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GitHub was talking to Google but went with Microsoft instead
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoIn this case I prefer Microsoft than Google. They both spy on us, but Google has a much more complete profile of me.
- kkleindev 8y agoCurious, based on what do you know how Google is creating profiles?
- mv4 8y agoProbably meant Gmail + search + ads. Google does know much more about you than Microsoft.
- petepete 8y agoNot to mention Google's habit of buying stuff, getting bored and canning it.
- paulie_a 8y agoOr making 9 different versions of the same thing like they have done with messaging.
- gkya 8y agoI feel it has been better that the more openly "bad" one of the two has acquired Github, because Google has this "don't be evil" face which is the fake one of its two faces, though many still just fall in for it, forgetting it's just another company with commercial interests.
- city41 8y agoThey are quietly dropping that image: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
- koboll 8y agoIt's a pretty stupid motto from a public relations perspective. It practically begs for ironic counterexamples.
- vezycash 8y ago>It's a pretty stupid motto from a public relations perspective. Wait a minute. It was a great motto when Microsoft was clearly the enemy. It was a subtle Us versus Oracle, MS... The motto gave Google massive developer mindshare and support for android and anything Google. I've got no data to back this up - but I believe Google's key early employees may have joined the company partly because of this motto. However, with no clear enemy in sight. And with Google's privacy stance, the motto's begun to backfire. The last sentence from the book Animal farm fits perfectly >Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
- kyrra 8y agoBad summary and bad headline. It is not removed. From the very last line of the CoC: > And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up! https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
- danvayn 8y agoTo be honest, when I read that I thought of James Damore and got a good laugh out of it.
- modzu 8y agoi just feel dirty logging into github now.
- ship_it 8y agoI'm canceling my subscription. And I'll miss my contribgraph :(
- megaman22 8y agoI canceled my paid github and went to VSTS for private stuff a couple scandals ago. Never thought I'd be ahead of the curve.
- acdha 8y agoWhy? Nothing about the service has changed.
- modzu 8y agoindeed nothing has changed overnight. youre telling me it will stay that way? the reason 'why' is that GH is no longer independent. there are thousands of comments on all the related posts here on hn for you to figure out why that might be significant..
- acdha 8y agoYou said you felt dirty now, in advance of anything actually happening. Why not wait for some sign that random internet FUD is actually happening?
- astrodust 8y agoDodged a bullet on that one.
- banachtarski 8y agoI concur.
- maerF0x0 8y agoMakes sense. Google runs a mono-repo. Microsoft ran codeplex[2]. Microsoft wanted to be in Github's space but couldn't compete, so bought the space. [1]: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex
- theklr 8y agoA little oversimplified, but sure.
- foepys 8y agoMicrosoft is currently running Visual Studio Team Services [1]. We will see what will happen with that. 1: https://www.visualstudio.com/de/team-services/ https://www.visualstudio.com/de/team-services/
- swyx 8y ago> Microsoft wanted to be in Github's space but couldn't compete i just wanna take that in for a moment. when freaking Microsoft can't compete with you on enterprise software... you've done well.
- louthy 8y agoThey also have Visual Studio Profiles/Visual Studio Team Services, which appeared to be them trying to enter the space, but, bar people being forced to have a profile to use VS I doubt many are using the team or project features of that. Then there's one of their dev cash cows: Team Foundation Server, which I assume has been dying a slow death over the past few years due to git dominance in the source control space. I moved my team away from the shit show which is TFS for git (not github) several years back now. So, I suspect this is shoring up their position, reducing the number of man ours needed in competing, and buying the best product on the market. I wouldn't be surprised if github got more enterprise project management features, where it's a bit light right now, and perhaps more around management of super large projects. As well as tighter integration with Visual Studio (at the project management level, rather than just the source control level) - to phase out TFS over time.
- CodeSheikh 8y agoDon't you guys think that GitHub was meant to give heads up about acquisition to its subscribers, at least to premium users? Yes this would give away the whole "secret" but if acquirer is some evil corp? Or a foreign entity? I feel like there is an important law missing regarding acquisition of companies who run premium plans.
- quadrangle 8y agoThe only thing that matters here is that they aren't actually owned by MS yet. They have just agreed to be bought soon. So, there's still a substantial time for customers to leave or adapt or whatever before the acquisition is completed. It's true that it would be worse if one day you suddenly were already a customer of a different company without warning. That's not the case here though. Side-note: I'm very critical of MS as a acompany and have been critical of GitHub separately, nothing above should be seen as defending them other than on acknowledging the fact that they've announced the acquisition long before it actaully will be completed.
- xenomachina 8y agoOr even just "there are certain companies I don't trust enough to let them see what's in my private repos".
- spiralx 8y agoWell GitLab is hosted on Azure, so you're out of luck there if you're that paranoid.
- mikehodgson 8y agoI feel like this would be a great way to get investigated for insider trading.
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- bsharitt 8y agoGoogle buys GitHub. 6 months later it launches a new different code hosting site that is tightly tied with Google services. 3 years later new site and GitHub both shut down.
- raverbashing 8y agoSad but true "Why do I need a Google+ account to use GitHub?!?"
- netsharc 8y agoWell nowadays Skype is tied to a Microsoft account. I look forward to the pull requests from Xbox Live users. Commit message: "You suck, you n00b loser. I f*ed your mom."
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- rhacker 8y agoI'm not sure the current path is any better. I am worried Github is going to start looking like sourceforge or codeplex.
- DiabloD3 8y agoMicrosoft killed Codeplex because everyone at Microsoft was basically using Github anyways. I doubt they're going to change it meaningfully.
- ravenstine 8y agoI think they know better. I mean, how couldn't they? If Microsoft trashed GitHub, that means millions of developers are never going to trust them with anything again. It'd be severe clownery to not see what's clear as day.
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- spiralx 8y agoOut of the list of companies that the article says have expressed an interest in GitHub at one point or another - Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Atlassian and Tencent - I have to say that Microsoft seems the most best fit, especially given their existing work on integrating GitHub with GVFS: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/microsoft-and-github-team-up-to-take-git-virtual-file-system-to-macos-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/microsoft-and-github...
- merinowool 8y agoI'd rather see GitHub grow and buy Docker etc.
- maltalex 8y agoTo make them even less profitable?
- rhacker 8y agoMicrosoft will probably buy Docker too.
- adtac 8y agoI think it makes more sense for RedHat to buy Docker, but I wouldn't bet on that happening.
- numbsafari 8y agoWhy would anyone buy them when you can just hire away the talent and let it devolve into the moribund consulting agency they've turned it into? If anything, the failing "Docker the company" probably helps sell their competing implementations of the various OCI specs.
- pm90 8y agoHow does Docker even make money? I don't think I've known anyone to pay for it. And with so many people moving to kubernetes for orchestration, I don't think any of their solutions would be useful/profitable.
- jacquesm 8y agoWhat I find interesting is that IBM and RedHat never entered the picture.
- ship_it 8y agoI don't think RedHat has enough money to buyout GH like M$ did.
- mholmes680 8y agoI second the IBM comment... they could have consulted the heck out of GitHub in the enterprise.
- merinowool 8y agoThe worst part is giving up private repos for m$ to see.
- EpicEng 8y agoWhy is that?
- bmelton 8y agoMicrosoft, love them or hate them, appear to have been turning over a new leaf for the past while. If trends are to be used as indicators, then it seems the trend is that more and more of Microsoft's projects are becoming more and more open, while it feels like Google is becoming more closed. Yes, Microsoft still has closed source programs (Windows), and yes, Google still has open source programs (Android, Tensorflow), but the general feeling I'm getting from Google is shrinking away from a commitment to open source on practical grounds. I don't know if I'm ready to say that I have more respect for Microsoft than Google at this point, but I definitely have more respect for Microsoft than I ever have, and that's the direct result of their recent efforts to embrace the developer community at large.
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoStrange times, indeed.
- hinkley 8y agoThis feels a bit like IBM in the 90's. People have been predicting for 20 years that an Old Microsoft would look a lot like IBM. I just hope Microsoft doesn't inflict the moral equivalent of XSLT, XPath, and XML-RPC proxies on us.
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoHa. I was just talking to a coworker today about using XSLT, unfortunately.
- forgot-my-pw 8y agoBalmer times were the strange times. We're in good times now.
- some_account 8y agoYeah. That generally how you fool people you are a good person. You do stuff that appears to be good hearted. Companies do that too. Just like politicians. I can't understand why people today lack the ability to see a scam.
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- urda 8y agoThank goodness for that. If Google had picked up GitHub I would have had to start a migration strategy since their buyout strategy has included killing off the service in < 2 years.
- greggman 8y agoAll these comments that MS are going to read your private repos seem really out of place. it makes zero sense for MS to look at private repos because the moment they are discovered everyone would move off the system. they also run outlook.com and office online. if they got caught spying they'd lose all corporate customers
- d1zzy 8y agoI find it strange to live in a time when tech people trust MS more than Google, it could be because we think differently about the importance of information tracking, and this is coming from someone that for the past 15 years has used only private/incognito browsers (was a lot of fun back in when Flash was popular and had to manually remove its cookies directory after every session), doesn't have a facebook account, doesn't use social media. But here's something to think about, MS is in a position where they're making a lot of money from closed source software products where a good free open source equivalent would be a direct attack on that revenue stream, which means, there can be many potential conflicts of interest with owning something like GitHub. What do you think would happen in the following scenarios: - a researcher discovers a zero day security problem in Office/Windows/etc that affects almost all their products in the last 10 years, tells MS about it but doesn't wait for them to patch it for N months or whatever time they'd take so they push a working exploit/proof of concept on GitHub before the bug is patched. Will MS shut down the project/repository and/or sue the people behind it using IP/time information from their own logs? - MS pushes another Windows 10 update that increases tracking, people write programs to work around/disable that and post it on GitHub. MS is arguing that without tracking they cannot determine who is pirating their Windows so they sue the authors. Can they get access to the IPs/times of when the repository was interacted with without a court order? Can they shut down the project on GitHub before waiting for the lawsuit to reach a conclusion? - MS develops a new DirectX API that allows for many great things and some very hyped AAA games are already in the pipeline to be released to use it, but the catch is the new API requires Windows 11, a new version that costs money to upgrade to, previous Windows owners cannot use it. A Wine developer implements an emulation of the API on GitHub and releases a DLL build for Windows, suddenly all previous Windows users can play those games. What will MS do about that project? I feel it's pretty easy to imagine lots of situations where there's a conflict of interest between being a neutral Git repository and being a software company so I can't say I'm very happy with MS purchasing it tho I agree with others that it could have been much worse too :)
- PascLeRasc 8y agoHere's a today example: there are lots of Windows 10 de-bloaters [1] to remove awful features and telemetry disabling tools [2]. Will these stay up? [1] https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 [2] https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking
- gmiller123456 8y agoJust three years ago Sourceforge got all the rage, and I do mean rage, and a lot of people were giving all the love to Github. IMHO the cost of self hosting your projects has been too low for many years now to give control of your web presence to a third party.
- JeremyBanks 8y agoThe cost of self-hosting your projects remains gargantuan if you want to do a decent reliable job.
- gmiller123456 8y agoThe vast majority of projects do not require reliability above what can be simply and cheaply achieved. If/once your project gets to the point where reliability is a concern, that's the exact reason you wouldn't want to rely on a free/cheap 3rd party. The case in point is the one I referred to, GIMP had already seen SourceForge as an issue and had abandoned them over two years before the incident. And lots of other projects have taken on the task of hosting their own. However "gargantuan" the task may be, it's still usually a drop in the bucket compared to the overall project.