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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I think GitHub is generally safe as long as you have an exit plan for when it's no longer the place you want to be. Know where you're moving your issues and actions if you decide you need to leave.

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If you're not actually using your backup plan it will likely rot. And if you have a usable alternative, why wouldn't you just use it?

That community aspect. You get more drive by participation from GitHub, which is valuable in itself.

Since the Microsoft takeover, the platform is compromised. It seems people have very short memories.

I'm curious, what is the threat model? For SDL, for example, what's the nightmare scenario with Github and Microsoft?

Why engage with a company that have proven themselves to be an enemy of Free Software? I'm not buying their "how do you do, fellow Linux users" facade.

So, to ask again, what is a specific way that choosing Github and Microsoft can hurt a software project in the future?

I'm not asking in bad faith here. If there are such dangerous I would very much like to know them.

Look, I don't know. Speculating seems like a pointless exercise, and I'm already being downvoted for not liking Microsoft enough. I think I'm just about done with this website.

SDL is a project with a long history, so let's pretend they move a backlog of 5,000 issues over to Github. Everything is great--now users can search, discuss, open, manage, etc. all these issues on a slick web UI. People are happy and things just work.

Now some years later there's a blog post from Github, "An update to our free tier" that outlines dramatic changes. It turns out Microsoft needs to make some changes to keep their shareholders happy with their returns. Now Github only allows 2,500 issues per repo on the free tier--you'll be wowed with slick graphs that show for 99.999% of users they'll never even know or notice this new limitation. People will post long comments on the Hackernews thread about how 2,500 issues ought to be enough for anybody and that Github/Microsoft actually love developers _more_ because they're willing to reduce the features than shut down the business.

And now SDL is in a bind.. a free project that generates no revenue now is facing a dilemma. Should they pony up real dollars to keep the history of their 25+ year old project? The cost of moving source control isn't trivial and is a huge ops burden that keeps the devs from doing real work... and cha-ching out comes the credit card, out goes a $100/mo then $200/mo etc, etc. charge.

This isn't some wild speculation, look at Microsoft products like Onedrive that clawed back huge free tiers of storage in the past. It's just an inevitability with commercial software that costs will rise and someone will be squeezed for money.

So the threat is some number of years down the line they may have to go back to paying to host and maintain the infrastructure themselves again? I'd take that deal.

Tough luck for anyone who had linked to the project/issues on github dot com instead of sdl dot org.

It's probable that in that instance they could just pay for GitHub datacenter or whatever Microsoft chooses to name the new evil plan. But Microsoft has little reason to turn evil again (open-source projects generally have little money and won't spend it on source control/issues when there's a free competitor), as we're at a crossroads where nobody needs Microsoft software anymore (iOS/Android/Mac/Chrome OS for personal computing, Google/Amazon for cloud), so they need the advertising for their cloud. Therefore, $500K per year or thereabouts to host all of the open-source code on GitHub and provide some amount of CI minutes is worth it to get people to ask for GitHub/Azure at work.

It genuinely surprises the shit out of me that people haven't created a "middleware" layer that treats GitHub as its backend / source of truth, but everything gets routed through a custom domain. E.g., spin up this glorified reverse proxy on Heroku, and now example.com/bugs is really just example.github.io/bugs, which is a page with all its form actions pointing to the Heroku service acting as a go-between for managing github.com/example/whatever/issues with full backups, etc.

Changing pricing or terms of service.. don't be stupid.

Microsoft is a completely different company than it was even just 5 or 10 years ago. Saying that MS is an enemy of open source is uninformed at best and idiotic at worse.

Do me a favor, look at Facebook [1], Apple [2], Amazon [3], Netflix [4] and Google [5]. Now tell me which one has more Open Source repos than MS [6]. I'll give you a hint... none of them. Sure, volume of open source repos may not be the best metric, but to say in 2021 they are enemies of open source with almost 4k open source repos is just dumb.

Hell, even the new MS terminal [7] is open source. They realized that FOSS isn't the enemy and is actually good for the tech industry at large.

[1] https://github.com/facebook [2] https://github.com/apple [3] https://github.com/amzn [4] https://github.com/Netflix [5] https://github.com/google [6] https://github.com/microsoft [7] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

And this, btw, is the KEY to show that if MS decides to be evil there's a LOT of motivated players that would happily step in with a new platform and take over.

The fact that Apple is trusting MS with their source code really should tell you that your open source project will be fine. What you'll want to watch out for is when these other competitors decide to abandon ship.

You're factually correct, but you've probably forgotten the "3 Es": "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [0]. Microsoft is a business and is therefore about maximizing profits. I'd rather not assume anything, especially not that they are somehow friendly to the OSS movement. Lets give it a few more years before we assume that OSS is something they are gonna do long term. Otherwise, it's like "free" google products; here today, gone tomorrow.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

EEE is from a meeting in 1996 by someone who left the company in 2000. It's really hard for anyone to claim it represents the company today or even a decade ago.

You act as though Open Source is somehow mutually exclusive with profits and a sustainable business.

> Otherwise, it's like "free" google products; here today, gone tomorrow.

Respectfully, I disagree... google products are introduced as services, not open source and they shut them down often. If an OSS project is useful and has community support, you can always fork it.

>Microsoft is a completely different company than it was even just 5 or 10 years ago.

Counterpoint: No they aren't. Counting Git repos is totally nonsensical, and open sourcing their terminal is a meaningless gesture, but I guess that's enough to fool some people.

Microsoft has a very, very long history of being a shitty company. Fucking over DR DOS, fucking over Stac, war profiteering, patent trolling, up to the privacy dumpster fire that is Windows 10. That's just off the top of my head. And I've been around for all of it, so excuse me if I just don't fawn over Microsoft suddenly claiming to be the good guys now. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.

> Microsoft is a completely different company than it was even just 5 or 10 years ago. Saying that MS is an enemy of open source is uninformed at best and idiotic at worse.

Rather than fighting the target directly, they are embracing it at first; and this time, the target is open-source and the developers. They are doing it again and are targeting where the developers are: Hence their involvement with GitHub, Xamarin, Linux Foundation, Chromium (MS Edge), WSL 2, VS Code, TypeScript and Azure and it is working for them.

The company has not changed. Only the target has, and they are already embracing them and slightly started to extend.

Sounds like no amount of evidence will convince you, even with evidence that contradicts your opinion. The stuff you are talking about was the strategy for most big software vendors in the 90's/early 2000's. They sold software licenses and support.

If you look at current MS, it is all about services. Services do better when you have a larger addressable market and not embracing OSS will reduce who they can sell to, which is why they are going to.

VS Code is a perfect example, MIT License... OSS, wide support and well regarded.

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