"Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code"
That was already the case before Microsoft purchased GitHub. So why did they start to use it in the first place, if they had this concern?
That was already the case before Microsoft purchased GitHub. So why did they start to use it in the first place, if they had this concern?
You can say that it was a bad idea for people to store all of their things in a warehouse with no sprinklers or smoke detectors, but after it's been done, it's pretty silly to scold people for not continuing to store things in a warehouse that is currently on fire.
That metaphor is rather silly. Microsoft's purchase of github didn't set the metaphorical warehouse on fire. At most, it only raised attention to the fire hazard that was present since the warehouse was created.
What next? People will complain about the privacy risks presented in services such as Dropbox only after some major corportion buys it?
Up to the minute analysis of a meaningful percentage of the development ecosphere is highly valuable. Selling reports, analysis, or monitoring is a natural expansion of GitHubs business model.
Maybe having this dataset go into the same warehouse as LinkedIn strikes some as scary, but I think one actor who is less reliant on direct revenue will have less incentive to push boundaries and spread that info to as many other actors as possible... So whatever privacy issue people feel has arisen here, it's likely just refined itself a little to be much narrower but only a little deeper.
Fundamentally, if you don't trust MS with your goodies you shouldn't trust GitHub with your data at all. GitHub Enterprise might be a better solution ;)
So it isn't safe to assume they aren't changing to a more Facebook/Google-like data-selling business model.
I'll counter that with if we are using history as an indication of future actions, then selling off personal data has not been Microsoft's course of evil action. Suppressing competitors, sure, selling personal data, no.
Having dipped my toe briefly into the world of collecting and selling personal data, it is a rat-race way to try to make large sums of money. It is an absolute grind. I personally have a hard time seeing why Apple or Microsoft would decide to move away from making windfalls of money through direct purchases. Many startups fall into selling personal data because they can't crack the nut of getting people to pay them.
My point was that EvilCorps using the metadata from GitHub was an unavoidable eventuality IMO [and honestly, it would probably be a Good Thing for developers, but whatevs...]. As it stands, that dataset is now going to be owned be a single EvilCorp. One who has a distinct mercantile incentive to exploit, instead of resell, that data.
If the concern is corporate exploitation MS ownership is more likely to reduce the number of exploitative partners to 1. Ironically a net win, for those sensitive to metadata reuse.
For the same reason many people use GitHub (or facebook): network effect.
It's usually the large players that start taking down accounts at will and have bogus takedown rules, because they are the largest and don't care about any one account.