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Microsoft acquires Github

• nevi-me 8y ago
  Satya Nadela's done differently to his predecessors, maybe this will go well. I understand the concern of a few companies dominating everything that we use, but time will tell.
  • fredley 8y ago
    Microsoft has been setting a very (almost unthinkably) different course since Ballmer departed. Bash on Windows, Visual Studio Code, as well as other seemingly genuine commitments to open source. It's wonderful that competitors like GitLab exist, and today is probably a great day for them, but I'm willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on this one - we won't be moving.
    • c3833174 8y ago
      Meanwhile the rent-seeking on FAT patents continues
      • pjmlp 8y ago
        Intel and IBM also have their own share of not so FOSS friendly actions, yet devs keep embracing them.
  • jjuel 8y ago
    I wonder what people would have thought if Github had just disappeared instead of selling to Microsoft? I mean I understand some concern, but this can really only be a good thing for Github in the long run. It isn't like Microsoft was producing a competitor and just bought them to kill them. Honestly, I like this better than Amazon or Google buying them.
    • c3833174 8y ago
      Issues and old repots would be lost but people would move on to another service.
    • bovermyer 8y ago
      This is an important point. Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub means that Amazon and Google lost out on a major component of the developer ecosystem. I doubt we'll be able to predict how they'll respond. Their own code hosting services are... anemic, in Amazon's case, and dead, in Google's case.
      • ethbro 8y ago
        Yeah, it'll be interesting. In hindsight, it's amazing the other hyperscale cloud providers didn't buy it.
    • MrStonedOne 8y ago
      >I wonder what people would have thought if Github had just disappeared I would have preferred it. Very likely their final act would have been to open source github and then we could finally get a good OOS platform that used their own issue tracker. Atm the players are gitlab, a mess that barely works and reserves some pretty fucking basic features for enterprise, some random initials i can never remember (somebody get them a branding guy, even tom haverford would work) and closed source github. So ya, i would have preferred if github failed.
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      That definitely wasn't the only alternative. The reason this happened is to get a payday for the investors. I'm happy they invested, but when you look at GitHub it is a utility, not a commercial enterprise and should be treated like public transport rather than like an oil company.
• okket 8y ago
  Confirmed by GitHub, of course https://twitter.com/github/status/1003623284829638659 https://twitter.com/github/status/1003623284829638659
• chrisper 8y ago
  Empower, extend, extinguish? Or was it different?
  • wintorez 8y ago
    "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice."
    • make3 8y ago
      you can safely attribute to malice what has been clearly stated as a strategy by multiple people on the record (later)
  • atonse 8y ago
    I’m so tired of this trope. It’s like nothing Microsoft does is ever enough for people to realize that there is enough new leadership that isn’t doing this nonsense. Is there any evidence in the Nadella years of MS doing this in the way they used to do this in the 90s?
    • chrisper 8y ago
      Are jokes not allowed anymore? I was trying to make a reference to the "empowering" in the title...
      • DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
        HN is less receptive to humor than most other sites.
    • matthewmacleod 8y ago
      I would still say be wary. There isa definite change of tone in the modern Microsoft, but remember that they're still doing a lot of sketchy things. The ongoing patent trolling, or mandatory telemetry in Windows are examples.
    • TheCondor 8y ago
• oblio 8y ago
  > Once the acquisition closes later this year, GitHub will be led by CEO Nat Friedman, an open source veteran and founder of Xamarin, who will continue to report to Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie; GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath will be a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting to Scott.
  • EnderMB 8y ago
    This was one of the main outcomes I was hoping for in the last HN thread on this acquisition. GitHub get the strong CEO they were hoping for, and one with solid credentials with interacting with the development community.
• endymi0n 8y ago
  Guess that's the very definition of finally reaching their stated goal: Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8
  • gear54rus 8y ago
    Now they can finally begin to squeeze everything out of them. The 'extinguish' stage.
  • bovermyer 8y ago
    Keeping in mind, of course, that Ballmer's Microsoft is very, very different from Nadella's Microsoft...
    • angersock 8y ago
      Yeah, it had reliable revenue streams....
      • mistermann 8y ago
        Can you provide evidence that it is in fact very different in that respect?
    • sametmax 8y ago
      Keeping in mind, of course, that it's an opinion, and not a fact. I happen to have the opposite opinion, although I documented it a lot more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225290 History does not help with trusting them. So let's wait and see. But I talked about MS PR team before, and I can already see it at work everywhere. Here, the first HN links were not warmly welcomed, so we had another one published, then another one published, until one with a positive top comment for them is here. Also plenty of comments to defend them by using vague positive things like "they did good things recently" or "they like open source". If you go on reddit you'll see the same is happening. The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.
• aneutron 8y ago
  I pray to all the deities ever recorded that Microsoft not screw this up.
• Paul_S 8y ago
  "When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future." How is that patent extortion going then? Still earning you money? Any plans to stop in "the near future"? Didn't think so. I'm sure Microsoft will improve github. Just like it improved skype.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    So which company would you rather buy Github? GitHub wasn't profitable. Would you rather it just disappear?
    • mcny 8y ago
      I must ask, if it wasn't profitable on Sunday what changes today?
      • scarface74 8y ago
        You have a company with deep pockets that can fund it as ongoing concern.
        • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
          Going concerns are profitable. MS don't look to me like a company that wants to charitably support Github's userbase?
          • scarface74 8y ago
            The Xbox division wasn't profitable for years and neither was (is?) Bing.
          • hannasanarion 8y ago
            It's not charity, it's a loss leader.
      • dingo_bat 8y ago
• lewisj489 8y ago
  I'm actually happy about this acquisition. For everything that all the 13 y/o "hackers" say on Reddit, this will hopefully be a great thing for the wider community.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    What do you envision happening that will be great [for the current GitHub userbase]?
  • DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    Your post would be more interesting if you gave reasons, rather than merely stating your position.
• codetrotter 8y ago
  > And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future. It’s a fair point but I still cannot read this without thinking of someone saying “yeah I did some things in the past but I’ve totally changed I promise. Look, for the whole past week I’ve been really nice to people haven’t I?”
  • Totoradio 8y ago
    I can understand those concerns, but what can they do to convince you they have changed?
    • adamc 8y ago
      Continue behaving well.
    • nileshtrivedi 8y ago
      (1) Make it easy for alternative OS to run on Surface/Windows-certified devices: Both x86 and ARM. (2) Support OpenDocumentFormat in their office apps. Still remember how they corrupted the ISO certification process by creating OOXML (which is just a wrapper over binary blobs produced by MS-Office) (3) Stop suing Android OEM's for patent licenses
      • Totoradio 8y ago
        About your second point, I just tested it on my machine, Word 2016 saves and opens *.odt files just fine. Is there some unsupported stuff?
        • nileshtrivedi 8y ago
          Yes, their implementation is (deliberately?) patchy with many bugs. They've been lobbying to prevent governments from adopting ODF (an open ISO standard with multiple implementations): https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/22/microsoft_uk_odf_response/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/22/microsoft_uk_odf_re...
• goncalomb 8y ago
  Today is a good day.
• johanj 8y ago
  The press release: Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion: https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
• ulkesh 8y ago
  The real question everyone should be asking is whether Microsoft is trustworthy, cognizant, and honorable enough to be the steward of such a major player that facilitates a large portion of open source software. This has me very concerned for the open source community.
  • pavlov 8y ago
    Why were you not concerned previously about an unprofitable SV startup holding that central position? GitHub wasn’t a non-profit. This was always the endgame for them. They were losing money to acquire a userbase that would be sold when the time is right — just like WhatsApp and numerous other big social SV plays.
    • matthewmacleod 8y ago
      Remember that _GitHub used to be profitable_. Then they took $250m in investment and became unprofitable.
      • pavlov 8y ago
        And that was three years ago. So what’s the point of outrage now?
        • matthewmacleod 8y ago
          I guess it's a great example of why taking funding can be bad, depending on what your goals are.
        • swasheck 8y ago
          It's funny because people are raging over things that Microsoft "said" 20 years ago.
    • ulkesh 8y ago
      Who says I wasn't? And I know Github wasn't a non-profit. You make quite a number of assumptions with your statement. The difference for me is that I was supporting Github (by paying) to be an independent company, warts and all. If their goal was to always sell specifically to Microsoft, I would have voiced many concerns very early on. I would much rather they had sold to Mozilla or another in the open source community.
• ilarum 8y ago
  US$ 7.5 bn, all stock.
  • pavlov 8y ago
    Microsoft’s market cap is around $774 billion, so this is less than 1% dilution. Seems like a great outcome for MSFT investors.
• mromanuk 8y ago
  Microsoft is doing a great job with VS Code, let's hope they continue that way with GitHub.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• zachruss92 8y ago
  I am a GitLab user and have been for about 2 years now. With that being said, I think this acquisition makes a ton of sense strategically. Microsoft has really been trying to change their identity from being a stuffy close-source corporation to an open company that developers can rely on. And they have done pretty well at this. They open sourced .net, run MS SQL on Linux, and have released the WSL (which would have been unfathomable a decade ago). They also moved their VCS over to Git for Windows development. GitHub, however, has a business issue of not making money. I think with the resources that Microsoft can provide GitHub can continue to build a great product and tap further into Microsoft's enterprise user base to make sales and release more features that customers want/need. Congrats to everyone at GitHub for this momentous acquisition!
  • 5ersi 8y ago
    It is reported that GH makes about $200M a year.
    • bobwaycott 8y ago
      Right, but my understanding is they are not profitable (they were, but have been trying to work back toward profitability).
      • mwcampbell 8y ago
        Why did GitHub become unprofitable? Did they spend too much money hosting open-source projects, compared to what they made on private repos? Maybe the lesson is that free hosting never works.
        • bmuon 8y ago
          If I learned anything working at large companies is that hardware is never close to being as expensive as headcount.
          • 08-15 8y ago
• softwaredoug 8y ago
  More tech consolidation under Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple flat out sucks. It doesn't empower developers in the slightest to have a small number of giant companies own everything.
  • mo3gut 8y ago
    Yet they have numerous defenders on this site, all the more peculiar considering those companies' collusion to avoid paying market rates to developers. The preference to be a sharecropper on their plantations is evidently strong, for no very clear reason. And let us not forget the EU's efforts to support incumbents and deter new entrants, with their complex, vague and punitive regulations. These also receive much approval here; perhaps a fruitful field for study by some enterprising psychologists!
    • wilsonnb 8y ago
      I'd love to see some sources on your claim that they are colluding to avoid paying market rates to developers.
      • java_script 8y ago
        https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/ https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...
• Ajedi32 8y ago
  They do seem to be trying to reassure people that they're not gonna mess this up: > And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future. > [...] > Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device. > [...] > Most importantly, we recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform.
  • sametmax 8y ago
    Yes, they got way better at PR. They could get away with bad PR before when they were leader, but now that they have serious competition from everywhere, they are trying to win people away again.
    • gsich 8y ago
      Still pretty much undefeated when it comes to desktop usage.
  • skierscott 8y ago
    >> Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Does an “open platform” mean “open source” or “a plugin system”? I think making it open source would alleviate a lot of dev concerns.
    • heartbreak 8y ago
      If they meant "open source" I have to imagine they would have said so. "Remain" is the key word there. Github is already an open platform with an API and plugin system. Github is not already open source, so it can't remain so.
• rob_fulwell 8y ago
  As I previously commented in a related post: Perhaps Microsoft will open source parts of GitHub? What better way to demonstrate a commitment to the OSS community?
• vthallam 8y ago
  Numerous possibilities for Microsoft having a product with millions of developers. Some top of my head, -> Bundle Github Business Plans and Office 365 which includes Microsoft Teams I guess. -> Better azure integrations and push developers for more Azure usage -> Push VSCode out to more developers -> Connect LinkedIn accounts of developers to their GitHub accounts and help companies hire better
  • tootie 8y ago
    More generally, cloud is the key. MS is using O365 as a lead-in to Azure and Google is using G Suite the same way. GitLab currently has built-in support to pump your CI pipeline to Google Cloud and comes with some hosting credits. That would be the obvious next step for MS. Introduce one-click deployment to Azure Container Service. I can also see VS Code in the browser for your GitHub projects, but that would be brand halo, not a money maker.
  • kthejoker2 8y ago
    Azure already has great GitHub (git repo) integration, I'm hoping they bring some of the social features over into Azure.
• bad_user 8y ago
  People keep mentioning how "Microsoft changed" due to VS Code, the Linux subsystem, .NET Core. I say that they are the same company, only with different cash cows. Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? "But Mom, some of the other companies are doing it too", well yeah, but some of us don't have double standards, in spite of what you'd think and that doesn't absolve them of anything ;-) Brilliant marketing campaign though. They needed it I guess, but it's getting obnoxious. --- That said I'm glad that after the acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility. At least the news isn't all bad.
  • Iv 8y ago
    Exactly. Microsoft ethos is still despicable.
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    Nokia is pretty much alive. As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do, and even gave him a bonus for achieving it.
    • neves 8y ago
      What's is Nokia up to? I'd love to know they are doing interesting things.
      • scrollaway 8y ago
        Well, they just split up their Health division back into Withings. https://health.nokia.com/event/nokia-withings https://health.nokia.com/event/nokia-withings I only know that because I have one of their awesome scales (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales). I was shocked they were Nokia when I found out about them. They're absolutely awesome, highly recommend them.
      • coldacid 8y ago
        Networking hardware, mostly, especially cellular and POTS switching stuff.
• sharemywin 8y ago
  Somebody's got to pay for all the free accounts, might as well be the fortune 500.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• bovermyer 8y ago
  This line in particular caught my attention: > Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences. Does this mean we'll see some sort of VSCode-esque IDE built into GitHub's UI? Or perhaps exposure of VSTS to people who previously weren't aware of it?
  • marpstar 8y ago
    I can envision something like "Deploy to Azure" support as well.
• peter_retief 8y ago
  #2 in Hackernews "GitLab sees huge spike in project imports" I see no reason to trust Microsoft, all they are really doing is trying to buy out any opposition as is what they have always done. Microsoft rips off developers and pays bloggers to say nice stuff about them. No thanks, not now not ever
  • peter_retief 8y ago
    Having looked at it, it seems good, I have an old reaction to Microsoft which is a bit silly
• titanix2 8y ago
  "Cloud blablabla committed blablabla responsability blablabla developers blablabla empower blablabla open-source" Clearly written by HMM: Human Markov Model.
  • naiyt 8y ago
    > The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us. I still have no idea what "intelligent edge" is supposed to mean.
    • bloopernova 8y ago
      Are we the intelligent edge?
      • kuroikyu 8y ago
        Microsoft Edge, the intelligent browser
      • mar77i 8y ago
        No. We're the bleeding edge. Suffering from illnesses such as propaganda-resistance and DIY attitude. Let's move our open soresx elsewhere to bleed.
    • titanix2 8y ago
      Me neither. That's the goal I suppose: should the term had a real and defined meaning, people could argument we're not in this era.
    • callumlocke 8y ago
      I think the edge just means CDN edge locations. There’s been a trend towards making edge locations smarter (via Lambda etc), so you can sometimes send dynamic responses straight back from the edge, ie quicker than always deferring to the big data centre for dynamic stuff. Previously computing on the edge was restricted to fairly simple caching of static responses.
• heckanoobs 8y ago
  I'm excited by this. I feel trapped between Google who will give everything away in exchange for spying on me, and Apple who will respect my privacy but shake me upside down with the most ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics. I'm glad someone as powerful as Microsoft can play the underdog role and provide a viable third alternative. Windows laptops that run Linux well enough for development. VS Code. I now develop on my PC at home using the same workflows that I use on my fancy pants work MacBook. I have a lot of faith in this acquisition. My software team is growing fast and we have so many little problems that feel like they should be solved at the GitHub layer but the solutions aren't there. Microsoft will fix that.
  • swebs 8y ago
    >I feel trapped between Google who will give everything away in exchange for spying on me, and Apple who will respect my privacy but shake me upside down with the most ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics. I'm glad someone as powerful as Microsoft can play the underdog role and provide a viable third alternative. A third alternative of spying on you while also engaging in ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics? Microsoft is the worst of both worlds.
  • rootlocus 8y ago
    > Microsoft will fix that. You have no way of knowing what Microsoft will or will not fix. This is just blind hype.
    • heckanoobs 8y ago
      We can assume Microsoft's motivation is money, they have a long history of selling professional solutions to development teams, I'm a developer with a team on GitHub in need of solutions, and I have money. It's Microsoft's to lose. I think you're mistaking your blind hate for my blind hype
      • rootlocus 8y ago
        > I think you're mistaking your blind hate for my blind hype I don't hate microsoft, and I've shown no hate in my comment. I'm pointing out that you can't expect all your problems to be solved because of an ownership change. Caution and skepticism will serve you better than wishful thinking and hype.
• hsnewman 8y ago
  It seems that lately Microsoft has been making decisions that are in line with computer science. Hope that continues, since their monopoly sets the direction of the desktop and servers, perhaps we will move toward a more secure environment.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• merinowool 8y ago
  This is only a matter of time use of GitHub will require special client with built-in telemetry (read spying). Especially their defensive tone says all. What a sad day for GitHub and the community.
• MrStonedOne 8y ago
  "From the largest corporations to the smallest startups, GitHub is the destination for developers to learn, share and work together to create software." And I think this kind of business oriented view of the people who use github, 'corporations', 'startups' will ultimately hurt open source. No mention for the community developed tool/program/game that makes no money and sees more commits from non-org members then org members. If open source is startups then open source is dead.
• ethbro 8y ago
  From a financial perspective, any purchasing company with enterprise sales / support experience is a great fit. Having MS backing GitHub suddenly makes it a feasible option for a lot of conservative enterprise customers.
  • dnomad 8y ago
    Exactly. A big concern for enterprise customers (that often drove them to Atlassian over Github) was the fear that Github was "just a startup" and might disappear at any moment and the lack of integration with existing enterprise tools. If MS can put together a comprehensive platform here that doesn't cost an arm and a leg they could dominate this market. The real story here is that nobody wants to host their own services and nobody wants to spend time/money even integrating various hosted solutions. The success of Atlassian and this acquisition confirms that people want to pay a flat monthly fee and get access to a bunch of highly integrated, quality services. The web continues to drive the creation of highly centralized platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google) and it doesn't look like IT development market is going to be any different.
    • WorldMaker 8y ago
      Which partly was great marketing from Atlassian because it isn't like they are that far removed from "just a startup" either.
      • jupp0r 8y ago
        Have you missed their IPO?
        • WorldMaker 8y ago
          That's a fair point in that I was unaware they had IPOed as many years back as they had (I had thought it more recent). It was partly a joke. But I have worked with people of a Fortune Xty company mindset that didn't consider vendors unless they were also Fortune Xty +/- Y companies, and yet some of them used Atlassian products despite being outside their usual Y margin, which I found fascinating.
• dz0ny 8y ago
  GitHub signature box III https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBhH_spfBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBhH_spfBo
• unictek 8y ago
  It's a global step backward for Open Source Software. Microsoft was always hated because of their closed source software and now they hold the principal Open Source bastion. Github helped so many Open Source Developers get their projects out of shadow, thanks to the "star" system, news feed... and sometimes this could change a life (like me that created a startup on top of an open source project that became successful on Github). I feel ashamed now to work on Github, a platform that is, today, owned by Microsoft, a company which I do not support their philosophy and culture. For me it's a day of mourning and I pry Microsoft to not touch at what makes Github what it is today.
  • mtgx 8y ago
    Open source projects should move away from GitHub immediately. I'll consider it a con for any company that keeps its code on GitHub going forward.
• KwanEsq 8y ago
  If they could expand Github to support Mercurial as well perhaps they could bring some real value.
• krzat 8y ago
  I wonder what Google and Apple will do with their projects on github.
• unictek 8y ago
  Gitlab is not comparable to Github at all. Gitlab is just about hosting git projects that's all. It's not community driven at all.
  • rootlocus 8y ago
    From a development perspective, it's actually very community driven https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?label_name%5B%5D=feature+proposal https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?label_name%5B...
  • Qwertie 8y ago
    You have obviously never used gitlab in depth. I have never seen a tech company so open about everything they do with the community.
  • azurelogic 8y ago
    You're right on the first point. They aren't comparable. GitLab is a community driven, open core product that is far more powerful than GitHub. GitLab has an extremely robust CI system built in. In addition, you can even use them to create private Docker registries, which I find useful for creating my own private CI images. Plus, they have a better security model (5 tiers), wildcards for branch protection, and tag protection. I'm sure there's other places that they differ, but before you disparage a company, please be informed about who they are and how great their product actually is.
    • oaiey 8y ago
      I find the argument that Gitlab is community driven a joke. They are not. And they never can. The community edition can never be ready for more than git hosting. We were recently evaluating it, and found that basic needs like code reviews are not covered. And their hiding of LDAP Integration (luckily the extended community stepped in and duplicated their module) is a joke.
      • foepys 8y ago
        I don't get your point. GitLab has basic code reviews [1, 2] and LDAP support [3]. LDAP support is better in EE than in CE but that's expected. What is missing for you? 1: https://gitlab.com/help/user/project/merge_requests/merge_request_approvals https://gitlab.com/help/user/project/merge_requests/merge_re... 2: https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/development/code_review.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/development/code_review.html 3: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/auth/ldap-ee.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/auth/ldap-ee.html
• Iv 8y ago
  Well, I kinda trusted Github to be good actors with the things they centralized while Microsoft is almost the epitome of reasons why centralization is bad and why you want to carefully keep control over your process. Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.
  • tootie 8y ago
    I trust Microsoft more than GitHub, honestly. GH handled their last round of ethics issues very poorly.
    • Iv 8y ago
      When was the last time Github was fined for having abused a monopoly position? It was 2008 for Microsoft. EU charged them with more than 1 billion dollar for their abusive practices. An investigation is ongoing in Spain since Windows 8 UEFI's practices made competition harder. Microsoft is still Microsoft. Breaking standards, making interoperability harder. It won't be 6 months before github starts having VS-only or windows-only features.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• mtgx 8y ago
  They paid $7.5 billion? Wow. Microsoft has a knack for overpaying for companies (and then putting them into the ground), doesn't it?
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Given the earlier statements that they "balked" at $5 billion, I'm guessing they wish they'd bought in earlier. I had figured with their CEO troubles, Microsoft might've negotiated a lower price.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• Touche 8y ago
  If you're wondering why they bought GitHub, it's here: > Second, we will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services. This is it. At one time Microsoft used to dominate enterprise software development in certain areas (most of the east coast in the U.S.) to such a degree that it was almost impossible to find a non-.NET developer job. Their biggest failure was TFS. At one time all .NET shops used it. But then git crept in and the rest is history. Microsoft is going to sell a lot of enterprise hosting accounts. Look for the on-premises installations to go through the roof, especially.
  • foobarbazetc 8y ago
    Or they lock down the Enterprise version to Azure...
    • foepys 8y ago
      I don't think they will. They will most likely want to replace Team Foundation Server with GitHub Enterprise. There might not be a special AWS image anymore but a lot of developer teams rely on the on-premises variant of TFS.
      • GordonS 8y ago
        Honestly, I hope not - over the years, TFS has turned from a turd into something good - Visual Studio Online, Microsoft's hosted version of TFS, really is a great product. It lets you use Git for source control and provides excellent backlog and CI/CD features - I don't often get evangelical about a product, but it really is a joy to use.
  • dlandis 8y ago
    > it was almost impossible to find a non-.NET developer job. Mostly agree with the points, but I think it was always just as easy (if not easier) to find an enterprise Java based job than it was a .NET developer job.
  • binthere 8y ago
• flashmob 8y ago
  It read like a standard run-of-the-mill press release you would expect from a big corporation. Btw, the word-stem 'develop*' appeared 31 times. Reminded me of the old famous chant... "Developers, developers, developers!"
• gbil 8y ago
  As an engineer I'm a bit puzzled that github was valuated 3 times less than linkedin. Yet I haven't done any real analysis, neither I know if business data of X individuals is valued more than hosting Y projects, probably from an ad + data gathering perspective it makes some sense but still I'd love to hear a more in depth analysis on this
• Arnt 8y ago
  I reported a bug in a Microsoft product earlier this year, one whose only effect was to complicate interop with a minor opensource competitor. They handled that fairly, promptly and well. Microsoft isn't the same company as ten and twenty years ago.
  • ekianjo 8y ago
    > Microsoft isn't the same company as ten and twenty years ago. It's not because you had one positive experience with one small part of MS that it means the whole company's culture has suddenly reversed to be philanthropic or something.
    • BFatts 8y ago
      It's not one positive experience, but it's a sequence of them that shows that Microsoft is lead differently than it was in the past. Yes, this is one incident but personally I've witnessed many others that show that Microsoft isn't the same company it was 10 years ago.
    • Arnt 8y ago
      I've had more good experiences, I mentioned that one because it's such a stark contrast, not because it's unique. Microsoft is hardly philanthtropic. I'd say it acts like a fairly enlightened bigco these days, that's very different from around y2k. My experiences are such that I did report that bug, I'd never have bothered doing that 20 years ago.
  • hvo 8y ago
    "Microsoft isn't the same company as ten and twenty years ago."I notice this as well. But I am trying to figure out how Microsoft will manage GitHub. Is GitHub going to be a standalone company within Microsoft or a significant part of its enterprise division? What folks here are not talking about is how Microsoft handles LinkedIn after acquisition.
• bitL 8y ago
  So, is GitHub going to become a Synapse[1]? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817 I am wondering how good their Deep Learning-based code analysis tool prototypes are, if they can identify bleeding edge code in private repos already...
• ksec 8y ago
  GitHub - $160M Recurring Revenue in 2016... sometimes I am amazed how they got to the $7.5B figures. I wonder what happen to Atom Editor. Although I think most are using Visual Studio Code anyway, so may be it make sense to marge the man power. I wonder if they would make Coding ( Visual Studio Code ), Code Hosting ( GitHub ), Deploy ( Azure ) all seamless. Surely now Microsoft has the incentive to make Ruby Rails a first class Citizen on Windows? At this rate, I wouldn't be surprise in 10 years time Microsoft open sources its Windows Kernel.
  • mtgx 8y ago
    When Microsoft sets it mind on buying a company, they're willing to pay almost anything. Remember when they wanted to pay $45 billion for Yahoo only a decade ago? Companies that are exploring the option of selling to Microsoft know this quite well, and they exploit it to the fullest.
    • skinnymuch 8y ago
      That included the Alibaba (including the percentage sold off since) and Yahoo Japan stakes. It would’ve made them good money buying Yahoo at that price.
  • heartbreak 8y ago
    > Coding ( Visual Studio Code ) Both the "real" IDE, Visual Studio, and VS Code already have solid git and Github integration.
• netsec_burn 8y ago
  I still see Microsoft's predictable behavior in 2018. I have a friend who owns a Surface, and I was thinking it would be useful to put Linux on it (it was older ARM hardware). Well you can't, it's a Surface RT and Microsoft not only locks the bootloader but it also only runs Microsoft approved apps. That's their endgame whenever possible. Apparently people didn't like having fully locked down computers and they discontinued the product, shocker.
  • AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > Apparently people didn't like having fully locked down computers and they discontinued the product, shocker. They do, it just can't pretend to be a full on computer, see the iPad.
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      It doesn't have to pretend, it is a full computer that is intentionally crippled by the vendor. Apple doing it to doesn't make it any less despicable. These stupid strategies turn perfectly good computers into landfill.
      • giancarlostoro 8y ago
        Windows apps are NOT compiled for ARM though. It would take emulating the entire x86 processor arch on ARM to allow this to run normal software on it or the original devs porting / recompiling with ARM in mind. A lot of old windows software is only available in original binary form and the source is long gone.
      • sydd 8y ago
        It is as a full computer as an iPad, and was never meant to be more. It has a dumbed down version of Windows, has ARM architecture and was lacked down from day one. Why aren't people pissed that they cant install Linux on their iPhones and iPads?
      • ovao 8y ago
        "Despicable" is pretty questionable. I still use my six-year-old iPad almost daily. That's certainly a longer lifespan than I've ever gotten out of any PC or a Mac, and the reason is probably because it isn't a full-fledged computer. Once I'm finally tired of its now anemic performance and replace it, I can probably plug it in and use it as an SSH viewer for journalctl or something, so it can still be of some use.
• waydowntogo 8y ago
  Open source was / is Microsoft's opposite side - same like Linux is Microsoft's opposite side. No matter how hard Microsoft will try to be part of open source it never will be. Btw You can't have your cake and eat it.
• nimbius 8y ago
  Friendly reminder: this is the same Microsoft that "empowered" skype and once called open source a cancer. Its the same Microsoft that ruined open document standards and started the browser wars. I wouldnt be surprised to see next years release of "Github Pro Platinum with Minecraft 3D and Windows Store integration" For those looking to move, https://gitlab.com https://gitlab.com is an excellent open source alternative that can easily import all your github projects. https://gitea.io https://gitea.io is also available and runs on as little as a raspberry pi.
  • hobofan 8y ago
    Also the company that was responsible for killing the Limux project[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
    • 7dare 8y ago
      > In November Munich city council decided to revert to Windows by 2020 with all systems being replaced by Windows 10 counterparts. > Reasons cited were adoption and users being unhappy with the lack of software available for Linux. > A report commissioned by Munich and undertaken by Accenture found the most important issues were organizational. > In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD, wherein it is claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. > Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich. It's not as clear-cut as you're painting it.
      • foepys 8y ago
        Shortly before the official announcement of the end of LiMux, Microsoft's German headquarter moved to Munich [1]. It's also estimated to cost about 89 million € to return back to Windows [2 (german)], including 24 million € for "external consulting". 1: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-headquarters/ https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h... 2: https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2017-26-Muenchens-Rueckfall-auf-Windows-wird-zum-Millionengrab-3909196.html https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2017-26-Muenchens-Rueckfall-...
• matheuslc 8y ago
  It's clear and clever that Microsoft changed your vision about open source to make more money. It's ok as the society that we live are moved this way and its good for us. The only thing that scares me its the power of those all big companies to buy all other companies. We are tending to have a monopoly and strict visions about computers and all the philosophies involved in it.
• madebysquares 8y ago
  Curious why they are changing CEOs if they want to continue the culture and community.
  • Rapzid 8y ago
    I'm guess it's the external community culture they want to keep. GitHub has been looking for a new CEO since last August, and one of their other guys had actually taken over many of the duties in the interim.. They have had some high profile scandal/dramas(with one coinciding fairly closely with last August CEO search...). I'm guessing any internal culture related to that stuff as well as not making money is probably on the block.
  • spooneybarger 8y ago
    GitHub CEO stepped down in August 2017. They haven't had anyone in the role since then.
    • madebysquares 8y ago
      I was not aware of all the CEO troubles, makes sense then, on that front.
  • ggregoire 8y ago
    GitHub was not profitable, obviously you change the CEO.
• timvisee 8y ago
  Will be moving everything over to some different server this evening. So damn happy that that's easily possible with the decentralized approach within Git.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• diffeomorphism 8y ago
  > judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future. But please, please not the slightly less recent past? And not the telemetry stuff? And not the patent extortions? ...
• vinayms 8y ago
  Its ironic that the three men in the first picture are as uncomfortable and edgy as the developers are. Can someone explain why this merger is bad, beyond the usual refrain "Microsoft is evil"? I mean, I rally want to understand what the fuss is all about. It isn't like all our repositories are locked in some proprietary GitHub format and now we are at the mercy of MS. As is happening, people can always migrate elsewhere, and there is always going to be an elsewhere. Are people upset that they have to take the pains to migrate due to Microsoft's involvement? In that case, it begs the question why is it bad at all. Currently, with my trouble understanding this, it seems like a knee jerk reaction, like disgruntled Americans talking about migrating to Canada post Trump.
• mkirklions 8y ago
  Yes, I think people should expect to move. Microsoft cannot be trusted. They make fine products, but they are definitely looking to make money from this acquisition. EDIT: This is to say that Github was not looking to squeeze their users. I have been squeezed by microsoft.
  • lmcarreiro 8y ago
    > but they are definitely looking to make money from this acquisition Who wouldn't?
  • jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Why shouldn't they? It's not like GitHub wasn't trying to make money before.
    • LarryDarrell 8y ago
      It's like a bunch of anarchists woke up to find that Kushner just bought the apartment building they were squatting in. Github wasn't a Robin Hood scheme. They were never giving their finger to the man. Their goal was to make a lot of money, failing that, sell for a lot of money. We are lucky Oracle didn't buy them at least. Given how many employers/recruiters want to see a GitHub account, I expect to see a lot of future LinkedIn integration.
  • hannasanarion 8y ago
    Economics is not a zero-sum game. Just because the company is making money doesn't mean that you are losing something. Github has been underwater for years, would you rather it be propped up by a big corporate sponsor that can subsidize its losses, or run out of money and die? I expect to move, because I also do not trust microsoft, but I am not moving yet until I see what they do with it.
    • mkirklions 8y ago
      >Economics is not a zero-sum game. This is not what I'm implying. >I am not moving yet until I see what they do with it. If you are too late, you might not get your projects off without paying fees.
• chinathrow 8y ago
  Phew. As a non-Microsoft user for like 15 years, I'm really happy we setup my company to host our git repos on Bitbucket from the start.
• djhworld 8y ago
  Wonder what this will mean for other organisations and their open source projects? For example, Google has quite a few (e.g. golang, kubernetes etc)
  • sabujp 8y ago
    those are open source
• guidovranken 8y ago
  Precisely because the FOSS community is so worried about this acquisition, there is a lot to win for them, and if they manage to keep improving Github in the perception of its users, that is a trust and PR victory that would be difficult to attain otherwise, and it would help institutionalize their renewed, positive vision on open source. It can honestly go both ways.
• fiblye 8y ago
  I'm actually kind of surprised that HN permits clear marketing babble headlines like this, vs a more objective "Microsoft acquires Github" headline.
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    HN prefers the original headline according to the guidelines, unless it's extremely poor/clickbaity. There's also been about sixty or seventy threads submitted with "Microsoft is acquiring GitHub" in the past day, so leaving it as the original makes it clear this is the official announcement post.
• guylepage3 8y ago
  Ugh.. I feel like I've been punched in the gut.. First Sunrise. Now GitHub. I give MS 6 months to mess GitHub up or discontinue service. Time to really look into GitLab.
  • srean 8y ago
    Bitbucket is fine too.
• amq 8y ago
  A really powerful move now would be to open-source GitHub.
  • cjbillington 8y ago
    Now that would be how to to show people you mean it. By making themselves liable to being forked, they would be convincingly committing to doing a better job than anyone else as judged by the community.
• forgottenpass 8y ago
  I look at SoureForge's fall, and of all the possible futures for GitHub, is this really that bad? GitHub has been on a track to sell and/or monetize more aggressively for years. Of everyone that could afford GitHub, Microsoft has the money on hand to spend a bit of time figuring out a sustainable business model that doesn't run everyone off, and has doubled down on buying developer good will in the recent years. My more personal take is: if you hate Microsoft's track record, you should have every other big software company at least as much. Were there really better realistic possibilities for GitHub?
• braxxox 8y ago
  > Microsoft is all-in on open source Right. That's why Windoze is and always has been an open source project...
• Argentum01 8y ago
  Boooo
• samlambert 8y ago
  Here at GitHub, we’re excited for what this acquisition means for the future of software development and open source. We’ll remain focused on putting the developer community first and will stay an open platform to continue to serve developers in all industries. There has been so much excitement from both sides during this process. Our shared values around empowering developers across the globe made this a natural fit
  • jacquesm 8y ago
    > Our shared values around empowering developers across the globe made this a natural fit. Please. Do you have to start spouting corporate bs right away? I'm happy you guys got your payday but Microsoft and GitHub 'shared values' are so far from each other that I sincerely hope you won't end up regretting this deal in the longer term.
  • filomeno 8y ago
    I'm glad you have been so excited during this process, however mine dropped to zero just yesterday. Fortunately, in contrary to most markets dominated by your current owner, this is not a monopoly and we've got plenty of alternatives.
  • DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    > There has been so much excitement from both sides during this process. Glad you're having fun. > We’ll remain focused on putting the developer community first and will stay an open platform to continue to serve developers in all industries. What's your source of that confidence - what MS execs told you? For how long into the future can you personally swear that statement will be true? > Our shared values around empowering developers across the globe made this a natural fit. I really hope there's some nuance in that claim. Otherwise I retroactively regret having a paid Github account.
• partiallypro 8y ago
  I don't understand why everyone is so against this, this means Github is going to become more useful and tools will be extended. Microsoft knows developers better than many of the other companies. Perhaps it would have made more sense to be a joint venture company between Google/Microsoft/Apple/Linux Foundation? I don't know? I think this is the second best alternative to that.
• thelastidiot 8y ago
  Today, I decided to move to GitLab. Thank god there is an alternative. I won't give one penny to Microsoft since I remember all the deceptive methods they used to retain their market shares. Their CEO was in the company when all of that happens so don't come and tell me that things have changed.
• marenkay 8y ago
  I'm wondering what this will mean for Atom and VS Code. Wondering if MS will continue supporting that, considering that VS Code seems to be a more pleasant experience at this point.
• thelastidiot 8y ago
  Today, I decided to move to GitLab. Thank god there is an alternative. I won't give one penny to Microsoft since I remember all the deceptive methods they used to retain their market shares. Their CEO was in the company when all of that happened so don't come and tell me that things have changed.
• solatic 8y ago
  TL-DR: Push GutHub Enterprise sales through existing Microsoft sales channels, and push Azure and related products to GitHub users. The first doesn't matter to me. The second makes me think everything from "Add a .azure.ci.cfg file to your GitHub project to trigger builds, only $X/metric!" (not so bad) to "Advanced issue management available through MS Project 365 integration, please ask your project admin to subscribe to Office 365 to unlock!" (please, no...) A large part of GitHub's appeal to the open source community was that all features were available for free to open source projects. If Microsoft wanted to make more features available for free to open-source projects, then Visual Studio Team Services would be a much, much different product, and Microsoft wouldn't need to acquire a platform that directly competes with their current product line.
• pier25 8y ago
  If Nat is at the helm this may end up turning all right. Anyway, I'm moving my personal repos to Gitlab and strongly considering moving my team's repos too. Specially considering that our bill will drop to $0.
• ksec 8y ago
  Related Notes: Speakerdeak, originally part of Github is now under fewerandfaster.com Gaug.es - Turns out Github sold it long ago.
• vortico 8y ago
  <shitpost> "It's empower, extend, and extinguish now guys" - Microsoft </shitpost>
• greatamerican 8y ago
  GitHub itself has not been a well-run company. Maybe this will help them release features they've lacked for a long time.
• matthberg 8y ago
  Here's github's blog post on the subject: https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/ https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/
• alexeiz 8y ago
  Time to migrate off Github, folks. Microsoft has a long, long history of destroying every company they acquire. For the latest example, see how Skype is being run into the ground. There is a prevailing state of mind at Microsoft that if they own something they should be able to do anything with it. And so they will. It's only a matter of time until Microsoft starts putting their proprietary crap into Github to make it better integrate with their enterprise offerings. Free users will be neglected and things will get broken for them. For any respected open source project, it's irresponsible to depend on Github at this point. The sooner you get off it the fewer problems you'll have later.
• ams6110 8y ago
  Strike One: using the cliche buzzword "empowering" in the announcement.
• whataretensors 8y ago
  Microsoft waits on the sidelines til winners emerge then just buy the winners. Similar to what government is doing except earlier. I guess it works. I don't want to support that though. Time to find a new git host.
• throwawaymanbot 8y ago
  "Linux is a Cancer" - Some Microsoft CEO "Hello Gitlab" - Some Git user.
• olfactory 8y ago
  I've always maintained that Open Source is less an ideological movement opposed to capitalism than it is a different sort of contract for capitalist interactions. Of course, it was inevitable that in order to survive Microsoft would adapt its business to utilize the kinds of interactions fostered by open source. Acquiring Github represents the first attempt by Microsoft to own some of the culture of open source. Microsoft is still very far behind in several key ways that the Github acquisition won't fix. But the acquisition signals a willingness to move in that direction. Some of these are: - The "Microsoft account" is a hugely complicated mess, far more complex and unwieldy than a google account. This is a serious miss and it's not rocket science. Look at the places where users are having to reset passwords all the time, getting failed logins, incomplete profiles, etc. Those are major warts that should not exist. - Microsoft should push hard for adoption of PowerShell on unix/linux, and if it fails at that task it should adopt bash as the main shell for Windows, sunsetting cmd.exe and PowerShell. - Microsoft should figure out a way to provide integrated X Server (and next generation variants of X) support in Windows. There is a big opportunity to one-up OSX by doing this in an open way. - Microsoft should offer all of the "pro" and "enterprise" features of Visual Studio free to all developers and should provide high quality command line based tooling to allow for seamless integration with other open source development tools. - Microsoft should simplify and fix code signing and make available (for free) all tools and utilities and infrastructure for trusted software distribution across multiple platforms. - Microsoft should make firm committments with respect to any APIs or Azure services in terms of life cycle, EOL committments, etc. This would be a big differentiator with Google. - Microsoft should fully open source some of its products that are duds, such as outlook for ios, and let the community make them awesome.
• avs733 8y ago
  I wonder how intentional releasing this the hours before the WWDC Keynote was.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• dqoo 8y ago
  rip open source
• wewake 8y ago
  This doesn't seem okay. I don't feel good about this acquisition. I used to associate Github with open-source, now I'm going to have to associate it with another proprietary software from Microsoft and that breaks my heart a little. "Developers are the builders of this new era, writing the world’s code. And GitHub is their home.", doesn't feel like home anymore. :(
• balozi 8y ago
  $7.5 Billion is a lot of money for GitHub. Just saying...
  • amysox 8y ago
    That's an awful lot of inflation for thirty pieces of silver.
• stevetodd 8y ago
  Interesting, timed for the first day of Apple’s WWDC.
• amarraja 8y ago
  I for one am quite happy about this. Github innovation seems to have stalled, now with Nat/Scott Gu at the helm there could be exciting times to come.
• lameiam 8y ago
  Sorry, Nokia killed Nokia.
• AnnoyingSwede 8y ago
  My main consern is what will happen to projects hosted that MS would consider questionable repos, such as rootkits for consoles, open source drivers for their own proprietary hardware.. I expect a lot of data to be purged.
• mshenfield 8y ago
  My two cents are they'll leverage the acquisition and get free marketing by moving Github to Azure. I'm less worried about them doing some 90's Microsoft chicanery (they've shown a real willingness to invest in dev goodwill in the past 5 years) than inadvertently letting Github fall into disrepair, by understaffing and shifting focus even more to the Enterprise offering. I'm going to let things play out before judging. They might ramp up investment in the main Github platform, or open source Github because they're not relying on it as a cash cow.
• mehrdadn 8y ago
  I guess this is why they just shut down CodePlex? https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-down-codeplex/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-...
• strogonoff 8y ago
  Seeing GitHub acquired, I can’t help but imagine that Gitlab would go that route sooner or later. Their free offering is even more extensive than GitHub’s, and I don’t think there’s visibility into whether their revenue from paid plans is enough to offset that. Since becoming backed by a major player is both a blessing (cash reserves to fuel the free offering!) and a curse (drive to increase shareholder value could go against longer-term community interests), I have mixed feelings about this trend. Slightly tangentially, Gitlab has nearly caught up with GitHub and is arguably ahead in some ways feature-wise. I’m happy having built my small agency’s workflow around it. I enjoy being able to drop a dotfile into repository root and have the product tested and deployed by CI to (in my case) AWS S3 or EC2, or get an email report if something prevented that from happening, after subsequent commit. On my roadmap is Terraform integration and having the automation provision all resources, but even in its current state I don’t think I can overstate the difference it makes, especially with a smaller team of engineers. Some features of Gitlab at the moment are objectively inferior to GitHub’s implementation (simpler protected branch model with no way to mandate signed commits comes to mind), but many others appear stronger (issue tracker & boards, milestones, merge requests, the above-mentioned CI). Feel free to give me a shout if you’re considering moving your business to Gitlab and I’ll share my experience.
  • ChristianBundy 8y ago
    > Feel free to give me a shout if you’re considering moving your business to Gitlab and I’ll share my experience. I'd love to hear your input on this.
  • ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > Seeing GitHub acquired, I’d speculate that Gitlab will go that route sooner or later. Bingo. It's bizarre to hear people stampeding to GitLab when they're subject to the same financial and revenue pressures as GitHub or any other business. Somebody's paying for those servers and bandwidth and that somebody is expecting a return on their investment.
    • Kudos 8y ago
      Whatever happens to Gitlab, you have the option of hosting the open source edition yourself. If they get acquired by Oracle in the morning, a fork could conceivably rise to take its place.
• peff 8y ago
  I'm a GitHub employee and spend most of my time contributing to the Git project. I've always been very happy about how GitHub supported my participation in the community. Sometimes what I do is directly useful to GitHub, and sometimes it's a matter of keeping the project healthy for everyone. It's always been about contributing, and not trying to control. Microsoft started contributing to Git about 2 years ago, and in the last six months, we've seen them increase their contributions. From what I've seen they've taken the same approach: give developers the resources and freedom to figure out what the project needs and improve it. I'm excited about some of the performance work they've been doing (e.g., fsmonitor integration, graph optimizations). So I'm optimistic about this with respect to Git. I think it will mean continued support for the project. And I do feel like Microsoft "gets" open source in a way that most people never would have believed 5 or 10 years ago.
• digitalsin 8y ago
  Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
• CodeSheikh 8y ago
  Besides GitLab, is it also worth looking into Bitbucket free tier? I am just curious where the trend will go as far as porting of projects goes? I am guessing a lot of BIG NAME devs are going to jump the ship. One thing Microsoft failed to comprehend is that if you want to be all buddy-buddy with open-source community then don't go out and buy the condo they are renting in and lay out new rules.
• OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  Microsoft already had a open source hosting site called CodePlex until they fucked it into the ground.
• rishabhd 8y ago
  I hope it will be embrace, extend and empower instead of the usual embrace, extend and extinguish.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• nearmuse 8y ago
  I don't understand this. To me it looked like Github never much strayed (or progressed) in terms of functionality. It stayed a git repo management tool and that was it. It is obviously what people liked about it: it stuck to a single function. They had so a huge role in popularizing git IMO, they secured some room and ample time for (non-overbearing) experimentation. Their issue tracking was very basic, and there could be so much work done there they could subsequently sell as something additional to core git repo functionality. Or they could improve code review tools etc. I am afraid this is what will also happen to StackOverflow eventually with their attempts at Documentation, Jobs and now SO for teams. It looks like they are trying to compete but in the end it might turn out being them signaling their willingness to potential buyers by "moving in the right direction". It is not the fact that it's Microsoft, it's the fact that the finality is almost always acquisition. I always looked at SO and github as an alternative to Linkedin's walls of enumerations, as a way to speak to other developers instead of HRs, and now it is not so for Github.
• OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  Look at the general corporate response in this thread. They embody 'reassurance'. Heh.
• marricks 8y ago
  I think what I said yesterday stil has relevance: —- Can 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. *For example, MS hasn’t changed all that much: they still force device makers to sell Linux at a higher or equal price to Windows so people won’t jump ship. 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...
  • sixothree 8y ago
    MS has far many more project opened source than just VSCode. Maybe they will do the same for github, which ahem.... is not.
• um_ya 8y ago
  If Microsoft wants to make Github better, it needs to improve the search functionality and maybe add a "related libraries" section when you're looking at a particular library.
• ChicagoDave 8y ago
  This feels like Slashdot from 10 years ago. I thought the anti-Microsoft sentiment had dissipated, but clearly that’s not the case. I was a Microsoft focused developer through the bad years and even I thought they acted horribly against Netscape. They ended up paying a billion dollars for it and we’re forced to change. I wasn’t a fan of Ballmer either and thought MS had lost its way. Windows Phone started off nice but they just couldn’t get enough developer interested. Maybe that was the wake up call. If you don’t have the devs and you’re a dev-centric company, you’re doomed. In comes Satya Nadella, along with Scott Guthrie and other internal proponents of open development and the company has very demonstrably changed its stripes in the last five years. I judge companies on current behavior and Microsoft seems to be doing far more right than wrong.
  • romaniv 8y ago
    >I judge companies on current behavior and Microsoft seems to be doing far more right than wrong. This isn't about behavior. This is about product management. As a reminder, Microsoft's current products include TFS (and I don't mean just TFSVC) and Teams.
    • ChicagoDave 8y ago
      And nearly everyone using TFS uses the TFS-Git repositories now, including MS itself. The PM aspects of TFS are notoriously cumbersome, so I see the Github acquisition as a potential benefit to that side of TFS. Then again, I think Mingle (Thoughtworks) is the best agile project management tool.
• neelkadia 8y ago
  Octocat is sad. Look at the picture!
• wnsire 8y ago
  > We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open > Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences. Which one is it ? Those statements are just contradictory . It's obvious that they will bring all their stuff into Github as it has become a central piece for MS Engineers and has become strategic for them , either to optimize engineers productivity or just to better sell their products and Azure/Visual Studio Services Package. Meaning whether or not you like MS tools , you will get some "Open in Visual Studio" button , send in "Microsoft Team" buttons etc... and probably more stuff like this that most people didn't wanted in the first place. This is really a terrible day for Open Source.
  • 7dare 8y ago
    I don't think these are contradictory. Even if you interpret the second one as "new buttons to advertise Microsoft products", it doesn't damage a developer-first stance or independent operation. Moreover, GitHub has already partnered with dozens of other companies for its Education program for instance [0]. This already compromises independent operation, and displays ads to thousands of students, "whether or not they like these tools" (your words). [0] - https://education.github.com/ https://education.github.com/
    • wnsire 8y ago
      You are not getting the point. MS will integrate Github with MS Ecosystem ( Azure , .NET , VSTS etc.. ) as described in their slides. From this point there is two possibility A - They open every single new API they use as well as UI/UX API so other providers can integrate themself to Github B - They don't open (or partially) those new API and Azure/MS Ecosystem will be the de facto providers for every single stuff that is possible in github. You will end up with a "Open in [Insert Microsoft Products]" buttons and you won't be able to change that , third party providers won't be able to appear here as well. Github would have never done in the first place because they were independant , now every single stuff they do will have to be linked one way or another to MS. Watch the slides , everything is very well described. https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c.s-microsoft.com/en-us/CMSFiles/calldeck.pptx?version=f3eef72b-35d3-95b2-4fda-73a47f805c7f https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c....
• meddlepal 8y ago
  It's hilarious to see people kvetching about lock-in here when probably 90% of HNers are working on projects locked into AWS or something else in their stack.
• yetanothervoice 8y ago
  With Microsoft's proven record of "obeying the law" by suppressing free speech in China, what does the future hold for dissident sites hosted on Github that resulted in the world’s largest DDoS attacks?
• hoborama 8y ago
  "You don't always geeeet what you wa-ant..."
• garyclarke27 8y ago
  Wow $7.5 Billion, a nice juicy sum for a company that has influence yes, but very limited profit potential, considering that developers (despite earning well) seem to be v reluctant to part with their cash - juding by anecdotal evidence of numerous comments here, expecting everything to be free and moaning about piddling costs such as Sublime Text licence. Wonder how Linus Torvalds feel? The sellors should send him a small percentage in gratitude for making them billionaires.
  • oaiey 8y ago
    This is not only for extend their profits but also to protect. Imagine what it meant to Microsoft if another of the big five would have acquired it. Just think of Amazon and a deploy to AWS button.
• consultSKI 8y ago
  ask netscape devs, or Java devs, or Nokia devs. guess the headline, "MSFT: Destroying Standards Every Way Possible" is just not quite as sexy.
• strin 8y ago
  Github has been losing the battle in the enterprise world to Gitlab. The latter has more appealing features to enterprise users. So this acquisition in some sense a great opportunity for Github as well to enter enterprise under the wings of Microsoft.
  • ggregoire 8y ago
    My company uses GitLab because it's less expensive than GitHub.
• andjd 8y ago
  I realize that Atom is fully open source, but I'm a little concerned that this puts VSCode and Atom under the same roof. I feel that those platforms are where the innovation in text editors has been recently, and can't imagine that MS will fund two products that compete directly with each other and that without that direct competition, they won't work on improving either.
• angrygoat 8y ago
  The acquisition is for $7.5 billion[0]; dividing by the 28 million active developers on GitHub, that's ~ $270 per developer. [0] https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
• sanbor 8y ago
  This is a wake up call. Too many things are relying on Github right now. Microsoft was part of the PRISM program. If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks. What if in some very specific cases you download dependencies from GitHub and they give you a different version with malicious code? It's the NSA. They could be smart enough to only deploy those attacks on production servers were nobody is going to manually review npm packages.
  • dschuetz 8y ago
    Yes! The Internet is a giganto conspiracy theory! No, you're wrong, it's the CIA! They asked DARPA to develop ARPA net, remember?
  • kibwen 8y ago
    Why would Github be any harder for the NSA to coerce than Microsoft?
    • falcon620 8y ago
      Because Github, unlike Microsoft is not particularly dependant on US government contracts.
      • lwansbrough 8y ago
        NSA doesn't have to ask, so this is a moot point.
        • anonymouswacker 8y ago
          Exactly. This is why there's no point in encryption, or any sort of obfuscation.
      • xaiki 8y ago
        Well hello there, I'd like to share a story with you. I'm the maintainer of butterproject.org and have been maintaining popcorntime.io for a while, we had there 2 issues with GitHub a few years ago, both related to (unfounded) copyright claims on the butter and popcorntime code (we absolutely own the right to every single line there), when we tried to make our case we were ignored once and asked to 'keep things quiet' by side channels the second time. Most likely, the mpaa, didn't want us to exist and GitHub complied with shutting down our repos and sending a cese and desist to all our 800ish forks (at a time where we were trying to transform BitTorrent media streaming into a viable business plan). Maybe it's time we build our core infrastructure on something else than companies that act irrationally when threatened to be sued ?
• AngeloAnolin 8y ago
  Can't wait for the update on TFS where it will now say: Microsoft Team Foundation Server powered by Github =)
• arrowgunz 8y ago
  I really hope this acquisition is good for the developer community. Also, I can’t help but notice the fact that Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of GitHub, had turned down an offer[0] from Microsoft 10 years ago and today they’ve announced the acquisition[1] by Microsoft. They really have come a full circle. Good luck to the team at GitHub! [0] http://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... [1] https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/ https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/
• otterley 8y ago
  A bit of interesting trivia: back in 2008, GitHub's founder (Tom Preston-Werner) declined to work for Microsoft when they bought his previous employer, Powerset: http://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...
• danmg 8y ago
  Microsoft doesn't really want github. What they want is Electron. Say what you want about their Windows and Office divisions, they put a lot of effort and resources into their development tool side. Being able to direct the development Electron, the way a lot of desktop applications are being written in 201X, is a clear advantage to them commercially. They also have the ability and resources to solve some of the problems that have plagued Electron/NW like resource use and distribution. What will happen to the github site itself? Not a whole lot. That's all pretty stable. More likely it will stagnate since they won't really know what to do with it.
• slics 8y ago
  The beauty in all of this is that you still have the power to continue make use of github, or you can chose another provider if Microsoft doesn’t meet all of your needs. In contrary, as a business decision this was a good move for Microsoft. Now they can invest in integrating Azure and people can deploy directly to Azure.
• the_duke 8y ago
  Unrelated to all the other aspects, 4 times markup over the last valuation is quite an impressive markup for a loss making company. Of course the brad name, mind share and userbase are worth a lot, but that much? I reckon they must have also talked to some competing bidders, like Google.
• janemanos 8y ago
  Well, not that easy for a larger project to switch to another platform. I work for ArangoDB and as silly as it sounds but leaving the street and investor cred of our Github Stars behind is not really an option, kind of a lock-in is also there on Github
• alpos 8y ago
  /me moves to gitlab
• commandlinefan 8y ago
  Empowering developers to move to gitlab, apparently.
• ausjke 8y ago
  Microsoft the cash cow, please milk in your own yard and stop messing up with FOSS land, you have been evil, and that's hard to change, just leave FOSS alone. You lost the OS war, from cloud to the phone, just get over with it.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• hhsshhss 8y ago
  Why did Microsoft cross the road? To Git to the other side.
• loafoe 8y ago
  What would your reaction be if: 1) Google bought them 2) Facebook bought them Go!
• jasonrhaas 8y ago
  I get it, its the way this industry works. Build up a solid product, grow the user base, continue to lose money until you sell the business and cash out. I'm not against the company or the founders making money. This is America after all. What is disappointing to me and others in the open source community is that we have zero say over something that we helped build. This sale to Microsoft is just another reason why we need something new, a new system that can be owned by individuals and not corporations. I would love to see something where the developers and users actually have a stake in what happens, and can in turn profit from it as well.
  • samtho 8y ago
    > What is disappointing to me and others in the open source community is that we have zero say over something that we helped build. Github was never a community project; it was never "ours" in that sense. Why should anyone except for the owners have a say?
    • jasonrhaas 8y ago
      Never "ours" in any legal sense of the word. I said in my post I can't blame them for selling, its how our system works. I'm just trying to think towards the future and how "we" can do it better next time.
• tomtimtall 8y ago
  It’s understandable that a lot of people are mad at microsoft. It used to be the big bad wolf vs open source. Where the open source side would go on and on about how much more value it provided and how in then end Microsoft would fail horribly and GNU/Linux would rule. And at some point along the way Microsoft just jumped on the wagon, suddenly chanting the same pro open source slogans, fighting the sameness cause. But no blood was spilled, Linux didn’t destroy Windows and Microsoft never seemed to tank. It left a void in many people who are just not ready to accept that Microsoft judges only on their actions today is a huge supporter of open source software. The zeolots wanted to beat them, not convince them.
• jarym 8y ago
  Just please don’t let the UX ‘experts’ inside Redmond butcher it like they did Skype. Keep them away! If they were any good at their jobs they wouldn’t be turning out so much crap and parading it as a great thing.
• teachrdan 8y ago
  Can anyone who works at Github give us their perspective on the acquisition? What do Github employees think about this?
• gk1 8y ago
  Microsoft is being very careful to not scare developers off, even with their choice of outfits for the photos.
• iliaznk 8y ago
  Maybe I don't know something, but what I see is liking VSCode while hating Microsoft and it looks somehow funny to me.
• compute_me 8y ago
  Not affiliated with the team, but I feel compelled to plug https://gitea.io/en-US/ https://gitea.io/en-US/ here ... such a lean alternative to GitLab, I was really happy to find it. Runs just fine for a couple of dozen users on a rather whimpy virtual server.
  • richardwhiuk 8y ago
    Wow that looks like a copyright infringement spectacular.
• merinowool 8y ago
  So Microsoft will gain access to thousands of private projects and will be able to use this knowledge in its own products. For so much knowledge acquired they got it for cheap...
• steveeq1 8y ago
  People seem to be making a big deal about this. What is the controversy surrounding microsoft acquiring github? I mean, it's one big, evil corporation taking over another, so what's the difference? Not trying to troll, I just don't know the negatives from this. I have a github account and want to know if there's a valid reason to move it.
• walrus01 8y ago
  Microsoft wants monthly recurring revenue from services. They could care less in the year 2018 if you run Windows Server or Debian or CentOS or RHEL on an Azure VM, if you're paying $250 a month for it, they're happy either way.
• Method-X 8y ago
  I wonder if GitHub will stop development on Atom and move to VS Code.
  • danso 8y ago
    That’s a good question. Hard to imagine MS justifying resources for Atom, when VS Code is a direct competitor.
    • cobalt 8y ago
      given that they are both open source products making (afaik) no money...
• zelon88 8y ago
  The world's largest software retailer just acquired the worlds largest source code repository and everyone thinks this is a win for open-source.
  • jpleclerc 8y ago
    > everyone No ?
• marricks 8y ago
  I guess I shouldn't be surprised that come Monday morning all the reasonable critiques are buried at the bottom of the page and all the GitHub + MS love is upvoted to the top, hyping up all the "amazing business synergies". Multibillion dollar mergers like this are huge things, especially for with a big player acquiring a smaller beloved brand like GitHub. Makes one wonder how many of those leaks over the past week were planned to get the hate out and pave the way for a "cleaner" coming out like what we're seeing here. An independent player just got gobbled up by a major one, once again the tech world consolidates... --- EDIT: Perhaps HN is just having issues, but right after I made this comment and checked the thread ALL I saw were critiques. HN must be quite happening this morning... anyways, in response to /u/mcknz, some critiques: Centralization vs Decentralization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221933 Has MS really changed? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227370 GH was aa neutral 3rd party https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221640 Wake up call, MS ties to NSA https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17228593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17228593 Open source community Doesn’t have a say https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229241 ---- EDIT 2 - I'm probably wrong here, I see the comment now I claimed was deleted, I most likely just misplaced my reply. ~~I actually made this as a reply to the most upvoted MS + GitHub love posts and it looks like that comment was removed and I was placed onto the main thread. The title of this story also changed a couple times too. The current neutral one "Microsoft acquires Github" is the original I think, but for a bit it was changed to something a bit more pro MS.~~ ~~I wonder if we'll get a story in a couple days about what was happening in this thread...~~
  • mcknz 8y ago
    Since you're up here, maybe link to what you see as reasonable critiques?
    • dorkusmcgavin 8y ago
      I'll just dump my own here. This is mostly anti-corporate, anti-monopolistic, anti-cloud, and anti-surveillance ideas. Windows, the development environments, etc is a monolithic platform that has very little in terms of customization due to it's structure and prevents competitive integrations. Think of all of the WMs for Linux, or any other modular component in Linux. Linux provides extensive competition, and Microsoft is seemingly attempting to drag people into an all inclusive "developer" network that prevents anyone from doing anything outside the walled garden of their systems in a meaningful way. LinkedIn accounts are going to become Office365 accounts by their own admission when it was acquired. Governments, small businesses, etc are moving to Office365. Between LinkedIn, GitHub, Skype, and Xbox, their focus on developers is increasingly looking more like a "we want to see what developers do, how they spend their time, and data-mine them so we can tailor our experience better towards them, and assimilate them into our Borg hivemind". If you're fine with data-mining for these purposes, we're going to have to agree to disagree. WSL is mostly just a means of getting more Linux users to convert to the Big Brother Borg by providing them useful tools so they don't have to install Cygwin. For those asking why it's bad for a company to make money, you are missing the point. You can monetize GitHub (and it is), without selling over to another company. Even if GitHub is not profitable, that's just bad business management and pricing that needs to be fixed. You can monetize software while making a competitive platform. This goes to the MBAs approach of "blue ocean strategy" over a "red ocean strategy". People are afraid of competition, and want the comfort of knowing someone else has made those decisions for them. I do not, I want competition in technology otherwise we'll get to a stagnant technology development system. It's already theorized by WSJ analysts and defectors from Google, etc, that Silicon Valley is devoid of all ability to innovate, and they are investing and going elsewhere. Microsoft went from selling a product (Windows), to selling a product (Windows 10) that serves mountains of advertisements. Xbox is guilty of this as well. Telemetry, despite people's claims of the privacy screen, has an upper bound on the amount you can opt-out of (some telemetry, even in Windows 10 Enterprise, is not opt-out). From a security perspective, even if the data is silo'd off, this also provides many issues as individuals who are highly skilled in cybersecurity will end up needing access across services (especially incident responders), and they become targets for massive troves of data access and breaches. Microsoft is still attacking Android device handset manufacturers with lawsuits (but not Google), for Android's uses of FAT file systems, etc. Microsoft is inherently still acting as patent troll against open source. There are accusations of open source plagiarism (not certain the credibility): https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696931527700481 https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696931527700481 GitHub already has issues with pseudo-accounts. You can create a profile that showcases forked repositories that you have not contributed anything to and throw up a neat avatar and it looks like you are a coding god. Not to a skilled developer who understands Git, but to an HR recruiting representative who knows very little in a small business it takes about 5 minutes to create the equivalent of an Instagram fake coding lifestyle. And I'm really getting sick of the "Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are just as bad, get over it" whataboutisms. Yes they are. It's possible to oppose all of the above.
• crazy_monkey 8y ago
  RIP trust in GitHub...
• oblong 8y ago
  Steve Ballmer is jumping up and down screaming "developers!" somewhere right now.
• brian_herman 8y ago
  I made this script that deletes the private github repos from your github. https://gist.github.com/brianherman/11036e2466d4c5843b87acdbcc1ca735 https://gist.github.com/brianherman/11036e2466d4c5843b87acdb...
• angel_j 8y ago
  I wonder how equity holding employees made out. It appears MS paid 7.5B USD.
• c0smic 8y ago
  I think some skepticism is a healthy thing to have, especially with multi billion dollar acquisitions. It's a little surprising to me that there's been so much kool aid drinking in the open source community over this and a lot of "disappointment" with those who are not also drinking the kool aid. At the end of the day, Microsoft, a huge billion dollar corporation, bought GitHub because it thinks it'll help its bottom dollar. And sure, of course I can see the business sense in the deal for both parties, but it's yet to be seen if it'll actually improve things for end users.
• toofy 8y ago
  Part of the reason we trusted GitHub with our projects and our code was they were a neutral party simply providing a service. Sadly, being bought out by microsoft completely removes their neutrality. Whether they will abuse the trust of having complete and total access to every private repo and all of the code inside or not remains to be seen. But I certainly don’t view GitHub as neutral site anymore. Sadly, from a business perspective, GitHub just isn’t rational when they’re owned by Microsoft. Even less so when we’ve seen how blatantly evil they have been in the past. For us, at least at this point, it will be better to bite the bullet now and move sooner rather than gamble. As someone else here said, even good community oriented companies are only a rough quarter away from shady business practices. I truly hope they don’t kill off GitHub, it’s been a truly amazing space and I really hope it works out for the devs who work there — the ones I know are amazing people and true believers, I really do hope this works out well for them, they deserve it. Now off to start the long arduous process of migrating everything to GitLab :/
  • kumarharsh 8y ago
    Why will they kill of Github? They just shut down their own repository website (Codeplex) and moved all their code to github. That's perhaps the most misplaced fear I've read here. Plus, from what I've read, MS was perhaps the best possible buyer of GH - and no, a federated distributed model was definitely not a possibility given the huge sums of investor money involved.
    • andy-x 8y ago
      They don't need to literally kill, they can just make many useful features internal to Microsoft developers, or make some features that are free now subscription-only.
• Yuioup 8y ago
  $7.5 billion? Is that right?
• KillcodeX 8y ago
  Everyone 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
• walterbell 8y ago
  If you want to develop software for Microsoft’s Linux distro/kernel (Azure Sphere for IoT), you must use Windows 10 + Visual Studio, https://seeedstudio.com/productDetail/3052 https://seeedstudio.com/productDetail/3052 > To use MT3620 Dev Board for Azure Sphere, you’ll need a Windows 10 PC with the latest Windows Updates, along with the Visual Studio Tools for Azure Sphere (which will be available for download from Microsoft). These tools will include application templates, development tools and the Azure Sphere software development kit (SDK). Terms: This development board can be only used for prototyping, it cannot be built into a product for commercial distribution. It cannot be re-sold or used as part of a production environment. Dear Microsoft, since IoT is one of the “next big things”, it would be nice to use Microsoft Linux ARM kernel with open hardware (no terms of service for hardware resale) and open software (e.g. use open-source Linux dev tools with the Azure SDK).
• nimbius 8y ago
  the evolution of this acquisition over the past two days has been interesting. Its even more interesting in the context of say, gitlab importer state metrics in grafana..beware, the importer metric is under heavy load and sometimes doesnt respond. https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer Reports of migrations to other sites are real, and Microsoft sees a risk thats legitimate enough to issue a presser. Its going to be hard to head off a github exodus at the pass because git itself is open source and there are numerous alternatives that can quickly and easily (some with no more than the click of a button) spirit the github userbase --which is what Microsoft arguably wants in order to legitimize its cloud/open source push-- away from them. https://sourceforge.net/ https://sourceforge.net/ even released a special tool to migrate you away from github. Certainly some of the more business minded users will argue this acquisition from Microsoft is a "good move" but the fact that this is the second presser microsoft has thrown out regarding the nature of its merger in less than 5 hours reflects a pretty sincere push from redmond. Microsofts historic legacy of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and outright hostile action to crush open source and startups in general is a pretty insurmountable.
• rurban 8y ago
  Now we have an idea what will change: We'll get a dark blue instead of the old github black. I dig that.
• TuringNYC 8y ago
  When Microsoft acquired Skype, there were a subset of accounts that essentially became un-useable for close to 2yrs. There was a sub-sub case where if you had a Skype ID that was an email (not a username) which was also a pre-existing Microsoft email, your profile became unreachable and passwords could not be reset either. This is from personal experience and validated with a half dozen other people in the same sub-sub-case complaining online. Support just gave the same boilerplate response - reset your password. It is honestly shocking there was no review that a certain cohort of very similar accounts had suddenly and permanently stopped logging in. Honestly inexplicably given the size of the acquisition. That was when I finally dumped Skype and moved fully to FaceTime/Duo/WhatsApp/Messenger. Thank goodness for competition. I adore GitHub. My children and I wear their tshirts, we brandish their logo on our laptops and phones. I hope Microsoft doesnt half-abandon this post-merger integration.
  • bigmanwalter 8y ago
    Thank you for saying the Skype ID thing here. I thought I had gone crazy....
    • TuringNYC 8y ago
      Same thing here! I thought I had gone crazy until I started interacting with more more people online that had the same exact problem. Honestly, it became an obsession to figure out for me because I started feeling stupid not being able to figure it out...turns out there was no way out of this corner case! Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Think about the magnitude of dysfunction for a post-merger integration to only partially succeed despite this price tag!
      • bigmanwalter 8y ago
        I can hardly imagine what level of dysfunction is possible in an organisation as large as Microsoft. I have only worked in small companies, less than 30 employees, and my mind has already been blown.
• KillcodeX 8y ago
  Warning :the Microsoft bots are coming............. Github is going to inject malicious code in your computer..... The NSA try to get access via github.......To be honest, they are many types of devs (Hardcore cyberpunk = Hate corporations and true devs only use Linux and build cyber weapon systems to destroy evil corporations ) and Slaves devs (Slaves to corporations or materials etc...and write codes to destroy their own citizens ). Many slave devs are programmed via advanced algorithms warfare systems, so the corporation figured out the weaknesses of this type of Slaves devs (Microsoft devs etc....). I believe that they try to track/steal code project without being noticed from the owners of the project. Then, they will create the same project (Products), and they will sue right away if you try to compete. By the way, they will upload malicious code in your computer via github or they will get easy access to your computer or startup from this software. In short, Microsoft is a spy agency made by the NSA...... Solution :Gitlab(open source) with your own VPS
• cup-of-tea 8y ago
  > And Microsoft is all-in on open source. No you're not, you liars. Until the day that Windows and Office and all that is open source you can't say anything of the sort.
• joelhandwell 8y ago
  Submitted an issue to dear-github. "Host Github by itself as open source project" https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/304 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/304 Issue body: Microsoft open sourced Xamarin after acquisition and it was good for community. Open sourcing Github source will benefit open source community. Github was not open source for its own reason and it could be same reason why Xamarin was not. Now that Github acquired by Microsoft, would this event be an opportunity to re-consider the reason?
  • jenscow 8y ago
    I'm sure that will happen right away, considering they're "all-in on open source".
• BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
  I think more strategically, this is Microsoft's way of combating Atlassian, Slack, JetBrains, and the rest of the developer-first companies. In MS shops no one really wants to use TFS, so most turn to Gitlab and Bitbucket.
• fiatjaf 8y ago
  That's odd. If you think GitHub was trustworthy before and it isn't anymore now, you've been proven wrong, because your dear GitHub has just sold you to Microsoft.
• credo 8y ago
  In all these years, GitHub didn't make a single penny as profit Like most "successful" startup companies over the past decade, only way (for investors) to make money was to make the company a "product" that would be sold to the highest bidder Why is anyone surprised that GitHub would be sold ?
• stredicke 8y ago
  It is no surprise GitHub got sold; look at the investors and you know that they invested to sell later. We were worried about cloud repositories already some time ago, even started our own project (gitstorage.com) to be prepared whatever happens (we are totally relaxed about the GitHub takeover). It could have been worse. There are other companies with lots of cash that would have worried me a lot more. One interesting thought was that whoever owns GitHub can feed the open and also the closed source into their AI machine to learn how to code properly. IMHO the terms of service of GitHub allow that because AI is not considered a third party. This could have some significant benefit keeping in mind that good code tends to rule the world; and Microsoft understands how to use AI and has the actual means to do something like that. This is speculative, maybe one day the history books will tell us what was the main driver for this transaction.
• bagol 8y ago
  No ... I can't believe something like this is happening ...
• beezle 8y ago
  Perhaps I missed in the other comments, but is anyone else here shocked by the price tag? That is an outstanding amount of money to pay for Github, certainly a very large premium.
• gringoDan 8y ago
  Is there room in this space for a de-centralized, blockchain-based solution? Seems like that is an ideal implementation of the technology. I ran across OS Coin [1] on Twitter but couldn't find any additional info beyond what's on the website. [1] http://oscoin.io/ http://oscoin.io/
• stefs 8y ago
  i'm torn about this. on the one hand, microsoft is profit oriented, but so was github. and github was under certain pressure to make a profit, which is optional under microsoft, as they have other revenue streams which can be used to cross-finance a small, money hemorrhaging github. but why would microsoft buy a money-losing company? either they think they can turn it around - maybe because they can use their own, cheaper hosting infrastructure -, or because it's a ploy to reconcile a mostly microsoft-wary developer community with their new "not so evil as before" image (we all remember the microsoft under gates and ballmer and the damage it did). the question that remains is: can we trust them to continue to run github as we know (and love?) it? it's not like the company hasn't improved tremendously in the last years, but the windows 10 update and privacy debacle has shown they're not above suspicion. for me personally, i'll probably continue to use github, as i use it only for non-critical hobby projects anyway. for important work i'd rely on a self hosting gitlab/gogs/gitea instance. i know it's not the same, as the barrier-to-entry for potential contributors is higher and the added sysop work is a pita for most people. but that's the price to pay for a healthy, robust open source community.
• Zelmor 8y ago
  I, for one, have cancelled my subscription and moved all private repositories off GitHub.
• vdchuyen 8y ago
  I can guess this will happen soon when working with Azure and found that Microsoft documents had been stored on Github one year ago. I think this is a great deal to push Azure close to the developers and compete with Amazon.
• aries1980 8y ago
  fyi Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella On GitHub Acquisition Call (Transcript): https://seekingalpha.com/article/4179368-microsoft-corporation-msft-ceo-satya-nadella-github-acquisition-call-transcript?part=single https://seekingalpha.com/article/4179368-microsoft-corporati...
• leecarraher 8y ago
  I will be curious to see what competitors of Microsoft, who host projects on github (google,facebook, etc) do. Where previously Github was an unbiased host for open source projects, now being under the umbrella of MS, other entities might see it as clashing with their corporate policies.