13 ms·

What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

182 points by okket 8y ago

stunt 8y ago
Microsoft is on the good direction today (comparing to what it was). But problem is when management changes. after all their values are different. All classic big corporate stuff, their business model and expectations from investors. things can change in the future when making money is the main goal.. But the good thing is that GIT is easy to migrate. So we can migrate anytime that things goes wrong.. Github is still a great product/service. Hope they don't ruin it.
jasonvorhe 8y ago
> I’ve deleted my GitHub account, I’ll find a way to replace it and if you’re halfway clever so should you. So clever.
- thr0000waay 8y ago
  I like it when ppl say I'm halfway clever.
  - romanovcode 8y ago
    He's implying he is at least 2x smart than we are.
    - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
      I think he is just warning people he thinks should be warned of something that matters deeply to him. I suspect he assumes that anyone reading his blog / HN is already All-the-way clever and one can read it as "everyone should delete their account" Personally i am more sanguine
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    Halfway clever is an aspiration for me.
- katnegermis 8y ago
  I can't think of a worse way to get your point across.
  - walki 8y ago
    Agreed, this is ridiculous.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Agreed, as much as I dislike the acquisition, even I just wait and see. I'm setting up a migration plan right now of course, but I'm not going to activate it unless I have a good reason to.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Has there even been any kind of official confirmation that the sale is going ahead? Or the terms of the sale? Sabotaging a pivotal part of your own development workflow entirely based on internet speculation doesn't seem "clever" at all to me.
seren 8y ago
On a slightly tangential note, my company has a massive Yammer install (200k+ account) and I always wonder if people can discuss in yammer group about replacing Office by G Suite, without triggering anything. This is kinda paranoid, but I am still astonished that a company can essentially put all its communications, roadmap, and so on on another company platform. Even if you do not compete frontally, at some point, there are some diverging interests. I understand that the risk would be too big to eavesdrop on your customer, you would ruin your reputation and your product, but still, it seems the temptation even by a rogue employee could be strong. This is not a jab at Microsoft, it would not be better if it was another mega corp platform.
- 2sk21 8y ago
  Related - Slack is also widely used as a communication mechanism in many large companies. This seems fine but I wonder how attitudes would change if Slack got acquired.
- slowmotiony 8y ago
  People move their entire companies knowledge, documents and communication to Office 365 just to save some money. Even government or military institutions do it. I guess it's just how things are nowadays.
raesene9 8y ago
The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me. Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted) There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff. Is that to say that the Github acquisition will be an unalloyed good, no. but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a disaster...
- TimTheTinker 8y ago
  > but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff. Not disagreeing with your overall point, but culture can persist through employee and leadership turnover.
  - disiplus 8y ago
    not only that but i would be more willing to accept the change as hones if it did not came out of the previous failed attempt at "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", but to me this honestly feels just as another attempt with different strategy, they are taking a play from googles book.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    And the people who reached the top now are the ones who lived and worked happily in Toxic Microsoft of the past 20 years. I dont buy in their change of nature either.
- RyanZAG 8y ago
  Windows 10 is really recent though. That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it. And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus has done for the world is incredible.
mlazos 8y ago
TLDR; the 90’s happened. Delete your github account because Microsoft is evil. I’m surprised this article got this far because it really doesn’t add anything unique to discussions that are already happening.
- 21stio 8y ago
  not all of us witnessed the 90's..
  - oblio 8y ago
    Read this stuff: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ And after you do, remember that Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. have also read those documents and now they're smarter about hiding it. Also, Microsoft has changed and we're not living in the 90's anymore.
- macns 8y ago
  Putting personal sentiment aside (delete github account part) an article like this is needed to sum up and justify developer worries that are scattered through discussions here and other online communities.
  - mlazos 8y ago
    That’s my whole point. Without the part about deleting your account and the unnecessarily long introduction to what github is this article is a bullet point list of what Microsoft did in the 90’s. (With the exception of the telemetry and skype acquisition) Anyone can look up this history.
mwj 8y ago
Some of the shenanigans I've seen recently from MS employees in the .NET Core and JS space doesn't inspire me with confidence... For all of Nadella's "turning over a new leaf", it will still take a generation to change the culture of 120 000 employees
- klmr 8y ago
  Could you give some details? I’m no longer intimately involved with either technology but from what I can see Microsoft has been doing a lot of good things in .NET Core and with TypeScript. What are the shenanigans you’re referring to?
- sydd 8y ago
  > the shenanigans I've seen recently from MS employees in the .NET Core and JS space Do you have links? I Havent heard MS doing anything malicious recently in these spaces.
  - hiccuphippo 8y ago
    I guess the non compliance to GDPR by using opt-out instead of opt-in for their telemetry in .netcore and vscode.
    - macca321 8y ago
      As I understand it the information isn't PI and so isn't covered by GDPR.
- rejschaap 8y ago
  A generation of employees in tech? That's like 3 to 5 years
tekproxy 8y ago
Microsoft used to be bad (M$) but if you haven't noticed you can now run Linux on Windows and sql server runs on Linux. We're in the twilight zone bro; all bets are off.
- Mononokay 8y ago
  Running Linux on Windows solely benefits Microsoft and Canonical, not the Linux community. We're not in the twilight zone, we're in the zone where Microsoft realizes it's more profitable to leech off of others' efforts.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Leeching off of others' efforts is standard practice to many so called FOSS contributors, so why should Microsoft be singled out?
  - cube2222 8y ago
    Well, it benefits developers who use Windows machines and develop applications for Linux.
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      I'm genuinely curious as to what drives a developer to run Linux on Windows rather than just booting into a Linux environment. Is that software support? Is that hardware support that's not available on Linux?
      - cube2222 8y ago
        Desktop linux has been much less reliable for me. I'm also using a surface device and like to use it for sketching.
        rbanffy 8y ago
        Special input devices is a thing. I doubt the Cintiq would work with any of my Linux boxes in the same way it does on the Mac. This is how we end up with multiple computers... In general, desktop Linux has been rock solid for me. I even keep my music collection on BtrFS and, yes, I know it's tempting fate.
trixie_ 8y ago
How about the alternate reality where GitHub is desperate to monetize and/or is acquired by a company that is... don't think it could happen? Let me tell you a little story about SourceForge...
- erk__ 8y ago
  SourceForge have recently been acquired, by a new company that is a lot more friendly to everyone. But even then it still has a very bad reputation.
onion2k 8y ago
Assuming GitHub was actually losing money and couldn't fix that problem quickly enough it's fair to assume they had to sell, and it's reasonable to believe there aren't that many companies who could have bought them if you think an understanding of the domain is important, then you're really limited to Facebook (user surveillance, adverts), Apple (bad at software, not developer friendly), Google (user surveillance, adverts), Microsoft (history of extinguishing things) and maybe Oracle (very hostile). Regardless of who GH sold to they'd be facing a ton of negative reactions. Microsoft's actions recently make me thing maybe they're actually the least bad as far as their dealings with developers go.
- ssijak 8y ago
  How is Apple not developer friendly?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    They are, just not to the FOSS crowd that tries to use macOS as if it was GNU/Linux with a pretty face.
    - ssijak 8y ago
      Well, you pretty much describe my use case for Apple laptops. I resisted for a long time and used Linux desktop for dev work, but when I bought the first MacBook I never looked back. I would describe macOS as Linux desktop that works.
      - tjoff 8y ago
        That is great but the point was that it has nothing to do with apple being developer friendly or not.
  - onion2k 8y ago
    XCode is a clunky horrible mess of an IDE, iTunes Connect is worse, and they charge $100/year for a developer account. Also, they try to lock you in to buying Apple hardware to develop for Apple devices (though you can get around that using, among others, Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center).
pi-victor 8y ago
It's not like GitHub was the perfect open source place anyway. The platform itself is not open source in any way and it has been plagued by a few scandals. 'i've deleted my account' seems very pedantic and most of the arguments brought up are rather old. However, i do agree on the skype thing - man it got bad after MS bought it. Don't think any company that can afford to buy another company for well above 1.5 billion (i understand the worth of GitHub in 2016 was around 2 billion) has a pristine past.
Artemis2 8y ago
Not commenting on the acquisitions rumors; > The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases, for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was detected. IIRC the main reasons this was done are (i) due to the complexity of porting P2P code across many platforms and (ii) for resource consumption on mobile devices. These are hardly edge cases.
- culturestate 8y ago
  I know lots of people think Microsoft did this to kowtow to the NSA, but I'm willing to bet it was really done for the same reason that Apple fundamentally re-architected FaceTime: patent threats.
pg_bot 8y ago
The biggest surprise to me was that Github was running at a loss for a considerable amount of time. Given their roots as a bootstrapped company, I would've assumed that they would be more disciplined in their spending. I'm disappointed that they've decided to sell rather than go public, I would've happily been a shareholder of Github if given the choice.
- the_duke 8y ago
  Going public would probaly have been near impossible with large losses and a competitive marketplace where there are alternatives available you can switch to if price is too high.
  - pg_bot 8y ago
    This would be true for any industry other than tech. It feels like every single tech IPO follows the same formula of going public while posting large losses. See dropbox, box, twilio, spotify, snap, or any other high profile S1 of the last 10 years and you will find that almost none of them make a profit at the time they went public.
doubleunplussed 8y ago
I agree with this article on the basis that if Microsoft's incentives haven't changed, then there's no reason Microsoft should be expected to behave any differently to the nineties. Arguing that they're a different company I think should require arguments that their incentives are different, and I don't see that they are.
- hiccuphippo 8y ago
  I think for them today selling Azure is a bigger incentive than selling Windows and Office.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    Let me clarify: Selling Azure is absolutely a bigger incentive than selling Windows and Office. And more generally, selling solutions instead of technology. Their #1 competitor is AWS. They don't even mention Oracle, Apple, or really even Google.
- raesene9 8y ago
  I'd suggest that MS incentives are very different to the 90's. In the 90's they made their money from on-premises software installations, Windows/Office/SQL Server etc. So their incentives then were to ensure that people used their software as much as possible. Now the growth engine for Microsoft's platform is services (e.g. Azure). On Azure you can deploy Linux and Windows based applications, the underlying OS doesn't matter, Microsoft still make money on it. This means that their incentive is to have a good and smooth developer experience and to get as many people onto the Azure platform.
gressquel 8y ago
I myself am optimistic but some few questrions popped up: Microsoft is very proactive removing things from azure and shutting down sites as soon as they receive DMCA complaint or abuse complaint. Are they going to remove important github repos like these if they get DMCA or other complaints? https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-Project https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-Project (cheat for Counter strike) https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl (download from video streamers) https://github.com/kurtcoke/DemonHunter_Exploitkit https://github.com/kurtcoke/DemonHunter_Exploitkit (exploit kit) https://github.com/lontivero/vinchuca https://github.com/lontivero/vinchuca (p2p botnet) the second I hear any repos being removed by Microsoft, I i will dump my private repos and leave.
- lewisj489 8y ago
  Complaints should be respected and violating repos should be taken down.
- kraptor 8y ago
  Keep an eye on this one, then: https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd
- vortico 8y ago
  What's wrong with this? I don't want unauthorized infringing projects jeopardizing the service the rest of us use legally and ethically. Invalid DMCAs are another story, but what's the harm of respecting an IP owner's valid DMCA request?
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Indeed. "I'll leave if they dare comply with the law" seems like a strange argument, even if you disagree with the laws in question. What if it's your copyrights / patents that are being infringed?
  - gressquel 8y ago
    it will become a sterile, homogenous environment. Its the diversity (like the repos mentioned above) that made github the goto code-sharing site. I, for one, would rather jeaopardize the service to defend the rights of such fringe developers. Together we stand.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
I would look at using client- side encryption of my pushes upto github as a possible third way between fully trusting MS and deleting my account https://gist.github.com/shadowhand/873637 https://gist.github.com/shadowhand/873637 NB the irony of the top ranked article on git encryption being hosted on Github is not lost on me ...
gregknicholson 8y ago
GitHub has always been proprietary and centralised. If you choose to host your open source project on a proprietary service, you can't exactly be surprised when a different company buys that service.
Lordarminius 8y ago
GitHub is for all intents and purposes dead. They just don't know it yet. Open Source is the closet thing to a religion in programming and selling to Microsoft, while it makes commercial sense, is heresy in all but name. I moved all my workflow to Linux back-in-the-day (actually just over 2 years ago, but hey) and never looked back. I'll be damned if I let Microsoft in by this particular backdoor. Like the author, I'm deleting my account as well.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kojon55 8y ago
Grow up.
discreteevent 8y ago
I don't disagree with any of what he says. But he only includes the negative things they did. It's also worth remembering that ms also helped democratise computing. In the late eighties, early nineties Unix was an ivory tower. Only large organisations could afford it. Apple was expensive and closed. Windows was cheap and open. It worked with every kind of hardware and peripheral. And with dev tools like VB a lot of software was written and systems built for people that otherwise would just have had to stick with paper.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  > ms also helped democratise computing I find that laughable. Their client and processor licensing model is of the Oracle school. Large OEM's are still paying the MS tax on machines supplied are they not? (MS get fee on every OEM machine sold regardless of whether it includes Windows. Buy a Dell Linux laptop and MS still get their $x) > Unix was an ivory tower Hmm. What of BSD+FreeBSD? Hell even MS Xenix ran on 10x the range of machines that Windows did. Late 80s, early 90s folks like Sequent were charging a bomb because they included 4 or 8 processors and gobs of memory (for the time). Sun and SGI charged a fortune because 50% of the machine cost was the graphics and IO, and a net stack that worked. A Sun lunchbox wasn't that much more than an equivalent spec PC of the time but gave SCSI and networking. None of that plug and pray or fucking around with INT settings in BIOS, driver settings or it suddenly developing amnesia. SunOS (usually) just worked, Windows usually didn't until Win2k finally arrived and you could actually have uptime over a daily reboot. The expensive stuff in the Unix world was where there was no comparison in teh PC world or you scaled up. Multi processors, Sun pizza boxes where 50% of the cost was the top end graphics (always buy the flight sim CD when speccing that one), 100+ serial ports, racks full of USR Couriers etc. NT didn't scale (see Hotmail and the infamous scaling demo scam). > Windows was cheap and open It was neither. I'm not going to reopen VB memories. :)
Miraries 8y ago
Well.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257 Unrelated, is this standard practice when sharing a link to the HN Discussion? javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent("What%20is%20wrong%20with%20Microsoft%20buying%20GitHub")
iampoul 8y ago
Nothing
roadbeats 8y ago
Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me. Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back. Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom, this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks. It's sad to see they now own Github.
- raesene9 8y ago
  You know that Microsoft are the largest corporate contributor to open source projects on Github right?
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    Microsoft is probably one of the largest contributors to Linux itself.
    - nyandaber 8y ago
      Not at all, they're not even in the list of the contributors, as you can see on the 4.16 kernel statistics : https://lwn.net/Articles/750054/ https://lwn.net/Articles/750054/ The list doesn't vary too much with the versions, so either they're working under the radar as "Unknown", or they barely contribute to the kernel.
    - clhodapp 8y ago
      Microsoft contributes a bunch of money to The Linux Foundation now but they really don't contribute very much code. Their main concern seems to be keeping Hyper-V working well so that Linux VMs are performant on Windows server. They don't register as a top code contributor in the last Linux Kernel Development Report: https://storage.pardot.com/6342/188781/Publication_LinuxKernelReport_2017.pdf https://storage.pardot.com/6342/188781/Publication_LinuxKern...
miguelrochefort 8y ago
> I’ve deleted my GitHub account, I’ll find a way to replace it and if you’re halfway clever so should you. Is this satire?
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Has there even been any kind of official confirmation that the sale is going ahead? Or the terms of the sale? Sabotaging a pivotal part of your own development workflow entirely based on internet speculation doesn't seem "clever" at all to me.
DomreiRoam 8y ago
What I find sad is that github didn't find a way to be profitable on its own. I would really like to have some Consumers' co-operatives that would provide hosting/online services around open source. I wouldn't mind to pay something to have private hosting for me and subsidizing the hosting open source projects.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mmoez 8y ago
> Foxes may change their coats, they don’t change their nature. It seems clear today that the "Developers, developers, developers!" thing of Steve Ballmer is still in the plans of Microsoft. I wonder how do people who believed in the modern Microsoft with Nadella feel now?
bevax 8y ago
How much Microsoft loves open source is also proofed by the case of MeeGo. Their agent, a certain Mr. Elop, hugged it to death. > The first MeeGo device came out in 2011 and won all kinds of awards and is to this date the only flagship consistently ranked better than its contemporary iPhone, while MeeGo is the only OS ever launched in smartphones to be ranked as good as - or in some reviews even better than - Apple's iPhone iOS operating system. THAT was Nokia's strategy in January 2011. Only a delusional idiot would change this. http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/the-nokia-saga-predictions-on-this-blog-full-listing-with-links.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/the-nok...
onyva 8y ago
Microsoft’s brute force approache has never worked and will never work. It really doesn’t matter who heads it. As indicate by RMS, and proven time and again, these ethical questions at the heart of the free software movement are important and there for a reason. You can slap “open source” on anything these days, and it has been the case for a while, but it’s missing the point. And dangerous for the free software movement.
shishirsharma 8y ago
Microsoft acquiring Github has completely busted my chops. I am totally depressed now. Is deleting your account from Github is a viable solution? Where to go from here. Bitbucket?
kjeetgill 8y ago
If not Microsoft, who would you have liked to see GitHub bought by? Presumably they'd have to find an exit eventually. My vote would be Mozilla. I can't think of any other company I'd want running a service for "the greater good".
Lordarminius 8y ago
I'm waiting for a reaction from Linus and Stallman
bobdaal 8y ago
Awesome! Now we can end the mass delusion and realize Git sucks and has been a monumental drag on developer productivity. Thak you Microsoft!
heygema 8y ago
First step, Github Theme will go Fabric. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric Second, More ms tools in github. Third, atom is dead. Bright enough I guess.
htims 8y ago
Microsoft sucks .
mrgra 8y ago
Damn thieves!!! They are going to steal all the private repos code... Like they did with Quicktime...
mrgra 8y ago
Damn thieves!!! They are going to steal all the private repos code... Like they did with Quicktime code...

182 points by okket 8y ago

Microsoft is on the good direction today (comparing to what it was). But problem is when management changes. after all their values are different. All classic big corporate stuff, their business model and expectations from investors. things can change in the future when making money is the main goal.. But the good thing is that GIT is easy to migrate. So we can migrate anytime that things goes wrong.. Github is still a great product/service. Hope they don't ruin it.

jasonvorhe 8y ago

> I’ve deleted my GitHub account, I’ll find a way to replace it and if you’re halfway clever so should you. So clever.

thr0000waay 8y ago
I like it when ppl say I'm halfway clever.
- romanovcode 8y ago
  He's implying he is at least 2x smart than we are.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    I think he is just warning people he thinks should be warned of something that matters deeply to him. I suspect he assumes that anyone reading his blog / HN is already All-the-way clever and one can read it as "everyone should delete their account" Personally i am more sanguine
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Halfway clever is an aspiration for me.
katnegermis 8y ago
I can't think of a worse way to get your point across.
- walki 8y ago
  Agreed, this is ridiculous.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Agreed, as much as I dislike the acquisition, even I just wait and see. I'm setting up a migration plan right now of course, but I'm not going to activate it unless I have a good reason to.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Has there even been any kind of official confirmation that the sale is going ahead? Or the terms of the sale? Sabotaging a pivotal part of your own development workflow entirely based on internet speculation doesn't seem "clever" at all to me.

seren 8y ago

On a slightly tangential note, my company has a massive Yammer install (200k+ account) and I always wonder if people can discuss in yammer group about replacing Office by G Suite, without triggering anything. This is kinda paranoid, but I am still astonished that a company can essentially put all its communications, roadmap, and so on on another company platform. Even if you do not compete frontally, at some point, there are some diverging interests. I understand that the risk would be too big to eavesdrop on your customer, you would ruin your reputation and your product, but still, it seems the temptation even by a rogue employee could be strong. This is not a jab at Microsoft, it would not be better if it was another mega corp platform.

2sk21 8y ago
Related - Slack is also widely used as a communication mechanism in many large companies. This seems fine but I wonder how attitudes would change if Slack got acquired.
slowmotiony 8y ago
People move their entire companies knowledge, documents and communication to Office 365 just to save some money. Even government or military institutions do it. I guess it's just how things are nowadays.

raesene9 8y ago

The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me. Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted) There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff. Is that to say that the Github acquisition will be an unalloyed good, no. but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a disaster...

TimTheTinker 8y ago
> but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff. Not disagreeing with your overall point, but culture can persist through employee and leadership turnover.
- disiplus 8y ago
  not only that but i would be more willing to accept the change as hones if it did not came out of the previous failed attempt at "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", but to me this honestly feels just as another attempt with different strategy, they are taking a play from googles book.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  And the people who reached the top now are the ones who lived and worked happily in Toxic Microsoft of the past 20 years. I dont buy in their change of nature either.
RyanZAG 8y ago
Windows 10 is really recent though. That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it. And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus has done for the world is incredible.

mlazos 8y ago

TLDR; the 90’s happened. Delete your github account because Microsoft is evil. I’m surprised this article got this far because it really doesn’t add anything unique to discussions that are already happening.

21stio 8y ago
not all of us witnessed the 90's..
- oblio 8y ago
  Read this stuff: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ And after you do, remember that Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. have also read those documents and now they're smarter about hiding it. Also, Microsoft has changed and we're not living in the 90's anymore.
macns 8y ago
Putting personal sentiment aside (delete github account part) an article like this is needed to sum up and justify developer worries that are scattered through discussions here and other online communities.
- mlazos 8y ago
  That’s my whole point. Without the part about deleting your account and the unnecessarily long introduction to what github is this article is a bullet point list of what Microsoft did in the 90’s. (With the exception of the telemetry and skype acquisition) Anyone can look up this history.

mwj 8y ago

Some of the shenanigans I've seen recently from MS employees in the .NET Core and JS space doesn't inspire me with confidence... For all of Nadella's "turning over a new leaf", it will still take a generation to change the culture of 120 000 employees

klmr 8y ago
Could you give some details? I’m no longer intimately involved with either technology but from what I can see Microsoft has been doing a lot of good things in .NET Core and with TypeScript. What are the shenanigans you’re referring to?
sydd 8y ago
> the shenanigans I've seen recently from MS employees in the .NET Core and JS space Do you have links? I Havent heard MS doing anything malicious recently in these spaces.
- hiccuphippo 8y ago
  I guess the non compliance to GDPR by using opt-out instead of opt-in for their telemetry in .netcore and vscode.
  - macca321 8y ago
    As I understand it the information isn't PI and so isn't covered by GDPR.
rejschaap 8y ago
A generation of employees in tech? That's like 3 to 5 years

tekproxy 8y ago

Microsoft used to be bad (M$) but if you haven't noticed you can now run Linux on Windows and sql server runs on Linux. We're in the twilight zone bro; all bets are off.

Mononokay 8y ago
Running Linux on Windows solely benefits Microsoft and Canonical, not the Linux community. We're not in the twilight zone, we're in the zone where Microsoft realizes it's more profitable to leech off of others' efforts.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Leeching off of others' efforts is standard practice to many so called FOSS contributors, so why should Microsoft be singled out?
- cube2222 8y ago
  Well, it benefits developers who use Windows machines and develop applications for Linux.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    I'm genuinely curious as to what drives a developer to run Linux on Windows rather than just booting into a Linux environment. Is that software support? Is that hardware support that's not available on Linux?
    - cube2222 8y ago
      Desktop linux has been much less reliable for me. I'm also using a surface device and like to use it for sketching.
      - rbanffy 8y ago
        Special input devices is a thing. I doubt the Cintiq would work with any of my Linux boxes in the same way it does on the Mac. This is how we end up with multiple computers... In general, desktop Linux has been rock solid for me. I even keep my music collection on BtrFS and, yes, I know it's tempting fate.

trixie_ 8y ago

How about the alternate reality where GitHub is desperate to monetize and/or is acquired by a company that is... don't think it could happen? Let me tell you a little story about SourceForge...

erk__ 8y ago
SourceForge have recently been acquired, by a new company that is a lot more friendly to everyone. But even then it still has a very bad reputation.

onion2k 8y ago

Assuming GitHub was actually losing money and couldn't fix that problem quickly enough it's fair to assume they had to sell, and it's reasonable to believe there aren't that many companies who could have bought them if you think an understanding of the domain is important, then you're really limited to Facebook (user surveillance, adverts), Apple (bad at software, not developer friendly), Google (user surveillance, adverts), Microsoft (history of extinguishing things) and maybe Oracle (very hostile). Regardless of who GH sold to they'd be facing a ton of negative reactions. Microsoft's actions recently make me thing maybe they're actually the least bad as far as their dealings with developers go.

ssijak 8y ago
How is Apple not developer friendly?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  They are, just not to the FOSS crowd that tries to use macOS as if it was GNU/Linux with a pretty face.
  - ssijak 8y ago
    Well, you pretty much describe my use case for Apple laptops. I resisted for a long time and used Linux desktop for dev work, but when I bought the first MacBook I never looked back. I would describe macOS as Linux desktop that works.
    - tjoff 8y ago
      That is great but the point was that it has nothing to do with apple being developer friendly or not.
- onion2k 8y ago
  XCode is a clunky horrible mess of an IDE, iTunes Connect is worse, and they charge $100/year for a developer account. Also, they try to lock you in to buying Apple hardware to develop for Apple devices (though you can get around that using, among others, Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center).

pi-victor 8y ago

It's not like GitHub was the perfect open source place anyway. The platform itself is not open source in any way and it has been plagued by a few scandals. 'i've deleted my account' seems very pedantic and most of the arguments brought up are rather old. However, i do agree on the skype thing - man it got bad after MS bought it. Don't think any company that can afford to buy another company for well above 1.5 billion (i understand the worth of GitHub in 2016 was around 2 billion) has a pristine past.

Artemis2 8y ago

Not commenting on the acquisitions rumors; > The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases, for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was detected. IIRC the main reasons this was done are (i) due to the complexity of porting P2P code across many platforms and (ii) for resource consumption on mobile devices. These are hardly edge cases.

culturestate 8y ago
I know lots of people think Microsoft did this to kowtow to the NSA, but I'm willing to bet it was really done for the same reason that Apple fundamentally re-architected FaceTime: patent threats.

pg_bot 8y ago

The biggest surprise to me was that Github was running at a loss for a considerable amount of time. Given their roots as a bootstrapped company, I would've assumed that they would be more disciplined in their spending. I'm disappointed that they've decided to sell rather than go public, I would've happily been a shareholder of Github if given the choice.

the_duke 8y ago
Going public would probaly have been near impossible with large losses and a competitive marketplace where there are alternatives available you can switch to if price is too high.
- pg_bot 8y ago
  This would be true for any industry other than tech. It feels like every single tech IPO follows the same formula of going public while posting large losses. See dropbox, box, twilio, spotify, snap, or any other high profile S1 of the last 10 years and you will find that almost none of them make a profit at the time they went public.

doubleunplussed 8y ago

I agree with this article on the basis that if Microsoft's incentives haven't changed, then there's no reason Microsoft should be expected to behave any differently to the nineties. Arguing that they're a different company I think should require arguments that their incentives are different, and I don't see that they are.

hiccuphippo 8y ago
I think for them today selling Azure is a bigger incentive than selling Windows and Office.
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  Let me clarify: Selling Azure is absolutely a bigger incentive than selling Windows and Office. And more generally, selling solutions instead of technology. Their #1 competitor is AWS. They don't even mention Oracle, Apple, or really even Google.
raesene9 8y ago
I'd suggest that MS incentives are very different to the 90's. In the 90's they made their money from on-premises software installations, Windows/Office/SQL Server etc. So their incentives then were to ensure that people used their software as much as possible. Now the growth engine for Microsoft's platform is services (e.g. Azure). On Azure you can deploy Linux and Windows based applications, the underlying OS doesn't matter, Microsoft still make money on it. This means that their incentive is to have a good and smooth developer experience and to get as many people onto the Azure platform.

gressquel 8y ago

I myself am optimistic but some few questrions popped up: Microsoft is very proactive removing things from azure and shutting down sites as soon as they receive DMCA complaint or abuse complaint. Are they going to remove important github repos like these if they get DMCA or other complaints? https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-Project https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-Project (cheat for Counter strike) https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl (download from video streamers) https://github.com/kurtcoke/DemonHunter_Exploitkit https://github.com/kurtcoke/DemonHunter_Exploitkit (exploit kit) https://github.com/lontivero/vinchuca https://github.com/lontivero/vinchuca (p2p botnet) the second I hear any repos being removed by Microsoft, I i will dump my private repos and leave.

lewisj489 8y ago
Complaints should be respected and violating repos should be taken down.
kraptor 8y ago
Keep an eye on this one, then: https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd
vortico 8y ago
What's wrong with this? I don't want unauthorized infringing projects jeopardizing the service the rest of us use legally and ethically. Invalid DMCAs are another story, but what's the harm of respecting an IP owner's valid DMCA request?
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Indeed. "I'll leave if they dare comply with the law" seems like a strange argument, even if you disagree with the laws in question. What if it's your copyrights / patents that are being infringed?
- gressquel 8y ago
  it will become a sterile, homogenous environment. Its the diversity (like the repos mentioned above) that made github the goto code-sharing site. I, for one, would rather jeaopardize the service to defend the rights of such fringe developers. Together we stand.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

I would look at using client- side encryption of my pushes upto github as a possible third way between fully trusting MS and deleting my account https://gist.github.com/shadowhand/873637 https://gist.github.com/shadowhand/873637 NB the irony of the top ranked article on git encryption being hosted on Github is not lost on me ...

gregknicholson 8y ago

GitHub has always been proprietary and centralised. If you choose to host your open source project on a proprietary service, you can't exactly be surprised when a different company buys that service.

Lordarminius 8y ago

GitHub is for all intents and purposes dead. They just don't know it yet. Open Source is the closet thing to a religion in programming and selling to Microsoft, while it makes commercial sense, is heresy in all but name. I moved all my workflow to Linux back-in-the-day (actually just over 2 years ago, but hey) and never looked back. I'll be damned if I let Microsoft in by this particular backdoor. Like the author, I'm deleting my account as well.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kojon55 8y ago

Grow up.

discreteevent 8y ago

I don't disagree with any of what he says. But he only includes the negative things they did. It's also worth remembering that ms also helped democratise computing. In the late eighties, early nineties Unix was an ivory tower. Only large organisations could afford it. Apple was expensive and closed. Windows was cheap and open. It worked with every kind of hardware and peripheral. And with dev tools like VB a lot of software was written and systems built for people that otherwise would just have had to stick with paper.

oldcynic 8y ago
> ms also helped democratise computing I find that laughable. Their client and processor licensing model is of the Oracle school. Large OEM's are still paying the MS tax on machines supplied are they not? (MS get fee on every OEM machine sold regardless of whether it includes Windows. Buy a Dell Linux laptop and MS still get their $x) > Unix was an ivory tower Hmm. What of BSD+FreeBSD? Hell even MS Xenix ran on 10x the range of machines that Windows did. Late 80s, early 90s folks like Sequent were charging a bomb because they included 4 or 8 processors and gobs of memory (for the time). Sun and SGI charged a fortune because 50% of the machine cost was the graphics and IO, and a net stack that worked. A Sun lunchbox wasn't that much more than an equivalent spec PC of the time but gave SCSI and networking. None of that plug and pray or fucking around with INT settings in BIOS, driver settings or it suddenly developing amnesia. SunOS (usually) just worked, Windows usually didn't until Win2k finally arrived and you could actually have uptime over a daily reboot. The expensive stuff in the Unix world was where there was no comparison in teh PC world or you scaled up. Multi processors, Sun pizza boxes where 50% of the cost was the top end graphics (always buy the flight sim CD when speccing that one), 100+ serial ports, racks full of USR Couriers etc. NT didn't scale (see Hotmail and the infamous scaling demo scam). > Windows was cheap and open It was neither. I'm not going to reopen VB memories. :)

Miraries 8y ago

Well.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257 Unrelated, is this standard practice when sharing a link to the HN Discussion? javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent("What%20is%20wrong%20with%20Microsoft%20buying%20GitHub")

iampoul 8y ago

Nothing

roadbeats 8y ago

Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me. Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back. Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom, this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks. It's sad to see they now own Github.

raesene9 8y ago
You know that Microsoft are the largest corporate contributor to open source projects on Github right?
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  Microsoft is probably one of the largest contributors to Linux itself.
  - nyandaber 8y ago
    Not at all, they're not even in the list of the contributors, as you can see on the 4.16 kernel statistics : https://lwn.net/Articles/750054/ https://lwn.net/Articles/750054/ The list doesn't vary too much with the versions, so either they're working under the radar as "Unknown", or they barely contribute to the kernel.
  - clhodapp 8y ago
    Microsoft contributes a bunch of money to The Linux Foundation now but they really don't contribute very much code. Their main concern seems to be keeping Hyper-V working well so that Linux VMs are performant on Windows server. They don't register as a top code contributor in the last Linux Kernel Development Report: https://storage.pardot.com/6342/188781/Publication_LinuxKernelReport_2017.pdf https://storage.pardot.com/6342/188781/Publication_LinuxKern...

miguelrochefort 8y ago

> I’ve deleted my GitHub account, I’ll find a way to replace it and if you’re halfway clever so should you. Is this satire?

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

Has there even been any kind of official confirmation that the sale is going ahead? Or the terms of the sale? Sabotaging a pivotal part of your own development workflow entirely based on internet speculation doesn't seem "clever" at all to me.

DomreiRoam 8y ago

What I find sad is that github didn't find a way to be profitable on its own. I would really like to have some Consumers' co-operatives that would provide hosting/online services around open source. I wouldn't mind to pay something to have private hosting for me and subsidizing the hosting open source projects.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mmoez 8y ago

> Foxes may change their coats, they don’t change their nature. It seems clear today that the "Developers, developers, developers!" thing of Steve Ballmer is still in the plans of Microsoft. I wonder how do people who believed in the modern Microsoft with Nadella feel now?

bevax 8y ago

How much Microsoft loves open source is also proofed by the case of MeeGo. Their agent, a certain Mr. Elop, hugged it to death. > The first MeeGo device came out in 2011 and won all kinds of awards and is to this date the only flagship consistently ranked better than its contemporary iPhone, while MeeGo is the only OS ever launched in smartphones to be ranked as good as - or in some reviews even better than - Apple's iPhone iOS operating system. THAT was Nokia's strategy in January 2011. Only a delusional idiot would change this. http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/the-nokia-saga-predictions-on-this-blog-full-listing-with-links.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/the-nok...

onyva 8y ago

Microsoft’s brute force approache has never worked and will never work. It really doesn’t matter who heads it. As indicate by RMS, and proven time and again, these ethical questions at the heart of the free software movement are important and there for a reason. You can slap “open source” on anything these days, and it has been the case for a while, but it’s missing the point. And dangerous for the free software movement.

shishirsharma 8y ago

Microsoft acquiring Github has completely busted my chops. I am totally depressed now. Is deleting your account from Github is a viable solution? Where to go from here. Bitbucket?

kjeetgill 8y ago

If not Microsoft, who would you have liked to see GitHub bought by? Presumably they'd have to find an exit eventually. My vote would be Mozilla. I can't think of any other company I'd want running a service for "the greater good".

Lordarminius 8y ago

I'm waiting for a reaction from Linus and Stallman

bobdaal 8y ago

Awesome! Now we can end the mass delusion and realize Git sucks and has been a monumental drag on developer productivity. Thak you Microsoft!

heygema 8y ago

First step, Github Theme will go Fabric. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric Second, More ms tools in github. Third, atom is dead. Bright enough I guess.

htims 8y ago

Microsoft sucks .

mrgra 8y ago

Damn thieves!!! They are going to steal all the private repos code... Like they did with Quicktime...

mrgra 8y ago

Damn thieves!!! They are going to steal all the private repos code... Like they did with Quicktime code...