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Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks
- thosakwe 8y agoSomething makes me feel like Microsoft acquiring Github will do away with Github's current, open nature. If the extreme advertising in Windows 10 is any sign...
- tomovo 8y agoAt first they will just inject random commits that don't change any files but inform you about the latest price offerings on One Drive and Azure hosting. Later on if you're still on the "free" plan some of the commits will modify your hosted software to show their ads at runtime. Have fun!
- parvenu74 8y ago> will do away with GitHub's current, open nature. Apparently the Gnome folks concluded that GitHub was already too closed to even consider them in the competition for the question "Where will the Gnome project live in the future?" GitLab won that competition, btw, and icrosoft wasn't even part of that calculus.
- WorldMaker 8y agoWith current trends in Microsoft's Developer Division, it's possible that GitHub could end up way more open if Microsoft acquired them. GitHub's core business is GitHub and they need that to stay closed to stay competitive. GitHub under Microsoft could have less financial pressure to keep closed. Is it likely? I don't know. It is an interesting possibility though, that would certainly change the game.
- parvenu74 8y agoThere is precedent. Prior to Microsoft acquiring them, Xamarin was closed-source and licensing was $1000 per platform per year. At the Build conference in March 2016 Microsoft announced (1) that they were acquiring Xamarin, (2) that pricing would be dropping to zero, and (3) the Xamarin platform code would be open sourced as soon as possible after the acquisition.
- kerng 8y agoYeah, for dev tools Microsoft was always very open. Github and Microsoft might make a great combo, boosting dev productivity and open source
- parvenu74 8y agoThey already do: Visual Studio Code is based on GitHub's Electron shell. :-)
- WorldMaker 8y agoThat precedent is even more useful as a measuring stick with Nat Friedman (formerly CEO of Xamarin) announced to takeover the CEO role at GitHub.
- mihaela 8y agoYep, and vaccines are bad for you and the earth is flat...
- kyberias 8y agoWhat extreme advertising? I've been using Win 10 from the beginning and haven't seen ONE add.
- PaulHoule 8y agoOh shit. I run Windows. I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, and the sense that Microsoft is ritually unclean will drive many of them away from github. It's the best thing that's happened to BitBucket and Altassian ever. If I have a choice between MS tools and Altassian tools I will usually take MS. (Visual Source Safe really did suck, but Visual Studio is not that bad...) Also, Microsoft acquisitions do not seem to go well. Look at Skype, LinkedIn, etc.
- ihsw2 8y agoPerhaps they perceive that AWS and GCP seek to own more of the work infrastructure and they're trying to get out ahead of this. * email/domain integration * code hosting * issue tracking/kanban-based project planning * CI/CD processes Developer tooling is evolving and there's a land-grab happening, from small workshops all the way up to global-scale enterprises.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIts a smart way to increase Azure uptake. Acquire the tools needed as a dev, make your platform a first class citizen and everyone else runner up.
- tootie 8y agoSource Safe is ancient. TFS is their new jam and it's pretty solid. Especially if you're in the Visual Studio and Azure world.
- WorldMaker 8y agoTFS (or more accurately TFVC) is old news. Git is their new jam and it's pretty solid. ;) (Not entirely a joke. The Windows team has moved to git, which is a fascinating sign of the times.)
- foepys 8y agoTFVC is being outphased. Microsoft doesn't want to openly say it but everything in MS' docs is pushing Git. When you have an on-prem TFS installation, the default version control for new projects is Git. Visual Studio Team Services doesn't allow to import anything into TFVC, only into Git. Visual Studio lists Git first, when you want to add version control. Visual Studio Code makes working with Git a lot easier than working with TFVC. TFS as the development process management solution will live on as an on-prem service, but TFVC is unofficially feature-complete and in the maintenance phase.
- mindcrime 8y agoGitLab here we come...
- falcon620 8y agoMore like "gah, we're going to have to self-host git, aren't we"?
- akerro 8y agoOr you know... just use gitlab.com...
- falcon620 8y agoI don't trust them to be compent at operating a large scale service after their insane meltdown february last year. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/01/gitlab_data_loss/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/01/gitlab_data_loss/
- Rjevski 8y agoUnrelated to that incident, but I feel their web UI to be extremely slow lately. Working with PRs (or "merge requests" as GitLab calls them) and CI pipeline is a pain, you're looking at 1 second response times.
- sytse 8y agoWe're not happy with the merge request speed either. We're close to converting the merge request view to Vue, this should speed it up considerably.
- Rjevski 8y agoTo me it doesn't look like it's a front-end issue. I am mainly complaining about the HTTP response time. It seems extremely slow on both pipelines and merge requests, and Vue ain't gonna fix that I'm afraid. I don't know if it's an optimisation issue with the software itself, or if it's just GitLab.com being overloaded..
- 0x0 8y agoGuess they could always relaunch VSS as "GitHub for Business" at the same time then! :)
- AgentK20 8y agoReally hope these talks fall through and nothing comes of it. Too many bad experiences with Microsoft buying something out, mismanaging it, and it goes down the drain. As much as I love GitHub, I won't be using a Microsoft-owned GitHub for any of my company's work.
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- jordache 8y agosuch a presumptuous statement. Why proclaim you won't use a MSFT owned github, even as a hypothetical?
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- d0lph 8y agoIf it were maybe 5 years ago I would be horrified, but under Nadella they are a lot less ... Microsoft-y.
- someonewhocar3s 8y ago
- youdontknowtho 8y agoThat would be kind of awesome, but I don't know how the github culture would meld with a big corporation. It would be an interesting case study for other similar start ups.
- forgottenpass 8y agoDidn't github already deliberately kill their own culture a few years back with policy changes and a layer of middle management? edit: This isn't snark. Didn't they legit cut a bunch of perks, refocus everyone's priorities, and hire some people to start cracking whips? Or was I reading the public accounts of that situation wrong? Got bad scuttlebutt?
- SanDimasFootbal 8y agoI think you are saying that they shifted from the full holocracy ambition to one with a more traditional management element because it wasn't working as well as they wanted.
- youdontknowtho 8y agoI hadn't heard that. That stands to reason. Business people actually detest that "flat organization" model. They really get off on hierarchy and power.
- ibdf 8y agoIf anyone has used VSTS or TFS knows this is a bad bad idea. They tend to make unnecessarily complicated user interfaces with poor usability.
- pjmlp 8y agoI happen to like TFS, specially the triggers to prevent commits on broken unit tests.
- skellera 8y agoSeems like the view here is pretty negative. I feel like most people here haven't worked with Microsoft dev products recently. They're getting better. I guess the crowd here isn't typically in the .NET world.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoParticularly with how they interact on GitHub now, it's quite impressive. I've reported issues for docs.microsoft.com, participated in discussions on Visual Basic development, etc. and while there's still definitely that corporate veil to some degree, they're extremely responsive, they're very active in responding to requests and discussing fixes. I generally now hope that whatever Microsoft thing I'm dealing with somewhere ends up linking to GitHub, because everyone on the side of the company that's working with GitHub is pretty on point. Which is what gives me some hope that they could manage this acquisition right: They're already doing GitHub the way GitHub should be done.
- tracker1 8y agoEven when it leads from GH to internal email chains, they're really good about keeping those on the GH issue in the loop... often from only parallel issues. Issue filed in node sql driver... azure tech notices the issue, raises to sql team... sql team dev starts replying and working to resolve... recommends patch to upstream project in github... issue resolved. Oracle would NEVER do something like that. It was actually very impressive, and that's just my one anecdote, and I've seen many others.
- jacksmith21006 8y agoMS buying GitHub will be one of the worse things to happen to the industry in a long time. But should end all discussion that MS has changed. FB, Google and the other big tech companies that contribute so much will have to go elsewhere and we will have a fragmentation mess. I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.
- kosinus 8y agoI think that's the point. I'm personally worried Microsoft may have a very narrow view of what GitHub is. A lot of tech hosted there doesn't even run on Windows, or isn't even related to software. (legal, political, docs, guides, etc.)
- iambateman 8y agoFor the comparisons of this acquisition to Skype, yes Microsoft bungled the Skype acquisition. But they have been killing it with Typescript and Visual Studio. I feel like that at such a large company, the Typescript recent history matters more than the Skype history. Two very different areas with different people in charge, etc.
- deedubaya 8y agoMS has always been pretty good at making products. MS has always been pretty bad at providing services.
- tracker1 8y agoAzure is pretty nice to use... Office 365 is second to none imho. Teams is great.
- sametmax 8y agoAs much as I love VSCode, you live in a buble. A communication app affects way more people than a programming language or a text editor. Even my mother uses the former, while only a fraction of all the programmers I met in my life use the laters. And MS did messed up on other major products or companies - Rare video games. They did freaking golden eyes and conkers bad day and they manage to kill it. - they messed up Wn10, which is still not as good as Win7 after all those years but spies more on you and forces update at the worse moment on you - the latest outlook is barely usable. Sometime mails can't be sent. Sometime it freezes or crashes. It's very slow, the search sucks and I never find the buttons I'm looking for. - they killed Nokia and the windows phone despite all the investments the community did in it. And it was considered a good product. - they are milking minecraft like disney is milking SW, so that all the creative community has moved to private servers. I mean, we are talking about a company that had a monopoly on the media player and the web browser on the most used OS in the world. The player and browser, the most used software ever by the non tech saavy users. And to this day, none of their versions is remotely as good as the competition.
- 8y ago
- falcon620 8y agoWell, that's a scary thought.
- pasbesoin 8y agoE3 -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Stems from at least the 1990's. The MS behavior as opposed to the term can be argued to pre-date that decade. I'll just remind people who may think I'm being old, crotchety, and living in the past, that this has been a repeated pattern of theirs that has resurfaced so often and reliably as to become considered by many to be a core component of MS culture. Repeated including in the face of DoJ prosecution and monitoring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoAlmost nobody who even worked at Microsoft in 1996 still actually works at Microsoft. You are bringing up something said in one meeting from when floppy disks were still pretty important to the computing world. I can't fathom a single statement from 1996 about a computer company that is still accurate today, and EEE falls into that category as well.
- hapnin 8y ago"postmaster@nsa.gov" is probably still true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
- jwilk 8y agoNon-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
- craftyguy 8y agoCompany culture is a thing, and like other cultures it doesn't require the original folks to keep it going once it has been established.
- jacksmith21006 8y agoBut with the latest news that MS is looking at buying GitHub demonstrates nothing has changed at MS. Instead of helping and pushing the industry forward like Google does instead we have them hurting the industry. They buy GitHub and we will have a mess as FB, Google and the others that contribute to the greater good of the industry will have to go else where and we have a fragmentation mess. Google gave us map/reduce and K8s and so many incredible papers and a big one is VP8 and VP9 stopping the mpegla from trying to extort ridiculous license fees. Or finding all the big security vulnerabilities like Shellshock, meltdown, Cloudbleed, Heartbleed Spectre and so many more and sharing and helping the entire industry. I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.
- jhare 8y agohaha Skype fuggin RIP GitHub
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do this here.
- tootie 8y agoPeople are being overly pessimistic. This would be a potentially great deal. GitHub is very successful at what they do and I don't think MS would change that. More likely they would use GH as lead-in to selling cloud services the same way Google uses GitLab.
- parvenu74 8y agoIf you've watched the last couple Build Conferences (Microsoft's annual developer conference) they frequently demonstrate their CI/CD pipeline based on Github checkins, not VSTS checkins (just takes a webhook invocation and all the source-hosting sites support sending those out on check-in or merge).
- falcon620 8y agoA zillion companies use Github. This does not qualify them to operate Github.
- parvenu74 8y agoHasn't GitHub been running on Microsoft Azure for a few years now?
- colemickens 8y agoWhat does GitHub's choice of cloud have to do with Microsoft's aptitude to take over an existing, huge, critical piece of the open source world? From a business perspective, or an operational one?
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- chasote 8y agoSome of my pessimism is not just with Microsoft, itself, even though I do have that. I think an argument can be made that we should not want all the decent software companies to be bought up by the same big five giant companies, no matter who it is.
- falcon620 8y agoHopefully it's just a negotiation tactic to get Google to buy them for more than their first offer.
- the_duke 8y agoGoogle is notorious for killing products too, though. For me, much of the same rationale would apply
- aphextron 8y ago>Google is notorious for killing products too, though. For me, much of the same rationale would apply Agreed. The best possible solution for making GitHub long term sustainable would be following the Mozilla model.
- dawnerd 8y agoI mean the other option is to just not sell and if money is a problem adjust pricing. I find their plans to be incredibly cheap for what they offer so they definitely could have room to grow in that regard.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sametmax 8y agoPlease no. I spent months to find strategies to limit my google product usage between mails, search, phone, calendar, contacts, maps, streaming, dns, adsense, cdn and analytics. It's a struggle. They are everywhere. I really hope they don't eat github too.
- danso 8y agoHas Google ever killed an acquisition or product of Github's scale? Most products that come to mind were niche things like iGoogle, or things that got deprecated/integrated into other products, e.g. Buzz, Wave, Picasa Google Reader is the product that seems to leave the most bitterness, but that too seems to have been relatively niche. Google killed Google Code in 2016 and moved much of their code base to Github. Maybe they'll rebrand Github back to "Code", but outright killing it seems unlikely.
- xacky 8y agoIt's ironic how Microsoft has embraced Git considering it was made for Linux's development.
- parvenu74 8y agoMicrosoft has been the largest contributor to Git for a while. Getting to a point where all of Windows is building out of Git repos has caused them to solve problems that Git has never faced previously.
- drenvuk 8y agoThe one thing that I like about Github is that everything is public by default and you have to pay to keep your code private. I feel like a positive consequence of that business choice was the opening up of way more software. Gitlab, while being very awesome doesn't have that same rule and neither does Bitbucket. It's my assumption that this is the biggest reason there's so much open source code flowing right now. It makes me wonder whether I'll be able to find as many random interesting projects just by searching for things anymore. I'm a bit sad about this.
- antonkm 8y agoNot having to pay for private is the reason we chose Bitbucket back in the days.
- drenvuk 8y agoSame here, but for each one of us there was another who probably said 'screw it' and just put their stuff on github anyway.
- kokx 8y agoThough there is indeed much more software open source lately, I feel that is mostly a consequence of the free and easy availability of open source hosting. I still remember the old days where most opensource projects were doing self-hosting or using sourceforge. Self-hosting is something that most developers that just want to build something nice won't consider. And using sourceforge back then was also atrocious (they didn't exactly have an easy to use UI, if I remember correctly). This makes me think that what contributed the most to there being so much open source, is the easyness of creating your own repository on GitHub. With just a few clicks you have one.
- api_or_ipa 8y agoI can't help but be insanely sceptical. Microsoft has a massive legacy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and I don't want the GitHub ecosystem to suffer from the same reoccurring pattern. Call me jaded by Microsoft's past behaviour, but I just cannot forget the numerous times Microsoft has absolutely ruined thriving ecosystems by using the same tricks.
- Someone1234 8y agoMicrosoft wouldn't benefit from killing GitHub. Heck Microsoft killed their own competitor TFS and pushed people to migrate to Git, and uses GitHub themselves for hosting several products. Microsoft also has full Git support in Visual Studio Online (their enterprise competitor to GitHub), Visual Studio, and VS Code. Microsoft would likely use GitHub to advertise their development products, tools, and services like Azure. I doubt they'd want to "extinguish" GitHub because it just means less eyes on their adverts.
- gmueckl 8y agoThey extinguished Skype. They will manage to do the same with Github eventually. They are the biggest user already and would therefore be forced to cater to their own needs first over those of the rest if the community. This would drive the service squarely into the ground by doing everything right.
- oaiey 8y agoTFS is not dead. And the TFS native source management (one small pilar in TFS) is just quite unpopular right now :). But not dead.
- h1d 8y agoIf you can see MS itself is a big customer, why kill it when their own teams have moved over to it over their own code plex?
- pixelmonkey 8y agoGithub shouldn't sell. It has an opportunity to be a once-in-a-generation tech company. I can't believe they even held the talks.
- sametmax 8y agoMaybe the founder are fed up with running it. I can understand your want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.
- sametmax 8y agoMaybe the founders are fed up with running it. I can understand you want out, and it's very hard to find people to replace you, and much easier to sell it to a big entity that is already used to do something like that.
- qop 8y agoGod yes! Please oust the GH execs too, thatd be such a blessing for the product.
- smacktoward 8y agoLooking forward to the big rebranding to Microsoft GitHub Team Cloud Services for Enterprise 365 2019®.
- Jaymoon85 8y ago*subscription required
- londondev45 8y agoMicrosoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling. C# is a pleasure and visual studio code is an excellent, extensible coding tool. Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.
- moeadham 8y agoI wonder what Linus Tovalds is thinking right now. If I remember correctly, he wrote Git because Perforce was forcing him to use Microsoft software licences. https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290 https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...
- TimTheTinker 8y agoGit != GitHub
- DaveMebs 8y agoGit was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper (which was originally provided freely to Linux kernel developers under the agreement that they not develop a clone). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper
- cesarb 8y ago> Git was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper Git was not developed as a clone of BitKeeper, it has a very different design (snapshot-based content-addressed filesystem, versus the SCCS "weave"). If anything, git was a (much faster) clone of Monotone, minus the heavy cryptography focus which made Monotone so slow.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoI lived through the 90s, so I disagree. Anyone who feels perfectly comfortable with Microsoft's embracing of things they like is ignoring history. Maybe it's different this time, maybe it isn't.
- sametmax 8y agoThe ghost of the skype acquisition would make me panic.
- cma 8y agoThey can stop updating the Github web interface and put all development efforts on a new Github for Windows Store UWP app.
- adfm 8y agohttp://blog.sunrise.am/ http://blog.sunrise.am/
- nicoburns 8y agoThat one was really sad. Sunrise was an excellent product. I'm actually tempted to recreate it myself. I'm sure it would be possible to commercialise something like that.
- nailer 8y agoThat's Steve Ballmer. He had the reverse-Midas touch, but he's gone now.
- derrikcurran 8y agoMicrosoft was actually highly successful under Ballmer. Just not in terms of image or in the consumer-facing world.
- origami777 8y agoIt's a big company and hard to blame an individual for mistakes. But they totally missed out on being the mobile OS of the future under him. And they ended up getting a late, slow start to cloud computing (minus SAAS).
- nailer 8y ago
- lalos 8y agoA better fit would be Docker. Totally unrelated but I can see that as a better fit with Azure rather than invest on the dev community around Github.
- falcon620 8y agoUp next: - Github user account migration/integration with outlook.com - A much-internally-championed Github/Office/LinkedIn integration effort created by some sharp but inexperieced program manager fresh just out of Washington State, that happens to require Github project descriptions to be authored in .docx format, launched as an improvement from that primitive format made by a certain mac fanboy. - An effort to migrate the Github infrastructure to Azure cloud on Win 10 that ties up 85% of all development resources for the next five years and ultimately fails.
- oblio 8y agoFor the last one: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736149.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736149.aspx And that’s from when they weren’t allowed to use BSD or Linux internally and Windows Server was rudimentary. Microsoft would have no problem migrating Github to Azure quickly.
- _bxg1 8y agoI'm happy that Microsoft has gotten so on board with git recently and made contributions to the project, but this kind of consolidation still makes me nervous, for multiple reasons.
- craftyguy 8y agoWhat contributions has MS made to git?
- detaro 8y agoThey made a post listing some of their performance improvements last year: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/01/11/microsofts-performance-contributions-to-git-in-2017/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/01/11/microsoft...
- deft 8y ago.NET is great and the openness is great, I don't really see why so many people are up in arms about this. Microsoft is a large user of github. Maybe this will push you all to use gitlab ;)
- TimTheTinker 8y agoI haven't bashed Microsoft for a long time, and I won't any time soon. However, this development has me worried. There's a big difference between engaging the developer community with great products and purchasing important services that the developer community relies on. Microsoft has succeeded many times with products and services they've built themselves, and with products they've purchased, but how often have they succeeded with services they've purchased?
- danielvf 8y agoFrontPage was purchased and pretty successful back in the day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
- oblio 8y agoPowerpoint was a purchase. Hotmail was another one. Frontpage, Visio, Navision, Skype, Linkedin. They’ve had quite a few which were pretty successful.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoMost of those are products. Of the services you mentioned, I would only call Hotmail a success in the sense that there wasn’t a net detriment to users because of the purchase.
- oblio 8y agoLinkedin is the same. Skype kind of sucks.
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y agoAn acquisition would mean the inevitable split of support between the MS toolchain and the OS toolchain, which would eventually be left to die. Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS.
- ams6110 8y ago> Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS I'm not sure that's true, but it is true that MS would have motivation to leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software. At a conference years ago, a Microsoft rep told me over beers that almost everything his division did had the ultimate objective of selling more SQL Server licenses. That's why SQL Server is a required component of almost all MS enterprise software. So you might for instance see a SQL Server backend option, and then "Github Enterprise" sold with that configuration.
- sdesol 8y ago> leverage Github to promote other (licensed) MS software. This is pretty much business 101. You have loss leaders, that are solely designed to drive traffic to different products.
- tracker1 8y agoConsidering how many Windows admins would prefer it that way, I wouldn't blame them. (Not that I agree)
- tomnipotent 8y ago> Today's MS is no different than yesterday's MS. This is the silliest thing I've read on HN in awhile.
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y agoGive it time. MS does what it has always done to competitors (even to MS internal products) that it acquires. Takes awhile sometimes and you younger kid will get to live through what others already have.
- Negative1 8y agoTrying to understand the cloud strategy here; does Github run on Azure, GCP or AWS?
- sigfubar 8y agoThis is our chance to gain a GitHub+LinkedIn integration. Just imagine... your LinkedIn profile and endorsements will auto-populate based on commit & PR activity.
- ttam 8y agothese talks are actually not new. the same rumor appeared back in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/github-is-raising-a-secondary-round/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/github-is-raising-a-second... imho, github feels a bit too slow innovating, which is kinda surprising since they are still "a startup"
- tomnipotent 8y agoGitHub has not been a startup for a few years, and it's business model is more or less mature now.
- doorbumper 8y agoHave they ever turned a profit yet? Last I heard they were still losing money in 2017. Not what I would call mature.
- koolba 8y agoI’m pretty sure they’ve been profitable since the first month of private repos.
- hobofan 8y agoAFAIK the timeline of profitability is somewhat like this: - really profitable after introducing private repos - burning quite some money for growth after they took VC money - really profitable again after they changed their pricing to per-seat pricing
- aaron-lebo 8y agoThey lost 66 million as recently as 2016. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574
- hobofan 8y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoCould be worse. It could be Oracle.
- erichurkman 8y agoOr IBM.
- jamiepenney 8y agoOr Google. At least Oracle would keep its dead corpse alive while it was still producing revenue.
- whitepoplar 8y agoGitLab must be psyched for the potential influx of defectors.
- detaro 8y agoor fearing for the stability of their servers...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ASalazarMX 8y agoThis has me wondering, what Microsoft wants GitHub for? It's not like they can't use it without owning it, and I doubt they want to improve it as it is. Probably they want control before integrating it with their products.
- femto113 8y agoMaybe they just want something to buy with the $100B+ cash they are sitting on?
- 7952 8y agoGitHub do for developers what Microsoft want to do for the rest of business through SharePoint. Maybe they could add Office 365 editing to GitHub and pitch it as the successor to SharePoint. Or try to integrate it with their other products in some kind of Frankenstein mess.
- tracker1 8y agoThey seem to be doing much better with these things lately though. MS Teams is incredibly good. VSTS is pretty nice as well. I'm frankly unsure why they'd take on Github, other than better integration points into Azure services, CI/CD and other tooling for commercial/enterprise users.
- seltzered_ 8y agoMicrosoft has been investing in developer services for a number of years - they acquired hockeyapp (mac/ios crash analytics), and have a whole bunch of other tools under the azure brand https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ It's almost worth re-asking the question as...what does Azure want Github for, to try and strip away thinking about MS's windows/office products. There could be some crossover between github's Atom efforts and VS Code, and MS already worked on projects like Git virtual filesystem (GVFS) for their own needs ( https://github.com/Microsoft/gvfs https://github.com/Microsoft/gvfs )
- emodendroket 8y ago
- shmerl 8y agoOh, oh. That doesn't sound good.
- user5994461 8y agoThis is negative value. The only reason the big companies host their source code on GitHub is because it's independent. They will stop doing that tomorrow if GitHub is acquired and it will lose all its value.
- pishpash 8y agoPositive for Atlassian I guess.
- therealtomsmith 8y agoAs someone who has always despised git for its complexity and being a movement more than a new technology I have been waiting years for this. Let git fracture and die. Maybe then we can get tools that work for us instead of the other way around.
- guitarbill 8y agoI enjoy Mercurial as much as the next person. But git is an engineering feat simply because it works well enough for so many use cases. Also, if git is the worst part of your tooling, that's some great tooling and a good problem to have.
- therealtomsmith 8y agolol an engineering feat. It's just software. My experience with git was about a month long phase where I devoted a few hours a week to learning it. Now I can use it but I still have to google commands for anything other than the basics. That's the problem with git. Git without google would be unusable. That's why I consider it to be extraordinarily poorly designed. You've seen git commands, I'm not going to go look up some esoteric command just to prove a point to you. The point is a good program would not force you to google everything, it would just work. I consider git to be more of an advertising feat. It fascinates me how many people drank the kool-aid.
- neaanopri 8y agoWhy does GitHub need to be acquired at all? Do the costs of running the servers and hosting the free services not cover the revenue from Enterprise users? I believe that any Enterprise users won't notice even a doubling of the subscription fee, if GitHub really needs it. I don't know why there needs to be more than a handful of employees working at github, just don't break what's already there!
- ilaksh 8y agoIs there a truly decentralized peer to peer alternative to github or gitlab? And please no lectures about how git is inherently decentralized. Obviously there is something missing that causes us to rely on github etc.
- kchoudhu 8y agoTime to spin up that Gitlab instance, I guess.
- mihaela 8y agoI hope that a tragedy like MS acquiring GitHub does not happen, ever...
- mimiflynn 8y agoI wonder how projects like Electron are figuring into the interest that Microsoft has in GitHub. How would Microsoft move forward with such a project if they bought GitHub? Would its continue to be based on Chromium? Would future versions of Office follow VSCode and be build as Electron apps?
- DaiPlusPlus 8y agoI was in DevDiv at the time of the launch of VS Code (but on a different team): The pressure was on to ship a cross-platform editor ASAP to support the new cross-platform .NET infrastructure. This was very much an "IBM PC"-project with the Directors tasking a small team to get something done and to disregard the NIH culture. Atom was chosen as the platform because it was already close to what they needed with the right license. Heck, the rush to ship was so intense that they screwed up the name (I forget the story exactly, but "VS Code" was not the name the MSFT naming department came up with, but the name they initially chose turned out to be used elsewhere and they didn't have the time to come up with something trademarkable so they just sighed and shipped as "Visual Studio Code"). Anyway - I think the VS Code experience helped with Microsoft's institutional "fear" of pushing ahead with a JavaScript ecosystem elsewhere - I think the knock-on effects contributed towards the Office org's recent announcement to add JS as a first-class macro language in Excel, I just wish it was TypeScript instead.
- oaiey 8y agoElectron is save. VS Code needs it. Atom however does not look that good.
- poisonborz 8y agoAre people here really reasoning like "C# / .Net and VSCode are really great SO Microsoft acquiring GitHub would surely end well". What is the connection between SOME of their newer dev tools being good (oh, just try the mess that is Visual Studio) and... well, anything else.
- danso 8y agoYou believe that these well-liked tools/initiatives were random anomalies, born independently from and untouched by Microsoft's leadership?
- SanDimasFootbal 8y agoAren't dev tools are going cloud. MS might have just bought a bunch of servers with nasty dependencies on Jenkins in the hopes it results in more deployments to Azure.
- htaunay 8y agoDon't really agree with most comments trashing this hypothetical deal, bringing up the Skype precedent. Its been what, 2 years since the Linked-in and Xamarin acquisitions? Nothing seems to have changed. Microsoft just seems to know that the desktop is no longer the cash cow that it used to be, office still is but may not last long, so its a good idea to diversify its portfolio. Satya is not Ballmer.
- sbr464 8y agoI really hope this doesn't happen. Microsoft design and services are all over the board, not in a good way. I'm sure they would add more features, or make it more enterprise-y, which could have benefits, but I would definitely move to a self hosted setup if this went through. It's nice to have diversity of brand/company personalities in the tech ecosystem.
- nelsonic 8y agoplease no! :-(
- nixpulvis 8y agoI don't care if Microsoft is the new Apple, or anything like that. I just don't want to see more consolidation.
- Joeri 8y agoIf github had to be sold, which tech company would be a better buyer than microsoft and able to afford a $2 billion acquisition?
- Reedx 8y agoAmazon? They seem to handle acquisitions well. Zappos, Audible, Twitch...
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoPossibly Amazon. They tend to leave acquired companies alone to manage how they prefer, apart from Bezos micromanaging how to cut costs and restructure logistics, which is often a good thing. Plus Amazon (like Microsoft or Google) also has economy of scale opportunities for hosting GitHub on AWS. I do believe Amazon would interfere less with what users like about GitHub than Microsoft would.
- ianwalter 8y agoApple. I know it's not Apple's style but imagine if Apple started expanding outside of it's bubble like Microsoft has. If they really went all in it would be amazing.
- discordance 8y agoI would prefer if Apple would continue to focus on making my phone better. They really slipped up with their QA on recent iOS releases.
- ianwalter 8y agoYea but I don't think it's continued focus that will help here. Apple has continued it's modus operandi and quality has decreased like you mentioned. Granted, acquiring GitHub is most likely not the right fix, but I think something about Apple's particular way of operating is holding it back.
- earenndil 8y agoApple has enough money that they could easily make your phone better and develop github and do eight other things.
- z3t4 8y agoI don't think anyone really understands what Github is. It's more like a spirit then a thing. I bet Microsoft is prepared to pay a lot for the goodwill, they don't care about the product/tech.
- rrcaptain 8y agoGitHub being bought buy Microsoft is like the opposite of what it represents. If Microsoft wants to pay for goodwill they should drop a big chunk of cash on forming a GitHub Foundation similar to Mozilla.
- zmmmmm 8y agoIt's getting depressing to see that mid tier companies are all now reliably getting swallowed up by larger ones. It is starting to feel like the golden age of technology - where brand new small companies emerge and become giant ones - is waning. Were Google, Amazon and Facebook actually the last of the tech giants to emerge and from now on, it's just a procession of watching every other company merge into the existing 5 or 6 big companies? I guess it is inevitable but it still makes me sad if we are transitioning to a more mature, but fundamentally more boring phase.
- meiraleal 8y agoI think it is a cycle. When the middle tier companies vanish, the small ones start to rise again.
- yawaramin 8y agoMicrosoft should actually buy Slack.
- seansmccullough 8y agoAlready tried to clone it with Microsoft Teams.
- yawaramin 8y agoI've used Teams. Microsoft should really buy Slack :-)
- CosmicBagel 8y agoI'm mostly indifferent, but would like point out that MS has managed their dev products decently well. (At least the ones I use)
- cwyers 8y agoHOT TAKE: The things that drove Skype to change from the Golden Age Of Skype were largely market-driven things like the rise of the smartphone that killed pretty much every other popular communications platform at the time (AIM is dead now, too) and there is no evidence that an independent Skype would have weathered the market shift any better than a Microsoft-owned Skype did.
- Rjevski 8y agoDisagreed. Skype worked perfectly for me on smartphone, and the few quirks could've been patched without screwing it up completely. I feel like Skype was ahead of its time, it was essentially a cross-platform iMessage & FaceTime that was mainstream. Had Microsoft not fucked it up we'd still be happily using it.
- moistoreos 8y agoLeave it alone! Github pricing is perfect for all incomes. They'll slap on a few features, create a tiered payment system and charge $20 for the first tier. 100% will take my code somewhere else if this acquisition goes through. Go acquire Atlassian if you want to "diversify" your portfolio. Go stick it up your Azure MS.
- ATsch 8y agoMany people mention Microsoft's past history as reasons for worrying about this. However, I disagree. I don't think this would be bad because it's Microsoft. I think it would be bad because GitHub wouldn't be a generally independent entity, with no business interests besides making a product good enough that people will pay for it anymore. Currently, GitHub doesn't really have any incentive to care what tools and platform you are using, or where you deploy your code. To the contrary, they want to appeal to the widest audience possible. This would all change if owned by Microsoft. GitHubs role would then instead likely instead be to channel users into other Microsoft products and services, especially Azure. Instead of functionality that benefits everyone independent of platform, it will be in their interest to add features that only benefit users of the Microsoft ecosystem. Azure CI, deploy to Azure, .NET integration, LinkedIn integration. I don't think this is the kind of platform most FOSS projects would want to use, certainly not me.
- pcthrowaway 8y agoThis is what I was thinking also (though you articulated it much better than I would have). A large company doesn't make an acquisition like this without a business incentive. For them, it's driving people to their products. Maybe making the tooling in github for interacting with microsoft-y products a little bit better. Maybe adding whatever licenses microsoft likes to the front of the default licenses you can pick from when you create a new repo. Things generated by their editors going into your .gitignore by default. I don't see any reason they'd acquire github and then entirely leave it alone.
- h1d 8y agoMaybe MS understands this concern and at least keeps it comfortable for the devs not to leave for alternatives else what's the point.
- qwerty456127 8y agoSo this is why they have closed Codeplex!
- rrcaptain 8y agoNot too keen on GitHub being acquired. If Microsoft wants to do something good here, they should give GitHub enough money to form a Foundation similar to Mozilla. That would be the best way GitHub could pursue its mission.
- oaiey 8y agoThat also crossed my mind. But they have shareholders.
- vira28 8y agoI understand most of the concern about Microsofty way. However, basically I see two different era for MS. Before Satya and After Satya. So, I don't have any concern/worries in this acquisition.
- bborud 8y agoAs a long time GitHub user I really do hope these talks do not result in an acquisition. I would really like GitHub to be independent from OS vendors, or vendors of platforms, ecosystems, compilers, IDEs etc. I want GitHub's goal to be a good GitHub. Not a good part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Those may initially be the same, but it takes very little for them to not be the same.
- samatman 8y agoI can't understand why Github hasn't built out a clear path from repository hosting, to continuous integration, ending in low-friction renting of cloud instances. I don't want Google or Amazon to buy them, and that almost leaves Azure. It seems like something they could have done themselves a few years ago, though. Puzzling.
- m6g6a 8y agoNO! GOD! PLEASE NO! [GIF]
- voidwtf 8y agoSo, Which Microsoft login will I need to use for Microsoft GitHub? My Microsoft Personal Account? Microsoft Work Account? Azure AD Account? Microsoft GitHub account? p.s. All of the accounts have the same username, you just try different password and 2FA combinations til it works.
- amf12 8y agoDoes that not depend on you? Personal account - well that's your personal account ending in maybe @outlook.com Microsoft Work Account - Defined by your workplace. Ending in @workplace.com Azure AD Account - Same as your work account, unless your workplace uses a different tenant account for Azure. Github Account - Well they still need to support the older accounts.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- coldseattle 8y agoI already don’t use GitHub because of their awful politics. Maybe Microsoft will get rid of their bad actors.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- egberts1 8y agoI’m bailing if Github gets Windowized.
- m3kw9 8y agoGitHub: the ale requires you to keep us open. Microsoft:..
- m3kw9 8y agoGitHub: the sale requires you to keep us open. Microsoft:..
- lioeters 8y agoAs much as I love GitHub, if Microsoft acquires it I might start looking for alternatives.
- geokon 8y agoDoes anyone have insight into what they're been working on recently at Github? I feel like the user experience hasn't changed/improved in the last couple of years at all. It feels to me like there is a lot of low hanging fruit to make a ton of money. For one they could integrate or replicate the functionality of Bountysource and let people donate to users. There is also tons of room for improvement in licensing like making copywriter-assignment frictionless and letting people dual license their software (so I could at a click of a button buy a proprietary license for someone's GPL'd library)
- wepple 8y agoFor all the silly unicorn IPOs of companies which don’t necessarily have a clear product or revenue, GH seems like the type of company that could successfully go public and actually succeed. It would fend off potential suitors for a while too.
- crb002 8y agoNot unless they bought red hat first and shipped Linux laptops unseating Lenovo. Money is now in the mega data cloud center not the desktop market.
- themusicgod1 8y agoIf Microsoft buys github I will be pulling all my repositories, deleting my account, and finding any software that I use on github and quickly cloning it and importing it to some competing server(Probably gitlab)...and I would encourage everyone else to do the same. edit In the meanwhile I would recommend filing an issue on every single project as you would normally file issues on, asking what their migration plan in the event of a Microsoft takeover is, before, not after this happens.
- CryoLogic 8y agoThis could be the best thing ever for GitLab. (see: Skype)
- stblack 8y agoThe price as stated seems lowball to me.
- openfuture 8y agoAaand this is the weakness of centralizing everything in Github. Inevitable that it gets acquired by something with other motives (or is forced to exploit its central position in some way because business). The fact it may be Microsoft that seals the deal is just a cherry on top. We need proper decentralization. There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it.
- hk__2 8y ago> We need proper decentralization. > There could still be aggregators for browsing projects and bookmarking but the structural weakness of keeping all the eggs in one basket will never go away. No matter how much wishful thinking you throw at it. The Web is decentralized, and so everybody’s using Google to discover it. The problem with decentralization is you still need global entry points, i.e. some sort of centralization.
- openfuture 8y agoThese entry points could be run by networked organizations like Sensorica (except more developed) and run on free software.
- sbr464 8y agoLinkedIn won’t let you cancel your account if you’ve paid a year subscription. The option simply doesn’t exist and their support is oblivious
- jaytaylor 8y agoPaywall bypass: https://archive.is/V7Oyy https://archive.is/V7Oyy
- ksec 8y agoI don't understand why all the bashing, there is no better time to cash in. Gitlab in few years time will make Github worth less. Gitlab.com and self host GitLab offer the best of both worlds. Gitlab right now still isn't as good as Github, but it is good enough for many things. And we see improvement coming in every few months. Not to mention Microsoft will likely move the whole Github infrastructure to Azure.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- trisimix 8y agoNonononononono
- DrBazza 8y agoThis feels a bit like MS wanting to buy Yahoo, Nokia, and aQuantive. It feels like Github is now resting on its laurels and has peaked.
- aruggirello 8y agoIf this goes through, it's going to impact users of Atom and VS Code - one of the two has no reason to survive. I wouldn't be surprised if the former is discontinued then.
- speedplane 8y agoConsidering that software powers most of the modern economy, it's pretty sad how small the market is for quality software development tools. Programmers get paid high six figures, but balk at paying for quality debugging tools. Visual Studio, despite being a strong debugger and exceptional piece of technology in its own right, is not a real revenue driver for MS, it's just an exceptionally sophisticated way to nudge programmers to Microsoft's libraries and platforms. Github has generally been platform agnostic (except for git itself), and it would sadden me to see Github start to compromise those values and start favoring one platform or another. (One could easily see Github / Visual Studio plugins, enabled by default, with built-in subtle nudges towards the MS Cloud platform).
- TomK32 8y agoCan't we do something like a customer-buy-out and put Github into a foundation of some sort?
- Yetanfou 8y agoI foresee a great future... for Gogs [1], Gitea [2], Gitlab [3] and other Github-alternatives. I was a late and somewhat reluctant adopter of Github as I don't like the idea of centralising so much of the free software infrastructure and putting it in the hands of one company, even a supposedly 'friendly' company like Github. I mirror everything I do on Github to a local Gitea-instance as a backup and exit strategy for when Github becomes a liability. If these talks go through and Microsoft does take over the latter will become true and I'll remove my accounts there. [1] https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ [2] https://gitea.io/ https://gitea.io/ [3] https://gitlab.com/ https://gitlab.com/
- monodeldiablo 8y agoThis seems, to me, to illustrate perfectly how Microsoft still doesn't understand open source as an idea nor as a culture. The whole movement exists as a reaction against central, corporate control. Large companies think that, by acquiring important hosted open source infrastructure, they'll somehow acquire the users or act as gatekeepers. But open source tooling is so decentralized these days that is not easy to be a captive user. The cost of switching is so low -- plenty of other comparable services supply collaborative utilities for git -- that, for most projects, a weekend spent altering URLs and configs should suffice. If such a deal goes through, Microsoft will spend millions on the acquisition and, simultaneously, alternative providers who appear more independent (Gitlab, BitBucket, etc) will see a surge in new accounts. And I, for one, think it'd be a good thing for open source. Every time an OSS sugar daddy turns on its users -- SourceForge, BitKeeper, Oracle, SCO, etc -- the community has grown more robust, more decentralized, and more resilient.
- nejdetckenobi 8y agoThey're literally ruining my life. First Minecraft, now GitHub? Congratz MS. Now I hate you more.
- oneweekwonder 8y agoOnly one mention of CodePlex[0] in the comments? Microsoft had a "github" it could not compete and github took the mindshare. Now it seems Microsoft want to buy that mindshare. I wonder how many FOSS and other projects will jump ship once/if Microsoft takes over. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex
- gaelow 8y agoI'd seriously consider migrating to bitbucket if this happens.
- igammarays 8y agoIf SendGrid and Twilio could IPO, then surely GitHub can. Keep incentives aligned and do that instead, please. If Microsoft acquired GH it would a non-neutral platform, and I would be off to Gitlab immediately.
- xkr47 8y agoSign the petition: https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-stop-microsoft-from-buying-github https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-stop-microsoft-from-buyin...
- tekknik 8y agowell I’m canceling my sub, thanks for ruining Github MS. Gitlab here I come!