What if Microsoft open sources GitHub?
(By which I mean everything whiny MS-skeptics have said today (myself included).)
It would be a knockout PR move, suddenly sucking all the wind out of the sails of all knee-jerk-antiMicrosoftism surrounding this acquisition.
Satya, bro, you should really take a page out of Apple's playbook, and announce right now that you are going to.
(That way, whether you really do[1], or you don't[2], most people won't remember the idea anyway...)
[1]: https://swift.org
But there was some skepticism, because Steve Jobs had previously announced they were going to open-source their FaceTime technology so non-Apple platforms could adopt it and it could become a cross-platform communications system... but they never did.
Both announcements got people excited, though.
EDIT: Okay, my bad; I stand corrected. I remembered him saying that in 2012, but I googled it after lowtolerance disputed my claim, and what he actually said was, "We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.”
They won't, though. They won't open Windows or Office either.
But windows must be a colossal mass of who knows what at this point. I'd be embarrassed to open that cupboard for all and sundry to inspect. And likely a double edged sword in terms of security.
The idea - in any form - really does make one think, and kinda hard. The world would indeed be a very different place. I wonder what kind of innovation such a move would stifle?
Hmm, maybe superscalar/moonshot-level competition would be defined by and buoyed by 10-year disclosure! That would be kinda fun...!
Regarding Windows, those who poked around the Win2K and WinNT leaks regarded the code as reasonably well-written, so there's that. The Windows Research Kernel is somewhat more straightforwardly accessible; "wrk-1.2" will find innumerable copies rehosted on GitHub.
Regarding security, yes, it would be a payday loan. The NSA tool leak had some pretty old things in it that still did a fair chunk of damage.
This is not a case of Red Hat EL vs Oracle Linux. Microsoft has a mean enterprise sales machine and it's huge. All those Microsoft sales folks want to hear from a competitor is "oh, by the way, our enterprise SCM offering is based on a Microsoft solution".
I mean--I used to use Skype all the time, but now I use something else. If MS breaks Github, there are options.
They use it to manage issues, wikis, releases, orgs & commit permissions, etc. Some of that stuff is easier to migrate than others...
Obviously there are few if any guarantees here, but if Satya is going to find a way to open source all or most of GitHub, placing Nat Friedman in charge is certainly a sign.
Github is more a service than a software, you need tons of components to make it work (Elastic Search, a DB, haproxy or nginx, a lot of ruby, a few C/C++ libraries, a few python libraries, etc) it's a big beast.
I know they provide VM images for Github Enterprise, but IIRC, it was quite a big beast, requiring at least 16GB of RAM a fast CPU with many cores and a large disk last time I looked (3 or 4 years ago). And there was a lot of stuff in that image.
If I had the source code, I'm not sure I would be able to properly deploy it and maintain, even with some documentation. Too many moving parts. And I feel a lot of sysadmins would be in the same situation.
There are some services that open source there code. Travis-ci is the one I've in mind, yet I don't know of any deployments outside of travis-ci.
[1] https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...
a.) A huge part of GitHub's value is their default-ness. Anybody can build a website UI to git, although it is a lot of engineering work. Gitlab and Bitbucket are somewhere in that equation.
People uneasy about MS are all over the Internet talking about moving off of GitHub today. MS announcing that they are open-sourcing GitHub would instantly evaporate a lot of that doubt/resentment/NOFUCKYUOM$!!!!URRRGH.
b.) They could also open-core it, not totally open-source it, just like GitLab. Thereby keeping basically all of the more-lucrative enterprise business (that's probably way more comfortable with Microsoft anyway).
So, literally not open sourcing it, which defeats the purpose.
For that reason, they have a strong incentive to keep people happy and on github, and they have a huge incentive to make it easy to deploy from github to azure with a single click or something similar.
They don't lose any customers by open sourcing it. Nobody's going to use GitLab if they can just download GitHub, and companies will still pay for Enterprise because they still need support for their massive investment in GitHub's extended features.
GitLab should treat GitHub as S3 and copy everything. I don't mean the git part, I mean the GitHub API bits that run on top.
By "code hosting" I mean that most places say "we support code hosting" but in reality their systems are only setup to work with/use github.com; the domain at the very least, and possibly the API on top of that. Now places are going to have to generalize a bit, at the very least by thinking of multiple domains.
There are undoubtedly going to be tiny differences between how gitlab handles things; those will surface over time. They probably won't make headlines, but they'll cause tiny localized headaches.
As for S3, I mean that the GitHub API (issue tracking, etc) is all non-git proprietary stuff. GitLab should copy that so people's workflows Just Work™. I have no idea if they've already done this, I'm sure they've considered it.