30 ms·
Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub
- Gaelan 8y agoIs this a done deal, or could GitHub (maybe after seeing the backlash) still back out?
- ryan-allen 8y agoOf all the big players who could have acquired GitHub, I'm most glad that it's MSFT. Their open source initiatives of late have been fantastic, and they really get developers. Visual Studio is a 10/10 IDE. Congrats GH and co :)
- consultSKI 8y agoHello gitlab.
- shmerl 8y agoI guess it's time to move to Gitlab.
- atmosx 8y agoMS has had an 180 degree turn in policy since Balmer left. Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.
- shmerl 8y agoI simply have little trust in MS. They did improve in some areas, but not enough to gain overall trust. They are still not on the same page with many FOSS efforts. Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
- vinn124 8y agoparticularly when most microsoft investors value microsoft stock for its earnings potential, as opposed to growth/revenue potential.
- shmerl 8y agoAdd to that Microsoft's position about copyrightability of APIs. That alone should be a red flag for many FOSS projects to avoid Github if MS buys it.
- devuo 8y agoAnd TypeScript <3!
- glogla 8y agoLooking at Windows 10, with stuff like telemetry that's impossible to disable completely and hidden behind every dark pattern imaginable, or ads in Start menu? Microsoft of today is more Microsoft than ever.
- madeofpalk 8y agoEh. Windows today might be more Microsoft than ever, but the rest of the org is spending lots of effort creating cross platform developer tools that's preparing Microsoft to remain relevant in a world that doesn't involve Windows PCs.
- Nullabillity 8y agoTrue, they went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either. Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
- mythrwy 8y agoThey really haven't. Maybe like a 150 degree turn at best.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kworker 8y agoAs i know it started under Balmer, but he have to left because the failed phone OS.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y agoHonest question: do the still threaten Linux-related companies with suing for violations of unspecified Microsoft patents?
- shmerl 8y agoLast time I've heard, MS is still shaking down many mobile manufactures who use Android, using patent protection racket.
- gressquel 8y agoI am gonna wait and see. I know they messed up Skype really bad, but LinkedIN for example they havent touched and destroyed. I will wait and see..
- carlosdp 8y agoLinkedIn is kinda hard to make worse though tbh
- mikece 8y agoMicrosoft screwed up Skype by trying to “make it more Microsoft” whereas LinkedIn is being left to operate as before (tough MSFT is using the data for something). My guess is that GitHub will continue as before with the main change being that MSDN subscribers will likely get private GitHub repos as part of their package. Now MSFT just needs something along the lines of Jira to replace the dog’s breakfast that is VSTS Agile project management tooling. I don’t suppose the folks in Redmond are looking to acquire Atlassian next...?
- zackya89 8y agoYou dont pay 2 Billion, and leave it untouched, they see an earnings potential in the company given the right management and shareholders expect ROI that is higher then the average market return
- mikece 8y agoThe earnings are getting people who already have code in GitHub to also buy into Visual Studio App Center, Azure, all other Microsoft value-adds. By not leaving GitHub untouched otherwise reduces the chances of spooking the current patrons of GitHub. Makes nothing but sense to me.
- the_duke 8y agoThanks for this comment. Most of the discussio here is just centered around Microsofts goodwill and trustworthiness, mostly ignoring that MS wouldn't make this investment without a solid plan and path to profitability. That doesn't have to be bad per se, I guess there are a lot of options like integrating Github well with Azure and providing alternatives to AWS CodeCommit / pipelines, ...
- wierd0 8y agoIt's good that there is such an alternative as GitLab, because there is a slight but still not unsignificant risk that MS will not do the right thing. I think they will though since they are power users of their own product. I'm hoping they know this space.
- dghughes 8y agoI thought many people did after the infamous incident at Github.
- shmerl 8y agoSome did, but this will be another major incentive.
- jwilk 8y agoWhat incident?
- _betty_ 8y agoThey ran dome SQL on wrong server and wiped main db instead of its mirror. Lost around 48 hours of stuff (as multiple backups also failed)
- hobofan 8y agoI think the majority of the Github users started using the platform in the time since that, and don't even know much about Github's history.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- madspindel 8y agoTbh, I like this move. I hope they will merge Atom with VS Code and shutdown VSTS in favor for GitHub.
- mikece 8y agoAtom and VS Code are both built on Electron. No need to kill Atom as it and VS Code are built for different purposes.
- carlosdp 8y agoWhat different purposes? They're both text editors / lightweight IDEs focusing on plugin extensibility built on top of Electron. They're literally the same thing.
- Klathmon 8y agoAnd there are many who would say a sedan and a crossover are basically the same thing, but the devil is in the details. Atom is extensible to a fault. A plugin can do just about everything and anything. FFS tabs are actually a plugin! While that means that performance will suffer, many (myself included) use Atom because of that insane freedom that plugins have to do what they need to do. VSCode on the other hand is much more "if you want to do X, use this API". It's much more controlled, much more opinionated about how things "should" be done using VSCode as a platform. From 30,000 ft, they are the same. But their goals and details differ, and I always prefer more choice rather than less.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- madeofpalk 8y agoI use neither, and I can see that the two take fairly different approaches, but why would you say they're build for different purposes. I don't think it's clear why a single org (though very far apart) has two approaches for a code text editor.
- mikece 8y agoNot surprising. Microsoft has made a big deal of partnering with GitHub, showing off how well their Azure-based CI/CD products and services integrate with code hosted at GitHub. Not to mention that .NET Core and many companion libraries are hosted at GitHub, not on VSTS.
- jstanley 8y agoStep 1: Embrace.
- dabockster 8y agoWe still have Gitlab if MSFT decides to do anything malicious.
- gurkendoktor 8y agoI don't think the big loss here is GitHub-the-software, but this short sweet period in time where everyone, from Microsoft to Apple, had their source code on the same platform. I doubt that e.g. Swift would have moved to GitHub if it had already been owned by Microsoft.
- dabockster 8y agoAgreed. Having GitHub be the place for OSS code has definitely been beneficial and convenient. That being said, I don't feel like it would be the end of the world if some of the projects moved to competing platforms.
- jenscow 8y agoI think they're on step 2 now. They already embraced it by adding 1k repos. They're now going to extend it. We'll soon have an msgit, which is git with extensions that only github will support.
- MarkyC4 8y agoYou mean like the current extensions in the .github folder (pull request template, etc)?
- eevilspock 8y agowell, this may be too late, but it's a top 10 trending repo: https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT let 'em know.
- obl 8y agoTangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ? If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet. As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.
- ezekg 8y agoTheir search is really frustrating, I agree. I feel like they only index a small percentage of files, so results are always bad.
- tomduncalf 8y agoThe fact that you can’t search within a branch too...
- brazzledazzle 8y agoThey don’t index forks. Cloning a fork just to search through it locally is always fun. Very annoying when a fork becomes the de facto project because it’s the one being maintained.
- ezekg 8y agoI’m not even talking forks. I’m talking largish projects hosted on GitHub (100k+ loc). The actual results will contain less than half the results you’d see with grep, and even then the indexed content may even be out of date. This is exacerbated even more when database migrations are kept in source control, with older migrations archived, and the only search results you get for eg a stored proc search will be a version of the sp from 6 months ago.
- aarongolliver 8y agoGithub won't let you do a code search in a forked repository. Clone & grep is literally the only option!
- lkrubner 8y agoI'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github. At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall. Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
- gressquel 8y agowhat did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change. as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.
- darawk 8y ago> what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change. I think that's his point. He's saying that LinkedIn has the opportunity to do lots of interesting things, and appears to be squandering it.
- gressquel 8y agoLinkedIn is excellent as it is; its a utility to keep your CV updated and connect with professionals. We don't want FB-like functionality here, thank god.
- TekMol 8y agoI feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
- singularity2001 8y agoI feel the same. It's not the end of free software, but the end of free software as we knew it (or something, still trying to rationalize). Someone explain the extreme feeling of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
- TekMol 8y agoSomeone explain the extreme feeling of uneasiness penetrating our brains. There is not a single Microsoft product/tool/service I like. Including the ones they aquired. So I expect them to turn GitHub into something I don't like too.
- solidr53 8y agoNot even VSCode ?
- TekMol 8y agoNo, because as the VSCode license puts it "The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft."
- PascLeRasc 8y agoEveryone says on here that VSCode is way faster than Atom but I've found the opposite every time I've tried, Atom opens faster and feels slicker when editing, especially multiline. I'm also not a fan of the VS UI and its icon.
- Lukas_Skywalker 8y agoWhat does Github have to do with free software? It's a closed-source, non-free SaaS. Free software repos can (mostly) relocate to any other hoster as they wish.
- rootsudo 8y agoAlot of MSFT codebase was moved to Git in 2016 and this just makes sense. Wow. Wonder how hiring/firing is going to be now at Git. They are pro-remote, while most MSFT positions are going no longer remote.
- steve_musk 8y agoGit != Github
- Jedd 8y agoFrom at least two angles this is great news for Gitlab. But it feels a bit like the Atlassian / Trello arrangement, which has had little impact on users. From recent behaviour I'd expect Microsoft to have a very light touch here.
- miketery 8y agoI'm not familiar with recent behaviour anything in particular? (My memory goes to Skype...)
- Jedd 8y agoThe Skype buy was seven years ago, and it was a pretty user hostile piece of software before that. Post Balmer we've seen a more open (in the transparent, consultative, community sensitive sense) attitude, with genuine contributions to free software. People also seem to be citing LinkedIn as an example, but that doesn't feel like it got any more unpleasant since the buyout.
- intern4tional 8y agoMinecraft, LinkedIn as examples. While LinkedIn has not gone super well, it has been left to make the decisions that it made on it's own. Minecraft has also gone untouched - it's still hosted on AWS in fact.
- threeshoes 8y agoThey bought xamarin and then made it open source and free. They also have continued to support mono despite having .net core
- singularity2001 8y agoIf this is true, I delete my account immediately. The last thing I want is my code to fall into the hands of MS.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoIf you've used GPL then you have nothing to worry about.
- singularity2001 8y ago80% of github projects here are hidden, inhouse trustworthy secret private projects! This is such horrible news!
- zufallsheld 8y agoSo you put trustworthy, secret projects on GitHub instead of hosting them in-house?
- singularity2001 8y agoyes, my bad, should have listened to IT The idea was that it's more likely our servers get hacked than a breach at github. Guess I was wrong.
- yongjik 8y agoMicrosoft built its business by selling software products. If they had meddled with Fortune 500 companies running their business-critical information on top of Windows, Microsoft wouldn't be here now. There are situations to be wary of MS, but I don't think this is one.
- singularity2001 8y agoIn Europe there are real worries about state-driven industrial espionage. We shouldn't be worried that our developers coding habits will get connected with linked-in and fed into the surveillance state (which MS is big part of)?
- ajiang 8y agoThere will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.
- rashthedude 8y agoCan you maybe elaborate a little on BizSpark and how it was helpful?
- saagarjha 8y agoBizSpark is discontinued.
- jenscow 8y agoNot the best example... BizSpark has been discontinued.
- hapnin 8y agoWhy I'll never trust Microsoft ever again. "postmaster@nsa.gov" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
- sverige 8y agoI stopped trusting them when they stole the intellectual property of numerous small companies years before the _NSAKEY debacle. I know, I know, Bill Gates is supposed to be some kind of good guy now (malaria, etc.) but I can't think of any good reason to trust any robber baron, based on the past histories of robber barons. Even Andrew Carnegie was an asshole in the final analysis.
- TheCabin 8y agoDon't forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- slg 8y agoMicrosoft is basically the corporate version of the ship of Theseus at this point. The have a lot of questionable stuff in their history, but the leadership and the culture at large has shifted drastically since those days. At a certain point it is worth reevaluating one's opinions and question whether it is still worth hanging on to those old grudges. I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
- TheCabin 8y agoYeah, I am not saying I would trust any other big competitor more than Microsoft. However, I am still not convinced that Microsoft really changed as much as many people like to believe. I think it is obvious that they lost the fight against open-standards in many domains. Linux on Smartphones would be one example. Now they have two options, either to embrace these technologies or lose market. The question is: How genuine is their enthusiasm and are they really acting in the interest of open-standards? Do they still have strategies to hurt open alternatives to their own products in the long run?
- zitterbewegung 8y agoSo it looks like Github is going to be the next sourceforge! Onward to gitlab!
- Angostura 8y agoPersonally, I can't wait for GitHub360 Professional for Sharepoint 360.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoEnterprise Edition with Cortana.
- merinowool 8y agoWith VoiceCommit(tm)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bitmapbrother 8y agoPersonally, I can't wait to start doing git push and pulls using HoloLens.
- riazrizvi 8y ago“Hi, I’m Gitty! I see you are having difficulty submitting your large file. Would you like some help with that?” [YES] [NO]
- oaiey 8y agoFinally someone with the right attitude. I am waiting for a change in the URL ... https://GitHub.NET https://GitHub.NET
- PascLeRasc 8y agoThis is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.
- hobofan 8y ago> I hope they don't discontinue Atom Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...
- nielsbot 8y agoI thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)
- spicyj 8y agoIt’s not. They are both web-based but otherwise unrelated.
- gschier 8y agoNo, not at all. The only common component (I think) is Electron (Atom shell).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ezekg 8y agoVSCode is built on top of the same framework as Atom, Electron, which was previously called Atom-shell.
- frutiger 8y agoIt's worth noting that the core contributors to Electron are Github employees.
- autarch 8y agoI don't understand how GitHub has been unable to become profitable. Anyone know more and want to share some details?
- ezekg 8y agoIt is weird, isn’t it? GitHub was the first SaaS I ever subscribed to out of my own pocket. Spotify was the next one.
- ec109685 8y agoPlus they have very large private enterprise instances of github.
- nvarsj 8y agoMy guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.
- user5994461 8y agoThe costs of the fancy office and the workforce should be quite high as well. The cash flow is probably good but even with a million customers at $5 a month, that's not enough to sustain a large company.
- jorams 8y agoThe weird part is that they were actually profitable before they started taking funding. [1][2] [1]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... [2]: https://a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-development-2/ https://a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-developme...
- noah-kun 8y agoDoes it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit. Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
- CM30 8y agoOh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube). Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.
- singularity2001 8y agoI was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)
- tekkk 8y agoYou didn't use Youtube before it was acquired? I vividly remember finding a lot of cool videos and music that I couldn't otherwise have found. Now once you watch a few garbage videos it's all Youtube autosuggests to you. Also if you start exploring videos they'll probably be mostly around the same what you've already seen and not diverge too much from what's popular. Anything novel and out-of-ordinary is pushed to the bottom in most cases. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is different but the freshness of it is gone. I don't expect anymore to find anything super-interesting and the same old stuff that I've already watched is being suggested to me again and again.
- CM30 8y agoVideos get demonetised for questionable or non reasons Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time). Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything. Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today). Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site. Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant. Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them. YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections. And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.
- nicoburns 8y agoI worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.
- kworker 8y agoWhy not self-hosting?
- williamdclt 8y agoI'm not sure what exactly you're reacting to, but a lot of us absolutely do not want to self-host our github repos. Because it's work, because we don't need it, because we like using github/gitlab/other as a "marketplace"
- threatofrain 8y agoBut what about the social / code sharing / collaboration part, which is arguably the most interesting part? We need a quality central meeting place.
- EchelonFuxMe 8y ago1. Electricity cost 2. Need for constant electricity 3. Internet cost 4. Need for constant Internet access 5. Cost of hardware 6. Heat generated by the running hardware 7. Noise generated by the running hardware 8. Space occupied by the hardware 9. Need to update and maintain hardware/software 10. Worse discoverability for your repos 11. ISP asking questions 12. Government asking questions 13. Police asking questions Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
- ceejayoz 8y agoThis is a weird comment. "Self-hosting" doesn't have to mean having a giant server farm at home. You could put it on an AWS/GCP/Azure free-tier VPS instance.
- LeanderK 8y agoI am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github. Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.
- zackya89 8y agothe history of Microsoft is the reason why we all reacting this way. But encouraged by the move they made lately coming into Linux, even though other players have forced their hand
- tradesmanhelix 8y agoMicrosoft has slain giants before. They will try to do it again. No one is too big to fail.
- merinowool 8y agoExcept HSBC.
- smolder 8y agoYes, particularly because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- d3sandoval 8y agoAs far as I can tell, today's MS is very aware of the brand problem they created for themselves and have been working hard to fix it. A recent changelog episode addresses this exact issue:https://changelog.com/podcast/298#transcript-78 https://changelog.com/podcast/298#transcript-78
- kakwa_ 8y agoI would be as worried if it was AWS or Google. Github should remain a neutral ground in my opinion.
- carlosdp 8y ago"The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work." Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?
- zackya89 8y agoAlternatives and no not bitbucket
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tradesmanhelix 8y agoGitlab.com is what I was already slowing moving to, because their code is open source. This will just hasten that migration.
- lioeters 8y agohttps://gitea.io/ https://gitea.io/
- singularity2001 8y agoCan the old CEO be sued for 'breach of trust'? At least they must have to give prior notice before any of our sensitive data (trusted to github) falls into the hands of MS (untrustworthy)?
- Yizahi 8y agoAt least it's not Oracle
- larkeith 8y agoPrevious discussion re:acquisition talks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208293
- ggregoire 8y agoGitHub became too expensive. I’m curious to see the new pricing model.
- vortico 8y agoInteresting that you say this. If the price was 3x what it was (for both individuals and organizations), I feel both parties would still find it valuable enough.
- vezycash 8y agoLook at Amazon Prime. For ONLY $99 free video, deals, free shipping, and many more. This purchase is about increasing 365 value. They'll make the pro version free with office 356 subscription.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoAll good things must come to an end. We had free software before Github and we will have free software after Github.
- salmonfamine 8y agoAnyone know the easiest way to migrate to GitLab?
- ggregoire 8y agoClick on “import from GitHub” when you create a new repo.
- wetpaws 8y agoI can already see gitlab and bitbucket jumping up in popularity.
- waydowntogo 8y agoRIP Github.
- VectorLock 8y agoThink Microsoft will use this opportunity to throw some people in jail for whats in their github repos, like they did with the poor guy offering freely available recovery CDs?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- skriticos2 8y agoI read about this as a hypothetical a few days, but it really moved to done deal quicker than I expected. I started to look for alternatives to host private repos and found that Amazon CodeCommit has a plan that's even much better than the GitHub plans. Does anybody have experience on how well this works?
- wiredfool 8y agoI’ve got a couple of code commit repos for various purposes, and it’s high friction. Uploading a large repo with a plain git push will likely fail. The user management is way more complicated and enterprisey than github. It does work, but it feels awkward.
- drexlspivey 8y agoKeybase has encrypted git for free https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAre Amazon considered less evil than Microsoft these days?
- dschuetz 8y agoSo long, and thanks for the fish!
- MightySCollins 8y agoGitHub is the website 90% of the packages I use are hosted on. All our company code and hundreds of hours are invested into whats hosted on it. I would hate to see this change...
- stock_toaster 8y agoSoonds like a good time for gitlab to go fundraising!
- singularity2001 8y agoGithub to Gitlab migration: https://gitlab.com/import/github/new https://gitlab.com/import/github/new EDIT: the old links were useless: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html I'm stuck here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/github.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/github.html what is the gitlab Authorization callback URL?
- timvdalen 8y agoThis may just be paranoia but if I were competing with Microsoft on something that I'd have private code for hosted on GitHub, I'd be pretty worried right now.
- sverige 8y agoThat's not paranoia. That is completely reasonable considering Microsoft's history.
- peteretep 8y agoMicrosoft have a history of corporate espionage against their customers?
- severino 8y agoWell, considering all this "telemetry" thing they have been pushing down its customer's throats, I wouldn't be comfortable at all with this move.
- peteretep 8y agoI think if Microsoft are even slightly shown to have used this to spy on its competitors, it'll be the end of the company as we know it, and people will go to jail.
- sverige 8y agoJust for example, among the EU's criticisms of Microsoft were some of the documented (as in civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars documented) abuses of some of its notable customers like IBM and Intel.[0] "Oh, but that was way back in the 80s and 90s, and different people run the company now. They're more mature and responsible these days." This is the only argument I've been offered when pointing out Microsoft's very shady history. It doesn't suffice. [0] http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...
- ancarda 8y agoIf you're thinking of moving off GitHub, one thing that I have heard about that might help you is you can ask GitHub to mirror repos, the way https://github.com/moodle/moodle https://github.com/moodle/moodle looks -- note it says: moodle/moodle mirrored from git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git That way any URLs to your GitHub repo should carry on working. People can even clone and pull this repo. That may ease migration, especially if some tools assume code is on GitHub and don't allow you to specify the full URL to the repo.
- sandworm101 8y agoOh well. Github was great while it lasted. What's next?
- cuddlypsycho 8y agoMicrosoft ruined Hotmail, JellyFish, Skype, LinkedIn, Yammer ... and now they want to ruin GitHub? :/ Noooooo
- chrissnell 8y agoCan you imagine how this story would have gone over on Slashdot in 1998? Microsoft was the Borg, Linux was the nerd's favorite OS and Google was a benevolent and powerful new search engine. How the tables have turned...
- cft 8y agoI doubt that Google or Amazon will use GitHub to opensource anything two years from now.
- andyidsinga 8y agoI was just thinking the same thing. If github ends up running completely on Azure infrastructure; how likely will microsoft's competitor's be to host large projects there. that said, I'm not sure the impact will be too negative if google or _______'s open source being on some other git-based system if it includes decent github / gitlab like collab tools.
- merinowool 8y agoNoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo....... That means I could finally get to cancel my multiple subscription and setup gitlab.
- davidu 8y ago790b9db572a6a819f11ad0e0cac7d261 --- will update later.
- spludge 8y agoWhat's this?
- EnderMB 8y agoI spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear. With all that said, things have changed a lot over at GitHub over the past 2-3 years, so I can't say I'm all that surprised that this was the outcome. Restructures, scandals, and some crazy comments over the few years has led me to believe that GitHub probably isn't the same company that the development community embraced. For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft mess with GitHub then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years, it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service (i.e. GitLab).
- closeparen 8y agoThis dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
- rbosinger 8y agoYeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.
- ozim 8y agoI think that this is real "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" and they know it will bring them good times.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoCan't speak for everyone but that won't happen personally until they start respecting privacy.
- sarpmis 8y agoGet ready to merge your Github account with your Office 365 and Skype accounts
- Zekio 8y agodoesn't seem like something that will happen, just look at LinkedIn, they don't even have MS Account logins
- dz0ny 8y agoThe way GitHub is developed (remote) and culture, this is pretty much death of GitHub and if most developers leave it will become a mess quite quickly. GitLab just got big boost.
- jasonvorhe 8y agoThat's extremely doubtful. First, having to login to different Gitlab instances is terrible UX. Second, you cannot easily reference another instance's issues. Hosted Gitlab is also unreliable and slow and comes with no publicly mentioned SLO of any kind. I'd be surprised to see any big projects going away from GitHub in the coming years, unless Microsoft actually manages to tarnish the GitHub brand in a meaningful way. The typical tinfoil head probably never trusted GitHub anyways, whether they're owned by Microsoft or not.
- nelsonic 8y agoJust when it looked like GitHub was "sustainable" through revenue ... greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") and they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! :-( Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? I would buy a few (thousand) shares ... Who else would buy stock/shares if they remained independent?
- anothergoogler 8y ago> they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! Right? It's like your wife leaving you for your high school bully.
- azernik 8y ago> Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? No. Unless they want to go for an IPO, they are only allowed to sell to accredited investors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor). > greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") That's their job. They put hundreds of millions of dollars into GitHub 3 (Series B) or 6 (Series A) years ago, and their sustainable business relies on selling those investments for a profit.
- meesterdude 8y ago> relies on selling those investments for a profit. There are more ways to make money than selling out
- nelsonic 8y ago@asernik I was referring to the idea of them doing a "Direct Public Listing" ("DPO") as opposed to an IPO (similar to what Spotify recently did...) http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/spotify-ipo/ http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/spotify-ipo/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-difference-between-ipo-and-direct-listing/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-difference-between-ip... > "a DPO is attractive to small companies and companies with an established and loyal client base. A DPO is also known as direct placement." GitHub has the "established and loyal client base" with many millions in recurring revenue. GitHub's principal VCs, Sequoia and A16z can both afford to wait for a return. everyone could sell in the "DPO" so VCs could liquidate if they needed cash ... https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github
- gkya 8y agoI'm kind of happy with this happening as it seems to me that this can cause the VCS hosting arena to diversify a little bit. The "monopoly" of github always worried me as a huge freaky single point of failure.
- chrisws 8y agoOh, fork
- Distant_horizon 8y agoSmart and inevitable, to secure dominance in the talent vertical. I remember walking into an org where none of the engineers or UX folks had Linkedin accounts. They didn't need it to land in a healthy workplace w/ a decent salary. They were active on GitHub instead, had Angellist profiles. One of them mentioned LI's InMail tool drove him away. Another said he can network just fine with Meetup and twitter. Edited those typos.
- ttoinou 8y agoMicrosoft [...] is now one if the biggest contributors to GitHub Citation needed ?
- golf1052 8y agohttps://octoverse.github.com/2016/ https://octoverse.github.com/2016/ under Organizations with the most open source contributors
- pavlov 8y ago...And in the comments, a thousand developers suddenly realize GitHub is a plain old business rather than some kind of core infrastructure service altruistically provided by Free Software Elves and their Infinite Bandwidth Rainbow.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI don't mind this, as long as the side of Microsoft which has been on GitHub so far as the side of Microsoft who ends up dealing with GitHub in the future. But this will definitely end the concept of GitHub as a single-source place to find code. Microsoft's competitors will likely move their code, at the least, and of course, the crowd who will never trust Microsoft will leave as well, regardless of how well they manage it. All-in-all, I don't think that's a bad thing for anyone: Software shouldn't all come from one site, and the industry was becoming far too centralized around GitHub.
- ChicagoDave 8y agoReading through replies to this and especially about "the death of free software" makes me ask, "Was software ever free?" From my perspective, any software that has made it to production use ended up supported by some large for-profit corporation. Java<-Oracle Linux<-multiple distro's with paid-for enterprise support And IBM and other companies hiring developers to work on "free software". Without the support of corporations, most software just dies. So Github is losing money and can't figure out a model to become profitable. They could start charging for all repositories. They could go public, but then they're beholden to some small set of investment groups. Microsoft, under Nadella, has been about as pro-open source as you can get. The only change I expect from Microsoft re: Github is that they will very likely bake DevOps into their tools (Code/Visual Studio) and their cloud (Azure) so that developers can be more productive. The illusion of free software has always been just that. An illusion.
- smolder 8y agoThis isn't even about free software... github is closed. It's SaaS. It just became a defacto standard interface, a sort of facebook for git. git is free and will stay that way.
- flocial 8y agoIf this goes through Microsoft basically gets access to all the private proprietary code of so many companies. I would have never expected Github founders to even entertain the notion. I guess times change.
- nicodjimenez 8y agoThis is seriously depressing. GitHub had such massive network effects that you'd think if anyone could stay independent it would be them.
- sandebert 8y agoI can imagine the people at GitLab being very excited about this! Perhaps sytse would like to comment?
- aphextron 8y agoWhat a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do things?
- sillysaurus3 8y agoSure. It motivates millions of young developers to try to become kings.
- amelius 8y ago> Sure. It motivates millions of young developers to try to become kings. ... so VCs can profit.
- sillysaurus3 8y agoSo? The point is that millions of people are trying to create things who otherwise wouldn't.
- amelius 8y agoMillions of developers are shooting for the moon, while of course only few succeed, but VCs are laughing all the way to the bank because they spread their risks.
- sillysaurus3 8y agoAgain: So? I think people focus too much on the "VCs are getting rich" part while overlooking "the world is creating thousands of things that wouldn't otherwise exist" part. If you imagine what the world would be like without any incentive to create, it would be a very different place.
- gaius 8y agoWhy would they when they have VSTS already?
- hnrodey 8y agoPersonally, I think this is great news given the investment Microsoft has made in hosting their open source projects on GitHub. I'm heavily invested in the Microsoft stack so I'm kind of excited to see where they take this. Also, I'm excited because I'm in the middle of launching a product that aims to build people in to Git experts, or at the bare minimum build up your comfort level with Git to make you productive. I'd love for you to check it out. This open source version is kind of the basis for my upcoming commercial project. https://github.com/ryanrodemoyer/git-evangelism https://github.com/ryanrodemoyer/git-evangelism. Also, let's connect if you're in the Denver area. You can find my email through my GitHub account or comment on my message.
- pesfandiar 8y agoI hope they keep GitHub Pages, even if it's not free anymore. It's so convenient to host small static sites there.
- Ros2 8y agoNetlify does this for free along with a path to hosting larger sites as well. I found them via HN and have seen them recommended here many times.
- meesterdude 8y agoNetlify is great! I also found them via HN at some point and use them for a couple customer projects. Totally moving my personal stuff to them too now.
- erichurkman 8y agoHey, GitLab, if you want to push a big migration from GitHub, inundate the GitHub design team with requests for a ribbon UI on github.com and to move the subscription system to Office 365.
- sytse 8y agoWe'll not spam GitHub. But we see people #movingtogitlab
- bauerd 8y agoI think your company has a great product, but your shitty hashtag spamming surely won't make me adopt it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- slg 8y agoI completely agree. I am a happy Gitlab user. I think it is a great product. The CEO coming into this thread repeatedly pushing "#movingtogitlab" is a pretty tasteless move.
- anothergoogler 8y agoHow is it tasteless? This has to be one of the most appropriate times/places for GitLab to promote itself.
- slg 8y agoSure, but it was more the manner of the promotion itself that was off-putting. There was no substance to any of the comments saying why we should switch or why Gitlab isn't going to follow the exact same path and be purchased by Google in 6 months. Instead it was a gloating comment that came off like a vulture circling a sick animal.
- 8y ago
- scarface74 8y agoMicrosoft's own hosted platform Visual Studio Team Services is nuetral. It supports hosted and on prem build and deployment agents for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are easy to use plug ins for building and deploying on both Azure and AWS. You can use Github now for hosted git repositories in VSTS and still use Microsoft's other build and release tools. Thier Wiki is Markdown based and they have a very visible link that lets you pull down your entire Wiki using git clone. They also have free private repos, 40 hours of hosted builds, up to five users for free, project management features that are at least as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) as the other project management tools - again free for up to five users. You can also host your own private Nuget, NPM, and Maven feeds for free. For non open source projects, you can't beat the value. Additional users over 5 are $5 a month.
- bauerd 8y agoI think you ascribe different meaning to "neutral" than most others here
- scarface74 8y agoI ascribe "neutral" to technology. VSTS supports every major platform/OS and the tools are on par for all of them.
- foepys 8y agoBy "neutral" people mean politically neutral (as in no affiliation with anybody). There is a big chance Google will start using their own hosting platform again for all their code. Same with other Microsoft competitors.
- scarface74 8y agoThat's not how big companies work. Netflix hosts all of it's infrastructure on AWS and competes with Amazon Prime Video. Google pays Apple $2 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS and Apple hosts part of iCloud on Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft and Google work together on Angular and Typescript. Apple buys components from Samsung while at the same time suing them. The Fire TV stick competes with the AppleTV but Amazon Prime is available on iOS devices - including the Wpple TV3 that doesn't have an App Store. Who do you trust more not to abandon git hosting? A Microsoft owned GutHub or any replacement that Google conned up with?
- makecheck 8y agoThis seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub’s biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub). You see, whether or not it’s justified, some projects invariably will leave GitHub simply because it’s Microsoft. And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where most projects exist. And really, GitHub isn’t perfect: projects overlook a lot of minor imperfections in GitHub’s actual product because there are so many projects on GitHub and the usefulness of the networking outweighs the warts here and there.
- jannes 8y agoWhy would investors care? It's a payday for them. Current investors are going to be bought out in cash or MSFT stock.
- static_noise 8y agoThey have reached the end goal of the big buyout. What more could they possibly want?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- azernik 8y agoThey don't call them "exits" for nothing - once a company is acquired, you have exited the market and no longer care about the future of the company, except insofar as it affects your payout at acquisition time.
- greenhatman 8y agoI bet GitLab is getting infrastructure ready in anticipation of the exodus.
- sytse 8y agoWe're starting to scale up as I type this #movingtogitlab
- grzm 8y agoI’m happy there are alternatives. But can you please leave the hashtag campaign for Twitter? This is your third such comment in minutes.
- sillysaurus3 8y agoIt's a big day for gitlab. Let them celebrate a little.
- hartator 8y agoSpecially with wrong capitalization in plus of wrong platform.
- greysteil 8y agoSeriously? Where is the “congratulations” message?
- lostsock 8y agoOn their website: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/microsoft-acquires-github/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/microsoft-acquires-githu...
- sureaboutthis 8y agoThe exodus began a number of days ago when this was just a rumor.
- gorbachev 8y ago
- geff82 8y agoGitHub was never conceived as a charity. But this didn't stop people to put half of the world's open source code centrally on this one platform. Now they are crying/worried because this platform is being sold. Can't really understand your point, guys. That is the way it often goes with commercial enterprises. It's quite an irony that free/open source makes this platform so financially interesting to buy.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kylehotchkiss 8y agoI use it for work like everybody else here, but being so comfortable and happy with it, I paid $7/month for a few private repos which maybe used $.02/month in their resources. Just a shame companies and the developers paying for it wasn't enough
- sytse 8y agoThanks for mentioning GitLab as the next big one. We're seeing people #movingtogitlab
- cookiecaper 8y agoGitLab is also venture funded. What's the end game there? Wouldn't GitLab's investors, including YC, be ecstatic to see the company achieve a similar outcome? Wouldn't they consider basically any other outcome to be a failure? The bigger question is why GitHub didn't IPO. They have name recognition and prominence such that it wouldn't really be a surprise to hear that they were doing so. I don't have any internal details, so maybe the numbers just didn't line up, but that would've been the investor-approved exit that allowed it to maintain some neutrality. That leads to the next question: if GitHub didn't/couldn't IPO with all of its name recognition, why should anyone expect that GitLab will? While Atlassian's open-source pedigree is much weaker, they own BitBucket, and they're a bootstrapped startup that focuses on developer tools. They IPO'd a few years ago. They're probably the best bet for developers interested in a "neutral" hosting platform.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jacksmith21006 8y agoShould be the big winner as the big guys move off of GitHub. Hopefully they will all go to a common site. Finally had a single site and MS destroys it.
- discordance 8y agoCan't help but notice the announcement aligns with Apple's WWDC this week. Wonder it'll take a bite out of Apple's PR.
- saagarjha 8y agoMight be the other way around: Apple's event overshadows this one, and Microsoft quietly acquires GitHub with many being none the wiser.
- nyxtom 8y agoIt's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
- naiveai 8y agoThe whole world's demanding it. No one really knows how to do it efficiently, it seems.
- toyg 8y agoIt’s not just about efficiency, it’s about responsibility. I love decentralization when I can avoid dealing with BigCo, I hate it when I’m responsible for fighting spam, ensuring my services stay up, not getting hacked, and so on. All of these tasks are a requirement as soon as collaboration is in the picture.
- naiveai 8y agoYou've got a point there. I'm just so sick of all this. The Internet's a great thing, but it just seems to be going downhill with corporate interests.
- QML 8y agoI disagree. The popularity of GitHub amongst the programming community means that ease of use / convenience is more important than the notion of “decentralization”. Otherwise, people would already be setting up their servers for hosting git repos.
- naiveai 8y agoThat's really what I meant by efficiency. Ease of use increases that for businesses, that's the only reason they really care about ease of use of products they want to buy.
- siruncledrew 8y agoThis is pretty conflicting. Github is nice on its own, but business wise they haven’t been profitable, so sooner or later some change had to happen. In my experience, Github is great for public code storage and small private projects (easy to manage developers that already have github accounts), but it does become pretty expensive and I don’t necessarily think the ROI is worth it compared to a self-hosted solution. For opensource and personal portfolios, the “network effect” or first mover advantage sort of set the stage for github’s popularity over gitlab, but for a paid enterprise solution I think gitlab does a better job and offers more value per dollar. Partially what sucks is having to have separate github/gitlab accounts/repositories since that’s now 2 things to manage. I’ve tried codecommit and bitbucket as well, but those were kinda meh (in my opinion). Typically when “the Microsoft touch” is added it’s for the worse, so the expectations bar is pretty low. But who knows. I can definitely see them leveraging github to further go after AWS by giving Azure a leg up over codecommit. VSCode has also been pretty good, if they add in the “social integrations” of github to VSCode that also competes against Cloud9 on AWS. Right now AWS is solidly winning the cloud race, but if this puts price/service competitive pressure on amazon I won’t complain. I also wonder what will happen with all the code and personal data from github. I really don’t want to have to make a microsoft account to access github. As long as the switching costs from github to a viable alternative (right now gitlab) remain low, I would not have a problem with jumping ship.
- anothergoogler 8y agoMicrosoft paying $2B for a company based on Linus Torvalds' work, unreal.
- geoalchimista 8y agoIt's probably not for the platform, but for the user base and the community.
- squarefoot 8y agoNow we need a GitLab alternative, just in case MS decides GitHub isn't enough.
- static_noise 8y agoI wonder how Microsoft can manage to commercialize all the projects on GitHub. Maybe by providing an universal installer that works through the Windows Store. Maybe by adding a few mandatory patches to each project that improve compatibility. Maybe by making a much improved version of Git with a proper GUI interface. The possibilities are endless!
- Cofike 8y agoPack it in boys
- Rapzid 8y agoI'm hoping this puts the times of people with political agendas stearing the GitHub message well behind us. They weren't really neutral anymore when the CEO stepped asside and they got the business guy to take over... I suspect MS is aware of the delicate situation in regards to alienation the user base. If this goes through I expect them to address this directly and with perhaps some creativity. As a bonus Microsoft did some great work scaling git for the Windows codebase. That and other great engineering efforts making there way into GitHub could be great for the community.
- oaiey 8y agoI also think that Microsoft is very aware of this situation. They should already work on the communication part of this. And if true that maybe Nat Friedman will take over, they will handle it the right way. He has shipped his Mono team and the later Xamarin stack through four companies with success and stability for the product and the team.
- smsm42 8y agoIf this is true, it is really sad news. Remembering what Microsoft did with Skype, turning it from one of the most usable communication platforms to a pile of unusable crap, I can't help but wonder if it's time to prepare a migration strategy right now.
- onyva 8y agoHorrible and sad news.
- Starz0r 8y agoPeople moving to a alternative just because they can't handle change is hilarious. Good riddance!
- jasonrhaas 8y agoThis is a sad day for Open Source and software in general. What makes Github great is that its a neutral place where anyone can host their code. Now that its owned by a Big Corporation, the values that Github has built will be abandoned in favor of making money for the corporation. R.I.P. Github. Your move, Gitlab.
- atlasM 8y agoFunnily enough a friend of mine and I migrated some of our projects over to GitLab right before this original story broke. It’s really unfortunate though that this will probably go through since GitHub was/is really the staple site for social programming and project management, something that GitLab is certainly lacking.
- marricks 8y agoCan anything exist anymore without A) Getting acquired by a multinational B) Becoming one Sure, MS visual code is open but as a few players get more and more power we all become subject to their whims and not them to ours. MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment, or will it’s data be useful to MS for those ads? What sort of integrations can we expect to see with other MS products that encourage a more closed ecosystem? This may all seem alarmist but with so many companies having so much power this sort of behavior get through unchecked. The only recourse people suggest is “well then don’t use it” but what options do employees have when higher ups mandate technologies? What about most users who just go with the wind and just let these snowballing large companies skate by? It all makes me very sad...
- snthd 8y ago>Can anything exist anymore without... See the recent post about ghost (it has a structure that can't be sold) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228
- digianarchist 8y agoNot really the same. The Ghost foundation exists purely to fund John O Nolan’s digital nomad lifestyle. Product hasn’t changed a lot since launch.
- slig 8y agoIs there too much to change on a blog engine? Besides rewriting it every couple of years.
- digianarchist 8y agoWhat else are they paying a team of developers and designers for if not that?
- archagon 8y ago
- jenscow 8y agoI'm not one to praise Microsoft without reason - I've worked the last 2 decades with their tech. However, I don't see this as a negative thing. Provided they don't trash it like most of their acquisitions - and bear in mind they sort of depend on github themselves. I feel this will prevent github from going like sourceforge now that someone with deep pockets can support it. They have a lot of PR to lose if they screw this one up. Generally, migration is a only few git commands away.
- mindcrime 8y agoGitLab appears to be the default choice for migration for many people... I wonder though if this might prompt some folks to go old-skool and move back to SourceForge?
- noja 8y agoGood. Can we make a distributed GitHub now please?
- everdev 8y ago/me moves to GitLab
- 013a 8y agoThis is a completely smart purchase on Microsoft's part. I can't imagine more synergy between two companies: - Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players (Google has been a great contender for this position since 2010). - Microsoft has moved most of their open source projects to Github. - Microsoft is a major contributor to Git, including massive infrastructure projects to make it possible to host the NT kernel on Git. - Microsoft has tried to do open source git hosting in the past (Codeplex?) but it never succeeded. Also: Microsoft partnered with Github when they shut down to migrate Codeplex projects to Github. - Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team. - Github are the champions behind the electron project, with a lot of institutional knowledge about that technology + native web apps/PWAs in general. Microsoft is making a huge push toward writing UWP apps as PWAs. Time will tell how they handle this merger. They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin, Mojang come to mind) and others horribly (Skype, Yammer, Nokia).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 8y ago> Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players That just means that none of the major tech players have been doing a whole lot in this regard.
- falsedan 8y agoI miss the comprehensive programming docs from MSDN.
- QML 8y agoHow has the LinkedIn acquisition benefited LinkedIn users or Microsoft users?
- sb8244 8y agoIt has allowed LinkedIn to remain free for one customer base (professional networks) while expanding sales and recruiting tools (navigator) without compromising user information (InMail rather than your private email unless you've opted as such).
- ptrkrlsrd 8y agoTo everyone switching to GitLab or considering it: Theres a feature on GitLab where you can import all your GitHub repos in on go. Or you can do it one by one if you want.
- olivermarks 8y agosourceforge, github...these platforms have their moments but are almost always superseded by something else that is more of the moment and useful.I can't see this msft move, which has been in the works for what feels like years, will help github to stay in the position it's been in for the last 3 years or so...
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoPrediction: 5 years from now github will be a memory for anyone but the Enterprise.
- EGreg 8y agoGuys and girls, I really don’t get this. It’s 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content? Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.) Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon’s store, Google’s search engine, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s social network ... don’t you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers? Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we’re upset. Oh no, what’s the new owner going to do? With a network that no one controls, we wouldn’t worry about that. We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It’s a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to “the cloud” ie some servers owned by someone else. Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.
- rbanffy 8y agoWe don't use Github to host Git repos alone. We use it as a tool for collaboration - to track bugs, host some documentation, do code reviews, track workflow and so on. And, most of all, we use it for discoverability. It's easy to find things on Github. > Why did we stop at DNS? A lot of companies host their domain servers on AWS because Route 53 makes it convenient. A real successor to Github would allow all the extras around Git, but in a federated way. We'd deploy a server for our projects, different addresses for our repos and all members of this federation would agree on an API and share data with each other. It's doable, but, unless it's easier than other options, it won't fly.
- EGreg 8y agoBack in 2011 I saw this problem — that social networking (profiles, ratings, collaboration of all kinds) is all based on centralized platforms. Even github as you said provides all the social layer on top of git and you jusy have to trust them. There was no good software to take care of that stuff. So we built it. It’s exactly the federated API layer you’re talking about! Here it is: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
- shiado 8y agoDeleting my accounts tonight. I just can't stomach a future Microsoft Github Azure™ 365 Enterprise Edition with LinkedIn™ integration. Fucking gross.
- __bee 8y agoand .. we will start seeing Linkedin ads on Github.
- smolder 8y agoI hope this encourages people to fight vendor lock-in a bit and move to self-hosted git portals. With SaaS there is always the danger of acquisitions and degradation of service. The solution is open software, self hosted and portable. Git itself is absurdly easy to self host, but self-hosted alternatives to github deserve more attention, both in terms of use and development effort. See here for some alternatives: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-management https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-manag... (Funny that this list is hosted on github.)
- bwblabs 8y agoI think instead of moving everything to one new (central hosted) silo like GitLab.com, we should move to self hosted git instances, with some GitHub like web interface to do remote comments/pull requests (e.g. gitea/gogs with some simple modifications).
- shp0ngle 8y agoThey can finally join github and LinkedIn
- markovbot 8y ago<shudder>
- kthejoker2 8y ago90% of this comment section could have been copied from a Slashdot post in 1999. Ironic, all the FUD being thrown here. Really showing HN's selective myopia.
- beenBoutIT 8y agoGitLab's prayers have been answered. Hopefully they can make GitLab easier to use.
- fntd 8y agoThe negativity in here is crazy. It‘s not even official yet everyone already seems to know that Microsoft will destroy Github. Microsoft tried really hard to improve their relationship with developers in the last couple of years and they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again. I can understand the scepticism and that people dislike the fact that Github is not independant anymore, but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
- markovbot 8y agoAre they still trying to extort "licensing fees" from Android device manufacturers? Have they apologized for ever doing that and promised never to do that again? Until that, I won't even consider it. Fuck Microsoft. They're horrible and their recent attempt to go back to the "embrace" part of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deserves absolutely zero good will.
- mythrwy 8y agoI hate when people accuse others of negativity when manifestly negative thing happen. "Hey, stop punching me in the face!" "Why are you being negative?" There are very good reasons people aren't happy about this. Microsoft's track record for one. And the loss of independence of major repo source for another. Not being happy about this isn't being "negative". It's entirely understandable.
- pritambaral 8y ago> they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again The old MS — and I'm not trying to comment on how different or similar the current MS is to the old one — did indeed spend a lot of money to screw developers and the developer community, including developers who bought into the MS stack. > but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this. I don't think many people are worried MS will ruin GitHub, per se. I think what most people are worried about is that MS will change GitHub enough to inject MS-specific stuff in there.
- foepys 8y agoEvery business that built their service around the GitHub ecosystem will get massively screwed. They should immediately start to integrate as many GitHub competitors as possible or Microsoft will just eat them within the next months. GitHub always wanted to concentrate on the code hosting, not the CI/CD, code quality, code analysis, etc parts but Microsoft will soon start to extend GitHub to support Azure's services directly.
- bitL 8y agoSo, where should I switch to now? I dumped LinkedIn and Skype since MS acquired it, next is GitHub. Hosting own GitLab? Something else?
- braindongle 8y agoWhat specific user-affecting changes would the new overlords make that suck for developers? I don't doubt that there are good answers to this. They could treat it like a cash cow and just start charging more for less, but I mean functional changes.
- jannes 8y agoI wonder what Linus thinks about this. He has a mirror of the Linux kernel on GitHub: https://github.com/torvalds https://github.com/torvalds
- UK-Al05 8y agoProbably doesn't give a crap. Microsoft have their Linux disto for embedded stuff already.
- guidovranken 8y agoSo a lot of people mention GitLab as an alternative. Would anyone with experience with that platform care to chime in and list some pros & cons compared to Github?
- rahkiin 8y agoI like that is also has CI/CD and other features, and that you can host it yourself (also for free). I do keep hearing about database issues on their hosted version though. In general: haven't had problems with it, am cheaper than hosted GitHub, cheaper and works better than (self-)hosted Atlassian software. That is for a developer duo.
- waivek 8y agoWhy Github can't host the Linux kernel community https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872
- baxuz 8y agoI can't wait to see Skype, OneDrive and Office integration in GitHub......
- EchelonFuxMe 8y agoSpeaking of fickle developers, I'm already planning my exit. Any mention of Microsoft is enough to turn me off, I have seen enough - I have had enough.
- parvenu74 8y agoAnd... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/microsoft-fortifies-commitment-to-open-source-becomes-linux-foundation-platinum-member/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/microsoft-fort... https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/
- zeth___ 8y ago>And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Skype.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoThat acquisition was almost 7 years ago under the old leadership.
- zeth___ 8y agoSo skype isn't shit any more?
- rainbowmverse 8y agoYou didn't say anything about that. I've never used it, so I don't know anything about its quality.
- SwaroopH 8y agohttp://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...
- dreamygeek 8y agoOpen source or NO open source? Never thought Github would sell itself one day. Always thought it to be a treasure from divine sources that need no money.
- nol13 8y agoBetter than getting bought by Dice at least.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoGitlab is a good solution for most folks. They have a for profit business powered by open source software.
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoGH also had a for-profit business. Apparently the profits weren't enough, but they were profitable and bootstrapped in their early days
- codexon 8y agoIt says in the article: GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work.
- timr 8y agoAnd why exactly do you think that GitLab is any more profitable than Github?
- codexon 8y agoI never said it was. I am just pointing out that the article says Github hasn't even turned a profit yet while the OP said they were profitable.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- timr 8y agoFair enough. The parent said "early days", though. It's fairly common for reporters to get this stuff wrong.
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoFrom 2010: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... At some point the situation clearly flipped
- indigochill 8y agoHeck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.
- bamboozled 8y agoWhat makes you think the same thing won’t happen to GitLab? No one would’ve dreamed of this happening 5-10 years back.
- sytse 8y agoGitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
- indigochill 8y agoI expect it'll happen to Gitlab at some point, but the beauty of self-hosted is that I can cut ties with the organization and continue using their software anyway because it's entirely running on my machine. Which, incidentally, is just one reason I usually strongly prefer self-hosted options over SaaS. You're not signing a pact to become beholden to the business whims of a third party.
- bamboozled 8y agoGood luck hosting an unmaintined piece of software though, there is no guarantee it will just instantly have community backing.
- miguelrochefort 8y agoI'm sure GitHub will introduce free private repos soon enough.
- Midnightas 8y agoWhat's a tool for moving every GitHub repo to GitLab?
- techload 8y ago"Nothing speaks louder than money; except more money."
- burnstek 8y agoI love this! Maybe the absolute fetishism over the overrated GitHub and Git will finally cease.
- adjkant 8y agoWhy lump git into this?
- foobarbazetc 8y agoRIP GitHub.
- sbr464 8y agowelp, bye github, it's been fun.
- futurix 8y agoWill it go the way of Nokia, LinkedIn, Skype or the way of ... err... did they have any really successful acquisitions ever?
- crazy_monkey 8y agoTime to move everything off GitHub...
- franciscop 8y agoJust posted the petition on Hacker News: > Github petition: please remain independent https://github.com/independent-github/petition https://github.com/independent-github/petition
- MrBingley 8y agoPetitions don't pay bills; GitHub is bleeding money. The solution is not signatures, but for developers to start paying for all the free hosting GitHub has given them. The open-source community itself is strapped for cash, so this is an excellent time for all the users of that open-source software (especially companies) to start chipping in for hosting and development costs. However, the cynical side of me says that ain't going to happen. :/
- franciscop 8y agoThat was my original idea but if the deal is already closed it is too late. I've been paying for years even though I never needed it only to support Github's amazing work. And now this :/
- hestefisk 8y agoPerhaps there is a market for a really simple Git based issue tracker, which doesn’t require Ruby. This acquisition feels like Freshmeat / SourceForge v2; the hardcore OSS enthusiasts will begin their exodus. Is there an argument for actually building simple issues management into Git itself with a simple API for pull requests?
- czeidler 8y agoNot judging if this is a good or bad thing but in general it's annoying to be dependent on a single company. While git is decentralized, github's social platform features are centralized and lock users to github. I would love to see more solutions that allows users to migrate freely between platforms without losing their social contacts. See https://fejoa.org https://fejoa.org for more information.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoBased on the way Microsoft has been “punishing” their on-prem customers since they started pushing O365 this has me a bit concerned about the fate of GitHub Enterprise.
- skynet42 8y agomicrosoft should die for this
- pipio21 8y agoIt was good while it lasted. We will have to start migrating our software there into a more neutral platform. I don't like the consolidation in Software in which there are only 5-6 huge players. It means politics and private interest of the conglomerate take precedence over everything else, like competence, and freedom. Those oligopolies can just send their lawyers against competition or just buy them to stop the threat.
- smartmic 8y agoSome HN reaction reminds me of... "Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class." [A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark, 022] Big five representatives of the vectorialist class are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple.
- tostr 8y agoNot very much on topic, but is the book worth reading? I started a couple of times but always kinda tuned out at some point.
- oculusthrift 8y agofeel like if any of the other companies made this acquisition less people would care. It’s just trendy and good for your hacker creds to oppose microsoft as people did in the 90s. No one is crying about AWS hosting all applications.
- phantom_oracle 8y agoI don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why? Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software. Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle that: > Open Source software needs Open Source tools
- zeth___ 8y agoLooking at you Atlasian.
- timvisee 8y agoAlthough this doesn't directly have anything to do with open-source; look at what happened to Skype, LinkedIn, and other companies they acquired.
- joering2 8y agoDid i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn’t changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.
- xt00 8y agoSkype UI was changed dramatically for virtually no obvious reason and resulted in the usage of skype to be way more annoying for basically no good reason. They then rebranded Lync to be called Skype for Business which is a giant mess because like so many microsoft enterprise products it uses some strange scheme to connect to either a web-based server or to an enterprise server that invariably is not setup correctly and never works reliably. So they basically bought skype which everybody loved and turned it into something that a huge amount of people don't like now due to UI changes and created a second version of Skype that basically barely works and many people are forced to use at work..
- kylehotchkiss 8y agoI'm losing faith that people are in tech for anything more than the payday.
- rambojazz 8y agoLong live https://notabug.org https://notabug.org
- jermaink 8y agoThe irony. 404 comments.
- aquova 8y agoI'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft to begin with, but I definitely see a reason to be wary about this. I don't really want any Microsoft integration into GitHub, and really the best case would be for them to not change much with the site at all, although I don't see this being the case.
- Philipp__ 8y agoI am really sick of monopoly and centralization of internet. For last few years many of important projects changed hosting to GitHub... Now this? We have alternatives, and good ones (one may argue much better than GitHub), but where is all of this going? And Microsoft going around devouring open-source community. To some extent we are the responsible ones. But on the other hand I am getting really tired of this. Then people ask me why I use Emacs... it's free and immortal as of now...
- akerro 8y ago"Open season on open source"
- beatle_sauce 8y agoI expect partial geoblocking and more censorship. The chinese government tried to force Github to censor shadowsocks and the NY times repository. But back then it would have to block the whole site with other resourceful content. My guess is that when Github is with Microsoft, the communist party in China has far more leverage as Microsoft has to follow Chinese laws, e.g., for selling Windows (even a special government-version), and bc China is an important market. I hope I'm wrong.
- simon_acca 8y agoAsk yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github? I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github! Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, it might be too late for github now, but I will myself conduct a review of the free services that I use regularly and reconsider pitching in, since I value independent businesses. EDIT: looks like my experience may be atypical, that’s good! Just for anecdata, would you include where you live as part of your replies? In my case it’s central europe.
- grandmczeb 8y agoI know plenty of orgs paying for Github. I don't know if your experience is typical.
- majewsky 8y agoMy company (SAP) has a GitHub Enterprise installation that, given the number of active users, is going to be a very pleasant revenue stream for GitHub.
- azernik 8y agoOh wow. That's a monster of an account to land.
- geerlingguy 8y agoI’ve paid for private repos on my personal GitHub account for years, and many of the companies I work for/with have paid organization accounts for GitHub, since the integrations and access control / management is really slick vs. setting it up internally. I can see many of these orgs (and myself) determining it’s worth the effort to move to GitLab / self-hosted depending on what Microsoft does.
- saagarjha 8y ago> I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. You're looking at the wrong people. It's companies who are paying for GitHub.
- OJFord 8y agoWell, they must be over the moon at GitLab!
- SubiculumCode 8y agoExtinguish. I mean, if I had wanted to troll. Still..almost everything about MS's choices in Win10 (aside from Linux Subsystem) bother me.
- 0xFFFE 8y agoMaybe this is an unpopular question. People unwilling to pay for a service they think is important for their work, yet lose their shit when the the said service does what is best for them. That is, to be sustainable. AFAIK, GH charges for private repos and yet they are not-profitable. Gitlab offers free private repos, how will the story end differently? EDIT: Typo
- daveheq 8y agoMicrosoft ruined Skype, why wouldn't I think a company whose main source of income is from closed-source software wouldn't ruin GitHub?
- shihn 8y agohttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/DezCaWaUYAAa5ih.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DezCaWaUYAAa5ih.jpg:large
- pletnes 8y agoI wonder if Stallman will be right, again, and whether we will see the rise of the Fossil SCM? (Or a similar clone)
- mychael 8y agoGood for Github. Bad for Github users.
- Animats 8y ago"Please sign in with your Microsoft account". "Requires Windows 10". "Best viewed with Microsoft Edge". "This project violates our terms of service by competing with a Microsoft product." OK, where do we move everything?
- coldseattle 8y agoGood! Getting rid of Atom for Visual Studio Code should make things a lot better (and allow them to free up some staff). And if they eliminate they head of "community" that makes public repository owners have to tiptoe around any sensitive snowflake's sensibilities, that will fix most of the remaining problems.
- astrodev 8y agoFinally, we will be able to use the same login for both Skype and GitHub.
- nkoren 8y agoOuch. So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market. To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value." Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!
- testplzignore 8y agoAccording to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run-rate-from-business-products.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit. I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors. I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.
- throwaway080383 8y agoThe final step will be acquiring StackOverflow. After that, nearly every developer will find their next job via Microsoft.
- ianwalter 8y agoThis is a little unfortunate but I think theres a possibility this could turn out to be a positive thing for both MS and GH. I hope so at least.
- segmondy 8y agoI'm hopeful. I like typescript and Visual Code. I like their linux subsystem on windows granted that I don't use it since I'm not a windows user.
- meiraleal 8y agoThis is great for Gitlab. I'm going to try to use more and more.
- Ice_cream_suit 8y agoTime to move to Gitlab...
- ianwalter 8y agoJust in case people are looking for one more alternative, it looks like no one has mentioned codegiant.io yet.
- skellera 8y agoSo much parroting going on in here. Microsoft has been doing amazing things recently for devs. Wait to see what their plans actually are before you start to freak out.
- meesterdude 8y agoWhat Microsoft acquisition has been a "success"? Because there are quite a lot that got worse under MS. They have a long track record and it'l take years before they can begin to counter all the stuff they've done. Would have rather seen an investment or partnership in github than a purchase. Recognizing the desire for github to stay neutral but supporting it to continue would have been a much better received move and done far more to build up reputation.
- gerdesj 8y agoSoooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty frontend. MS buys GitHub for $5B. Funny old world.
- jasonvorhe 8y agoYou'll be surprised to learn who has is primarily sponsoring git's development for the past years. (It's Google.)
- gerdesj 8y agoAye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junio_Hamano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junio_Hamano
- chrisan 8y agoPerhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof There’s a reason MS bought GitHub and not GitLab
- Operyl 8y agoBecause GitLab doesn’t have 5 Billion dollars? I mean, you act as if there’s a singular reason here.
- gerdesj 8y agoActually my real point was: scratch an itch and find you have lice living off you. No, err that's not it. It is genuinely nice to see hard work pay off. Github have seriously put their back into it to create an environment that a lot of people feel comfortable with. I sincerely hope that MS do not fuck it up and wish them both all the best. We still have git itself - that has never changed. That is the power of open source software.
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoMicrosoft was the second most frequent contributor on Github (to Google)[1]. [1] https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-github-2017-be98ab854e87 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...
- EnderMB 8y agoAbsolutely, and this has been the case for many years. Microsoft has contributed to open source heavily for a long time, but it won't stop a lot of people that have been burned in the past from not trusting Microsoft.
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoIt's worth noting that the same goes for Apple. They have tons of closed source stuff, but they also make huge contributions to the open source world. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have LLVM or Clang as they exist today. WebKit is another big one.
- qop 8y agoThis is amazing. I hope they build in support for Azure and let us have free private repos. Congratulations to Microsoft!
- jacksmith21006 8y agoThis is terrible news. Big guys will have to move code elsewhere. We finally has a single and neutral site and MS destroys it. Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.
- cjhanks 8y agoMicrosoft being an owner here doesn't bother me that much. The Azure integrations are inevitable. I guess we'll see if Microsoft has learned that strong-armed vendor lock-in makes people not like them. At this point, I am more glad they were acquired by Microsoft than Amazon. Still - there is still so much Microsoft ill-will, that this will take away the aura of 'software purity' from the GitHub. Microsoft, please be a kind steward... I don't want to waste time migrating.
- nyxtom 8y agoGitLab > Import all repositories from GitHub
- EastSmith 8y agoI am very interested in what will happen with these accounts (t name a few) the next few weeks / months: https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/mozilla https://github.com/mozilla https://github.com/google https://github.com/google
- jasonvorhe 8y agoDo you seriously expect anything to happen to these accounts? On what grounds?
- lioeters 8y agoI'm guessing: access to all private repos.
- voltagex_ 8y agoWhat do you think will happen? What advantage would any change bring for Microsoft? (/torvalds/linux is not the upstream, btw)
- EastSmith 8y agoI am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way. Another issue: Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository. Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I still will be moving away right now.
- voltagex_ 8y agoA bit like if you're a bookshop running your online site on AWS. The downside risk for Amazon messing with anything is greater than any benefit they could gain. I mean, Microsoft has a kernel module upstreamed. It's not 1990 anymore.
- geuis 8y agoI may be in the minority. I’ve had a change of heart over the last 5 years or so towards Microsoft. They’ve changed a lot of the practices that used to make me not like them. They’ve embraced open source a lot more than in the past and have clamped down a lot on the anti competitive practices they used for decades. I also have a good friend that works there and I’ve seen how the sausage is made from the inside a bit. They treat their employees really well and from what I’ve experienced they’re a good company to work for. I don’t have a hard opinion on this acquisition for the OSS community, but it will be good for the employees and I’m hopeful that not much will change with Github as a service and somethings may even get better. Time will tell of course.
- pier25 8y agoGitlab must be really happy. I know my team will move out of Github if Microsoft buys it.
- skynet42 8y agoHell is coming
- spdustin 8y agoSeems like a big boost to their recent ML offering that suggests source code.
- kennxl 8y agoPart of me likes the possibly new native Windows-Git integration projects to come for developers. Part of me wishes some companies were non-profit entities.
- skynet42 8y agoOne of the company i work for is using microsoft stack, it's the worst nightmare i ever had to deal with, microsoft is the devil of the internet era, we should all quit github if this happen
- pronik 8y agoWe've been lamenting the github-centralization of open-source for years now, this might be the wake-up call people have been waiting for. Rightly so. Gitlab ops people might be in for a treat tonight.
- wmij 8y agoThere probably won't be (m)any noticeable changes for the open source and devs running personal private repos and possibly the same for GitHub team plans. However, I'd bet Microsoft will plan on a sunset timetable for TFS and push their licensing and sales machine toward GitHub for Enterprise. I'm glad my group isn't on GitHub for Enterprise because after seeing this news I'd be looking to migrate away ASAP. I can envision the the potential for their draconian licensing lock-in and TOS language spawning a nightmare for teams that are running GH Enterprise. These GH enterprise installations will likely be required to purchase MSDN licenses.
- alkonaut 8y agoWhy would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? I use both and there is barely any overlap in features. GitHub is only code storage + a rudimentary issue manager. There is very little release management, test management, CI/CD etc. If anything I’d expect them to integrate better and of course integrate more with Azure (e.g one-click setup of build/test on azure from any Github project)
- marpstar 8y agoAgreed. I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting. VSTS is awesome, and quite feature-packed. Maybe Microsoft will use GitHub specifically for repo hosting, while offering VSTS as an CI/CD/ALM platform.
- wmij 8y ago> I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting. I didn't say that the "simple" choice for repo hosting would go away... My point was that if you need GitHub Enterprise, you get it only with the biggest MSDN subscription and end up with a bunch of things either you don't need or don't want and having to agree to licensing that's MS/MSDN specific.
- wmij 8y ago> Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? Admittedly I've been away from TFS for a number of years, however, it seems that GitHub Enterprise is a natural fit product wise for revenue stream via licensing thru MSDN to get organizations onboard with GitHub that weren't before. If they were to sunset TFS and provide a migration path, it would end up giving them significant licensing dollars. The more important point I was trying to make is that orgs that are now on GitHub Enterprise would need to subscribe to MSDN enterprise licenses for a bunch of things that aren't relevant and get locked into TOS that they hadn't been previously. Regardless of sunsetting TFS/VSTS, I think that Github Enterprise will be only available through a MSDN enterprise/premium license or whatever that is now in 2018.
- tajen 8y agoWait a minute. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so it has prime access to recruitment. It now also owns GitHub, where it can run anything they want to find the best programmers. I don’t know what Microsoft plans to do, but those are good wats to find all kinds of talent.
- herogreen 8y agoI hope that we will never read "X Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Stack Exchange" With X being a GAFAM.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoI think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's. But that Microsoft has changed, I see the most what people are complaining about is telemetry that is send, for following up on their biggest product. But all companies do this ( eg. https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not-just-you-clicking-on-links-in-ios-9-3-can-crash-your-iphone/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not-just-you-clicking-... ), also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this. Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too, because I think they have more to lose if they fail with GitHub then when they succeed (with more integration for visualstudio.com probably)
- zzzcpan 8y agoBeing evil is a natural state for any large corporation. Trying to be not evil is always either fake or temporary. Microsoft cannot change, until it is split into hundreds of companies. Neither can Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago> I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's. And because of how Microsoft was in the 2000s, and the 2010s. Ballmer was after the 90s. Did they ever stop suing Android manufacturers for using FAT, or open up exFAT after managing to get it as part of the SDXC standard? > also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this ...Yeah, Ubuntu did that. Not Debian. Not Fedora. Not Arch. Not Gentoo. Even RHEL barely phones home enough to check its license and get updates. And in Ubuntu, the single Linux distro to have done this, you could toggle it off in 5 minutes and it would actually respect your choice, rather than "accidentally" resetting to the most invasive set of options every other update after you spend hours hunting the latest set of registry hacks that make it better. > Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too I agree that they want to show that they've changed. I even agree that the current ecosystem is forcing them to change some. I also expect them to pull something the moment they think they can get away with it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sjukfan 8y agoO-boy! I hope they'll make GitHub as awesome as Skype.
- feelix 8y agoDoes it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it? So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.
- gkoberger 8y agoLinux doesn't use GitHub for anything other than a mirror, and Linus famously hates GitHub. (More reading: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/)
- feelix 8y agoPoint taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA: "The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy." But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."
- spystath 8y agoThe official git repo of the kernel is git.kernel.org. The github one is just a mirror and it's just sad that is returned as a first result on Google.
- cesarb 8y ago> and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github Linux isn't hosted on github, it's hosted on their own cgit instance: https://git.kernel.org/ https://git.kernel.org/ There was a short period of time, back in 2011, when kernel.org went down for some time (from late August: https://lwn.net/Articles/457142/ https://lwn.net/Articles/457142/ to early October: https://lwn.net/Articles/461465/ https://lwn.net/Articles/461465/), so Linux was temporarily hosted on github. After that, the repository on github was kept as a mirror of the official kernel.org repository, but it's a one-way flow. See also the following article: https://lwn.net/Articles/464233/ https://lwn.net/Articles/464233/
- robert_nsu 8y agoThis doesn't bother me at all. I'd be far more worried if Oracle acquired GitHub.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoMaybe this means Netlify will speed up adding GitLab support to their CMS.
- samfisher83 8y agoMicrosoft had codeplex which was older than github. They are probably going to spend 4 or 5 billion buying Github. They most likely write down the value a few years later.
- vzaliva 8y agoWe've all seen how it ended with Skype... Terrible news indeed.
- 7ewis 8y agoPutting aside my general dislike for Microsoft for a moment, I still believe this is bad for the tech industry. It was great having a neutral player running the site, I don't think anyone should own them. GitHub would be best as a nonprofit, though unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen. Imagine if CNN for example bought Twitter, would other news companies use Twitter still? Probably not. Will Google, Amazon etc. move their code elsewhere? Maybe. But we will no longer have a centralised git repo, whether that's a good or bad thing. GitLab have already said they're having 10x the amount of normal traffic migrating GitHub repos to them. Will employers now ask to see your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket profiles?
- oculusthrift 8y agoyeah but frankly 10x of a small number is still a small number. we still have to see what the real numbers are.
- manigandham 8y agoGood. I don't understand the hundreds of comments invested in a company that provides one of the most fungible services around, with the weakest features and no profitability. The only other option for them was dying a slow death on the public markets if they did an IPO. There are dozens of git hosting companies, including GitLab, BitBucket, Microsoft's own VSTS, repos by all the major clouds, and many others. Microsoft has every incentive to not screw this up but even if they did, so what? Nothing happens. Switch to something else and you're all set.
- bunkydoo 8y agoSeems like something that would have been more fitting for Google...
- UK-Al05 8y agoI wouldn't be surprised that the first thing they do is open source it. Removing the advantage of its competitors.
- jrochkind1 8y ago> GitHub preferred selling the company [in this case to a public company --jrochkind] to going public Anyone have any comments on what might drive this preference?
- textmode 8y agoAny plans to make backups/archives before Microsoft takes over? There is an enormous volume of useful open source code from individual authors on Github. A pleasing respite from the world of team-developed commercial software. It is difficult to imagine Github could remain the number distribution channel for individual authors of non-commercial code when it is run under the auspices of a large, proprietary enterprise and consumer software company. Since its inception, I have been using simple tcp/http clients and text-only browsers to download and browse source code from stable Github urls, as I did throughout the 90's with Freshmeat, Sourceforge, etc. To its credit, Github has always been very accessible. What are the chances this kind of accessibilty will continue to be possible if Github is being administered by Microsoft. Direct downloads of small, source code files, many with no licensing restrictions, no sign-ups, no web browser required, no hassle... Microsoft has never managed anything like that. Microsoft has always done the opposite. Indirect downloads of large collections of binaries, often coupled with installers, licensing restrictions, usually requiring some sign-up or click-through agreement, and today, possibly with telemetry. I hope I am wrong to be concerned about this takeover. Will Github continue to be the respository service of choice amongst authors of free source code? Perhaps some will pull out and move their code elsewhere.
- jkells 8y agoPerhaps an unpopular opinion around here but I see nothing but positives in this announcement. This move towards a "good" Microsoft has been going on for a decade, ASP.NET MVC was released as Open Source in 2009. Seeing where they're going with .NET core, VSCode and TypeScript makes me pretty confident they will be good stewards of the site. Microsoft had their own open source hosting solution Codeplex but closed it and migrated all their stuff to GitHub so they could be where the community was. That was a bold move and I think demonstrates how they see the community now. This isn't the Microsoft of the 90's. GitHub is great but it's not profitable and I'm sure there are lots of improvements they could make with a bit of a cash injection. On the flip side if Microsoft stuff it up or there is an exodus from Microsoft because people hate Microsoft, that's not such a bad thing either. There are great alternatives out there, it's not the same landscape as when GitHub launched, everyone's learnt from GitHub, GitHub's biggest feature is the network effect. Everyone has an account and it's super low friction to contribute there. If we can break that a bit and everyone has an account at 2 or 3 places I think we might see some great innovation as competitors try to differentiate themselves. Finally on that point. Bitbucket is awesome, you can build apps that are integrated directly into the UI https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/ https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/
- noah-kun 8y agoIn case you haven't seen it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... TL;DR, Microsoft's known strategy is to feign goodness, then use the goodwill to kill competition, especially in the open standards/open source area.
- randop 8y agoAs for me, I also dislike Github being owned by Microsoft. Big conflict of interest. Microsoft core business is closed-source software. But, it's not wrong to give Microsoft a chance to cultivate Github. Yes, Microsoft have a long track record of being disproportion with open source products. This is also true with other companies. Good thing to point out is, there are alternatives.
- supergirl 8y agogood. github sucks and i don't want to be forced to use it just because everyone uses it. if microsoft buys it it will slowly die.
- martin1975 8y agoColor me naive but it can't be that bad, maybe they will surprise the FOSS community by opensourcing the NT kernel. Satya has said it is a possibility. And he is probably the only CEO who has been friendly toward FOSS.
- wand3r 8y agoMy dissenting opinion is that this is good. I am not a Windows user and only peripherally use their services however ironically I believe Microsoft is now the challenger if monopolies: - Bing is one of the only english search engines with a big userbase; provides a google alternative. I like ddg but it isnt mainstream yet. - Provides alternative to gmail and enterprise services - a big 3 cloud provider, competes with AWS and GC. Likely why this github acq makes sense - runs linkedin to keep fb in competition There are a lot of examples where they drop the ball, but they are surprisingly the challenger in a lot of new markets providing an alt to the leader/incumbent
- bluefox 8y agoFrom a recent github blog post: "Millions of developers trust us with their data—and protecting their privacy is a top priority for us." Now these millions of developers will face a dilemma.
- kome 8y agoTime to migrate to SourceForge.
- mhartl 8y agoAs [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community. If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.
- ageofwant 8y agoI'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI
- qazqwert 8y agounhappy...! Fuck Microsoft.... u know what iam not in the mood / energy/... to talk about this right now...(at 2:50 am at my country) u shuld get it...
- lapinot 8y agoHop, that's one thing less to do tomorrow! ... of course it was just a matter of time before it happened, github have stood on the other side of the mirror for a long time now, they just happend to have kept that not-for-profit/garage-built-startup image for some time, kinda like twitter. Or reddit and even y combinator. And yet people comment stuff like "let's switch to {gitlab,bitbucket,gogs}". We need to understand that making a self-hostable floss clone of a service that has been designed for a monopoly captive market is not gonna change anything durably. Build something based on small friend-to-friend networks. Something that doesn't need to be big to suceed. That will slowly change the way people think about collaborative tools and get people out of the "giant ad-based ex-startup owned; `free' (as in beer) to use; hosted service" mental model. Please stop building services and start sharing collaborative tools with your peers.
- myf01d 8y agoIf it's true, it's the moment that GitLab will see a major boost and replace GitHub within 2-4 of years
- nearmuse 8y agoIf anyone could stay independent, it should have been them. If it weren't Microsoft but someone else, it would be almost the same to me. There are so much things they could do to improve the experience and make it more profitable.
- jschrf 8y agoI hope this deal results in Visual Studio Team Services somehow getting support for public projects. It is amazing for private ones. Also, paid tiers of GitHub moving to (or on top of) VSTS would not be a bad thing IMHO. I hope both GH and VSTS benefit from this and I'm inclined to think they will.
- DimitarIbra9 8y ago微软又毁一公司
- abraae 8y agoGitLab++
- unfunco 8y agoThis might be a stupid question, I did Cmd+F to search if it had already been asked and answered and it hasn't, so it might actually be stupid. I'm guessing it's very illegal (IANAL) and that it's not the intention of Microsoft (IANACEO), but what are the ramifications relating to IP (GitHub's customer's IP, rather than the GitHub's IP) - has Microsoft essentially bought access to a massive stash of IP/trade secrets in the form of private repositories?
- lioeters 8y agoI'm wondering this too - private repos might be a goldmine of intellectual property, which businesses assumed would stay "private", i.e., not in the hands of companies like Microsoft.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- geekjock 8y agoI recently built a GitHub Markeplace app (https://pullreminders.com https://pullreminders.com) and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership. GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition: > ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time. It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out. P.S. Here's the GitHub Marketplace: https://github.com/marketplace https://github.com/marketplace
- jbschirtzinger 8y agoI surely become tired of becoming the product for someone else's overly inflated bottom line after having an option to feel it is "safe" to be a part of a community...
- m4shd0t 8y agoIMO, I think Microsoft will take a hands off approach, they don't want some of people's fears to be realized, and they really would want a friendly attitude towards their acquisition.
- m4shd0t 8y agoIMO, Microsoft will most likely take a hands-off approach. They would not want some people's frights to be realized, and they would appreciate developers being okay with their acquisition.
- bob33212 8y agoI talked to a VP from MSFT last year. He asked how MSFT could do a better job appealing to the open source community and start up community. I said just keep doing what you are doing. It is going to take time for those of us that were around during the Balmer days to be willing to believe that MSTF has turned a corner. I think that they are on the right path, but I certainly don't judge anyone who is skeptical about the future of github. I've been on gitlab since 2011 so it don't make much difference to me.
- matte_black 8y agoI wonder now that Microsoft controls LinkedIn and Github what kind of synergies can form between the two to better serve recruiters looking for software developers.
- jacksmith21006 8y agoHorrible news. Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff. Wonder where the big tech companies will move their projects to? GitLab? We finally has a single, neutral site for code and which everyone uses and MS messes it up. I do hope once and for all we can put to rest this idea MS has changed. Clearly these actions show they have not change.
- mrahmadawais 8y agoI am a [full-time open source developer](https://github.com/ahmadawais https://github.com/ahmadawais) working as a core developer of WordPress contributed to every single major version for the last couple of years. I am also well versed in JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem and have a deep interest in DevOps, Cloud, and the new serverless tech. I care very deeply about Developer Experience and most of my open source work is related to dev-tooling. Now that you know this about me, it's easier for you understand why I am writing this post, and maybe why I think my opinion matters. Below is a copy-paste from the Twitter thread that I created on this topic: 1️⃣ @Microsoft is about to acquire @GitHub. A lot of folks are skeptical. But I have a different view. Many of you know I am building a course on VSCode.pro for that, I've seen firsthand, how 🆚@Code repo is one of the best #OpenSource repos out there 2️⃣— Once I created a GitHub issue at 🆚@Code repo for markdown and I was impressed by how vscodebot auto-assigned @MattBierner (who works on Markdown of VSCode) to the issue and then @tonybrix from MarkedJS helped me out. It was best GitHub automation WITH results ever! 3️⃣— Don't "@" me coz I know about @Microsoft's history with #OpenSource. I am a full-time open sourcerer and I can't sit here quiet instead of supporting what looks like the new @Microsoft — @SatyaNadella's moving the company from @Windows dependant to in-house @Linux dev 4️⃣— Every other day I find/meet people working at @Microsoft using Linux/Mac based devices — even bought by the company for them. Guess what? 1,000 MSFT Employees pushing open source code on GitHub. This is a BIG 🆕 change. Taking it lightly in 2018 would be tomfoolery. 5️⃣— I've been most inspired by teams behind 🆚@Code (@auchenberg ) and @Azure — I think that @JeffSand has built an incredible team of @AzureAdvocates folks like @ashleymcnamara @sarah_edo @jawache @burkeholland @simona_cotin @_clarkio @John_Papa @holtbt @film_girl @TommyLee 6️⃣—I'm a big fan of "Dev Experience" (DX) that's why I pay $200 for a font I use in 🆚Code & have built s of #OpenSource dev-tooling github.com/ahmadawais—Teams at @Azure are doing a lot to make DX better for the cloud → @AzureFunctions + @Code integration is impressive! 7️⃣— GitHub's been struggling to find a new CEO for a year. What if? It's my primary code hosting company. It's helped me go full-time open source with the support from awesome dev community/companies. Safe to say that @GitHub has made #OpenSource better 8️⃣— @Microsoft has done a lot for #OpenSource in the last 4 years with @SatyaNadella. 🆚 @Code's love. @Linux Subsystem on @Windows. Draft.sh for @kubernetesio didn't have a Windows version and still offers @MacHomebrew as the go-to way of installing it! 9️⃣—@GitHub is not exactly a cash-cow. @Microsoft has put money where their mouth is — out of 1.5 Million organizations on GitHub MSFT has most GitHub contributors to its repos, it's the biggest company with over 1000 employees contributing code to GitHub →proof of good faith! — I think @Microsoft is changing for good. The intent here's to connect with developers and not offend them by disrupting a good company. MSFT won't change a lot but this acquisition might make GitHub a lot better. Also, MSFT will jump into ROR. It's high time for #OpenSource. What are your thoughts on this whole thing?! Peace! ️
- abinoda 8y agoI recently built a GitHub Markeplace [0] app Pull Reminders [1] and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership. GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition: > ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time. It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out. [0] https://github.com/marketplace https://github.com/marketplace [1] https://github.com/marketplace/pull-reminders/ https://github.com/marketplace/pull-reminders/
- throwaway35411 8y agoGitLab has always demanded too much faith from its users. First with CI, it was the all-or-nothing approach where you couldn't use GitLab CI with any other provider. Lately they have tried to fix this but it was a half-hearted development after a lot of complaints. Lately with their DevOps approach, it's exactly how you've said. I don't have trust in GitLab leadership and their product feels way too bloated.
- yeukhon 8y agoGitHub UI is terrible in recent years. The launch of discovery was a mistake; now they finally made the newsfeed "simpler" and cleaner, thank god.
- ceohockey60 8y agoJust like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reasons, now no tech company who hosts its codebase on GitHub would want to continue doing that if its MSFT-owned. It's already happening: https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632 https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632
- Jdam 8y ago> Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reason My former employer, a major e-commerce player in Europe and a direct competitor of Amazon, had basically their entire infrastucture on AWS. You might want to reconsider your definition of “no”.
- zxcvhjkl 8y agoJust because someone did it, it doesn’t mean it’s wise and advisable. Just saying.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIf somebody of the size of GitHub can't manage to stay a standalone company it's a pretty sad state of affairs. We really need more players in this industry. It's becoming more and more a monoculture (not sure what the term is for a few players that together pretty much have monopoly. Oligopoly?)
- rixrax 8y agoGitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft. I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I’ve had paid private account since forever). GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire. TANSTAAFL [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574 [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com
- prh8 8y agoIf anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.
- zxcvhjkl 8y ago> I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? I imagine most HN readers are paying customers either directly or indirectly(their company/startup). As a private customer, I wouldn’t object to an increase in the price if that meant they stay independent. If they get acquired by MS I am definitely stopping my subscription.
- ReverseCold 8y ago> I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire. Either they eventually fail/become evil, or they don't. If they do, just move somewhere else. If they don't, good. (Benefits of non-proprietary software and standards like git.)
- wener 8y agoRIP
- mickronome 8y agoIf it's true, I'm cancelling my paid account immediately. A monopolist tried and found guilty of monopolization shouldn't own the company where many of their future competitors have their private repositories, it's frankly rather disturbing they think it's a good idea.
- jaboutboul 8y agoGuys. Enough with the FUD please. I myself don’t even believe I’m saying this but clearly Satya Nadella != Steve Ballmer. Dude has seen the light and is trying to put the company on the right path. Every time they do something good all the tinfoil hats come out. Give them a chance. They’ve turned over a new leaf. And until and unless we see otherwise we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. This is not our childhood Microsoft.
- bgorman 8y agoBallmer didn't turn Windows into spysare the way Nadella has. Windows 10 is basically a rootkit that phones home about your every activity.
- ENGNR 8y agoGit is great, but it has a few social features missing Centralised git is great, but becomes a target Is this the perfect blockchain pairing?
- siavosh 8y agoAre there any projects in the "blockchain" / "decentralize everything" industry that's tackling the source control problem?
- tnorthcutt 8y agohttps://sivers.org/horses https://sivers.org/horses
- burger_moon 8y agoA lot of GitHub employees are remote. All of the big tech companies are allergic to remote teams. I wonder if that will change now?
- oculusthrift 8y agoI wonder as well. If linkedin is any indication, Microsoft hasn’t affected their engineering culture really at all yet. In fact linkedin still routinely poaches Microsoft engineers and used slack and google drive and bluejeans instead of skype. If anything linkedin has gone on a massive hiring spree on Microsoft’s dime.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- victor106 8y agoMoving all my projects to gitlab. For those wondering why gitlab is different see this comment from another HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yogthos https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yogthos
- leothekim 8y agoI'm probably being silly, but it is ironic to me that Microsoft will own the service that hosts the Linux codebase.
- rhblake 8y agoThat's just a mirror. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... is where it's at.
- crisopolis 8y agoAt least it wasn't Oracle.
- mythrwy 8y agoI can't believe Microsoft isn't aware an exodus (at some level) will occur and Github will no longer be what it is if they buy it. But apparently they don't care. Demonstrating they have not changed as so many claim but are still the same old M$. I'll be closing my account as soon as this is official. As for clients who decide to stay, sorry, I won't be able to help them as I won't have a Github account. But I will walk them through moving if they like.
- jugg1es 8y agoI really like Microsoft, but this is a TERRIBLE idea for GitHub. Some rich bastard needs buy GitHub and then make it community owned. Why is GitHub a for-profit? It should be considered a utility.
- rdlecler1 8y agoI’m sure they paid a good chunk of change but this looks like more of a soft landing than an acqusition. Even the language: “Microsoft agreed to acquire” dampens the enthusiasm. I wonder how this worked out for investors.
- sidcool 8y agoWas GitHub under monetary duress? I thought their private Git hosting business was doing well.
- deepaksurti 8y agoI wonder if instead Apple had acquired GH and today morning introduce laptops with 32 GB RAM, discreet GPU and fully tinkerable laptops for geeks to recapture losing mindshare. Well I can wish!
- bitmapbrother 8y agoIt just seems odd that a company that threatens to sue companies for using Linux, unless they pay their patent licensing extortion royalties, may control GitHub.
- ausjke 8y agoSo it's time to move on, is gitlab up for the job? or bitbucket? or everyone should run a gitea/gogs container on their $5 vps? While I use vscode sometimes for web hacking, I use geany/vim for anything else, other than that, I have nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever, and yes, I run linux as my desktop for the last 15+ years. Money talks, Microsoft is embracing OSS because it's defeated by OSS, it never liked OSS, and it does all these moves just because it has no better options. And, who knows,it might be the modern Trojan to ruin us all when time comes, I have no doubts on this when I recall how hostile MS has been to OSS.
- joeblau 8y agoYou want to buy gitignore.io? I'll sell it for a fair and reasonable price :).
- gonational 8y agoWe’ll be migrating everything off GitHub this week. This is good, because I’ve been wanting to dive into GitLab for a while.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoFuture often rhymes with the past (Skype).
- nt411 8y agoI'm a CTO in the genomics sector. I'll hastily be looking for an alternative. I've long ago abandoned the Microsoft morass.
- mehrdadn 8y agoI guess now this makes sense: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-down-codeplex/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-...
- animex 8y agoHave YET to turn a profit?! Wow.
- yani 8y agoI am so happy to see this moving forward. Microsoft will provide the proper management to drive innovation again in GH. Start by creating a replacement for the astronomically priced Travis
- nt411 8y agoDisaster.
- AdeptusAquinas 8y agoI wonder what this will mean for VSTS? That has it's own public/private git repositories. Though they're more 'enterprise integrated ci/cd' than github's 'portfolio'
- pellucide 8y agoRelevant https://help.github.com/articles/about-archiving-content-and-data-on-github/#third-party-archival-projects https://help.github.com/articles/about-archiving-content-and...
- buvanshak 8y agoNever used github. Always used bitbucket.
- some_account 8y agoI was using gitlab anyway. But it's significant that Microsoft is taking another step towards destroying open source and the community around it (while making it look like they are embracing it, of course).
- the_arun 8y agoIt is a matter of concern for private repositories (of Microsoft's competitors) in GitHub.
- jaigouk 8y agoguess it's time to move away from github.
- erikb 8y ago9 hours ago: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub 6 hours ago: GitLab sees huge spike in project imports I think that says all there is to be said.
- dba7dba 8y agoEnd of an era for sure.
- debacle 8y agoUnhappy about this. If TFS and Github are ever glued together, you'll see the end of github as a platform.
- xucheng 8y agoWill it mean that we will see Atom and VS code merging in the near future?
- goffi 8y agoFor people looking for alternatives, I've started to write code forge tools in Salut à Toi (on top of XMPP). It's decentralized, already working (tickets and merge requests), based on standards, and written in a popular language (python), help would be more than welcome! It is also agnostic of the tools, I'm using it with Mercurial, but Git implementation will of course follow. You'll find details and a demo at https://www.goffi.org/b/9555cc02-6a87-4b6b-af85-20f1c0736722/xmpp-based-tickets-merge-requests-with https://www.goffi.org/b/9555cc02-6a87-4b6b-af85-20f1c0736722...
- glorkk 8y agoNot surprised, someone had to acquire github, it was only a matter of time. I’d rather it be Microsoft than Facebook or Google.
- miguelmota 8y agoGitlab is seeing 10x the normal daily amount of repositories https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200?s=19 https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200?s=19
- onra87 8y agoCould have been great to see the GAFAM agree to finance GitHub to remain an independant platform. Now, I can't imagine the GAFA let their open source projects on GitHub...
- vmhy 8y agoThis is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
- carlchenet 8y agoSome years ago I wrote "The Github Threat" https://carlchenet.com/the-github-threat/ https://carlchenet.com/the-github-threat/ and I'll be delighted to update the conclusion with this quite predictable and logical outcome.
- lioeters 8y agoThis the end of an era. GitLab, BitBucket, self-hosted options, here we come!
- JepZ 8y agoLets just hope Microsoft has learnt how they tend to kill good products by merging them into their ecosystem and won't do that. If Microsoft honestly wants to improve GitHub, they should ask the community first.
- innocentoldguy 8y agoDammit!!!
- nkkollaw 8y agoI wonder what will happen to Atom, considering that Microsoft makes VS Code..?
- bigbugbag 8y agoGreat news ! Maybe now people will understand why github was the wrong was to do things. Using a designed to be decentralized development tool and flocking all in one place, centralizing free software development on proprietary centralized platform is the epitome of not doing things the way they should. Hopefully people will catch the difference between opensource which microsoft is surfing on in a PR effort to regain prestige and free software which is a nemesis of microsoft. Now let's see projects scramble to find another centralized place to migrate to in order to keep doing things wrong, and see which ones do not care enough to even do this.
- ojosilva 8y agoBut what would be the alternative then? I mean, GH serves as the de facto opensource social network, it allows private and public collaboration and integrates with many tools creating a web of transparency and free flow of knowledge. How do we make a similar or comparable service that is decentralized yet transparent and instantly accesible to millions of people across the globe?
- atesti 8y agoI consider this a huge waste of money on Microsoft's part. Why did they create and then shutter codeplex in the first place? Why can't we have multiple competing platforms (Google Code, Github, Codeplex, Sourceforge, bitbucket, etc.)? If I were Microsoft I'd rather invest a smaller amount of money (it surely is much cheaper than acquiring Github!) into making Codeplex the best platform. And then I'd just do a traditional way of forcing people a bit: Why did Microsoft put their software on Github, a competitor? Why not force people a little bit into your ecosystem? Why give up the fight for winner takes it all every single time??? If I were Microsoft I were a bit more proud to use Codeplex, Windows phones, Windows instead of Mac, etc... Why shutter MSN messenger for Skype? Why making apps for iphone first before Windows phone? Why does Microsoft not simply fund their projects (Windows Mobile had a head start and was abandoned, tablet PCs were already there with XP) and try to compete and create an ecosystem full of solutions working together? Of course it's kind of nice to see Microsoft embracing github and being more open etc. But where's the fight? Why give up all the time? Why letting codeplex die when all we need is a bit competititon.
- oculusthrift 8y agoJust depends on the product. Microsoft decided to create Teams in house instead of acquiring slack.
- TheCabin 8y agoYou need to reach a critical mass of users. In contrast to Github, neither Codeplex nor Windows phone did that.
- rhabarba 8y agoA monopolist wants to buy a monopolist. Linuxers disagree.
- preek 8y agoCentralized and proprietary unfortunately are two key attributes to Github. That fits the old school MS bill. But it also fits the new “we have changed hype”. It’s most unfortunate, because git made decentralized revision control popular. My future Tooling bets are on sustainable open source. Good for MS, though. It’s a smart move for them. And Github has been struggling for years, anyway. Scandals, new structure, more hierarchy. It’s probably easier to pick up now than three years ago.
- skor 8y agoOh crap.
- narven 8y agoIf is true, this is one of the saddest news I've heard in the last 5 years. Please Github don't allow this. Look of what crap Skype became to be... look at what crap LinkedIn became to be... Time to move to gitlab.
- amelius 8y agoI'm really looking forward to IPFS ...
- codesternews 8y agoWhy microsoft and google ruin the things developer loves? First Kaggle and than Github.
- detaro 8y agowhat happened to Kaggle?
- DrBazza 8y agoGithub harassment in 2014, Microsoft potentially (at time of writing) buying Github. Mountains, molehills.
- zamobo 8y agowas this when they decided, nah fk it let s just aquire the thing https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-largest-git-repo-on-the-planet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...
- gandutraveler 8y agoUsed to seeing these kind of reactions on HN. Saw this during FB React licensing issue. Angry Engineers moving to Vue or whatever was non-react, only to move back to usual in few weeks.
- grizzles 8y agoGoogle open source ERP and realize what a gold mine github data will be to an enterprise play like Microsoft. As acquisitions go, it's pretty brilliant.
- erazor42 8y agoI'll probably quit github once they add their horrible login system. Have you experienced the login on azure portal or skype ?
- tzzgb 8y agoMicrosoft is also heavily "embracing" Python. CPython is on GitHub, the infra is partly controlled by MSFT employees and the CI moves to MSFT as well. Caveat emptor.
- lurcio 8y agoWhy isn't all this code on 'the chain'?
- bigcostooge 8y agoWell. There’s always bitbucket.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- greatNespresso 8y agoDone or not, at least Github's wikipedia entry has already been updated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
- nottorp 8y agoWell, let's say I wouldn't switch away from github at once (I have a paid account with private repos and all), but consider the Skype precedent: from a mostly working native application, now it's an Electron abomination that takes 100% CPU and is a lot harder to use than the previous versions. But it has social networking! It's very likely they will "improve" github in the same way. I don't think they dare to make the site explicitly not work on anything but IE, but I expect subtle incompatibilities to pile up over time...
- zanny 8y agoThis is the "extend" phase, in case anyone is keeping track. The embrace was "MS loves Linux!", switching Windows to use git, and putting tons of near random libraries and projects on github publically (vscode, chakracore, etc). I just love how anyone that cards had been actively avoiding walled garden proprietary services like this and were using gitlab, phabticator, etc for years saying this or anything similar (could have just been github starting to sell user data themselves) but only when big evil MS comes along to put the reality in peoples faces that you don't bet your software infrastructure on some proprietary non interoperable web service.
- blauditore 8y agoI wonder what the reaction would have been with Apple being the acquirer. Microsoft still receives lots of hate, sometimes justified, but often just baseless. On the other hand, whenever Apple fucks devs (or users) over, they're just "protecting users" or "making business decisions". I feel there's a strong bias in the dev community.
- greaseball 8y agoApple being the acquirer wouldn't change the potential conflicts of interest or the trend towards monopolization, which is what a lot of people are upset about. Animosity toward large corporations isn't unique to Microsoft.
- aldanor 8y agoI bet the reaction would have been largely the same; a megacorp monopoly is a megacorp monopoly. That being said, Apple did make a few nice moves lately -- e.g., open-sourcing FoundationDB (when was the last time Microsoft opened up anything it acquired?).
- KillcodeX 8y agoEveryone is leaving this platform because Microsoft is a spyware OS (NSA OS). To be honest, they are going to put Malware tracking in your code. Something big is coming inside your machine..... Warning : stay away from any acquired platforms of Microsoft (LinkedIn (Resume tracking), github (project code tracking), Skype ( Voip tracking), etc.......). They can't innovate anymore, and the weak dev work for money instead of building the next big thing..... Anyway.... Gitlab is the answer
- spdegabrielle 8y agoNow is the time to move to Fossil https://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki Issue tracking & wiki built in. You can use its git integration to ensure recruiters/employers can find you.
- mikece 8y agoA spokesman for Microsoft said "Buying GitHub was cheaper than paying for all our private repositories."
- pcarolan 8y agoWhat is Github's reason for this? I'm looking for some salient reason why they'd sell their company. Is it investor pressure or founder apathy, or ...? It seems to me like creating and running a product as admired as Github is a bigger prize than just cash in the game of life? “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though, it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.” ~ Adam Smith
- erjjones 8y agoRight click and publish to Azure. For the win!!
- clarke78 8y agoI was really hoping GitHub would focus on a IPO vs. acquisition. I honestly think we would be saying the same things about Google/Apple if they had decided to swoop in and make a deal here (so none of what I say is directed specifically at Microsoft). I think the general consensus is that we want a new, independent org, that genuinely cares about OSS but has the mind to create/maintain a sustainable business model and ensure the long-term success of an OSS platforms is extremely important (and now we'll look to Gitlab and others for that). Microsoft will, no doubt, have their fingers all over this platform in short order. It's what they're paying for; and it's an extremely smart move (EXTREMELY). Some of GitHubs product offerings have competitors within the Microsoft ecosystem already, which may spell bad times for those long-term. Atom directly competes with VSCode and it simply doesn't make sense to continue development of two, independent, IDEs. Electron utilizes Chromium under the hood, and I'd be hard pressed to thunk Microsoft wouldn't want to try and inject Edge/Chakra into that platform somehow. It makes good business sense to consolidate efforts once a company is acquired. I give it, at most, 12-18 months before you start seeing major changes to both of those platforms that reflect Microsofts own interests.
- taf2 8y agohttps://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
- billfruit 8y agoMy fear in this is that MS may require MS passport or whatever it is called ID system to log in to GitHub, with their really unreasonable 16 character max password length restrictions.In general MS websites are poor in usability, and littered with marketing copy, difficult to find useful information.
- hicolour 8y agoMicrosoft 2016' new year resolution [X] Join bigest open source community and get right to vote #linuxfoundation [X] Acquire the largest open source community #github [X] Do not share even bit of valuable open source (*do not count azure toolkits) .. completed in 2018
- cdnh22 8y agoWhat are the goals Microsoft wants to achieve with this?
- htims 8y agoMicrosoft got me using IDE's it was a nice cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good .... likely they will turn it into shit like everything else.
- htims 8y agoMicrosoft got me started using IDE's. It was a good cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good and more likely turning into shit.
- suranyami 8y agoIt looks like you’re trying to issue a Pull Request! Would you like to use Visual Studio Azure Github for Windows 2000, Enterprise Edition with Skype & Linkedin Integration? https://www.redbubble.com/people/suranyami/works/32080448-it-looks-like-youre-trying-to-issue-a-pull-request?asc=u&ref=recent-owner https://www.redbubble.com/people/suranyami/works/32080448-it...
- jas- 8y agoDoes this remind anyone else of the back to the future movie where Biff is the free worlds leader and just a pompous asshat with the power to keep being a pompous asshat? Having watched Microsoft over the years steal ideas from smaller companies (not purchase them then bastardize and part them out mind you), but actually steal their ideas and make them standard in their operating system. Some examples are CDR/CDRW now standard after small companies in the late 90's developing the standard. The bastardized implementation of Active Directory after Novell's Netware platform and the later implementations of OpenLDAP and the standards that were spurned. What about the MIT Kerberos authentication mechanisms after Microsofts MsCHAPv2, MsCHAP & NTLM roll your own crypto schemes were found easily crackable and exploitable? I can go on but actually have to do some work today...
- Erikajames 8y agoMonths before I mailed Whitehatservices@programmer.net, I have really been battling with a bad report and was feeling skeptical about the whole fix process online seeing my mom been ripped. Though My colleague recommended whitehatservices to me, I still didn’t feel right contacting them cause I’ve previously seen them online. Finally, with my fingers crossed, I gave it a try and here I am recommending you Whitehatservices@programmer.net. The best part of the story; No upfront payment, though it took me almost a month but I’m good.