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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

This is a reaction that is both funny and frustrating. While there is enlightened self-interest for Microsoft to buy GitHub (they rely on GitHub for a lot of their open source work as well as their documentation websites) buying GitHub and saying "We're going to let it operate independently as before while we fund the project knowing it will never turn a profit -- that's how important Open Source is to us, we're willing to lose money every quarter to ensure GitHub will never implode for want of money" STILL brings distrust.

And yet, the hue and cry is "Unless you open source every byte of GitHub's code and infrastructure you're just evil monopolists trying to smother us!" Given all that Microsoft has done to embrace and support open source I think the onus is now on the Open Source community to justify their distrust of Microsoft because "Duh, it's Microsoft" simply doesn't fly as a legitimate argument anymore.

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Microsoft is the heart of corporate America, it's a facepalm to imagine that any dollar they spend isn't in their own long term interest to make money. It would be illegal for them not to. You can apply that to any large corporation but the problem is by definition how Microsoft makes money.

How does Microsoft make money? They make money by renting from a platform which is monopolistic and enforced. What do they do to maintain this? They deliberately force people onto their platform by abusing their market position, and try to crush any opposition by any possible tactic, including dubious legal cases designed just to bankrupt their opposition. What else do they do? EEE, and also just blatant unnecessary reinvention /ripping off and lock-in when they get the chance.

They didn't abandon some of the visible tactics and start paying open source because they had a moral revelation, it's a company with the same business model it's not possible. Those tactics were just inneffective and co-opting, more subtle EEE has to be the game plan.

Why does that make me angrier than equally evil Facebook/Apple? Well if I was a farmer driving around one of those trucks with source code preventing me from fixing it I'd be pretty personally furious. But I'm not, I'm a developer and those guys are the ones trying to make everyone drive the coding equivalent. But it's worse, because coding isn't just my livelihood, it's a lot of how I think and express my thoughts. They're not messing with my job they're trying to restrict the way I think, so their shareholders can make a buck.

"Microsoft is running Github for charity" have a word with yourself.

> Microsoft is the heart of corporate America, it's a facepalm to imagine that any dollar they spend isn't in their own long term interest to make money. It would be illegal for them not to. You can apply that to any large corporation but the problem is by definition how Microsoft makes money.

Feel free to show me which part of the criminal code "not making money" falls under. You want to rant about EEE (irrelevant for decades now) or some other silly plan to undermine open source development, feel free. But expect to be called out for your pointless drivel at the same time.

I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.

I think your response misses the point of my post. The point wasn't that they're trying to undermine Open Source, the point was that they fundamentally and unavoidably make their huge profits by extracting rent from a platform that they try to force everybody onto. They don't sell support, expertise or individual products. They get you in, lock you in and then charge rent. In infra teams in the UK at least the guys used to call it "Microsoft rent" with a straight face. The motivations of a company where that has and always will be the game plan are antithetical to someone who identifies freedom of coding with freedom of thought and expression.

"We are pro open source except our entire business model which is build around a closed source platform on which we sell closed source products"

Yeah they're worse than they could be but that's not really the central point.

The legal thing you asked for a source on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Some people dissent from this reading of the case but it's also not that important, in practice they act like this.

I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.

It's never time to stop being cautious about megacorps.

To think that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for altruistic reasons, without a plan to actually turn a profit on the purchase, is dangerously naive.

> To think that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for altruistic reasons, without a plan to actually turn a profit on the purchase, is dangerously naive.

You thinking tech companies don't have loss-leaders is naive.

The person you replied to is probably referring to the concept of fiduciary duty which is often mentioned alongside discussions of public companies. I don't know anything about it though.

I agree, but calling it "illegal to not make a profit" is patently false.

>Feel free to show me which part of the criminal code "not making money" falls under.

I don't really know anything about US laws, but I think they do have to act in the interest of their shareholders, i.e. make them more money.

Right but profit can be both long-term and short-term and often one requires sacrificing the other, which is why calling it "illegal" was completely incorrect.

Not to dogpile, but it's essentially a naive take on the Ford vs. Dodge case. It's usually trotted out as "proof" of the evils of capitalism. As such it ignores nearly 100 years of evidence to the contrary.

(My view of capitalism meshes with Churchill's view of democracy: It's the worst except for all the others)

> it's a facepalm to imagine that any dollar they spend isn't in their own long term interest to make money

This is true, but "long term interest" for Microsoft means 30, 50, or 100 years from now. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits, and therefore doing good things is quite easy to align with the notion that companies only do things that make them a profit.

I find myself saying this a lot - companies are by definition amoral (lacking a moral sense or understanding), not immoral. Just because they are driven by profits doesn't mean they don't do things that are moral or good, as many good things are in the interest of a company's profits. Especially their long term profits.

> w. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits

This hasn't been the case with Microsoft. They had their most successful era, and created (at the time) the richest man in the world, all while we hated them.

Yes, but the world of software development is radically different now. Microsoft knows that the cloud is where most of their potential for growth is and they think (correctly, in my opinion) that developer goodwill is going to be important in getting more of the cloud market share.

They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.

After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.

I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.

> ...all while we hated them

Who's "we"? The open-source advocate reviled Microsoft in their own clique but the vast majority of the software industry just quietly went on with their lives.

We = People that value Ethics, Privacy, and Software Freedom...

Speak for yourself please, I am not part of we.

> the problem is by definition how Microsoft makes money.

That assumes that this situation is a zero-sum game. It's not. Microsoft clearly benefits from this, but so does everyone else.

Spare a thought for those of us who distrusted GitHub before Microsoft bought it, precisely because they're closed-source attempted-monopolists whose interests don't necessarily align with their users'.

> ...precisely because they're closed-source attempted-monopolists whose interests don't necessarily align with their users'...

As I asked a few days ago: "Do proponents of Free Software, on the whole, assert that the concept of intellectual property should not exist?"

If so then I can see why a closed-source supporter of open source is an abhorrent concept.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232778

Exactly many/most of the people Critical of this buyout where critical of GitHub BEFORE this announcement,

I have viewed GitHub as a net negative for Free Software for a number of years, this Microsoft deal amplifies that...

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