19 ms·

GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

351 points by danso 8y ago

unabridged 8y ago
Part of me is hoping this is in preparation of releasing an open source version of windows
jack9 8y ago
> The WWDC, sacred nerd summit of Appledom, is where they announce things like a new “night mode” for the operating system and try to convince programmers that Apple Watch matters. Bloomberg got an honest laugh out of me.
- senectus1 8y ago
  they're not wrong.
  - culturestate 8y ago
    They aren't right, either. I wasn't exactly wowed by the public-facing announcements (other than the Siri-related stuff) but there's some nice stuff in the side sessions...and the Apple Watch is somehow the hottest product in both wearable devices and watches at the moment.
    - sixothree 8y ago
      And are they not expected to make some product announcements at this conference?
      - culturestate 8y ago
        I guess it depends how you define "products," but if we're talking hardware then WWDC as a product announcement platform is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is a developers conference, after all.
        sixothree 8y ago
        Right but there is always some announcement that is not developer related. In 2017 it was iMac Pro, HomePod. In 2016 it was Apple Watch Updates. In 2015 it was El Capitan.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I don't see why this is relevant for this article, though…
  - flafla2 8y ago
    The whole article is tongue-in-cheek. It's relevant mostly because it's funny and partially because it provides context. Also, later in the same paragraph: > For Microsoft to trot this out during WWDC is a real thunder-stealer. It’s nice to see global-platform capitalism played with a little verve.
  - Volt 8y ago
    Because Apple and Microsoft are still at war. Or something.
- CharlesW 8y ago
  It is funny, but (for the benefit of those who haven't been to one) also a complete mischaracterization of WWDC. The keynote has always been "dumbed down" for press/analysts desperate for between-product-launch news, with most of the juicy stuff saved for in-depth developer technical sessions.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    And that's the problem. It's a World Wide Developer Conference. And then, in the keynote and later in news and announcements all they come up with is emoji and dark mode?
    - SllX 8y ago
      The Platform State of the Union is the real Keynote and the sessions are the meat of the conference.
- Razengan 8y ago
  Apple Watch is apparently the best selling watch (not just best selling smartwatch) in the world [0], with millions of users, and many copycats. Why shouldn’t it matter? Of course, there’s only so much you can do and make on such a small screen, and it is an accessory rather than a “primary” device, but that is another issue altogether, if one. I think it may even function as a motion control input for the rumored VR headset they’re planning. And is anyone seriously trying to pass off Dark Mode as a MINOR feature? It can be a significant productivity and wellness boost for many people who have to look at a screen all day. Microsoft has struggled for decades to achieve universal consistency across their OS even for a single system theme, and they still haven’t gotten it right, whereas Apple is already doing seamless switching of UI appearances across many apps (this is more than just changing the colors; I’m currently watching their WWDC session about it, and the amount of thought they’ve put into it and how easy they’ve made it to implement is impressive imo.) [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swiss-watch-industry-in-2017-2018-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swis...
  - redial 8y ago
    It matters for Apple, for developers? not so much. Millions of users and not a single third party "killer" app.
    - Razengan 8y ago
      Which developer wants to miss out on serving potentially millions of users? What kind of “killer” app do you envision for a watch? Being able to check messages, calls, Uber, flights, etc. right on my wrist are all killer applications for me, along with the fitness features of course. I suspect the upcoming walkie-talkie will be fun too (something that should’ve been there from the start.)
      - chris_wot 8y ago
        I think you make your own point. There is no killer app, so why would developers care about millions of people with a watch they can’t do anything novel by a third party?
collinf 8y ago
Sent this to all of my non-techie friends who asked wtf GitHub was and how it was worth $7.5b. Great read.
- jlgaddis 8y ago
  And when they still didn’t “get it”? It’s a great read (and good for a few laughs) for “nerds”, sure, but it still doesn’t explain to non-techies what Github is (besides “some thing that programmers use instead of e-mail”) — or, more importantly, why it’s worth $7.5B.
  - chris_wot 8y ago
    It does explain it. He wrote that “Git keeps track of changes in sets of files.”
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Ironically, this explanation is shorter than the article's URL.
    - jlgaddis 8y ago
      That doesn't really explain it, though. "You mean like 'Track changes' in Word?"
      - statictype 8y ago
        Well, yes, that's kind of what it is, isn't it?
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      That's true, but Microsoft already does that with VSS, so that's not what is interesting about Git or GitHub.
yurishimo 8y ago
I think the author nailed it. This is Microsoft's chance to reach out to developers and prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source. We've seen this over the years with previous code hosting platforms. If the platforms betrays it's users, developers are not scared to mass migrate to something else. The onus is now on Microsoft to keep developers happy or risk losing their $7.5B investment.
- sixothree 8y ago
  That to me is what DotNet Core is, along with Asp.Net, Entity Framework many years ago, and everything developer related becoming open source. GitHub is just a signal to people who have been out of the loop, bloomberg and many linux developers. When I start dropping my apps on their systems, they might be surprised how well they run. https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/aspnet
  - kumarvvr 8y ago
    DotNet Core was a real surprise to me. As was Windows Subsystem for Linux. With DotNet Core we have an extremely well crafted language available on all Windows and Linux. It's a great move on part of Microsoft.
    - vvanders 8y ago
      I've heard it told that WSL was actually a repurposing of the Android emulation layer for winphone. If that's true it's a hell of an awesome pivot.
  - tehlike 8y ago
    People may or may not remember, but most of this started with ALT.NET movement, with a number of influential people and developer supported or created a number of projects. Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate. It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started proving success and showing an alternative to people.
crazy_monkey 8y ago
If it ever became profitable to be evil again, Microsoft would do it in a heartbeat... And, next time they will have GitHub in their arsenal to do it...
hunter2_ 8y ago
> Computers are mercurial No pun
- bcatanzaro 8y ago
  This one was the funniest joke of the piece, IMO.
jlgaddis 8y ago
Since the announcement, I’ve been trying to figure out what the most evil uses of “telemetry” that could be incorporated into Github in order to invade user’s privacy are. I’ve had a few (small) ideas but I’m confident that Microsoft already has people much more evil^W^Wsmarter than me working on this very problem (if it wasn’t already figured out beforehand).
- freeone3000 8y ago
  You're already uploading the big one. If you're going to trust Microsoft with your actual data, who cares about the metadata?
  - herbst 8y ago
    What about all the people who don't use any Microsoft products (yet)? I don't really get the deal with github and privacy right now. However it is obvious that this could upset many OS devs who avoided MS
  - jlgaddis 8y ago
    No, you're just uploading the source code (although, in many cases nowadays, that's the important stuff). The "actual data" doesn't get uploaded to Github but Microsoft has been working on getting their hands on that too -- see Azure, Windows 10 telemetry, etc. (I used to actually like Microsoft Windows -- having ran every consumer version from 3.0 up to 7 and every business version from WFWG 3.11 up to 2008 -- and even earned several Microsoft certifications. I even taught courses on Microsoft server operating systems at a .edu for a few years. But... I've probably only spent 5 minutes on a Windows 8.x machine (and it wasn't mine) and have never used Windows 10 (or 2012 or 2016). Unless something major happens, I will never again run any Microsoft operating system on anything I own. For the last several years, I have simply been unable to trust them as a company.)
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The vast majority of GitHub content is already public. Massive datasets have been generated, and hosted on Google BigQuery, regarding activity on GitHub[0]. I think we're trying a little too hard to find a way to invent malice here. Most of the client software people use to interface with GitHub is also open source and impossible for Microsoft to inject telemetry into: It's called "git". Also, I would note that the teams that work on Windows and Office, and the teams that work on .NET and Microsoft's other big open source initiatives, might as well belong to two different companies from the differences in how they appear to approach things. Your upset that one product of Microsoft's chose to implement something that everyone else in the industry was doing years earlier does not really justify the nonsense FUD. [0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/github https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/github
hliyan 8y ago
I'm listening to the audiobook version of Nadella's Hit Refresh these days. It does sound like he had thought through the open source strategy from very early on. There he says something to the effect that Microsoft had so many things in-house that were better than what some other companies were publicly showcasing, but they were hiding them away for some reason.
- oever 8y ago
  > they were hiding them away for some reason Why sell better things when your customers are locked-in and you can force them to buy garbage? Big companies are reactive. They have no need to innovate. In fact, innovation usually harms business. Domination via lock-in is much more lucrative. GitHub offers lock-in via the social developer graph.
niftich 8y ago
I can't figure out why everyone seeks to imbue so much meaning to the GitHub acquisition. Is it not sufficient to suggest that GitHub was looking for a buyer, and Microsoft took a calculated risk and offered more for them than one of their star competitors, and perennial sweetheart of developers, Google? Microsoft is trying to ensure they retain relevance in a world where Google has successfully shaken their dominance, and having a service that's effectively become a commonly used piece of web infrastructure be under their umbrella as opposed to Google's (or Salesforce's, or Oracle's, or Dell EMC's) is an obvious win for them.
kumarvvr 8y ago
I am a developer, use git, but don't use too much GitHub. I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site? Is the cost of moving to another platform, really that difficult??
- ioquatix 8y ago
  If you use pure git, no. If you built your company around GitHub team management, yes. If you integrate with 3rd party services that function via GitHub, yes. If you depend on an open source community which is primarily connected through GitHub, yes.
  - eight_ender 8y ago
    I went to reply to the parent but you just nailed it. Microsoft isn't after your open source project git user here, they're after the multitude of companies that are heavily invested in what Github offers on top of git. If I were to tell my team right now we were moving away from Github I'm pretty sure there'd be riots and fire. We rely on the hooks to tell us when things are being merged and we rely on PRs to do code review. Even the wikis are maintained and contain relevant information. No one does that. Corporate wikis are a black hole of shit, and somehow our Github wiki isn't. The MS sales team is most likely currently engaged in some Defcon 2 sales planning in a war room bunker deep underground. Deals are going to happen, upsells will be sought. Account managers are being dropped from helicopters. Quotas are coalescing off the shoulder of Orion. Contracts are glittering at the Facebook compound gates. All of these deals will be won in time, making it rain.
- airstrike 8y ago
  Not difficult, but no other platform offers the same. Why would you move from Google to Bing?
- bad_user 8y ago
  > I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site? For open source projects of multiple contributors, yes, because that's where the community is, along with all relevant traces, e.g. issues, comments, PRs, all linked to their user's accounts. I've seen people here suggest that GitLab's import tool is pretty good in importing the history of issues. It's also a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, but beyond the import, the problem is that the community isn't there. Not to mention that many projects have been uninspired enough to use GitHub as their homepage, which means that the web is littered with links to GitHub that aren't replaceable. I've seen people here downplay the difficulty of moving off GitHub. Such people do not maintain popular or multi-contributor open source projects.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
phoenix24 8y ago
if it's about developer love, then next acquisition target for Microsoft should be StackOverflow.
- pests 8y ago
  It already uses Microsoft tech so why not?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Would be interesting but I don't think SO needs the funding / resources as badly as GitHub does.
  - megaman22 8y ago
    Considering they keep bailing on new features that could make them money at an astounding rate, I think that's accurate. The SO documentation site thing was gone before I could think about using it.
- caymanjim 8y ago
  Stack Overflow was founded by Joel Spolsky, who is a Microsoft veteran from their era of peak dominance. I suspect it's a passion project of his that he'd like to hang on to, but he's also pragmatic and everything has its price. And it's profitable. I wouldn't be surprised if someone bought it. I can envision synergy between Stack Overflow and GitHub. Satya Nadella seems to really "get it", though, and I don't anticipate any dramatic changes to GitHub, or to Stack Overflow should they take it over.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Spolsky certainly had a strong influence with his ideas and feedback, but I don't think he was ever very directly involved in the project - the main driver was Jeff Atwood. At least that's what I got from listening to the podcast, back in '08.
notveryrational 8y ago
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
TomK32 8y ago
We might see the day when Nat Friedman rises to the top job at Microsoft. Imagine that, a ex MS-intern who made his fortune with an open source support company running the company that was "celebrated" in hate partys (we have a 1997 poster of that at our hackerspace). GitHub will be the only Microsoft product I use, but I'll give them a chance.
notveryrational 8y ago
Microsoft can not buy goodwill with me, personally. I worked at the company and was privy to "strategic conversations" whereby they were looking to regain trust with developers to get them back from Android and Google to Windows stack. Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything, even when there were much better tools. Under Satya, it was better, but the emphasis is still very much on getting, as Steve Balmer said "Developers developers developers". Microsoft knows its being challenged in the platform game and that developers have migrated. But having seen the inside of Microsoft corporate, legal, compliance and policy I don't have high confidence that this isn't another PR project destined for death of the startup. It's also a terrifying lesson about the fragility of the open source movement.
- gaius 8y ago
  Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything This is called “dogfooding” and all companies should do it. How can you sell to customers or understand customers if you’re not using the product yourself? One day I’d love to visit SAP and see how they do their own vacations and expenses. It can’t be with their own software.
  - flukus 8y ago
    I wish they dogfooded on spinning rust and limited RAM.
    - gaius 8y ago
      It’s always been the case that developers have better hardware than end users, I don’t see that changing anytime soon!
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    Customers and potential customers also use competing products, so you also need to use those to sell to, understand, and grow your customers. Maybe SAP uses their own software internally and they've all become power users that aren't bothered by the issues that you're having. Perhaps if they used competing products they'd have a better understanding of where theirs is lacking.
arthurfm 8y ago
With Google recently investing $20 million in GitLab [1] and helping them migrate from Azure to Google Cloud Platform [2][3], what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab? Move their repositories back to GitHub, switch to BitBucket or something else entirely? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c-round-led-by-gv/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando... [3] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/
- iaml 8y ago
  >what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab? Fork it and move on with their day.
  - some_account 8y ago
    You will not be able to easily move away from any dominant platform because it will be not just the code but the community you leave behind. Also it's quite possible that github will add CI stuff directly into Azure and if you start using that, there may be no other product to move to with the same functionality. Vendor lock-in is a strategy that works even if you know its there. I'm building my code with the excellent CI stuff built into Gitlab today and I really don't want to move away from it because of its amazing ease of use.
    - kokey 8y ago
      As long as GitLab remains also deployable on your own infrastructure and not become a SaaS-only platform, I'll worry less about this.
      - _nalply 8y ago
        You know that GitLab offers commercial add-ons?
reacharavindh 8y ago
The best case for GitHub would've been for Redhat to acquire them :-( Just feeling sad for what has happened. Microsoft is in it for business. Talking about "change of heart" for a company is bullshit. It's all associated with the business model one way or the other. RedHat would've been the best model. Imagine. Buying GH, open sourcing it, selling a self-hosted version of it for paid support....
- fetbaffe 8y ago
  Redhat? Company that is currently infiltrating every Linux distro with systemd bloatware? No, thanks.
  - reacharavindh 8y ago
    I never understood the Systemd argument in the Linux ecosystem. Sure, it may not be what everybody wants in the Linux ecosystem. But, that's the point of having so many independent distributions right? Red hat is not secretly pushing anything on anybody. If something is better than Systemd, clearly other distributions will go that route and try to outcompete Redhat... No? I see Redhat as the enterprise seller of Linux. They are catering to Enterprise needs and supporting where they go (even Systemd) what is wrong with that? If you're mad that Debian followed RH's steps and adapted Systemd, then you should be mad at Debian not Redhat? Disclaimer: I have no association with RedHat in any sense. Just trying to ask why Redhat is always blamed for Systemd.. I don't particularly enjoy systemd either.
    - cthalupa 8y ago
      > Just trying to ask why Redhat is always blamed for Systemd Probably because Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee and wrote systemd while working for them? Not a comment on whether systemd is good or not, but... the author being paid to write it as an employee of the company is a reasonable reason to believe they are responsible for it's creation.
      - reacharavindh 8y ago
partycoder 8y ago
The difference between "the old Microsoft" (monopolistic, openly insulting/abusive) and "the new Microsoft" is like the difference between colonialism and neocolonialism. - Colonialism consisted in annexing territory, forcing them to use your flag, sing your anthem, and work for you under penalty of violence. - Neocolonialism consists into forcibly indebt countries, so they direct all their productive efforts into paying you a never-ending debt. A country can keep its flag, its anthem, its culture, can celebrate its independence day... but for economic purposes it is indistinguishable from a colony. This is done by gaining influence over those countries, so they act in the best interest of a foreign power: lobbying. The idea of Microsoft is to allow open source to happen, but to happen in terms that are favorable to them. Like having people work with their OS, their tools, their APIs, their cloud, use their authentication services, etc. This is achieved by gaining influence over the governance of high profile open source projects. Either by having their full time employees collaborate into an open source project, or by directly buying companies, like the case of Github. In either case, in the end, the idea is to obtain control over open source projects to steer them into a direction that benefits Microsoft. As a mentioned earlier, the modus operandi is to either infiltrate projects or buying a company. When they've decided to acquire companies, the results are more aggressive and more visible, and are in my opinion not good: - Skype: Linux version is largely unmaintained relative to other versions, UX is inferior. - Xamarin: Standalone Windows IDE was abandoned, now you should use Visual Studio. Xamarin Studio for mac was rebranded Visual Studio for Mac. No Linux version is planned despite community requests. - Minecraft: Java client development left behind with inferior investment, no feature parity with native Windows client. - Microsoft R Open / MRAN: Encourages people to adopt a vendor specific flavor of R, and use vendor specific repositories, moving away from R and CRAN. And for Github, I would not be surprised if it starts getting coupled with Microsoft products, like Azure, Visual Studio, etc... to the detriment of other tools. Even if it doesn't happen at all, I am not over punishing Microsoft for what it did in the past. Without provocation, they attacked noble and altruistic developers sacrificing man years of their own personal time to the benefit of open source software, providing this generation with the tools they use today to put food in their table. Like the Linux kernel team. Microsoft called Linux and open source licenses "cancer". Never forget.
- AnonymousPlanet 8y ago
makapuf 8y ago
However, like git itself, you can undo and branch to something else but for some you cannot rewrite history. All is kept and some developers will not forget.
ramijames 8y ago
Microsoft kills everything it touches. Look at Skype.
- romanovcode 8y ago
  LinkedIn stayed pretty much the same.
  - jenscow 8y ago
    Exactly.
- pluma 8y ago
  Skype was acquired by MS in 2011. At that point Skype had already gone through the hands of eBay and several investors. Additionally -- unlike GitHub or LinkedIn -- Skype was acquired for its technology. Microsoft used Skype to replace both Windows Live Messenger and Lync. They integrated it into Windows and extended it with various features to fit their use cases. They already announced they will keep GitHub independent much like they did with LinkedIn. We will likely see some minor integrations like deploying to Azure or maybe GitHub Enterprise with Office 365. But this isn't anything like Skype where Microsoft pretty much bought the company to scrap its technology for parts. EDIT: Also when criticizing MS don't make the mistake of mixing up complaints about MS with general complaints about acquisitions. GitHub was going to be acquired by someone. It's difficult imagine GitHub having a better fate after being acquired by Facebook, Apple or Google. The only other alternative I can think of would have been Amazon, who would likely have integrated GitHub fully with AWS much like they did with Cloud9 IDE.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    > Skype was acquired for its technology. No, it was not. The technology was NOT worth billions of dollars. It was bought for the existing userbase and network effects. And rumours are that also for some payment-or-something-in-kind from the NSA, which wanted it to be run by a friendlier-to-the-NSA company. There were quite a few competitors at the time, some with comparable firewall penetration ability and call quality, which could have been bought for a fraction of the price. But none had the ubiquity, userbase or network effects of skype.
bad_user 8y ago
These threads are so funny — let me do a TL;DR: - "Microsoft does this and that" - "Oooo, that's not fair, Google has been doing it too" - "Patents" - "Oooo, that's not fair, Oracle has been doing it too" - "Privacy" - "Not fair, Facebook has been doing it too" Predictable arguments that for the purposes of judging Microsoft are irrelevant. Look, we all know that companies are meant to turn a profit. People are meant to survive too, but in society you don't get a carte blanche to act as you see fit in order to survive or make money. When you do shit to others, some people will never, ever forgive you. That's just how society works. So you know, in case you're in management, might do well to consider the long term ramifications of the company's actions. That's just life, sorry.
- oblio 8y ago
  So you mean there can be no redemption, ever? Kind of a harsh perspective... By this logic Germany, Italy and Japan should have been nuked forever.
  - sharpneli 8y ago
    Sure there can be redemption at some point. But there must be some consequences too. Instead of just "Ok we're the good guys now". There must be the expectation that if you behave badly now it can make changing plans in the future harder. It takes time to regain trust. Right now it's nowhere near enough. Let's see after more years if they can pull it off.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    Germany, Italy and Japan have paid war reparations and suffered both during and after the war. That's probably the dumbest comparison I've ever heard. But to answer, yes, if I were alive and if I would have suffered through the war like my grandparents before me, I couldn't have forgiven them as it would be my prerogative. So what can I say, I guess Microsoft will have to wait for those alive during the Halloween Documents to be either dead or really old.
lowkeyokay 8y ago
What I’m missing from GitHub is an easy way to search for repositories by subject. Say you need to create a user admin front end you should be able to find that easily. I always end up using Google or DDG instead. Maybe MS can fix that. (insert Bing joke here.)
- herbst 8y ago
  I haven't thought about that one. I really hope they keep the current search instead of replacing it with Bing :/
happertiger 8y ago
Three words: Github for Business.
marenkay 8y ago
With there being so much talk how Microsoft is reformed/reforming, I do not really see the change at all. Microsoft always was about developers and getting them into their ecosystem and I do not think this is evil. It's business. People act like the Open Source strategy is so much different from the Ballmer days but is it really? From a business perspective they tried to throw rocks into the paths of Open Source as a thing, and it did not work. It just alienated more developers. Logical conclusion is to blend in. And so they did. Apart from that, with Open Source being kind of a de facto default for the past decade, it just becomes so much harder to find engineers who would work at a company not respecting the ideas behind Open Source development. Microsoft is now sitting at the focal point for the majority of Open Source efforts. And it has a kill switch in its' hands. The reformed Microsoft is the old Microsoft. It just learned a few tricks from the Open Source community.
- oblio 8y ago
  I feel we're focusing way too much on this good vs evil debate. Life doesn't work like that, there's always shades of grey. Everyone has their interests. So, based on this underlying assumption, what does Microsoft by gaining by using this kill switch? Heck, what does it even gain by appearing to threaten people with this kill switch? It's worse that no benefit, it's actively harmful for them. So, why are we discussing about them this way? They're not irrational.
  - marenkay 8y ago
    I should probably added a few irony tags here, the "kill switch" picture was just meant to exaggerate what seems to be the primary concern going around. So to add two things to clarify: personally I do not see any of this as good/evil. It's business. But one catch: business is comprised of human beings, thus it often _is_ irrational :-)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Dowwie 8y ago
This time may be different, but everyone needs to think about next time, too.
usermac 8y ago
All that banter here aside, that was a really well written story. It's not often I enjoy a read from start to finish but I did. Thank you Paul Ford. - Brian
dkobia 8y ago
The GitHub acquisition feels like losing a piece of ones "coding" childhood if there's such a thing. When we grow up, find out how things work and the innocence is lost because it feels like there is a malevolent undercurrent.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  GitHub's past 3 years didn't already lose that piece of childhood? Also, my impression was that young coders don't have Microsoft loathing that is held by programmers who were new before Git/GitHub were invented.
trisimix 8y ago
Personally I see nothing but discourse in hosting my code with a company that is anything but inpendent and dedicated to hosting my code with no alternative motives.

351 points by danso 8y ago

Part of me is hoping this is in preparation of releasing an open source version of windows

> The WWDC, sacred nerd summit of Appledom, is where they announce things like a new “night mode” for the operating system and try to convince programmers that Apple Watch matters. Bloomberg got an honest laugh out of me.

senectus1 8y ago
they're not wrong.
- culturestate 8y ago
  They aren't right, either. I wasn't exactly wowed by the public-facing announcements (other than the Siri-related stuff) but there's some nice stuff in the side sessions...and the Apple Watch is somehow the hottest product in both wearable devices and watches at the moment.
  - sixothree 8y ago
    And are they not expected to make some product announcements at this conference?
    - culturestate 8y ago
      I guess it depends how you define "products," but if we're talking hardware then WWDC as a product announcement platform is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is a developers conference, after all.
      - sixothree 8y ago
        Right but there is always some announcement that is not developer related. In 2017 it was iMac Pro, HomePod. In 2016 it was Apple Watch Updates. In 2015 it was El Capitan.
saagarjha 8y ago
I don't see why this is relevant for this article, though…
- flafla2 8y ago
  The whole article is tongue-in-cheek. It's relevant mostly because it's funny and partially because it provides context. Also, later in the same paragraph: > For Microsoft to trot this out during WWDC is a real thunder-stealer. It’s nice to see global-platform capitalism played with a little verve.
- Volt 8y ago
  Because Apple and Microsoft are still at war. Or something.
CharlesW 8y ago
It is funny, but (for the benefit of those who haven't been to one) also a complete mischaracterization of WWDC. The keynote has always been "dumbed down" for press/analysts desperate for between-product-launch news, with most of the juicy stuff saved for in-depth developer technical sessions.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  And that's the problem. It's a World Wide Developer Conference. And then, in the keynote and later in news and announcements all they come up with is emoji and dark mode?
  - SllX 8y ago
    The Platform State of the Union is the real Keynote and the sessions are the meat of the conference.
Razengan 8y ago
Apple Watch is apparently the best selling watch (not just best selling smartwatch) in the world [0], with millions of users, and many copycats. Why shouldn’t it matter? Of course, there’s only so much you can do and make on such a small screen, and it is an accessory rather than a “primary” device, but that is another issue altogether, if one. I think it may even function as a motion control input for the rumored VR headset they’re planning. And is anyone seriously trying to pass off Dark Mode as a MINOR feature? It can be a significant productivity and wellness boost for many people who have to look at a screen all day. Microsoft has struggled for decades to achieve universal consistency across their OS even for a single system theme, and they still haven’t gotten it right, whereas Apple is already doing seamless switching of UI appearances across many apps (this is more than just changing the colors; I’m currently watching their WWDC session about it, and the amount of thought they’ve put into it and how easy they’ve made it to implement is impressive imo.) [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swiss-watch-industry-in-2017-2018-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swis...
- redial 8y ago
  It matters for Apple, for developers? not so much. Millions of users and not a single third party "killer" app.
  - Razengan 8y ago
    Which developer wants to miss out on serving potentially millions of users? What kind of “killer” app do you envision for a watch? Being able to check messages, calls, Uber, flights, etc. right on my wrist are all killer applications for me, along with the fitness features of course. I suspect the upcoming walkie-talkie will be fun too (something that should’ve been there from the start.)
    - chris_wot 8y ago
      I think you make your own point. There is no killer app, so why would developers care about millions of people with a watch they can’t do anything novel by a third party?

collinf 8y ago

Sent this to all of my non-techie friends who asked wtf GitHub was and how it was worth $7.5b. Great read.

jlgaddis 8y ago
And when they still didn’t “get it”? It’s a great read (and good for a few laughs) for “nerds”, sure, but it still doesn’t explain to non-techies what Github is (besides “some thing that programmers use instead of e-mail”) — or, more importantly, why it’s worth $7.5B.
- chris_wot 8y ago
  It does explain it. He wrote that “Git keeps track of changes in sets of files.”
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Ironically, this explanation is shorter than the article's URL.
  - jlgaddis 8y ago
    That doesn't really explain it, though. "You mean like 'Track changes' in Word?"
    - statictype 8y ago
      Well, yes, that's kind of what it is, isn't it?
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    That's true, but Microsoft already does that with VSS, so that's not what is interesting about Git or GitHub.

yurishimo 8y ago

I think the author nailed it. This is Microsoft's chance to reach out to developers and prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source. We've seen this over the years with previous code hosting platforms. If the platforms betrays it's users, developers are not scared to mass migrate to something else. The onus is now on Microsoft to keep developers happy or risk losing their $7.5B investment.

sixothree 8y ago
That to me is what DotNet Core is, along with Asp.Net, Entity Framework many years ago, and everything developer related becoming open source. GitHub is just a signal to people who have been out of the loop, bloomberg and many linux developers. When I start dropping my apps on their systems, they might be surprised how well they run. https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/aspnet
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  DotNet Core was a real surprise to me. As was Windows Subsystem for Linux. With DotNet Core we have an extremely well crafted language available on all Windows and Linux. It's a great move on part of Microsoft.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    I've heard it told that WSL was actually a repurposing of the Android emulation layer for winphone. If that's true it's a hell of an awesome pivot.
- tehlike 8y ago
  People may or may not remember, but most of this started with ALT.NET movement, with a number of influential people and developer supported or created a number of projects. Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate. It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started proving success and showing an alternative to people.

crazy_monkey 8y ago

If it ever became profitable to be evil again, Microsoft would do it in a heartbeat... And, next time they will have GitHub in their arsenal to do it...

hunter2_ 8y ago

> Computers are mercurial No pun

bcatanzaro 8y ago
This one was the funniest joke of the piece, IMO.

jlgaddis 8y ago

Since the announcement, I’ve been trying to figure out what the most evil uses of “telemetry” that could be incorporated into Github in order to invade user’s privacy are. I’ve had a few (small) ideas but I’m confident that Microsoft already has people much more evil^W^Wsmarter than me working on this very problem (if it wasn’t already figured out beforehand).

freeone3000 8y ago
You're already uploading the big one. If you're going to trust Microsoft with your actual data, who cares about the metadata?
- herbst 8y ago
  What about all the people who don't use any Microsoft products (yet)? I don't really get the deal with github and privacy right now. However it is obvious that this could upset many OS devs who avoided MS
- jlgaddis 8y ago
  No, you're just uploading the source code (although, in many cases nowadays, that's the important stuff). The "actual data" doesn't get uploaded to Github but Microsoft has been working on getting their hands on that too -- see Azure, Windows 10 telemetry, etc. (I used to actually like Microsoft Windows -- having ran every consumer version from 3.0 up to 7 and every business version from WFWG 3.11 up to 2008 -- and even earned several Microsoft certifications. I even taught courses on Microsoft server operating systems at a .edu for a few years. But... I've probably only spent 5 minutes on a Windows 8.x machine (and it wasn't mine) and have never used Windows 10 (or 2012 or 2016). Unless something major happens, I will never again run any Microsoft operating system on anything I own. For the last several years, I have simply been unable to trust them as a company.)
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The vast majority of GitHub content is already public. Massive datasets have been generated, and hosted on Google BigQuery, regarding activity on GitHub[0]. I think we're trying a little too hard to find a way to invent malice here. Most of the client software people use to interface with GitHub is also open source and impossible for Microsoft to inject telemetry into: It's called "git". Also, I would note that the teams that work on Windows and Office, and the teams that work on .NET and Microsoft's other big open source initiatives, might as well belong to two different companies from the differences in how they appear to approach things. Your upset that one product of Microsoft's chose to implement something that everyone else in the industry was doing years earlier does not really justify the nonsense FUD. [0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/github https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/github

hliyan 8y ago

I'm listening to the audiobook version of Nadella's Hit Refresh these days. It does sound like he had thought through the open source strategy from very early on. There he says something to the effect that Microsoft had so many things in-house that were better than what some other companies were publicly showcasing, but they were hiding them away for some reason.

oever 8y ago
> they were hiding them away for some reason Why sell better things when your customers are locked-in and you can force them to buy garbage? Big companies are reactive. They have no need to innovate. In fact, innovation usually harms business. Domination via lock-in is much more lucrative. GitHub offers lock-in via the social developer graph.

niftich 8y ago

I can't figure out why everyone seeks to imbue so much meaning to the GitHub acquisition. Is it not sufficient to suggest that GitHub was looking for a buyer, and Microsoft took a calculated risk and offered more for them than one of their star competitors, and perennial sweetheart of developers, Google? Microsoft is trying to ensure they retain relevance in a world where Google has successfully shaken their dominance, and having a service that's effectively become a commonly used piece of web infrastructure be under their umbrella as opposed to Google's (or Salesforce's, or Oracle's, or Dell EMC's) is an obvious win for them.

kumarvvr 8y ago

I am a developer, use git, but don't use too much GitHub. I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site? Is the cost of moving to another platform, really that difficult??

ioquatix 8y ago
If you use pure git, no. If you built your company around GitHub team management, yes. If you integrate with 3rd party services that function via GitHub, yes. If you depend on an open source community which is primarily connected through GitHub, yes.
- eight_ender 8y ago
  I went to reply to the parent but you just nailed it. Microsoft isn't after your open source project git user here, they're after the multitude of companies that are heavily invested in what Github offers on top of git. If I were to tell my team right now we were moving away from Github I'm pretty sure there'd be riots and fire. We rely on the hooks to tell us when things are being merged and we rely on PRs to do code review. Even the wikis are maintained and contain relevant information. No one does that. Corporate wikis are a black hole of shit, and somehow our Github wiki isn't. The MS sales team is most likely currently engaged in some Defcon 2 sales planning in a war room bunker deep underground. Deals are going to happen, upsells will be sought. Account managers are being dropped from helicopters. Quotas are coalescing off the shoulder of Orion. Contracts are glittering at the Facebook compound gates. All of these deals will be won in time, making it rain.
airstrike 8y ago
Not difficult, but no other platform offers the same. Why would you move from Google to Bing?
bad_user 8y ago
> I am genuinely curious, are the users of GitHub really that tied in to the site? For open source projects of multiple contributors, yes, because that's where the community is, along with all relevant traces, e.g. issues, comments, PRs, all linked to their user's accounts. I've seen people here suggest that GitLab's import tool is pretty good in importing the history of issues. It's also a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, but beyond the import, the problem is that the community isn't there. Not to mention that many projects have been uninspired enough to use GitHub as their homepage, which means that the web is littered with links to GitHub that aren't replaceable. I've seen people here downplay the difficulty of moving off GitHub. Such people do not maintain popular or multi-contributor open source projects.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

phoenix24 8y ago

if it's about developer love, then next acquisition target for Microsoft should be StackOverflow.

pests 8y ago
It already uses Microsoft tech so why not?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Would be interesting but I don't think SO needs the funding / resources as badly as GitHub does.
- megaman22 8y ago
  Considering they keep bailing on new features that could make them money at an astounding rate, I think that's accurate. The SO documentation site thing was gone before I could think about using it.
caymanjim 8y ago
Stack Overflow was founded by Joel Spolsky, who is a Microsoft veteran from their era of peak dominance. I suspect it's a passion project of his that he'd like to hang on to, but he's also pragmatic and everything has its price. And it's profitable. I wouldn't be surprised if someone bought it. I can envision synergy between Stack Overflow and GitHub. Satya Nadella seems to really "get it", though, and I don't anticipate any dramatic changes to GitHub, or to Stack Overflow should they take it over.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Spolsky certainly had a strong influence with his ideas and feedback, but I don't think he was ever very directly involved in the project - the main driver was Jeff Atwood. At least that's what I got from listening to the podcast, back in '08.

notveryrational 8y ago

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

TomK32 8y ago

We might see the day when Nat Friedman rises to the top job at Microsoft. Imagine that, a ex MS-intern who made his fortune with an open source support company running the company that was "celebrated" in hate partys (we have a 1997 poster of that at our hackerspace). GitHub will be the only Microsoft product I use, but I'll give them a chance.

notveryrational 8y ago

Microsoft can not buy goodwill with me, personally. I worked at the company and was privy to "strategic conversations" whereby they were looking to regain trust with developers to get them back from Android and Google to Windows stack. Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything, even when there were much better tools. Under Satya, it was better, but the emphasis is still very much on getting, as Steve Balmer said "Developers developers developers". Microsoft knows its being challenged in the platform game and that developers have migrated. But having seen the inside of Microsoft corporate, legal, compliance and policy I don't have high confidence that this isn't another PR project destined for death of the startup. It's also a terrifying lesson about the fragility of the open source movement.

gaius 8y ago
Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything This is called “dogfooding” and all companies should do it. How can you sell to customers or understand customers if you’re not using the product yourself? One day I’d love to visit SAP and see how they do their own vacations and expenses. It can’t be with their own software.
- flukus 8y ago
  I wish they dogfooded on spinning rust and limited RAM.
  - gaius 8y ago
    It’s always been the case that developers have better hardware than end users, I don’t see that changing anytime soon!
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  Customers and potential customers also use competing products, so you also need to use those to sell to, understand, and grow your customers. Maybe SAP uses their own software internally and they've all become power users that aren't bothered by the issues that you're having. Perhaps if they used competing products they'd have a better understanding of where theirs is lacking.

arthurfm 8y ago

With Google recently investing $20 million in GitLab [1] and helping them migrate from Azure to Google Cloud Platform [2][3], what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab? Move their repositories back to GitHub, switch to BitBucket or something else entirely? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c-round-led-by-gv/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando... [3] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/

iaml 8y ago
>what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab? Fork it and move on with their day.
- some_account 8y ago
  You will not be able to easily move away from any dominant platform because it will be not just the code but the community you leave behind. Also it's quite possible that github will add CI stuff directly into Azure and if you start using that, there may be no other product to move to with the same functionality. Vendor lock-in is a strategy that works even if you know its there. I'm building my code with the excellent CI stuff built into Gitlab today and I really don't want to move away from it because of its amazing ease of use.
  - kokey 8y ago
    As long as GitLab remains also deployable on your own infrastructure and not become a SaaS-only platform, I'll worry less about this.
    - _nalply 8y ago
      You know that GitLab offers commercial add-ons?

reacharavindh 8y ago

The best case for GitHub would've been for Redhat to acquire them :-( Just feeling sad for what has happened. Microsoft is in it for business. Talking about "change of heart" for a company is bullshit. It's all associated with the business model one way or the other. RedHat would've been the best model. Imagine. Buying GH, open sourcing it, selling a self-hosted version of it for paid support....

fetbaffe 8y ago
Redhat? Company that is currently infiltrating every Linux distro with systemd bloatware? No, thanks.
- reacharavindh 8y ago
  I never understood the Systemd argument in the Linux ecosystem. Sure, it may not be what everybody wants in the Linux ecosystem. But, that's the point of having so many independent distributions right? Red hat is not secretly pushing anything on anybody. If something is better than Systemd, clearly other distributions will go that route and try to outcompete Redhat... No? I see Redhat as the enterprise seller of Linux. They are catering to Enterprise needs and supporting where they go (even Systemd) what is wrong with that? If you're mad that Debian followed RH's steps and adapted Systemd, then you should be mad at Debian not Redhat? Disclaimer: I have no association with RedHat in any sense. Just trying to ask why Redhat is always blamed for Systemd.. I don't particularly enjoy systemd either.
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    > Just trying to ask why Redhat is always blamed for Systemd Probably because Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee and wrote systemd while working for them? Not a comment on whether systemd is good or not, but... the author being paid to write it as an employee of the company is a reasonable reason to believe they are responsible for it's creation.
    - reacharavindh 8y ago

partycoder 8y ago

The difference between "the old Microsoft" (monopolistic, openly insulting/abusive) and "the new Microsoft" is like the difference between colonialism and neocolonialism. - Colonialism consisted in annexing territory, forcing them to use your flag, sing your anthem, and work for you under penalty of violence. - Neocolonialism consists into forcibly indebt countries, so they direct all their productive efforts into paying you a never-ending debt. A country can keep its flag, its anthem, its culture, can celebrate its independence day... but for economic purposes it is indistinguishable from a colony. This is done by gaining influence over those countries, so they act in the best interest of a foreign power: lobbying. The idea of Microsoft is to allow open source to happen, but to happen in terms that are favorable to them. Like having people work with their OS, their tools, their APIs, their cloud, use their authentication services, etc. This is achieved by gaining influence over the governance of high profile open source projects. Either by having their full time employees collaborate into an open source project, or by directly buying companies, like the case of Github. In either case, in the end, the idea is to obtain control over open source projects to steer them into a direction that benefits Microsoft. As a mentioned earlier, the modus operandi is to either infiltrate projects or buying a company. When they've decided to acquire companies, the results are more aggressive and more visible, and are in my opinion not good: - Skype: Linux version is largely unmaintained relative to other versions, UX is inferior. - Xamarin: Standalone Windows IDE was abandoned, now you should use Visual Studio. Xamarin Studio for mac was rebranded Visual Studio for Mac. No Linux version is planned despite community requests. - Minecraft: Java client development left behind with inferior investment, no feature parity with native Windows client. - Microsoft R Open / MRAN: Encourages people to adopt a vendor specific flavor of R, and use vendor specific repositories, moving away from R and CRAN. And for Github, I would not be surprised if it starts getting coupled with Microsoft products, like Azure, Visual Studio, etc... to the detriment of other tools. Even if it doesn't happen at all, I am not over punishing Microsoft for what it did in the past. Without provocation, they attacked noble and altruistic developers sacrificing man years of their own personal time to the benefit of open source software, providing this generation with the tools they use today to put food in their table. Like the Linux kernel team. Microsoft called Linux and open source licenses "cancer". Never forget.

AnonymousPlanet 8y ago

makapuf 8y ago

However, like git itself, you can undo and branch to something else but for some you cannot rewrite history. All is kept and some developers will not forget.

ramijames 8y ago

Microsoft kills everything it touches. Look at Skype.

romanovcode 8y ago
LinkedIn stayed pretty much the same.
- jenscow 8y ago
  Exactly.
pluma 8y ago
Skype was acquired by MS in 2011. At that point Skype had already gone through the hands of eBay and several investors. Additionally -- unlike GitHub or LinkedIn -- Skype was acquired for its technology. Microsoft used Skype to replace both Windows Live Messenger and Lync. They integrated it into Windows and extended it with various features to fit their use cases. They already announced they will keep GitHub independent much like they did with LinkedIn. We will likely see some minor integrations like deploying to Azure or maybe GitHub Enterprise with Office 365. But this isn't anything like Skype where Microsoft pretty much bought the company to scrap its technology for parts. EDIT: Also when criticizing MS don't make the mistake of mixing up complaints about MS with general complaints about acquisitions. GitHub was going to be acquired by someone. It's difficult imagine GitHub having a better fate after being acquired by Facebook, Apple or Google. The only other alternative I can think of would have been Amazon, who would likely have integrated GitHub fully with AWS much like they did with Cloud9 IDE.
- beagle3 8y ago
  > Skype was acquired for its technology. No, it was not. The technology was NOT worth billions of dollars. It was bought for the existing userbase and network effects. And rumours are that also for some payment-or-something-in-kind from the NSA, which wanted it to be run by a friendlier-to-the-NSA company. There were quite a few competitors at the time, some with comparable firewall penetration ability and call quality, which could have been bought for a fraction of the price. But none had the ubiquity, userbase or network effects of skype.

bad_user 8y ago

These threads are so funny — let me do a TL;DR: - "Microsoft does this and that" - "Oooo, that's not fair, Google has been doing it too" - "Patents" - "Oooo, that's not fair, Oracle has been doing it too" - "Privacy" - "Not fair, Facebook has been doing it too" Predictable arguments that for the purposes of judging Microsoft are irrelevant. Look, we all know that companies are meant to turn a profit. People are meant to survive too, but in society you don't get a carte blanche to act as you see fit in order to survive or make money. When you do shit to others, some people will never, ever forgive you. That's just how society works. So you know, in case you're in management, might do well to consider the long term ramifications of the company's actions. That's just life, sorry.

oblio 8y ago
So you mean there can be no redemption, ever? Kind of a harsh perspective... By this logic Germany, Italy and Japan should have been nuked forever.
- sharpneli 8y ago
  Sure there can be redemption at some point. But there must be some consequences too. Instead of just "Ok we're the good guys now". There must be the expectation that if you behave badly now it can make changing plans in the future harder. It takes time to regain trust. Right now it's nowhere near enough. Let's see after more years if they can pull it off.
- bad_user 8y ago
  Germany, Italy and Japan have paid war reparations and suffered both during and after the war. That's probably the dumbest comparison I've ever heard. But to answer, yes, if I were alive and if I would have suffered through the war like my grandparents before me, I couldn't have forgiven them as it would be my prerogative. So what can I say, I guess Microsoft will have to wait for those alive during the Halloween Documents to be either dead or really old.

lowkeyokay 8y ago

What I’m missing from GitHub is an easy way to search for repositories by subject. Say you need to create a user admin front end you should be able to find that easily. I always end up using Google or DDG instead. Maybe MS can fix that. (insert Bing joke here.)

herbst 8y ago
I haven't thought about that one. I really hope they keep the current search instead of replacing it with Bing :/

happertiger 8y ago

Three words: Github for Business.

marenkay 8y ago

With there being so much talk how Microsoft is reformed/reforming, I do not really see the change at all. Microsoft always was about developers and getting them into their ecosystem and I do not think this is evil. It's business. People act like the Open Source strategy is so much different from the Ballmer days but is it really? From a business perspective they tried to throw rocks into the paths of Open Source as a thing, and it did not work. It just alienated more developers. Logical conclusion is to blend in. And so they did. Apart from that, with Open Source being kind of a de facto default for the past decade, it just becomes so much harder to find engineers who would work at a company not respecting the ideas behind Open Source development. Microsoft is now sitting at the focal point for the majority of Open Source efforts. And it has a kill switch in its' hands. The reformed Microsoft is the old Microsoft. It just learned a few tricks from the Open Source community.

oblio 8y ago
I feel we're focusing way too much on this good vs evil debate. Life doesn't work like that, there's always shades of grey. Everyone has their interests. So, based on this underlying assumption, what does Microsoft by gaining by using this kill switch? Heck, what does it even gain by appearing to threaten people with this kill switch? It's worse that no benefit, it's actively harmful for them. So, why are we discussing about them this way? They're not irrational.
- marenkay 8y ago
  I should probably added a few irony tags here, the "kill switch" picture was just meant to exaggerate what seems to be the primary concern going around. So to add two things to clarify: personally I do not see any of this as good/evil. It's business. But one catch: business is comprised of human beings, thus it often _is_ irrational :-)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Dowwie 8y ago

This time may be different, but everyone needs to think about next time, too.

usermac 8y ago

All that banter here aside, that was a really well written story. It's not often I enjoy a read from start to finish but I did. Thank you Paul Ford. - Brian

dkobia 8y ago

The GitHub acquisition feels like losing a piece of ones "coding" childhood if there's such a thing. When we grow up, find out how things work and the innocence is lost because it feels like there is a malevolent undercurrent.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
GitHub's past 3 years didn't already lose that piece of childhood? Also, my impression was that young coders don't have Microsoft loathing that is held by programmers who were new before Git/GitHub were invented.

trisimix 8y ago

Personally I see nothing but discourse in hosting my code with a company that is anything but inpendent and dedicated to hosting my code with no alternative motives.