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I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA
- minimaxir 8y agoWhy was the AMA posted on /r/AMA instead of /r/IAMA? Certainly the future CEO of GitHub is notable enough for the latter subreddit.
- alexwebb2 8y agoI assume that's just an embarrassing mistake on the part of Github's PR team. There's really no reason that a CEO currently making headlines should be on /r/AMA instead of r/IAMA (70x more users).
- Shank 8y agoIt's worth noting that until the deal closes, Nat isn't actually part of GitHub. That would make it the Microsoft PR team or his deal -- not GitHub's.
- minimaxir 8y agoThat makes less sense as Microsoft has done some excellent AMAs with the Excel team: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_microsoft_excel_team_ask_us_anything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_mic... https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/777mb6/we_are_the_microsoft_excel_team_ask_us_anything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/777mb6/we_are_the_mic...
- exolymph 8y agoEh, I wouldn't be surprised if they're already working together. PR teams are used to cross-company collaboration.
- gowld 8y agoNot known the intricacies of reddit is probably better than the reverse, toxic as reddit is.
- thomasmeeks 8y agoHonestly, I'd lean towards /r/AMA to get a higher signal-to-noise ratio & limit trolling. The smaller user base means you're more likely to bring genuinely interested parties into the conversation -- people watching the related twitter feeds & so on.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y agoWhat would you rather fight - a horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses? Hope he answers that one.
- anothergoogler 8y agoI hope Microsoft's PR people came up with a hilarious reply, this will show that the company is meme-aware and down with the Millennial and Generation Z demographics.
- antirez 8y agoYou can use this trick against 100 duck sized horses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae
- thedailymail 8y agoYou can use a version of the same trick against a horse-sized duck if you have a slightly smaller doorway
- fermienrico 8y agoI really dislike this kind of questions. "A little fun doesn't hurt" Reddit and the internet has a lot of fun things to do. Don't waste the opportunity of someone important willing to spend what little 30 mins they have in their schedule to take questions from the community and these questions come up - there are important things to ask. Absolutely useless question and should not be asked.
- tway4567897 8y agoI hope you understand that this is the person you're talking about: > Miguel de Icaza: but the idea of the nugget > Miguel de Icaza: The essence of the nugget > Miguel de Icaza: The nugget > Miguel de Icaza: It keeps me away from the radio > Nat Friedman: yeah i can see that > Nat Friedman: what you've got, son, is a nugget fixation > Nat Friedman: a common issue in the mid-30s man > Miguel de Icaza: I do > Miguel de Icaza: Oh, is that what it is? > Miguel de Icaza: Is there some ointment I can use? > Nat Friedman: you need baboon urine > Nat Friedman: very expensive > Nat Friedman: luckily i have some that i acquired on ebay some months back > Nat Friedman: using the 'sort by price' selection mechanism
- nikivi 8y agoI asked: What are your thoughts on how GitHub can incentivize open source work financially? Perhaps by integrating something like Patreon or OpenCollective in the website. It seems that he won't answer it. Still would be awesome if GitHub started addressing this in some way in the future. EDIT: He answered it. https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a51y1/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...
- craftyguy 8y agoThere's a reason it's AMA and not IAA (I answer anything). Most AMAs like this one are PR stunts, where the "what's your favorite ___" are answered while the tough, controversial qeustions are ignored.
- schoen 8y agoWell, we now know Nat Friedman's favorite cheese. :-) https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2id0/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...
- briandoll 8y agoTidelift has a compelling approach to this: https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/
- lucb1e 8y agoHe didn't really answer it, though. We, too, would "find it amazing to see what could happen". But that doesn't tell us anything whatsoever.
- whatever_dude 8y agoHe's a CEO-to-be, not the tyrant who can make all the decisions and know all the answers months before he even starts the job without consulting anyone involved.
- kartan 8y agoNat is being really smart here. It should not backfire unless he acts pedantic or insults Redditors intelligence. I think that both are unlikely. Maybe Nat is trying to counteract any PR damage to GitHub, or maybe he just wants to see how much can skyrocket his account's karma. If I was in his situation I will be happy doing it for both reasons.
- baby 8y agoHe’s probably too busy to care about internet points.
- dymk 8y agoAre you suggesting that Reddit, or HN, have had an intelligent discussion about the GH acquisition at any point this week?
- andrei_says_ 8y agoMaybe he also wants to connect with the user base and answer questions on a moderated popular platform. He may even be interested in taking the pulse of some of the community and learning from interesting questions. I know I would.
- mikece 8y agoHow long is it going to take Redditors / HN readers / open source advocates to realize that Nat is one of them and that being an employee of Microsoft or Microsoft's designee to lead GitHub doesn't diminish this?
- IncRnd 8y agoFrom now until the end of the year is his job interview. Microsoft wins either way. If Nat doesn't gain developer and corporate traction, Microsoft replaces him in a smash move of hiring a well-liked CEO. However, if he is lauded by developers, then he stays as CEO.
- squarefoot 8y agoSorry but this is the corporate world. When an employee of a company speaks about an asset of that company, he represents the company views, not his ones.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jameslk 8y ago> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.
- hari_seldon_ 8y agoThis is the standard HN effect. I also love when I think some startups are killing it based on what I read here; but then they end up shutting down soon after due to a lack of any real revenue model.
- craftyguy 8y agoGiven how 1) he's provided no evidence to support his claim, 2) he would never publicly say "a significant number of users have moved", and 3) gitlab has a public tracker showing thousands of projects being imported, I'd take his comment with a large grain of salt.
- gaius 8y agoGithub has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.
- alexwebb2 8y ago> We will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward [...] for as long as there is a healthy community of people who love each of them, which I expect to be a very long time.
- emilsedgh 8y agoMicrosoft should just make Github open source. It would be a great PR move and an amazing build of trust. I don't know why Github was not open source to begin with. Why do companies still think source code is a big deal? This is not Google Search or some advanced AI.
- whalesalad 8y agoGreat PR move? Amazing build of trust? Microsoft bought GitHub for over seven billion dollars. You don't buy something for that kind of cash unless it has that kind of value. Saying they 'should' do something as though there is a problem is silly. Engineers here on HN are so quick to say what someone "needs to do" something... but in response to what? What problem are you identifying? A vocal minority of engineers have complained about the acquisition, meanwhile GitHub has 28 million users. Most of those users don't care that this happened.
- emilsedgh 8y ago1. They have great competition in Gitlab. Gitlab's main point is it's open source. They simply will be more competitive. 2. They want to improve their "Open Source Friendly" image and they've been taking meaningful steps towards it. 3. Why not? What's the downside of doing so?
- gkoberger 8y agoApple has great competition in Android, however it would be silly to open source iOS. GitLab/Android are customizable and have a ton of features, while GitHub/iOS are more cohesive. Differentiation is how competition exists. Even if you prefer Android/GitLab, you can't deny that most of the early innovation was copied from iOS/GitHub. In fact, most open source projects (Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc) take their lead from closed source competition... and for all those examples, that competition was Microsoft. That's not to say they can't eventually innovate, however much of the R&D, creation of a marketing, etc come from closed source. The downside of Open Sourcing so is losing billions of dollars from companies who say "rather than paying $10k/mo, I'm going to just fork it for free". Lastly, part of the value of GitHub is the network effects. If everyone's hosting it on their own, then there's no network effect.
- staunch 8y ago"Developers are independent thinkers..." He seems to be playing the typical corporate lackey role. His comments are all full of condescension, platitudes, and corpspeak. He sounds more like a PR person than a principled leader. He's saying exactly what he thinks his audience wants to hear. It's not surprising that he thrived as a Microsoft exec. That he's willing to make promises about GitHub's future is also telling. He's the "CEO" of a company owned by another company. He can be fired and replaced at the first hint of disagreement with Microsoft execs. He can't afford to rock the boat at all and he knows it. So he's being dishonest or naive when he makes these promises. A more honest or aware person would make this distinction clear. Microsoft ruining GitHub over the next few years will be a good thing for open source. There was never anything ideal about relying on a highly centralized proprietary service. GitHub made it work but Microsoft will reveal the inherent weakness of this situation.
- orand 8y agoYour comment is a significant misreading of his current statements as well as where he's come from. Yes, he's very skilled in the corporate world, but he's just as skilled in the open source world. You absolutely need to be awesome at both to be able to do the right thing as the CEO of GitHub. Check out his history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Friedman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Friedman
- staunch 8y agoI've read his Wikipedia page. I see work at Microsoft, Novell, an open source version of Microsoft .NET that had little to no adoption, a Microsoft acquisition, and more Microsoft employment. What's there to be excited about there? He's not an open source developer with a great project that now leads GitHub. He's a corporate guy that now leads GitHub under Microsoft executives.
- orand 8y agoThe vast majority of his career has been leading open source projects and companies. You really can't do that successfully without deeply getting open source philosophy and culture. The most talented open source devs simply won't work for you otherwise. While Mono itself wasn't widely adopted, it was the code base that Xamarin came from, which _is_ quite widely adopted. And Xamarin Studio (now Visual Studio for Mac) is built using the "no adoption" Mono. http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[mono,xamarin,monotouch,monodroid] http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[mono,xamarin,monotouch,monodro...
- eklavya 8y agoEver since I heard of "Monaco" the online code editor which is used in VSCode. I always assumed Microsoft will eventually come up with a completely online IDE >> deploy toolchain like a GitHub on steroids. I think this acquisition is pretty much all about that. Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet though, at least not that I have read of.
- qz3 8y agoAn online toolchain would be a nice concept in theory, but at least on my laptop, performance is still an issue. Online IDEs still eat up a lot more resources.
- kjax 8y agoWASM might help make them a lot more performant, and I think online editors could be a place where it really shines.
- WorldMaker 8y agoMicrosoft does have Monaco used in Azure and VSTS online tooling.
- darzu 8y agoMicrosoft already has VSTS which has source hosting, CI, issue tracking, kanban, release management and more. I suspect acquiring GitHub was more about the developer mind-share than the technology.
- foepys 8y agoAre you sure that VSTS will live more than two more years? I'd suspect that Microsoft will eventually want to integrate GitHub with their CI and get rid of TFS (of which VSTS is just a hosted version) entirely. I don't know if you've used TFS/VSTS but it's not exactly user-friendly and well designed. Especially their CI configuration is horrendous.
- 8y ago
- handbanana 8y ago> Is there any truth to the rumor that Clippy will be joining your team? I think "You appear to have a merge conflict. How can I help you?" is a good fit for Github. > His name is actually Clippit, and you will address him as Mr. Clippit. Classic Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a5juw https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...
- colemannugent 8y agoLittle things like this build more trust with me than all the carefully written press release blogs ever could.
- marricks 8y agoI think this falls under “I want a president I would have a beer with”, you’re judging something by a bad metric.
- beambot 8y agoSeems that you believe you possess the authority to judge the worthiness of someone else's metric...? Curious.
- carlosdp 8y agoOnly if it's the only metric. I've worked with people who would never be comfortable making jokes like that in a public forum, always having their "PR-mode" on, and they tend to be the ones that don't have a ton of empathy. Being able to interact with the community in a human way is definitely a good signal, imo.
- marricks 8y agoEh... for a small organization sure but I think relatability from big wigs is more used as a way to hand wave controversies than being used for actual good? I think the president analogy really holds. A president who you could have a beer with can get away with a lot more crap then one who has to prove it through policy. I’m definitely being a bit nit picky, just saying it’s not a good metric.
- euroclydon 8y agoThinking about MS's recent acquisitions, how long will it take to recoup the money they spent on: LinkedIn, MineCraft and now GitHub? LinkedIn: $26b MineCraft: $2.5b Github: $7.5b
- bytematic 8y agoDid the Minecraft thing not make money for them? I imagine now that it's on a ton of platforms it's made that back?
- lcfcjs 8y agoAs of January 2018, over 144 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the second best-selling video game of all time behind Tetris. ^ from wikipedia If they sold each for $10, then thats $1.5 bil (if my maths right). So I think it's safe to say that they have not made their money back ... yet.
- rjeli 8y agoIt's $26 on PC and $20 on Xbox, so the revenue is about there
- soared 8y ago+ microtransactions for skins and graphics packs
- kthejoker2 8y agoMerch? Every kid I know has Minecraft Legos, Minecraft pajamas, Minecraft fidget spinners ...
- earenndil 8y agoMinecraft legos are a funny thought. Minecraft basically _is_ digitized lego.
- cbayram 8y agoAny code analysis initiatives in your pipeline?
- loco5niner 8y agoThe AMA is actually happening on reddit... He won't answer here.
- loco5niner 8y ago>> Why do you think Microsoft has previously rejected the idea of open source software? >Fear Well, that's a pretty brazen answer.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bwb 8y agoSo weird, I don't understand the freakout. Microsoft is a solid company, I am totally fine with them buying it. What is with all this craziness?
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoGo look up the October Papers. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
- maccard 8y agoFrom 20 years ago. Meanwhile, in the last 5 years they have opened up huge amounts of C#, are the most active organisation on the largest open source host o the internet, lead the development of one of the most popular open source editors, provide rock solid Linux support on their cloud offerings, and have been jnvolved in huge amounts of publicly available research. I’m not saying they get a free pass for it, but they’ve more than earned their trust back over the last decade.
- saagarjha 8y agoMicrosoft was not always this cozy with open source and with regards to their acquisition policy.
- jesseb 8y agoMicrosoft has a long history of not only opposing open source, but actively trying to attack and discredit it. That and they are somewhat notorious for their whole "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" approach.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoMicrosoft is where good products go to die. They change products and the communities and cultures associated with those projects. They are a big machine that has to please shareholders, and growth is difficult when you’re that big, so there are “hard choices” that can be made abruptly. These choices are often not to the benefit of the existing communities. Ignore anyone who brings up “Embrace, extend, extinguish”. I’m not an MS apologist but no rational person can still consider that to be relevant. There are many reasons to distrust them, but that isn’t one of them.
- systematical 8y agoUntil Microsoft does anything shady I'm staying put with both personal and business projects. I rather give them the opportunity to improve an already good service. Try justifying to management moving to gitlab because Microsoft...
- ishbits 8y agoWhat is the root of all the Microsoft distrust? I’m older, and left Windows for Linux back in 1997 and haven’t really paid attention since. I wonder if this mistrust is valid? Are they any worse than Apple?
- curun1r 8y agoWell, there are a lot of web developers that we're saddled with supporting ie6 for many years after Microsoft won the browser war with Netscape and proceeded to let it stagnate for years. That amount of pain that was inflicted on the web dev community left a lot of lingering resentment. Then there was their locked-down file formats, their role in killing off BeOS and preventing pre-installed Linux machines, their "embracing" of open technologies like Kerberos only to make their version subtly incompatible. For well over a decade, almost everything they did technically rubbed us tech folks the wrong way.
- mortehu 8y agoFor me it's that they're software patent abusers, and I won't send them any money because of that. However, all I did was switch from the paid tier to the free tier, and move my private repositories to my own server. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11323942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11323942
- jaimex2 8y agoNo one asked "why?" ?
- woodandsteel 8y agoDoes anyone really believe that if an open source project hosted on Github became a serious competitor to a Microsoft project, the Microsoft management wouldn't figure out some way to undermine it?