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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 f
by 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 agoWhy 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 agoRemember that _GitHub used to be profitable_. Then they took $250m in investment and became unprofitable.
- pavlov 8y agoAnd that was three years ago. So what’s the point of outrage now?
- matthewmacleod 8y agoI guess it's a great example of why taking funding can be bad, depending on what your goals are.
- swasheck 8y agoIt's funny because people are raging over things that Microsoft "said" 20 years ago.
- ulkesh 8y agoWho 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.
- detaro 8y agoWho in the open source community could afford to buy them, once they took VC at 2 billion valuation? maybe Red Hat, but even that seems stretching it?
- skinnymuch 8y agoHow would Mozilla afford this? Anyone in the open source community? The selling price of $7.5B is huge. Red Hat’s market cap is only 4x what GitHub sold for.
- Aldo_MX 8y agoWhat is SV? There are too many definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV
- aembleton 8y agoSilicon Valley
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- digitalsushi 8y agoI am not feeling extremely concerned, since every developer has almost or exactly an identical copy of the repository in at least one location, and can push that entire repository to another location with two commands. This would probably be the most difficult genie to put back into a bottle.
- cesarb 8y agoThe issue is with the issues, which are not cloned together with the repository (and pull requests, while there's the trick of using --mirror to also clone the pull requests, the comments aren't cloned).
- spacenick88 8y agoBut since they need to be GDPR compliant there needs to be a way to export those and I'd think there probably is already.
- cesarb 8y agoThere probably is, and if not, someone will have created one. But even then, "every developer has almost or exactly an identical copy of the repository in at least one location" is false for issues and pull requests; while nearly every developer can be assumed to have one or more "git clone" copies of the repository, few will have any copy of the issues and pull request comments.
- Ichelures 8y agoI don't think GDPR comes into this. You could probably make the case that the issues you've posted yourself are personal/identifying information but github have no obligation as far as I can see to allow you to export issues and comments created by others as well.
- BlackjackCF 8y agoI think the bigger question is that even if Microsoft is headed in a more trustworthy direction now, there's no knowing if they'll stay that course in a decade when there's a new CEO. Things shift. I can definitely see why this would be a desirable acquisition on GitHub's side. They were bleeding money. I can't blame them.