4 ms·

GitLab is awesome. There are a lot of features I use like the built in time tracking. Also, I'm not very interested in using GitHub since it was acquired by Mic

GitLab is awesome. There are a lot of features I use like the built in time tracking. Also, I'm not very interested in using GitHub since it was acquired by Microsoft since they have a littered history of abuse and vendor lock-in. I'm not sure how they will try to retrofit EEE onto Git, but I won't be surprised when they somehow do.

jchw 8y ago
I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s. As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows. They are also apparently going to support their VFS for Git protocol on GitHub, but VFS for Git is open source and supports Windows and Mac (and apparently, will support Linux.) And they claim Git is now the source control for Windows, which is impressive if true. By all accounts, Microsoft has been supporting Git in some form for several years and appears to have only increased their stake. I still think GitLab is awesome, though. There's a whole ton of things GitLab does that GitHub does not. I will probably continue to use both, myself.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  > I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s. I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.) > As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows That's the first and second E's in EEE. Wait for the extinguish portion of their plan. I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
  - jchw 8y ago
    >I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.) I do not know what their justification is for those defaults. They could, for all I know, have good reasoning, like legacy support. It's possible, though less likely, that they simply didn't put much thought into it. I do know that the xlsx format is standardized. I've not used it myself, but I've heard it's not unreasonable (whereas docx is apparently a bit less reasonable.) And I mean, from my experience I've not had trouble opening Excel spreadsheets in LibreOffice or Google Sheets. If they broke in any way, I failed to notice. In any case it sounds like minor greivances and a pretty darn far cry from 90s Microsoft. >I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again. Well this is incorrect. I use GitHub but I'm not doubling down. I don't use Windows except in VMs, I find it to be downright vexatious and even the new Windows 10 for Workstations is still incredibly annoying (yep, still getting Cortana SPAM by default.) I also find it suspicious when Edge is magically the default browser or my file associations to IrfanView keep getting reset to Windows Photo Viewer due to "corrupt file associations," yet those same file associations work fine if I uninstall Windows Photo Viewer. Those things are really super annoying. However, even some of the more egregious behaviors hit me as unlikely to be intentional. I am frustrated at an upsettingly similar rate by open source software and it only recently occurred to me that I would almost never attribute this to underhanded tactics. I still prefer my open source software, but I do think Microsoft is different. Time will tell.
    - chopin 8y ago
      Open a csv file in Excel, edit it and save (the latter is locale dependent). The result is horrible. I maintain a tool which offers csv import and export of data and we have regularly bug reports from users when they use excel to use it (Excel opens csv files by default on Windows). I did not find a way to tell Excel to not alter the meta-structure (such as replacing commas with semicolons), not to start about escaping. There's an RFC for csv data (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180), there's no way to tell Excel to honour it.
      - jchw 8y ago
        >There's an RFC for csv data (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180), there's no way to tell Excel to honour it. That RFC is from 2005. Excel appeared in 1987. Excel outputs CSVs in Excel dialect rather than RFC 4180. Unfortunate as it is, it's probably only sane to do that. A lot of stuff has probably relied on it for decades. Python 3, for example, defaults to excel dialect in it's CSV library. Apache Commons CSV supports Excel dialect. I imagine there's all kinds of crap relying on this by now. The fact that it doesn't have an option to output in RFC 4180 is unideal, but I can certainly see why. For almost their entire userbase, it would be the wrong option. I don't think they really want more code paths to maintain either. Seems logical enough. Of course it's relatively easy to support XLS/XLSX and it should be relatively easy to automatically detect what dialect of CSV you're taking in. So if your goal is happier customers, then you have options. It is what it is. I don't think this is a JScript type situation here. The world mostly standardized on Excel style CSV and a different standard was blessed by IETF. But much like HTML5 vs XHTML, sometimes standards should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. RFC 4180 would've been more useful had it followed Excel dialect. Instead I think it leaves Microsoft in a tough place and their decision has been to not change it in line with how they normally treat backwards compatibility. Far from a staunch fan of Microsoft myself, but I do think it's important to stay rational and have some reasonable skepticism.
        chopin 8y ago
        I understand legacy. The only wish I have is to tell Excel to honour the RFC (it's not that Excel isn't developed any longer). Just a checkbox (or whatever). I am using the Apache CSV library to parse csv. Content coming from Excel is still ... difficult. And Apache is fine with handling RFC 4180 compliant content. If the "new" Microsoft is really opening up to Open Source, it'd be nice if they honoured existing standards at least with products which are still under development. All I am asking for is one more entry in the "Save As..." dialogs drop down box. It can't be that hard...
- ionised 8y ago
  > I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s. On the contrary, I don't see them as having changed at all. The old tactics are still in play; they've just gotten better at convincing the gullible that they are now on their side. After the Windows 10 fiasco as well, I'm done with the company.
  - Dayshine 8y ago
    > I'm done with the company. Or you could made a measured decision on a product by product basis. As I'm sure you do with all the other big tech companies which have massively betrayed us. Unless you're telling me you boycott all products by Google, Apple, Facebook and Oracle (for starters).
    - seba_dos1 8y ago
      Boycotting all non-FLOSS products by Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle and Microsoft isn't a bad thing to do. I'm not there yet (Gmail, Facebook, occasionally something owned by Google like YouTube), but the goal is to eventually get there :P
    - ionised 8y ago
      > Unless you're telling me you boycott all products by Google, Apple, Facebook and Oracle Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you.
      - Dayshine 8y ago
        I wish I was affluent enough to be able to make that kind of decision. I'm glad you are.
        ionised 8y ago
        Your snarky dismissal aside, I'm far from affluent, I'm on £45k a year in the north-west (Liverpool, HIGHLY deprived area) of the UK. I'd wager, without even meeting you, that you are far better off than I am. I was raised on a UK council estate and none of my family had ever been to university before I did (and it was a former polytechnic). I'm far from making the kind of money the rest of you guys on HN do. Despite that, I can still justify the few £'s a month (£18.50 in total) I actually spend on service provided by non-shitty companies. Try addressing what I said instead of taking this immature attitude. Or just admit that cost has nothing to do with why you stick with and defend abusive companies.
- chopin 8y ago
  With Windows 10 spying, MS is pretty much out of the game for me. If I can't trust my OS to have my best interests at heart...

jchw 8y ago

I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s. As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows. They are also apparently going to support their VFS for Git protocol on GitHub, but VFS for Git is open source and supports Windows and Mac (and apparently, will support Linux.) And they claim Git is now the source control for Windows, which is impressive if true. By all accounts, Microsoft has been supporting Git in some form for several years and appears to have only increased their stake. I still think GitLab is awesome, though. There's a whole ton of things GitLab does that GitHub does not. I will probably continue to use both, myself.

ddtaylor 8y ago
> I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s. I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.) > As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows That's the first and second E's in EEE. Wait for the extinguish portion of their plan. I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
- jchw 8y ago
  >I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.) I do not know what their justification is for those defaults. They could, for all I know, have good reasoning, like legacy support. It's possible, though less likely, that they simply didn't put much thought into it. I do know that the xlsx format is standardized. I've not used it myself, but I've heard it's not unreasonable (whereas docx is apparently a bit less reasonable.) And I mean, from my experience I've not had trouble opening Excel spreadsheets in LibreOffice or Google Sheets. If they broke in any way, I failed to notice. In any case it sounds like minor greivances and a pretty darn far cry from 90s Microsoft. >I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again. Well this is incorrect. I use GitHub but I'm not doubling down. I don't use Windows except in VMs, I find it to be downright vexatious and even the new Windows 10 for Workstations is still incredibly annoying (yep, still getting Cortana SPAM by default.) I also find it suspicious when Edge is magically the default browser or my file associations to IrfanView keep getting reset to Windows Photo Viewer due to "corrupt file associations," yet those same file associations work fine if I uninstall Windows Photo Viewer. Those things are really super annoying. However, even some of the more egregious behaviors hit me as unlikely to be intentional. I am frustrated at an upsettingly similar rate by open source software and it only recently occurred to me that I would almost never attribute this to underhanded tactics. I still prefer my open source software, but I do think Microsoft is different. Time will tell.
  - chopin 8y ago
    Open a csv file in Excel, edit it and save (the latter is locale dependent). The result is horrible. I maintain a tool which offers csv import and export of data and we have regularly bug reports from users when they use excel to use it (Excel opens csv files by default on Windows). I did not find a way to tell Excel to not alter the meta-structure (such as replacing commas with semicolons), not to start about escaping. There's an RFC for csv data (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180), there's no way to tell Excel to honour it.
    - jchw 8y ago
      >There's an RFC for csv data (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180), there's no way to tell Excel to honour it. That RFC is from 2005. Excel appeared in 1987. Excel outputs CSVs in Excel dialect rather than RFC 4180. Unfortunate as it is, it's probably only sane to do that. A lot of stuff has probably relied on it for decades. Python 3, for example, defaults to excel dialect in it's CSV library. Apache Commons CSV supports Excel dialect. I imagine there's all kinds of crap relying on this by now. The fact that it doesn't have an option to output in RFC 4180 is unideal, but I can certainly see why. For almost their entire userbase, it would be the wrong option. I don't think they really want more code paths to maintain either. Seems logical enough. Of course it's relatively easy to support XLS/XLSX and it should be relatively easy to automatically detect what dialect of CSV you're taking in. So if your goal is happier customers, then you have options. It is what it is. I don't think this is a JScript type situation here. The world mostly standardized on Excel style CSV and a different standard was blessed by IETF. But much like HTML5 vs XHTML, sometimes standards should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. RFC 4180 would've been more useful had it followed Excel dialect. Instead I think it leaves Microsoft in a tough place and their decision has been to not change it in line with how they normally treat backwards compatibility. Far from a staunch fan of Microsoft myself, but I do think it's important to stay rational and have some reasonable skepticism.
      - chopin 8y ago
        I understand legacy. The only wish I have is to tell Excel to honour the RFC (it's not that Excel isn't developed any longer). Just a checkbox (or whatever). I am using the Apache CSV library to parse csv. Content coming from Excel is still ... difficult. And Apache is fine with handling RFC 4180 compliant content. If the "new" Microsoft is really opening up to Open Source, it'd be nice if they honoured existing standards at least with products which are still under development. All I am asking for is one more entry in the "Save As..." dialogs drop down box. It can't be that hard...
ionised 8y ago
> I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s. On the contrary, I don't see them as having changed at all. The old tactics are still in play; they've just gotten better at convincing the gullible that they are now on their side. After the Windows 10 fiasco as well, I'm done with the company.
- Dayshine 8y ago
  > I'm done with the company. Or you could made a measured decision on a product by product basis. As I'm sure you do with all the other big tech companies which have massively betrayed us. Unless you're telling me you boycott all products by Google, Apple, Facebook and Oracle (for starters).
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    Boycotting all non-FLOSS products by Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle and Microsoft isn't a bad thing to do. I'm not there yet (Gmail, Facebook, occasionally something owned by Google like YouTube), but the goal is to eventually get there :P
  - ionised 8y ago
    > Unless you're telling me you boycott all products by Google, Apple, Facebook and Oracle Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you.
    - Dayshine 8y ago
      I wish I was affluent enough to be able to make that kind of decision. I'm glad you are.
      - ionised 8y ago
        Your snarky dismissal aside, I'm far from affluent, I'm on £45k a year in the north-west (Liverpool, HIGHLY deprived area) of the UK. I'd wager, without even meeting you, that you are far better off than I am. I was raised on a UK council estate and none of my family had ever been to university before I did (and it was a former polytechnic). I'm far from making the kind of money the rest of you guys on HN do. Despite that, I can still justify the few £'s a month (£18.50 in total) I actually spend on service provided by non-shitty companies. Try addressing what I said instead of taking this immature attitude. Or just admit that cost has nothing to do with why you stick with and defend abusive companies.
chopin 8y ago
With Windows 10 spying, MS is pretty much out of the game for me. If I can't trust my OS to have my best interests at heart...