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Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub leaves some scientists uneasy
- Fomite 8y ago"During the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, for example, researchers used the platform to share and cross-check daily patient counts." Pretty sure this is referring to the lab I used to work in. Honestly, I'm not particularly worried about the buyout - pretty sure the chances of them just scrapping the whole service are slim, and "GitHub disappears" seems equally as likely burning through VC cash as it does owned by Microsoft.
- craftyguy 8y agoFor the current regime, mmaybe. But don't underestimate next regime's ability to flip tables.
- eftychis 8y agoThat is the main worry, I would say. Less likely Github is going to flip and die than Microsoft becoming anti-opensource again (they are anti-foss/floss still I would say -- not talking about the engineers working there of course).
- acct1771 8y agoOf course, this ignores the fact that by forging their employers goals ahead, they're, to some extent, endorsing their viewpoints.
- Fomite 8y agoI mean yeah, but that's always true. But until my next grant wants to pay for someone to deal with self-hosting, it's a risk I'll take.
- gaius 8y agothe chances of them just scrapping the whole service are slim, and "GitHub disappears" seems equally as likely burning through VC cash as it does owned by Microsoft. Right, the people who should really be worried are VSTS users. And GitLab users funnily enough. They are VC backed and will have to exit too, and everyone’s looking at them now. The least worst thing that could happen is bought by Atlassian and folded into Bitbucket. And you’re completely right, it is actually pretty weird that they were never worried before when it was burning VC cash. Funded by grants, I’m not sure scientists fully understand how this works.
- freeone3000 8y agoVSTS does a lot of stuff GitHub doesn't, and has had GitHub as a source control option for a while.
- jeremy_wiebe 8y agoGitHub or just git? I thought just the latter.
- my123 8y agoActually, both. GitHub is a nice option if you want to use VSTS for CI. Note that Windows itself is in a Git repo on VSTS (os repo in the Microsoft tenant)
- earenndil 8y agoIIRC they've said they intend to keep VSTS and github as separate products.
- gaius 8y agothey intend to keep VSTS and github as separate product Still, consider Codeplex, which isn’t around anymore. I see the two merging over time, say in 5 years, and I expect the migration to be fairly painless, so I am not too worried personally, but I can see how some people might be.
- notimetorelax 8y agoI don’t really understand why it matters that these are scientists. It seems that the scientist title is added only to give this article more weight.
- beojan 8y agoBecause this is Nature. It's a science magazine.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- azangru 8y agoTotally. Came here to say exactly this: the title of the article is needlessly and confusingly specific. It’s like saying that scientists are concerned about the declining US dollar value, or some such. There seems to be nothing unique about scientists who use GitHub as opposed to the rest of GitHub users, and their concerns are the same.
- johnchristopher 8y ago> "[..] researchers used the platform to share and cross-check daily patient counts." No concerns about private datasets in the open on Github ? I get they like the workflow but they traded ethics for convenience there. Medical ethics.
- jarfil 8y agoIf it's anonymized data, I see no problem. All scientific datasets should be in the open.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- johnchristopher 8y agoIndeed, the first four repository I found for a google search with `ebola outbreak github` terms only have statistical data.
- Fomite 8y agoThese were publicly reported data sets of case counts. You can find them on various Ministry of Health websites. I know because I worked in the lab that maintained one of them. The biggest issue was that one country reported their data in non-machine readable form on Facebook. Maintaining that was extremely time intensive.
- masonicb00m 8y agoThe cool thing about git is it doesn’t matter what happens to the platform. You can take your repo and push it somewhere else if you don’t like how Microsoft runs the show. Given how Microsoft took Github’s idea with Atom and ran with it to make VSCode, I wouldn’t be surprised if Github improves under Microsoft’s rule.
- jarfil 8y agoThe problem lies in the comments and issue tracking, which are not stored in git. Sure, you can clone the repo, but you can only take the wiki with you, the rest would be lost.
- Fomite 8y agoTo my mind, the actual problem is neither one of those things, but if Github is wrapped up into some new project. Many of the citations for Github aren't for software, but as a stable, open store for data. Which means if that URL changes, that link - in a physical paper - goes stale.
- Cyphase 8y agoEven if it does get merged or renamed, I don't see why Microsoft wouldn't forward the URLs. Link rot is a real issue in general though, I don't mean to minimize that.
- Fomite 8y agoI agree - which is why I haven't moved my lab's accounts.
- masonicb00m 8y agoIf you need stable links then buy yourself a domain or use a URL shortener that you can update. Might be wise to also provide content hashes of the data you're referencing in your paper.
- gpantazes 8y ago
- ToFab123 8y ago"Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code" That was already the case before Microsoft purchased GitHub. So why did they start to use it in the first place, if they had this concern?
- org3432 8y agoNow the whole data set in GitHub, the metadata, being able to analyze all the projects may not be as open since it can conflict with other microsoft products, such as LinkedIn if you're looking for candidates, or possibly AI training data.
- bobbytherobot 8y agoMicrosoft products already conflict with Microsoft products.
- mtgx 8y agoMaybe what he meant was one large corporation. It's usually the large players that start taking down accounts at will and have bogus takedown rules, because they are the largest and don't care about any one account.
- pessimizer 8y agoIt was a bad idea in the first place, and one of the dangers was that this one failure point could end up controlled by a company like Microsoft. You can say that it was a bad idea for people to store all of their things in a warehouse with no sprinklers or smoke detectors, but after it's been done, it's pretty silly to scold people for not continuing to store things in a warehouse that is currently on fire.
- geezerjay 8y ago> for not continuing to store things in a warehouse that is currently on fire. That metaphor is rather silly. Microsoft's purchase of github didn't set the metaphorical warehouse on fire. At most, it only raised attention to the fire hazard that was present since the warehouse was created. What next? People will complain about the privacy risks presented in services such as Dropbox only after some major corportion buys it?
- saagarjha 8y agoThis article seems to have a very focused interest on data in GitHub repositories, as opposed to source code. I get that the article is aimed at scientists, but I don’t see the problem here: if Microsoft takes down your dataset just move it somewhere else. You’re not tied down with pull requests or comments like code repositories are.
- Fomite 8y agoThe problem is the stable of the pointer. From a paper of mine: "The code and simulation results are available online at https://github.com/mylabname/ https://github.com/mylabname/ project." That's in print. In another paper, I expressly cite a GitHub repository as the source of the data used in the analysis. Pointing to data in papers is the way most of the scientists I know use GitHub - because it's relatively stable, not tied to an institutional account, and relatively pain free.
- IanCal 8y ago[disclaimer work for related company - Digital Science] It's really worth getting those things into a system that will give you a doi and participate in an archive so that content should never be lost. Figshare is one, zenodo another (I think but can't find on a phone that the data is archived). A doi, if versioned, can ensure people see the actual version you used. It can be pointed somewhere else if the provider goes down, and should be archived to ensure its not lost. URLs are just not stable over time.
- ploggingdev 8y agoSlightly OT. I was wondering what happens to Github's policy on employees' side projects post acquisition. Links : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142327
- wpdev_63 8y agoughh... just roll with your own git server.
- geoalchimista 8y agoTo be honest, I don't think GitHub is to be blamed for how scientists use it. AFAIK there are data repositories more suitable for the purpose of sharing data sets and metadata, and out of the hands of big corporations (but may subject to big governments), e.g., Zenodo (funded by CERN) and DataONE (funded by NSF). Zenodo can even generate a DOI for your data set, which GitHub does not do. That being said, I think this Nature report adds nothing new to the narrative. Sure, open science is great, but who's gonna pay for it? Neither GitHub nor Microsoft is a charity. Since most of the research mentioned in this article are funded by government, they should go to the data repositories that are designed to store data derived from publicly funded research. GitHub just wasn't designed for that purpose.
- randomsearch 8y ago“Why don’t scientists use modern tools like GitHub, instead of these crap bespoke ones? They shouldn’t waste their time duplicating effort.” “Why are scientists using inappropriate tools? These are for commercial use only!” In practice, GitHub works fine for collaborative code projects and sharing data over the next few years. If you’re looking to store large amounts of data over long periods, you’re right. If GitHub don’t want to support science (they’re just a business) then they should stop giving free products to academia eh.
- geoalchimista 8y agoDon't make a straw man argument. I said none of the above. I'm NOT against open science. And I am glad that GitHub supports open science. In fact, GitHub does offer free private repositories to researchers who have an .edu email address.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoI see it mostly as a summary of the "common wisdom"; it has been a mantra for years that you should "just put it on github", but now that Mircosoft has reminded us all of how cynical the world truly is, suddenly the scientists that paid attention before are to blame?
- lotia 8y agoSeeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony. They have profited greatly from locking up access to academic papers in their most prestigious journals. The article includes the following tweet: “Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code. I hope that expert coders in #openscience have a viable alternative to #github,” tweeted Tom Johnstone, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. Github's current position is to be default open with a paid option for private. Nature's default position was to lock up journal articles and sell them for extortionate prices. It's surprising to see them post an article noting that scientists feel MS will change that for the worse. They have been good participants in the open source community of late specially under Mr. Nadella's leadership.
- bonesss 8y agoSee I hope that "expert" coders understand that 'git push' works even on non-MS controlled endpoints, and how to setup a damned wiki if need be... GitHub is stupid valuable for MS, and will make their dev tools offerings much stronger (TFS is a dog, bringing GitHub Enterprise into MS Enterprise support & sales cycle is gonna make a loooot of scratch). But the value of the GitHub community persists only so long as the community is present. MS can't start destroying Open Science, because Open Science will be open any- and everywhere. Frankly, disciplines should be creating their own community hubs and portals based on Git and the publishing standards of GitHub: leveraging GitHubs infrastructure and standards while capturing and engaging with the relevant users. That way they can always migrate and maintain the community. Besides, even cynically MS is more likely to do a bad job of community management trying to upsell related services moreso than poop on things for the sake of pooping on them. If it becomes offensive you'll have a nice window to find a superior collaboration hub.
- mattmanser 8y agoYou can already use GitHub in visual studio. MS didn't have to buy GitHub to integrate with it. Pretty much the best that can happen is GitHub will now get worse as MS puts in functionality to do with their tools. The worst is they really fuck it up like they did with Skype.
- tanu057 8y agoTo survive, GItHub must provide the way to encrypt private repositories so that they can make sure that files cannot be read by github employees. Would that be possible?
- oaiey 8y agoMicrosoft is the number two cloud vendor. When they violate the privacy of their paying customers, they are dead. And no, telemetry is about privacy but not the same as reading the data/code itself.
- lucb1e 8y ago> Microsoft is the number two cloud vendor. When they violate the privacy of their paying customers, they are dead. Perhaps it's different for paying customers, but I do have evidence of them scanning my OneDrive about ten year ago and them reading Skype chats about a year ago. I bet if someone uploads the OS X source code to OneDrive, or perhaps a private Github repository, the good parts of its design would somehow make it into Windows. Or perhaps something else that they can use, I'm pretty sure they'll check that out before making an acquisition offer.
- Demiurge 8y agoPerhaps it's besides the point, but core osx is open source as Darwin and XNU, and I don't see much value in them. NT hybrid kernel is extremely well designed, and there is an ecosystem built around it. It is extremely unlikely anyone at Microsoft will find anything aiding in Office 98 compatability online...
- will4274 8y ago> evidence of them scanning my OneDrive Microsoft publically states that they scan OneDrives for forbidden content, like pornography (yes, all pornography is forbidden on OneDrive, not just child pornography). > I bet if someone uploads the OS X source code to OneDrive, or perhaps a private Github repository, the good parts of its design would somehow make it into Windows The OS X kernel is open source, and that's the most valuable part of the OS X source code. It's not like Microsoft can import the OS X window styles. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
- chris_wot 8y agoForget about GitHub, Nature makes scientists uneasy.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoJust the machine learning scientists, most every other community are more or less fine with them.
- a-dub 8y agotbh i think this article was pretty poorly conceived and written. was this an intern summer project? the complicated topic of open science, open data and reproducibility goes way beyond whether venture capitalists or a large public company are footing the bill for a fashionable place to host code publicly for free.
- subatomic 8y agoSo will Nature be comfortable with having scientists cross publishing on GitHub in the name of "Open Science"?
- SCdF 8y agoI know a lot of people don't like n-gate and webshit weekly, but I think their slice on this was particularly relevant: > Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub > A near-monopoly closed-source software company, fed up with trying to seem like a good corporate citizen by releasing source code of their worst programs, is acquired by Microsoft. When you combine that with the concerns from the article: > They fear that the site will become less open (it's not currently "open" in any significant way now, bar that there are free public accounts. They don't even have a public f-ing bug tracker for site issues) > Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code (It was already owned by one corporation, the Github corporation. Now it's owned by a different one. It's not like GH was some kind of open source alliance distributed project or anything)
- janwh 8y agoThe level of hypocrisy is beyond measure. If "Open Science" was a real thing already, nobody would care about Nature, Elsevier, et al. If there has ever been a danger to open access to scientific research, it's publishing conglomerates that provide little to no value — the exact opposite of what GitHub has been doing the past few years. Before complaining about others, clean up your own act, Nature.
- mariodiana 8y agoFrom the article: "Others are hopeful that Microsoft’s stewardship will make the platform even more valuable." Perhaps I missed it, but nowhere in the article were any of these hopes articulated. I may lack imagination; so, can someone tell me how Microsoft can make GitHub more valuable? I don't mean how they can use GitHub to make more money for themselves, by selling "enterprise-level" support, or by making their development tools better. I'm asking how GitHub is going to be made more valuable to people who currently are not using Microsoft products. Any ideas? What exactly is there to be "hopeful" about?
- manigandham 8y agoGithub is the least functional source-code hosting service. Everything from search to issues to wiki is sub-par compared to Gitlab and others. It's massively unprofitable and its main advantage is the large mindshare and community that keeps it around. Microsoft with its rich resources can easily improve the platform functionality which will benefit anyone using Github, along with likely making several features free (like private repos).
- Paradigma11 8y agoFree private repos come to mind.
- paulific 8y agoAre people worried that they're trying to eradicate free software at the source?
- prepend 8y agoThe beauty of all this is that people can simply run their #openscience in Github and gitlab and bitbucket and (hopefully) their own gitea instance running on a $5/month digital ocean instance. It’s funny that this is a complaint about a company controlling a centralized resource because they worry. But any centralized resource has this risk. Did they think Github would lose money forever and subsidise infrastructure in perpetuity? I think it was a situation of users being oblivious to risk and then murmuring because the externalized risk they ignored is now more apparent in a smaller risk. So maybe these jarring events are good, because it helps us realize that many users are stupid and don’t assess data risk well. Luckily for us Github was really principled and Microsoft is a good fit for a PR/biz perspective. So the risk didn’t hit. Having these discussions now, so scientists learn to push to multiple public repos (or universities run their own instance for a few thousand a year), rather than rely -falsely- on one source.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agoLike a frickin' ad.
- jdormit 8y ago> “Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code. I hope that expert coders in #openscience have a viable alternative to #github,” tweeted Tom Johnstone, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. This shows an astounding lack of understanding, both of Github and of git itself. Github was always owned and operated by "one corporation" - now it is owned by a different one. And "the platform" isn't Github - it is git itself! If this neuroscientist is so concerned about the acquisition, he can just set up a git server for himself and his colleagues and start citing that URL instead of Github.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoThe platform is pretty clearly github, a binary on a disk isn't a "platform". And any scientist is far too busy with the interesting stuff to set up a git server, otherwise they would be a sysadmin.
- tedajax 8y agoUmm, support staff exist largely for this exact reason. In college I worked in IT support for the CS professors and would setup whatever services a lab needed.
- alexandercrohde 8y agoTo follow up on this, the design of git is inherently open and free. The very act of checking out a repo is mere seconds away from pushing it to any other server or platform/service provider. Thus, by the great design of git, there is no way to make it a "walled garden" like your email/calendar/facebook. Should Microsoft ever show any inkling of restricting content, moving thousands of repos to another provider would be trivial (i.e. I could do it in a day)
- scruffyherder 8y agoGood thing GitHub wasn't just one company ready to sell out at a moment's notice. Why the hell are people centralizing everything on a single place? The whole point of the internet is open protocols, open end points that can host anything. Host your own build your own communities!