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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

I am sad this HN topic isn't trending up more, because THAT would change EVERYTHING.

(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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime

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I think the people having these reactions aren't going fall for any PR stunts, no matter how grandiose. Even with the OSS they have, they're constantly undermining the spirit with opt-out telemetry, some even forced, in fundamental tools, and they are unapologetic about it. Even if they announced they were taking all that out, I wouldn't trust it to last, or that they wouldn't use that PR to leverage something even worse.

fwiw gitlab also has opt-out telemetry that includes identifiable data such as instance hostname https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/admin_area/settings/usage_st...

I've hated Microsoft for much of my life. I try not to make it a religious issue, but I'm worried about github. If they open sourced it I would no longer be worried.

They won't, though. They won't open Windows or Office either.

It's a shame code doesn't drop into the public domain after a decade...

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.

I remember a quote by a philosopher that said corporations should be dissolved after 10 years.

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.

Github is very unlikely to be a massive cash cow, unlike those other two. And even if they make it Open Source, who's going to compete with them? If Microsoft revs up the enterprise sales machine, there's only a handful of companies that can compete with them. And none of those will want to build a company on FOSS tech owned by a direct rival.

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".

Why are people worried about Github? I mean, I use it and I like it, but I also have local copies of my code. If I stop liking Github, I feel pretty confident I could set up another workflow with Gitlab or even self-hosted git if I had to.

I mean--I used to use Skype all the time, but now I use something else. If MS breaks Github, there are options.

GitHub is more than just a place to upload code for a lot of people.

They use it to manage issues, wikis, releases, orgs & commit permissions, etc. Some of that stuff is easier to migrate than others...

I wouldn't know how to migrate that between any systems. Maybe what's missing -- more than open source code -- is open formats for that sort of data? Like we just need a button to export that from github more than I think I'd need Github's server code.

GitLab has that button - of course, it can't import a community, but it can import issues et al. - and it's been busy today..!

https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer

Satya's choice of CEO for GitHub in Nat Friedman seems to point to a previous precedent on the matter. When Microsoft acquihired Nat Friedman he was the CEO of Xamarin, and Microsoft open sourced all of Xamarin within several months of the acquisition.

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.

Not an Apple follower, could you explain the "Apple's playbook" reference?

Oh, it's in those two footnotes: Apple pre-announced that they were going to open source Swift, and then they did, and they did a great job and there was much rejoicing.

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.”

Apple open-sourcing Swift doesn't really do much though. Sure, Swift is a nice language but allowing IBM or others to start using Swift for making mainframe or web frameworks doesn't make a difference to Apple from a sales perspective. Now if they either open-sourced iOS or started a program by which OEMs could sell devices with iOS then that would be huge -- but that's not going to happen because Apple has been rather up-front that they are a consumer electronics company now so anything that diminishes their ability to sell hardware is counter to their prime directive. Google, on the other hand, makes money by having more information to index, analyze, and develop marketing profiles. They would be just fine with Microsoft putting Android on a Surface Phone as long as hooks to Google Cloud products remained... otherwise they wouldn't be able to call it Android (eg: why Amazon's Fire devices don't officially run Android even though 99% of the APIs are the same).

Apple never said anything about open-sourcing FaceTime. Jobs said they were going to make it an open standard. That’s very different, but it doesn’t matter because they didn’t do that, either. My understanding is that patents got in the way of the plan, but according to engineers at Apple, there was never any actual “plan” to do this. Jobs’ introduction of FaceTime was the first they’d heard about making FaceTime an open standard, too.

I don't think taking the wind out of critic's sails is worth over 7 billion. In fact, if whatever MS does is not worth at least 7 billion, then the shareholders are not going to be happy with Microsoft's executives.

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