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Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition
- Walkman 8y agoThe title in this case is not very clear because it's out of context. Should be something like "the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub is complete" to be more factual and instantly understandable.
- moritzplassnig 8y agoYes, good point. Updated the title.
- dustinmoris 8y ago> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you. Who asked you to make GitHub better though? It's pretty darn good already. I fear that the new CEO will try to make things better when they are already good. I'm really scared that GitHub will end up like Azure DevOps, perhaps get merged or shut down entirely when they feel they have feature parity. Currently there is no great GitHub alternative IMHO and for selfish reasons I wish Microsoft could just leave it. The most I am scared is to wake up one day and see the most ugly "Metro" UX applied to GitHub.
- kankroc 8y agoA fair point, but I, for one, will give him a chance.
- outside1234 8y agoI'd be more worried for the folks at Microsoft that work in competing spaces. :)
- sjroot 8y agoI have slowly moved most of my projects to GitLab. The UX is a little different, but you also get unlimited private repositories for individuals and organizations.
- btasovac 8y agoThanks for sharing this! I'd love to hear if you have more feedback on how is GitLab's UX different. Particularly, what do you think GitLab could do better here?
- fefehern 8y agoNot OP, but is there a way to preview Markdown when writing up your project's Wiki as you are typing? Alongside this, is there also a way to change the order of Wiki Pages?
- sytse 8y agoThe wiki edit screen has a Markdown preview tab https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouq7mwgazyyv6nc/Screenshot%202018-10-26%2008.21.06.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouq7mwgazyyv6nc/Screenshot%202018-... but it disables typing. I think you can override the default index of pages with a custom one.
- michaelcampbell 8y ago> unlimited private repositories for individuals and organizations. This was my draw to it as well.
- SEJeff 8y agoGitlab is a smaller company with a smaller userbase. You could argue they are a much more obvious takeover target for the Oracle / IBM / Google's wanting to compete more with Microsoft to own the developer experience.
- sgc 8y agoWhy GitLab over Bitbucket?
- hackerpoos 8y agoHaven't used gitlab but have used bitbucket server. It is trash compared to GitHub. Seriously feels like clunky stone age molasses.
- augustocamargo 8y agoGitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business. This means that GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud. GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.
- dustinmoris 8y agoNever in the history of acquisitions of that profile has the buyer ever given a different message than "we won't touch anything". Of course they will make big changes two years later down the line. You don't buy something if you have no plans for it.
- LaGrange 8y ago> Never in the history of acquisitions of that profile has the buyer ever given a different message than "we won't touch anything". Well, _technically_ I worked for one where it functioned in a hands-off way. The big difference was, the parent company was a holding company specialising in a certain industry, and us functioning differently from their other properties was the whole point. In this case, I expect things to go the What's App way: it's going to be long and slow, but MS will eat it eventually.
- bad_user 8y ago> Currently there is no great GitHub alternative GitLab is decent, with an open source core that can be installed on premise — I introduced it for a former employer and they are still very happy with it. https://gitlab.com/ https://gitlab.com/ All isn't perfect and I'm still on GitHub due to the network effects, but you do have alternatives.
- btasovac 8y agoHello, Community Advocate from GitLab here! I'm happy to hear that your former employer is happy with our product! If you have more feedback on the things that could be better, we would love to hear more!
- michaelcampbell 8y agoI'm using it for a couple personal projects and am very happy with it so far, for what that's worth.
- lucb1e 8y agoIt's not about an alternative -- heck, `apt install git` is the way everyone is already self-hosting git (you can push and pull from anything like Dropbox/Drive/OneDrive to an NFS mount). It's about the community that is GitHub. Since the news broke I've been hosting a Gitea instance and while that works fine, I cannot go a day without using Github for things like pulling other people's code, creating issues, etc.
- bad_user 8y agoThere are some prominent projects on GitLab already. Also once the apple gets rotten, people will move. Remember SourceForge? Seriously it only takes a bunch of high profile projects and people to drive a migration. In other words Microsoft has to play nice.
- lucb1e 8y agoMicrosoft is pushing some invasive stuff in Windows 10 but they totally get away with it. I don't believe that the only way to stay in business is to play nice, at least not in the short term that managers can oversee and will base their decisions on. SourceForge is from before my time. When Github was still small, I was still being brainwashed by school's free Windows and discount Office licenses and school educating us in using Microsoft Office. From my current point of view, though, SourceForge was never as big as Github is now. Almost every development company pulls code from Github, either in an automated fashion to pull in updates, or casually as they need random things that are published there. I don't think that was ever the case with SF.
- vesak 8y agoWhat's wrong with Azure Devops? I'm genuinely curious, because it looks like it might do a great job at replacing an Atlassian catastrophe.
- pc86 8y agoProbably 2/3 of my day job is implementing Azure Devops for our internal and client applications - personally I really like it although it certainly has a learning curve and some things are non-intuitive. But everyone I've talked to who has used it in a professional context more than once (e.g. not tried it once and given up) is more-or-less very happy with the quality and reliability. If you're good with Powershell it's also extremely easy to write your own build and/or release steps which is a huge plus.
- theflagbug 8y agoFor us, a few weeks ago Azure DevOps randomly stopped processing GitHub webhooks, so merge commits didn't trigger builds anymore (and we're not the only ones, see https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/346706/azure-devops-github-trigger-stopped-working.html https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/...). A fix for this issue still isn't deployed. Just a few days ago the service connection to Azure suddenly stopped working with "401 CouldNotFetchAccessTokenForAzureStatusCode" which appeared when deploying to Azure AppService. We had to recreate the service connection to get it working again. Recently we also wanted to move our Android builds to Azure DevOps but in the end the documentation was so confusing that we just used Bitrise instead.
- ladzoppelin 8y agoIt does not work unless Github is open to the internet. For example, Github Enterprise behind a VPN will not be able to use Azure Devops. Crazy but true.
- scarface74 8y agoIsn't Azure Devops just Visual Studio Team Services rebranded which is just hosted TFS? How hard is to bring TFS in house?
- dagaci 8y agoYour statements sounds a little confused. Everything stagnates, suffer from miss-direction, or just become irrelevant. Someone in an earlier post mentioned sourceforge for example. we just have to hope that this acquisition doesn't make it happen anytime soon.
- malvosenior 8y ago> Who asked you to make GitHub better though? It's pretty darn good already. It is? Because it takes my home feed ~5 seconds to load. Totally unacceptable.
- SEJeff 8y agoBlame elasticsearch for that :)
- sgc 8y agoBut shouldn't a company the size of GitHub fix elastisearch in that case?
- malvosenior 8y agoI blame poor product management and engineering. It's not even cached between page loads if nothing has changed (which is 99% of the time I load the page).
- recursive 8y agoWell, if github is using elasticsearch, then it's fair to blame them too.
- SEJeff 8y agoIt is. I run Github Enterprise (their on-premise version that comes in a Debian VM) and ES re-indexing has caused a few problems.
- cwyers 8y ago> Who asked you to make GitHub better though? Microsoft, his employer and the owner of GitHub.
- partiallypro 8y agoAnd every person that has ever used GitHub ever, that wants things to improve instead of remaining static. Just in the past few months Github has released a lot of cool stuff, before this was even completed. Github has changed a lot over the years, and that's a good thing. No one wants something that never improves.
- aerialcombat 8y agoCrossing fingers...
- frou_dh 8y agoTFA mentions the community "paper cuts" issue tracker[1]. I'd love to know what's so hard about the standout top-voted issue[2] that it hasn't been implemented since being logged in 2014. [1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop... [2] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/283 https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/283
- masklinn 8y agoProbably nothing, just that it wasn't interesting to the devs (e.g. they don't feel that is a paper cut) and/or was not pushed/promoted by management, leading to nobody working on it. Plus I'm guessing many/most GH employees aren't looking at this, this kind of listings is generally a bummer/PITA, and fixing them is a thankless job: once you've done so, all you get is "finally, took you long enough".
- frou_dh 8y agoMore like "Finally, thank God" (the implementer becomes a God for the day). This is the paradox of GitHub. The product itself is closed-source, so the outsiders cannot do the work to implement that feature themselves, no matter how much they want it.
- stan_programmer 8y agoI've been using this app called Octobox. It does a really good job of letting you organize and handle your GitHub notifications. https://octobox.io/ https://octobox.io/
- bad_user 8y agoNat Friedman has cofounded Xamarin, he understands Open Source and I'm sure he'll do well as CEO of GitHub. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. Microsoft could pull a Skype of course, but on the upside this might turn out to be a good thing, as in this climate many businesses, operating at scale and giving away so many freebies, are struggling and GitHub could have been the next SourceForge. Who knows, maybe they'll even open source it. Fingers crossed.
- cheez 8y agoMicrosoft is deliberately trying to be the biggest open source company in the world so I think Skype may not be the best example, maybe .NET core.
- bad_user 8y agoLets get one thing clear ... this company never gained anything from developing and pushing .NET and they haven't acquired a company for it either. So no, that's not a good example. A better example would be Nokia.
- cabaalis 8y agoDo you mean .Net in general or .Net core? In my industry, Microsoft stacks are extremely common. The talent pool for C# in this area is tremendous, which has absolutely gained the company much synergy in the form of OS and MSSQL licensing. So the development of .Net in my opinion has made the company much more sticky. I can't help but believe they're making a mistake (even though I want it!) in pushing .Net to open source.
- metildaa 8y agoIf Microsoft doesn't ccontinue to open up parts of the .Net stack, the OS and MSSQL licensing revenue is going to taper off more rapidly. Microsoft sees the writing on the wall, their software is focused on a stable, but not significantly expanding platform, and Chromebooks are eating the lower quartile of it. If Microsoft can't retain developer mindshare, they are sunk.
- walrus01 8y agoEmbrace, extend, extinguish.
- lou1306 8y agoDoes, not, apply. One could even say that GitHub was "embracing & extending" Git (pull requests, issue trackers, wikis) well before the acquisition.
- z3t4 8y agosolicitation then
- rileyphone 8y agoThat's Google's MO now.
- alpeb 8y agoYep, but the other way around. Open source was Microsoft's fiercest enemy, and now it's managed to root deep inside the company, eating it from the inside out, turning Microsoft into something very very different than what it was 15 years ago. We won!
- jeremyjh 8y agoOh, my sweet, summer child. This could just be the embrace phase.
- meddlepal 8y agoOr you're just a conspiracy theorist. Time will tell.
- meesterdude 8y agohow can you look at the history of Microsoft and call their playbook conspiracy theory?
- jhabdas 8y agoRemember, no matter who they are you will never own your data unless self-hosting. GitLab is slow, bloated and the free version lacks core features provided by Gitea for free so get a $5 vultr vps and speed up your workflow while owning your data.
- tenderlove 8y agoThis is some great FrontPage news
- sbjustin 8y agoI saw what you did there :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ksec 8y agowhat's the Outlook for GitHub ?
- adrianmacneil 8y agoIt's hard to Paint this as a bad thing.
- tenderlove 8y agoAfter the merge, we'll probably branch out and become an even better SharePoint for developers
- evanweaver 8y agoEverybody knows that Bills are the Gateing factor for further GitHub adoption
- mattkevan 8y agoA couple of lawyers and Bob’s your uncle.
- mattkevan 8y agoThe pace has been surprisingly Clippy for an acquisition of this size.
- sys_64738 8y agoWonder if they'll decide to open source Windows via GitHub.
- vezycash 8y agoDream on
- sys_64738 8y agoMaybe. But today's Microsoft is not that of your parents. 10 years ago, could you imagine them being the owners of the hub of the open source community?
- shmerl 8y agoThey had one since 2006 (Codeplex) but it didn't attract much interest as could be expected.
- Klathmon 8y agoIt's not without precedent! With .NET Core [0], and ChakraCore[1] (Edge's JS engine) both being open sourced. And them having thrown the entirety of MS-DOS [2] up under the MIT license, and making a bunch of new tools and stuff under open licenses (VSCode, TypeScript, msbuild, etc...). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they started making a push to open up many parts of Windows. Already some devs on the Edge team have said publicly that they are working on open sourcing the whole rendering engine from Edge, and seeing that they are moving toward having Windows be more of a "platform" and less of "software you buy", it makes sense that it could eventually become an open source (or at least "open core") product. I don't think it will happen this year, but I do think that if MS keeps going in this direction, it's more likely than not to happen eventually. [0] https://github.com/dotnet/core https://github.com/dotnet/core [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS
- tracker1 8y ago
- Svoka 8y agoJust a friendly reminder: Corporations are not humans. Corporation's acts are driven by profits. Last decade Microsoft CEO was describing Linux as "communism". Some say, till this day Microsoft would go after hardware manufacturers who use Linux for patent fees, having covert patent war vs Linux. [1] I really like how Microsoft is now, all open, free, unicorns and rainbows. Hell, they're producing some terrific open source themselves and support community. But lets not forget - corporations are not people. Next CEO may use Github to put obstacles on OSS movement's way. Just because it is good now, doesn't mean it will be good tomorrow, or in 10 years. P.S. Personally, I really happy where Microsoft is heading right now, and I think they're doing terrific job with their open source projects. You go Microsoft. I hope OSS way would be successful enough so MS would embrace it even more... But you never know. EDIT: [1] I'm aware that Microsoft recently joined Open Invention Network patent pool. But there're criticism that contributed patents are not important ones. I tried to find ExFAT patents, but couldn't in OIN list. Also, it is really hard to find full OIN contributed patent list. Here's US patent numbers MS going around asking money for, couldn't find any confirmation of all of them being contributed 5579517 5758352 5745902 6286013
- citrablue 8y agoWhile this obviously also applies equally to Apple, Google, etc., I'm curious: do you think it also is the case with companies like RedHat? The recent MongoDB announcement made me a bit more sensitive and aware of the orthogonality of interests, even in a company that produces OSS as it's core product (and monetizes services).
- Svoka 8y agoApple and Google didn't take over major OSS hub (some say, the OSS hub of today). This companies contribute a lot themselves, and have a long history of doing so. And yes, MongoDB ticked me too. I like way Microsoft is going, I just don't want to get hurt if suddenly their board/CEO decide to pursue opposite direction: won't even be first time for the company.
- tasuki 8y ago> do you think it also is the case with companies like RedHat? Not the op, but yes, both "Corporations are not humans" and "Corporation's acts are driven by profits" also applies to RedHat and other publicly traded companies.
- whoopdedo 8y agoI'm keeping a close eye on repos such as py-kms.
- spork12 8y agoThe benefits or Microsoft owning GitHub seem to keep rolling in. The visual studio integration has gotten much better already and I'm excited to see how they begin to integrate github into Azure.
- arethuza 8y agoA lot of the Azure documentation has been in GitHub for ages - made me wonder if MS viewed them as an acquisition target more than a year ago.
- lrvick 8y agoHow long before GitHub moves to Azure? Having it in RackSpace and AWS is bad optics, but they also must know Azure is not stable enough for something as large and visible as GitHub. I expect this to be the first integration they try. Stockpiling the popcorn.
- Operyl 8y agoMicrosoft uses other providers from time to time, I know a few of their services which reside in IBM's SoftLayer too.
- partiallypro 8y ago"but they also must know Azure is not stable enough" In what universe is this true? Azure is the backbone of large things in corporate America, especially in banking and healthcare that you never even think about. Things a lot more important than someone's repo being inconvenienced. Any migration will be painful, but to say Azure as a service isn't up to the task is just nonsense.
- marenkay 8y agoFrom practical experience, I would say Azure is a moving target currently. Things beyond virtual machine and networks feel like moving targets. For the sectors you cited that might not matter since those will not be using cloud resources but rather the common virtual machine workload.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoI remember when they moved Hotmail to Windows servers, took more than one try, if memory serves.
- 21 8y agoGitLab was hosted on Azure just fine for a long period, before moving off recently for optics reasons.
- veritas3241 8y ago
- shmerl 8y agoInteresting joining OIN was driven by GitHub acquisition. Did MS confirm that them joining OIN includes non aggression with exFAT and ActiveSync patents?
- kyleperik 8y agoHonestly I'll be happy no matter how this turns out. If this deters developers as a result, it should open up more potential for new platforms. If it does great, then open source as a community will continue to grow and be backed up by the credibility of Microsoft.
- ken 8y ago> GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love. > Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you. Whenever I see a product claim it's "for you", I cringe. You just can't put something on the web or on TV and say "for you" and have it mean anything useful. What I always loved about GitHub was that it was the underdog, so they naturally built tools so that a couple of developers in a garage (well, cafe) could have access to the same type of tools that a Fortune-100 company has (and has to pay companies like IBM big bucks to install and maintain). It's using technology to help those with fewer resources, which is to me the entire purpose of technology. Almost everything I've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been to help enterprise developers at big established companies. Creating giant workflows and integrating with legacy systems and such. The little things that individuals use are slipping through the cracks. When I reported that the milestone date-picker went away for Safari users, for example, they just told me "Sorry". "Developers" has become a dirty word. It's a weasel word that companies use to try to convince me they're talking about me, while actually talking about someone and something completely different. If you can't be more specific than that, you're almost certainly wasting my time. I miss the GitHub whose homepage had logos of little startups I'd barely heard of, and direct links to new and interesting repos. Now they've got IBM and SAP and Walmart logos. It's clear that the "developers" they're targeting no longer includes me.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoHave to go where the money is, and if we're at the end of the business cycle where VCs are making it rain, startups aren't where the money is at. Businesses run on cash, not hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Think about that the next time you're on the free tier of a service you love and can't live without.
- ken 8y agoI never asked anyone to run a business on "hopes, dreams, and aspirations". I'm a paying GitHub customer. They could have raised prices on me and I'd still pay. People used to say, "If you're not paying, you're the product", so I've been careful not to depend on any free-with-a-catch services. I guess now I have to be extra careful not to depend on any VC-funded services, either, because if I'm not as rich an income stream as the corporate world, I'm still not the real customer.
- adamnemecek 8y agoPlease fix search. A simple deduction would go a long way. So many times are there 30 pages of the same file.
- adamnemecek 8y agoDeduction = deduplication
- nanna 8y agoMy reservations about Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub are not that they might ruin it or whatever, but that I've no interest in adding to the value of any Microsoft product by being their user. For the same reason I use a Gnu/Linux operating system. Truthfully there are things that I imagine MS or apple might do better, but that's beside the point for me. It's a political stance.
- marcosdumay 8y agoIf you start a project somewhere, choose a competitor. FOSS development is way too much concentrated on GitHub already, it's unhealthy. But there is no problem in most people not thinking like you either. Overall, I think the acquisition was good, if no other reason, just because there are enough people that dislike MS for pushing some diversity on the FOSS hosting game.
- sevensor 8y agoSo when I write a project in C, will Github show me a popup recommending I switch to C# for a faster, safer development experience? Microsoft feels like an untrustworthy friend to me -- I'll go to a party at Microsoft's house, but I wouldn't let Microsoft hold my wallet.
- mmirate 8y agoTo be fair, a (hypothetical) non-morally-bankrupt hosting provider would do just that but for Rust instead of C#.
- jyriand 8y agoI remember that GitHub was paraded as boss-less company. But now they ended up in big pile of hierarchy.
- 0xfeeddeadbeef 8y agoNitpick: Nat Friedman's GitHub profile [1] does not have STAFF badge yet. [1] https://github.com/nat https://github.com/nat
- zzo38computer 8y agoI sometimes view projects on GitHub, but do not use it (nor do I use git at all; I prefer Fossil) for my own projects, so I am unaffected.