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Microsoftie here — throwaway for obvious reasons. Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expecte
by throwaway78359 7y ago
Microsoftie here — throwaway for obvious reasons.
Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.
The reality is npm was in a bad place and in a land of not good options, this strikes me as the best possibility. I’d rather have GitHub control this and be able to give the resources to npm than a company like Oracle or Amazon or even Google or Facebook to own it. In a perfect world, some independent entity could fund npm out of gratitude but at the same time, consider how poorly npm as a company was run for YEARS and the general lack of direction.
So yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic this won’t be fucked up by GitHub — but I understand the concern.
As for those worried about Microsoft embracing, extending, and extinguishing. Lol. Even if that was the goal (and I truly don’t think that’s the ethos at all any more), Microsoft is laughably incompetent at achieving that sort of strategy. Google and Amazon have the EEE under lock right now (Facebook too — let’s be glad Zuck didn’t buy this after we saw what happened to yarn), but Microsoft can’t even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure.
- skrebbel 7y ago> after we saw what happened to yarn I missed something, what happened to Yarn?
- purplerabbit 7y agoSecond this. It still seems to be working fine... (actually, better than npm last I checked)
- pkilgore 7y agoThe maintainer released Yarn 2. Yarn 2 is pretty foundationaly different than Yarn 1, and can and does break a lot of products/projects if used. Some folks are not happy about it, although Yarn 1 will probably continue to be maintained by the community for a while. This seems to be pretty fair about the whole thing: https://shift.infinite.red/yarn-1-vs-yarn-2-vs-npm-a69ccf0229cd https://shift.infinite.red/yarn-1-vs-yarn-2-vs-npm-a69ccf022...
- cjbassi 7y agoNote that yarn is also no longer under the control of Facebook and the primary maintainer who has been developing yarn 2 no longer works there. https://yarnpkg.com/advanced/qa#is-yarn-operated-by-facebook https://yarnpkg.com/advanced/qa#is-yarn-operated-by-facebook
- jrochkind1 7y agoWhat happened to yarn is they released a v2 with some backwards incompatibilities... and for this reason we should be glad facebook didn't buy npm? (Also facebook doesn't actually own yarn). Well I'm confused.
- pkilgore 7y agoI'm not OP, but I the inference I draw from the comment is that with Yarn declining in quality the probability is higher than NPM will once again become the de-facto standard, thus, it is ideal that any company responsible for its stewardship serve not as further consolidation of power in the industry (which currently leans Alphabet/Facebook). IMO its crazy we're here, growing up in the IE days, but Microsoft acquiring influence over the JS ecosystem in this day and age is at least arguably, as OP stated, a distribution of power.
- hinkley 7y agosome backward incompatibilities? You apparently can’t run node directly. That’s kind of a problem for all but the most obvious of use cases.
- halkcyon 7y agoYes you can, it just requires extra configuration and defeats the purpose of using v2 at all.
- paulddraper 7y agoOne of the big additions in Yarn 2 is Plug N' Play, which allows for more flexible module resolution. Support is middling, but once you get it working, you have near-instance near-zero size installs.
- mizzao 7y ago> Google and Amazon have the EEE under lock right now what is EEE?
- boramalper 7y agoEmbrace, Extend, and Extinguish: > "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- prawnsalad 7y agoEmbrace, extend, and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y agoYou know what they say ... there is no I in EEE.
- oaiey 7y agoOh sweet summer child.
- manigandham 7y agoWhat's wrong with Microsoft's dev strategy? .NET continues to be the most powerful and productive platform that I've used. .NET Core was a great move and it's all coming together nicely now, and even creating innovations like Blazor.
- judge2020 7y agoI think the poster was saying that .NET has a dev strategy, but other projects don't. > Microsoft can’t even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure
- manigandham 7y agoYou don't need Azure to use any part of .NET - and VSCode, Github, etc., stretch beyond both.
- thiagocesar 7y agoThat’s not what was said either. They said that .NET and Azure, two separate things, are very well managed. OP did not imply any correlation between the two of them.
- kmarlow 7y agoMy guess is that he is referring to Microsoft Azure's attempt to migrate to Javascript support. You can see some of the support, but it is still currently lacking and difficult to use. I hope that they can manage though, Azure has tremendous features, just challenging to utilize properly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwaway78359 7y agoExactly.
- _pmf_ 7y ago
- marricks 7y agoI’m not sure how you made out Microsoft to be anything but a benevolent ruler here, “throw away for obvious reasons” seems like a weird thing to say
- girvo 7y agoThey’re likely not supposed to be commenting on things like this as an active employee of the company in question.
- peglasaurus 7y agoFreedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences, as is often said.
- slightwinder 7y agoIf there are consequences for your speech, then it's not free.
- popinman322 7y agoYou're conflating definitions of the word free. Free in "freedom of speech" is the ability to say anything you want. Your choice of free means cost. So you're free to speak, but the speech itself isn't free.
- slightwinder 7y agoYour definition makes zero sense. Unless you are physical unable to speak, you are always "free" to speak, saying whatever you want. Freedom of speech is by definition exactly this: free of consequences.
- orf 7y agoSo by your definition if you call someone an idiot and they punch you in the face for saying that, you don’t have freedom of speech? Right. It’s freedom of consequences from a specific entity, the government, not freedom from consequences in general.
- lewisl9029 7y agoGiven that Microsoft for all intents and purposes killed Atom (along with their really promising xray project [0]) almost immediately after the acquisition [1] even after explicitly claiming they wouldn't [2], please excuse me for not seeing the GitHub acquisition in the same positive light. [0] https://github.com/atom-archive/xray https://github.com/atom-archive/xray [1] They never officially announced it, but they almost certainly de-staffed it to the point where it's barely on life support: https://imgur.com/a/jQBHsUk https://imgur.com/a/jQBHsUk [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2b2e/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman... Update: What a surprise, the VSCode fanboys are coming in droves to downvote and say nothing more than how Atom was going to die anyways. Sure, maybe it was, but that's not the point. The point is Microsoft _actively pulled development resources away from Atom after explicitly claiming they wouldn't_. I get that a lot of people like VSCode better than Atom, but _please_ put things into perspective for a moment and consider if you'd make the same comment if the same thing happened to _your pet project that happened to be #2 in popularity but then got axed after being acquired by the company who owned the #1 after claiming they wouldn't do exactly that_. Whatever your opinion might be on Atom vs VSCode, can we not at least agree that this kind of behavior is something we should hold acquiring companies accountable for? It might not make any difference to their bottom line at the end of the day, but the least we should do is hold them to the fire in the court of public opinion.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoCounter thesis: what "killed" Atom is the balance of user enthusiasm quickly shifting to VSCode. Well before the acquisition was even announced, VSCode started grabbing developer mindshare real, real fast. I remember being an Atom user who resisted that tide for a while, but it became pretty clear that VSCode was taking off like a rocket and Atom, well, wasn't. If commit activity graphs are really a meaningful measure, look at VSCode's: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/commit-activity The number of commits per, uh, date unit (the graph is not super clear on that axis, honestly) across the entire length of VSCode's activity graph rarely drops as low as the highest number of commits per date unit for Atom. I'd have preferred to see both survive and do well, but that really hasn't been the way the text editor space seems to have worked. Editors that are conceptually awfully similar to one another tend to have one dominant player: TextMate (at least for Macs), then Sublime Text, then Atom, then very quickly Code. Given that Code and Atom are probably the closest of any two in that list, this just isn't that surprising.
- Ctd2xUvMAicg 7y agoWhy, what happened to yarn?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Galanwe 7y ago> Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view. That's what we said about the Skype acquisition too. "It's different this time, it will run independently, for once Microsoft won't interfere and destroy the acquired company". 3 years later (I was there), 50% of Skype original management and developers left. All the major new projects of Skype turn out to be integration with the endless already existing Microsoft products: integration with Link, integration with microsoft ID, integration with Microsoft UI, etc... 5 years later, Skype is dead... but everyone left already. Good job Microsoft.
- robocat 7y ago> That's what we said about the Skype acquisition too. “On 10 May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype Communications, S. à r.l for US$8.5 billion” I think Microsoft has changed significantly in the last decade. I’m quietly hopeful the npm acquisition will go well for us (although I still hold some serious grudges about Microsoft’s past behaviour).
- dcabrejas 7y agoLet's face it. Microsoft is a business and at any point in the future it might change course if it has economic preasures to do so. It can only keep being "good" as long as it has a stream of money coming in that allows this to happen. So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable. They need to have a good business model. I can only imagine GitHub was economically viable when they bought it, hence they left it run indpendently since it provides a revenue stream.
- teknopaul 7y ago"So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable." Thats not the important thing, thats the problem. Npm could easily be an open source client. Contain less code and be better. And have a mirors system like every other repo so it does not need money for hosting. Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. And they have. Microsoft purchased that control and plan to make money out of it. This is bad news for OS dev.
- cool-RR 7y agoGitHub is still a good choice, but working with their more recent APIs, like GitHub Actions, I feel Microsoft's touch. They're slowly changing for the worst.
- slow_donkey 7y agoOoh details please. I've looked at the docs but haven't used actions yet. What makes it worse than circle? The initial capabilities look similar and circle really needs a competitor with how flaky their service has recently been.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ratww 7y agoNah, Github Actions is actually amazing, and has been rock solid for me. For someone who's not a pro in using CIs, it's been much easier to use than CircleCI. I never have to spend more than 20 or 30 minutes fiddling with Actions to make it actually work. This for me is the biggest contribution to open source: normal people like me (who don't want to get too familiar with proprietary or overengineered CI tech) will be able to have CIs for pretty much ALL their projects.
- tekknik 7y agoI can’t speak for actions but you seem extremely biased for some reason. It would take you less time than it took to write this post than to learn circleci. Much less than 20-30 mins. https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/hello-world/ https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/hello-world/
- ratww 7y agoI might sound biased because I had lots of difficulties with CircleCI that I'm not having with Actions anymore. That's why I think it's a better product for my own use case.
- 7y ago
- damagednoob 7y ago> Microsoft is laughably incompetent at achieving that sort of strategy. If they did choose to EEE, this makes it more likely, not less.
- greymalik 7y ago> after we saw what happened to yarn What happened with yarn? As a very casual user of it, it seems to work well and have pushed npm to innovate a bit when it was stagnating. But I haven’t followed it lately. Were there technical issues or political drama?
- cfv 7y agoYarn's new version does a bunch of weird, complex to reason about stuff that's closer to a bundler than it is to a module manager: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/6953 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/6953
- kall 7y agoAnd I think no facebook employees had a significant role in that v2.
- chatmasta 7y agoYou can use the node-modules linker and then it’s exactly like yarn 1 except faster.
- halkcyon 7y ago> "weird, complex" I mean, zip files are hardly complex. PnP is a breath of fresh air and lets you commit packages "safely" to your SCM without LFS. NPM has been experimenting in v7 with similar ideas. I'm personally quite fond of "zero-install" setup to a repo.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eric234223 7y agoNo. Microsoft did not adopt to Github. The first thing microsoft did after acquiring github is forced to login to view commits. I felt like some huge corporation took over the park i daily visit and charged me. It felt terrible.