4 ms·
"Developers are independent thinkers..." He seems to be playing the typical corporate lackey role. His comments are all full of condescension, platitudes, and
by 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...
- cjbprime 8y agoIt is extremely obvious that you don't know anything about Nat or his work history. Ximian led development of GNOME, which was one of the largest open source software projects at the time. Nat showed up to the hackfests and wrote code like everyone else. He is absolutely an open source developer, whose later career has been in management.
- 3princip 8y agoHis answers read like they were written by a bot tbh.