoft doing open source development is great. Microsoft trying to influence open source and FOSS development as a whole, not so much. Them aquiring a central hub of such development efforts doesn't signal good things to come: The users of Github have nothing to gain from this, whereas MS has, and there's a non-zero chance of them ruining the thing for everyone in the process.
It makes me wonder whether I'll be able to find as many random interesting projects just by searching for things anymore.
I'm a bit sad about this.
I still remember the old days where most opensource projects were doing self-hosting or using sourceforge. Self-hosting is something that most developers that just want to build something nice won't consider. And using sourceforge back then was also atrocious (they didn't exactly have an easy to use UI, if I remember correctly).
This makes me think that what contributed the most to there being so much open source, is the easyness of creating your own repository on GitHub. With just a few clicks you have one.
I generally now hope that whatever Microsoft thing I'm dealing with somewhere ends up linking to GitHub, because everyone on the side of the company that's working with GitHub is pretty on point.
Which is what gives me some hope that they could manage this acquisition right: They're already doing GitHub the way GitHub should be done.
Issue filed in node sql driver... azure tech notices the issue, raises to sql team... sql team dev starts replying and working to resolve... recommends patch to upstream project in github... issue resolved.
Oracle would NEVER do something like that. It was actually very impressive, and that's just my one anecdote, and I've seen many others.
FB, Google and the other big tech companies that contribute so much will have to go elsewhere and we will have a fragmentation mess.
I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.
Considering you bring up the second part, it makes me wonder if maybe outside of the obvious (owning GitHub), perhaps they're after the extra talent to bolster their SharePoint product.
i have a feeling they get it just fine.
They do get a lot of this stuff, but I feel like whatever they want to do with Github is more geared towards average Joe .NET developer. Possibly making the platform less attractive for everything else through neglect.
Just give it a little more time. They are turning around years of company culture and they're doing a great job at it. If VS Code is a sign of future products, I'm excited to see what they come out with down the road.
Their main competition is AWS and GCP. Very different world.
and i don’t get why you are mentioning those other things. what do they have to do with anything regarding microsoft understanding github? microsoft is no doubt and expert in all of those fields anyway, at least internally.
and what cross-platform gui framework would compete with a .net core cross-platform implementation of uwp, wpf, and windows forms? nothing, in my opinion. people would flood the .net ecosystem to get away from things like c++ and qt and the horror of writing script-based GUIs in python.
The Office team is probably more than happy to not be hamstrung to windows only. Particularly Office 365. Azure has been using a lot of non-ms/windows tech from the start.
I'm sure there's some in the recently re-org that used to be Windows still have issues, but the old guard is largely gone now.
Surely, there are preferred stacks (e.g. in the high level PaaS areas), but this includes node, python and .NET.
PS: one save bet: Java will never be on their support list :). But only for legal reasons :)
Externally though, the image looks completely different to those who don't really care for what's happening at MSFT - they just seem like an outdated Apple. That's slowly starting to change, I think the Verge recently put out a piece claiming they've switched positions. However, a lot of major consumer problems (Windows Update, Skype) have plagued the company tremendously. No amount of loving Typescript or VSC is going to change that.
Well it's not like the reason for being negative is unfounded. MS has a long history of running services into the ground, and their recent 'we love open source' charade brings back strong memories of E3 for many folks.
e.g. "GitHub is really starting to improve again" - Devs in 2050
The second part is true. .NET does not share the same wide ecosystem as Java.
I have hands-on experience with Unity3D and .NET Core 2. Both are cross-platform and worked relatively well. I’ve built MacOS, iOS, Android software with Unity, and Linux software with .NET Core.
I’ve heard Xamarin is also good for mobiles but haven’t personally used it.
But perhaps not without some pain for those involved making it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
Also, none of Atwood's reasons is "I don't like working in C#." And several of the concerns in this post are obsolete.
The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing, but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.
I like the fact Github is independent of all the big players. I really, really, really hope it stays a neutral ground.
Also, if acquired by MS, I'm not that afraid for github itself. However, what is at risk in my opinion is all the integrations around github. There is a rich and striving ecosystem surrounding github. Tools like appveyor, travis-ci, coverall, readthedocs, codacy are really useful, ease a lot development and are infinitely easier to setup/maintain than a Jenkins box plus a few slaves. What would happen to this ecosystem remains to be seen.
This is such a prejudiced statement. It can be said of any company.
GitHub works because it effectively belongs to "no one" as far as the big players are concerned. Sure they might themselves go bad one day but there is no point in hasting this for some two cents Azure/AWS/GCP mode.
1. LinkedIn's dark UI patterns are as bad as they've ever been. Bringing the same to GitHub or otherwise LinkedIn-ifying it seems like a very real risk.
2. Ramping up telemetry. Key loggers in Windows 10, opt-out telemetry in .NET Core, seems impossible to get VSCode to stop phoning home.
This is the stuff we very badly want to avoid.
2. (Windows 10) Isn't that only in the technical preview versions? Or is the keylogger in the release versions too?
Most routine jobs/contracts at the coalface are still Java/.NET (possibly with a bit of Kotlin thrown in) - I even see companies looking for PHP developers on a weekly basis.
They are definitely alive and kicking, though if you judged based on this website alone, they all ceased to exist 10 years, replaced by Golang, Elixir and Clojure.
Mild exaggeration (and it's not a criticism of the people here), but you get my drift. People here like to talk about new/shiny/cutting-edge - and that's fine, but it's also not necessarily what customers/clients want or need.
C#/.NET in particular, though not perfect, is one of the most pleasurable languages/frameworks to work in.
https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/08/23/the-steve-ballmer...
Their integration of Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft IDs into Skype has meant that I now have two or three contacts for some people, and I have to switch which contact I send messages to depending on what device they are currently using.
They've also broken other basic functionality like sending messages - even with a solid internet connection on both sides, it will often refuse to send messages leaving them in a 'Sending' state. Other times i'll be in the middle of a conversation and I won't get a reply to certain messages that appear to have sent correctly. Hours or days later I'll get a confused "What?" message from that person, to which I've got no idea what they're talking about, and then they send me a screenshot showing a half dozen messages suddenly showing up from previous conversations.
Then there's situations where I'll get messages on one device, but not on another (eg phone). So I've got someone pissed at me because I'm not responding to them, when the notifications are all piling up on my phone or another laptop, or whatever.
All in all, Skype has become so unreliable that I will only use it to make calls, because at least that way I can be sure the messages are getting through.
* colors - you can change your Skype colors from blue to red or green
* stories - follow your friends just like on Instagram or Snapchat
There's a big difference between engaging the developer community with great products and purchasing important services that the developer community relies on.
Microsoft has succeeded many times with products and services they've built themselves, and with products they've purchased, but how often have they succeeded with services they've purchased?
Heck Microsoft killed their own competitor TFS and pushed people to migrate to Git, and uses GitHub themselves for hosting several products. Microsoft also has full Git support in Visual Studio Online (their enterprise competitor to GitHub), Visual Studio, and VS Code.
Microsoft would likely use GitHub to advertise their development products, tools, and services like Azure. I doubt they'd want to "extinguish" GitHub because it just means less eyes on their adverts.
Do the costs of running the servers and hosting the free services not cover the revenue from Enterprise users?
I believe that any Enterprise users won't notice even a doubling of the subscription fee, if GitHub really needs it.
I don't know why there needs to be more than a handful of employees working at github, just don't break what's already there!
So VCs can cash in.
They raised a 250MM round a few years ago. You don't get to take that kind of money from VCs for a cut of yearly residuals.
It's just software. My experience with git was about a month long phase where I devoted a few hours a week to learning it. Now I can use it but I still have to google commands for anything other than the basics. That's the problem with git. Git without google would be unusable. That's why I consider it to be extraordinarily poorly designed. You've seen git commands, I'm not going to go look up some esoteric command just to prove a point to you. The point is a good program would not force you to google everything, it would just work.
I consider git to be more of an advertising feat. It fascinates me how many people drank the kool-aid.
My Microsoft Personal Account? Microsoft Work Account? Azure AD Account? Microsoft GitHub account?
p.s. All of the accounts have the same username, you just try different password and 2FA combinations til it works.
Microsoft Work Account - Defined by your workplace. Ending in @workplace.com
Azure AD Account - Same as your work account, unless your workplace uses a different tenant account for Azure.
Github Account - Well they still need to support the older accounts.
But they have been killing it with Typescript and Visual Studio. I feel like that at such a large company, the Typescript recent history matters more than the Skype history. Two very different areas with different people in charge, etc.
MS has always been pretty bad at providing services.
And MS did messed up on other major products or companies
- Rare video games. They did freaking golden eyes and conkers bad day and they manage to kill it.
- they messed up Wn10, which is still not as good as Win7 after all those years but spies more on you and forces update at the worse moment on you
- the latest outlook is barely usable. Sometime mails can't be sent. Sometime it freezes or crashes. It's very slow, the search sucks and I never find the buttons I'm looking for.
- they killed Nokia and the windows phone despite all the investments the community did in it. And it was considered a good product.
- they are milking minecraft like disney is milking SW, so that all the creative community has moved to private servers.
I mean, we are talking about a company that had a monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world. The player and browser, the most used software ever by the non tech saavy users.
And to this day, none of their versions is remotely as good as the competition.
> monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world
I know it's a trope to say that IE was a monopoly, but the longest view of these stats I can easily find comes from W3Counter[1] and at what appears to be its market peak in 2007, IE6 and IE7 had 50% and 17% of the market.
OK, so the combined share was downtrending since the actual peak in 2004, according to ADTECH data from Europe[2]...
Huh. There are stats that go way further back, to before IE was dominant, and Wikipedia says it actually peaked in 2002, with 96% of the market.[3] I stand corrected?
I started my reply to make a point, and upon doing the basic research found that it appears I don't know what I'm talking about. These stats are really interesting, though!
FWIW, I have not been primarily a Windows user since I was about 14 years old. That was in 1999, when Netscape was still a player in the market, and I began my switch to Linux. I guess I forgot (or blacked out, it was traumatic) the fact that there was a point in time in the Browser Wars when IE was effectively declared the winner. It's been a steady downhill trend since then!
[1]: https://www.w3counter.com/trends
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#AD...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Re...
Conveniently, Github fits right into the technology bubble. :)
We need proper decentralization.
There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.
> There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.
The Web is decentralized, and so everybody’s using Google to discover it. The problem with decentralization is you still need global entry points, i.e. some sort of centralization.
I want GitHub's goal to be a good GitHub. Not a good part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Those may initially be the same, but it takes very little for them to not be the same.
If the extreme advertising in Windows 10 is any sign...
Apparently the Gnome folks concluded that GitHub was already too closed to even consider them in the competition for the question "Where will the Gnome project live in the future?"
GitLab won that competition, btw, and icrosoft wasn't even part of that calculus.
Is it likely? I don't know. It is an interesting possibility though, that would certainly change the game.
Large companies think that, by acquiring important hosted open source infrastructure, they'll somehow acquire the users or act as gatekeepers. But open source tooling is so decentralized these days that is not easy to be a captive user. The cost of switching is so low -- plenty of other comparable services supply collaborative utilities for git -- that, for most projects, a weekend spent altering URLs and configs should suffice.
If such a deal goes through, Microsoft will spend millions on the acquisition and, simultaneously, alternative providers who appear more independent (Gitlab, BitBucket, etc) will see a surge in new accounts.
And I, for one, think it'd be a good thing for open source. Every time an OSS sugar daddy turns on its users -- SourceForge, BitKeeper, Oracle, SCO, etc -- the community has grown more robust, more decentralized, and more resilient.
imho, github feels a bit too slow innovating, which is kinda surprising since they are still "a startup"
- really profitable after introducing private repos - burning quite some money for growth after they took VC money - really profitable again after they changed their pricing to per-seat pricing
[0]: https://blog.github.com/2016-05-11-introducing-unlimited-pri...
Can you share some examples?
It's not perfect, but it's simple, easy to use, and gets to the point.
I run Windows. I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, and the sense that Microsoft is ritually unclean will drive many of them away from github. It's the best thing that's happened to BitBucket and Altassian ever. If I have a choice between MS tools and Altassian tools I will usually take MS. (Visual Source Safe really did suck, but Visual Studio is not that bad...)
Also, Microsoft acquisitions do not seem to go well. Look at Skype, LinkedIn, etc.
* email/domain integration
* code hosting
* issue tracking/kanban-based project planning
* CI/CD processes
Developer tooling is evolving and there's a land-grab happening, from small workshops all the way up to global-scale enterprises.
(Not entirely a joke. The Windows team has moved to git, which is a fascinating sign of the times.)
TFS as the development process management solution will live on as an on-prem service, but TFVC is unofficially feature-complete and in the maintenance phase.
I also love it how it detects changes on unchanged files ( they look at last modified timestamp) and you can't undo the unchanged unless you install TFPT and google for a bit for the command.
I also love it how when doing merges sometimes you have 10 000 conflicts even tho the files are unchanged :)
TFVC is bad and it should die... I'm glad they took up on git... now all i have to do is train my team on how to use git :)
After years of watching Microsoft gobble up and assimilate companies, I'd rather jump ship before they start the extinguish portion of the cycle. Mojang is starting to leave the extend part with updates that are pushed out early for the "bedrock" version of minecraft.
And for perfectly rational reasons, I would add.
Back in 1984 Apple released the first microcomputer that came without a software development kit. Since then it has all been about the computer using you than the other way around, a proud tradition of bay area companies such as Google, Facebook, Palantir, etc.
Ok, that's not relevant to anything else written in this thread.
I think they've gone down the road of harvesting.
I don't know if anybody is left at LinkedIn rather than life coaches, scam artists, offshore development companies, self-promoters, "business development" people, salesmen who can't sell (maybe that is what "business development" means?), recruiters that can't recruit (ex. they have been contacting you for years because you once said something about Cold Fusion and they badly need somebody to move to Nome, Alaska but they never hire remotes...), people who seem to write 20 articles about data science a day that verge on word salad (you'd think if they knew that much they could write a better neural network to generate the text.) And people who are gullible enough to think that there is some value in sending somebody an InMail or using all of those search features they sell so you can do more refined searches of life coaches, self promoters, ...
Numerous design problems with how the forums work mean that good discussions get drowned out. The same fraudulent messages get spammed that were being spammed six years ago and they won't do, don't do, or can't do anything about it
LinkedIn has closed off most access to the API and you cannot get anything interesting out of it... except all of the email addresses of your contacts so if you do that "Lion" thing you will probably need to change your email address at some point. (I think many people don't know they get so much spam because they have a LinkedIn account.)
I am on the threshold of nuking my Facebook account now that I've disconnected all of the sites that I need to log in that use Facebook. I still haven't decided if I nuke my LinkedIn account or just delete 95% of my contacts.
I'm not sure that's true, but it is true that MS would have motivation to leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software.
At a conference years ago, a Microsoft rep told me over beers that almost everything his division did had the ultimate objective of selling more SQL Server licenses. That's why SQL Server is a required component of almost all MS enterprise software.
So you might for instance see a SQL Server backend option, and then "Github Enterprise" sold with that configuration.
This is pretty much business 101. You have loss leaders, that are solely designed to drive traffic to different products.
This is the silliest thing I've read on HN in awhile.
It appears that what goes around does, in fact, come around.
What is the connection between SOME of their newer dev tools being good (oh, just try the mess that is Visual Studio) and... well, anything else.
I don't know if it's an optimisation issue with the software itself, or if it's just GitLab.com being overloaded..
Gitlab will also see upticks, but I suspect it's a lot more than most people need/want to maintain.
I don't want Google or Amazon to buy them, and that almost leaves Azure.
It seems like something they could have done themselves a few years ago, though. Puzzling.
Github has generally been platform agnostic (except for git itself), and it would sadden me to see Github start to compromise those values and start favoring one platform or another. (One could easily see Github / Visual Studio plugins, enabled by default, with built-in subtle nudges towards the MS Cloud platform).
They seem to handle acquisitions well. Zappos, Audible, Twitch...
I do believe Amazon would interfere less with what users like about GitHub than Microsoft would.
Microsoft has always been a developer-tools company. They are many other things besides, and I have had some nasty experiences with their sales reps (who would say anything to close a deal), but I have always felt that at its core, Microsoft is a developer-driven organization.
Apple likes developers too. They taste like chicken. And a cloud-based developer institution would let Apple destroy two populations - cloud operations and developers - with one asteroid.
Its been what, 2 years since the Linked-in and Xamarin acquisitions? Nothing seems to have changed. Microsoft just seems to know that the desktop is no longer the cash cow that it used to be, office still is but may not last long, so its a good idea to diversify its portfolio.
Satya is not Ballmer.
Microsoft had a "github" it could not compete and github took the mindshare.
Now it seems Microsoft want to buy that mindshare.
I wonder how many FOSS and other projects will jump ship once/if Microsoft takes over.
[1] https://gogs.io/
Anyway - I think the VS Code experience helped with Microsoft's institutional "fear" of pushing ahead with a JavaScript ecosystem elsewhere - I think the knock-on effects contributed towards the Office org's recent announcement to add JS as a first-class macro language in Excel, I just wish it was TypeScript instead.
It's almost worth re-asking the question as...what does Azure want Github for, to try and strip away thinking about MS's windows/office products. There could be some crossover between github's Atom efforts and VS Code, and MS already worked on projects like Git virtual filesystem (GVFS) for their own needs ( https://github.com/Microsoft/gvfs )
I imagine this move will lead to more integrations there... Kind of like what Microsoft did with Deis and their Kubernetes offerings.
Maybe they could add Office 365 editing to GitHub and pitch it as the successor to SharePoint. Or try to integrate it with their other products in some kind of Frankenstein mess.
Buying GitHub and then adding tooling to make shipping from GitHub to Azure easy (and the obvious choice) would help them push Azure more to companies not currently using other Microsoft products.
They have a clear long-term strategy of owning professional social networks, both within and across companies.
That way they can sell you access to your professional network, and your employer access to info you don’t even realize exists about you, and also sell it insights into its own org structure.
GitHub would just be another piece of the puzzle.
Gitlab.com and self host GitLab offer the best of both worlds. Gitlab right now still isn't as good as Github, but it is good enough for many things. And we see improvement coming in every few months. Not to mention Microsoft will likely move the whole Github infrastructure to Azure.
Skype worked perfectly for me on smartphone, and the few quirks could've been patched without screwing it up completely.
I feel like Skype was ahead of its time, it was essentially a cross-platform iMessage & FaceTime that was mainstream.
Had Microsoft not fucked it up we'd still be happily using it.
However, basically I see two different era for MS. Before Satya and After Satya. So, I don't have any concern/worries in this acquisition.
edit: This isn't snark. Didn't they legit cut a bunch of perks, refocus everyone's priorities, and hire some people to start cracking whips? Or was I reading the public accounts of that situation wrong? Got bad scuttlebutt?
I'll just remind people who may think I'm being old, crotchety, and living in the past, that this has been a repeated pattern of theirs that has resurfaced so often and reliably as to become considered by many to be a core component of MS culture. Repeated including in the face of DoJ prosecution and monitoring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
I can't fathom a single statement from 1996 about a computer company that is still accurate today, and EEE falls into that category as well.
Instead of helping and pushing the industry forward like Google does instead we have them hurting the industry. They buy GitHub and we will have a mess as FB, Google and the others that contribute to the greater good of the industry will have to go else where and we have a fragmentation mess. Google gave us map/reduce and K8s and so many incredible papers and a big one is VP8 and VP9 stopping the mpegla from trying to extort ridiculous license fees.
Or finding all the big security vulnerabilities like Shellshock, meltdown, Cloudbleed, Heartbleed Spectre and so many more and sharing and helping the entire industry.
I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.
Doesn't apply to buying the competition.
edit In the meanwhile I would recommend filing an issue on every single project as you would normally file issues on, asking what their migration plan in the event of a Microsoft takeover is, before, not after this happens.
100% will take my code somewhere else if this acquisition goes through. Go acquire Atlassian if you want to "diversify" your portfolio. Go stick it up your Azure MS.
Microsoft:..
Microsoft:..
- Github user account migration/integration with outlook.com
- A much-internally-championed Github/Office/LinkedIn integration effort created by some sharp but inexperieced program manager fresh just out of Washington State, that happens to require Github project descriptions to be authored in .docx format, launched as an improvement from that primitive format made by a certain mac fanboy.
- An effort to migrate the Github infrastructure to Azure cloud on Win 10 that ties up 85% of all development resources for the next five years and ultimately fails.
And that’s from when they weren’t allowed to use BSD or Linux internally and Windows Server was rudimentary. Microsoft would have no problem migrating Github to Azure quickly.
For me, much of the same rationale would apply
Agreed. The best possible solution for making GitHub long term sustainable would be following the Mozilla model.
Google Reader is the product that seems to leave the most bitterness, but that too seems to have been relatively niche.
Google killed Google Code in 2016 and moved much of their code base to Github. Maybe they'll rebrand Github back to "Code", but outright killing it seems unlikely.
They've killed / destroyed / butchered large acquisitions before, yes.
Metaweb / Freebase cost them a reported $200-$300 million.
Feedburner cost them $100 million.
Slide.com cost them $228 million.
Motorola was a $12 billion disaster. They might as well have killed it.
DailyDeal cost them $114 million.
Wildfire Interactive cost them $450 million.
There are a couple dozen more in the $30m to $100m range.
I can't believe people are salivating over the idea of giving google more control over open source. Need to wake up to their style of evil I guess.
If Google actually bought GitHub, I would be thinking twice about using it.
If you don't trust Startpage you can try DuckDuckGo with a !g modifier, it will search Google (mostly) anonymously for you.
You can also use the !sp flag, that redirects you to the startpage result page, without passing through google at any time, so that's what you should use instead of !g.