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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably out of the loop, but are people really scrambling to migrate away from GitHub? Why? Any reason other than irrational MS hatred?

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Other than what I would consider perfectly rational dislike of Microsoft (they have a long history of making the world a worse place), some people are old enough to remember what has happened to some of Microsoft's other acquisitions†, like Skype (which went from a promising p2p client to a funnel for the NSA which still doesn't work well or reliably). And consider what they've done with Windows 10: ads in the 'free' solitaire game (unless you pay a monthly fee), ads in the start menu, &c. &c.

Anyway, I think for lots of people it's just an impetus to move, a final push: Github is closed source, and there are competitors which are open source or at least 'open core'.

† Linkedin admittedly still seems pretty much the same, but even Microsoft would presumably have a hard time making Linkedin worse.

> old enough to remember what has happened to some of Microsoft's other acquisitions†, like Skype

But that was only 7 years ago.

That was a touch of sarcasm. But there must be some pretty young people on HN too.

A little careless and embarrassing to admit on my part... but I migrated away because the Microsoft purchase reminded me I was paying for a service I no long used. GitLab has free private repos. GitHub does not.

I don't think it's irrational.

I actively choose not to support such an organization. If Microsoft got serious about being moral and then I'd play ball.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

Even if only 2% of projects have an irrational hatred of MS and are scrambling to migrate away, that's still a huge influx to Gitea/Gitlab/etc in a short space of time.

There is few scrambling and lots of people ensuring they have viable exit strategies for when we enter the timeline where Github goes down the drain.

In the grand scheme of things likely not, it's just a vocal minority that can dominate the perspective on social media and places like Reddit, talking about exodus and betrayal and who knows what. Sadly, it works...and it twists the narrative.

The reports from Gitlab that they've had a significant uptick in signups can't be ignored though. Probably people in search of a new underdog since Atlassian and Bitbucket are out of the equation there.

Twist's whose narrative? MS' history is written plainly for all the world to see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

Creates a false perception that significant amount of projects are moving away from GitHub.

Fake news :-)

Out of curiosity, why would BitBucket be out of question?

Atlassian's not really an "underdog", presumably. As for me, I would hate to have my source code in the hands of the people responsible for "JIRA".

To be fair, Bitbucket is loads more pleasant to use than Jira.

Rational MS hatred?

Shitty OSes, naff late to the party phones and music players, convicted monopolists, tend to have arseholes running the company and are now paying 7 billion dollars to buy a company purely for the reputation, and it's people who are leaving GitHub who are not rational?

Does the product still work and provide the advertised service? If yes, then yes, it’s irrational. It isn’t like leaving GitHub is a multi-month process. It could be done in an instant.

It’s evacuating a house because there might be a fire in the future.

I think of it more like leaving a planet because the galactic empire just bought it and is about to hollow it out to build starkiller 2.

> It's evacuating a house because there might be a fire in the future.

Which is a perfectly rational thing to do, if the risk is close enough to 1. Even in actual housing, they preemptively condemn and evacuate buildings that have become too unsafe to trust, before a disaster occurrs.

If it can be done in an instant, why wait?

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