4 ms·

How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?

by Y_Y 1y ago

Spooky23 1y ago
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
- diggan 1y ago
  They used Emojis and printed "Microsoft <3 Open Source" on posters for conferences, so clearly they really had changed...
- reaperducer 1y ago
  How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time? There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum. They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end. I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    End of the day, PR works. Even in peak “friendly” Microsoft, they were hard nosed and noxious to negotiate with.
airstrike 1y ago
There is no law against that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. And git lives on regardless of GitHub
- latexr 1y ago
  > There is no law against that Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.
  - bapak 1y ago
    If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it. The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
  - airstrike 1y ago
    No, Adobe/Figma was stopped because it would severely reduce competition in a market where there are already very few relevant players. That's all they can block.
  - dboreham 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
andrewinardeer 1y ago
Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase? Or has Microsoft turned it into critical infrastructure?
- rs186 1y ago
  If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.
- oytis 1y ago
  It was the leading git storage at the time of acquisition, for many people synonymous with git itself
- daemin 1y ago
  Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc. I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
- diggan 1y ago
  > Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase? Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.
  - andrewinardeer 1y ago
    I am of the opinion that it wasn't critical infra, but it was at least unique infra. Similar to LinkedIn, which MS acquired. It wasn't that LI was critical it was because it was unique. And since the acquisition, they have built it out to be critical. Similar to what META did with Instagram. Instagram wasn't critical when META purchased it, but now it is the cornerstone of any business's online presence as it has been built out.
politelemon 1y ago
It wasn't critical at that time. But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us. It's easy to knee jerk on HN but let's try to do better than this.
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place. > But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us. That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
- topaz0 1y ago
  Not me.
layer8 1y ago
GitHub isn’t critical infrastructure, it’s only real USP is network effects.
- transcriptase 1y ago
  If outages make headlines and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide, that’s critical infrastructure, not just network effects.
  - Disposal8433 1y ago
    > If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it. Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
    - yunwal 1y ago
      > It's only a stupid git server with PRs. I feel like you’re missing a few features here
      - Disposal8433 1y ago
        Which ones and what are those exclusive features that GitLab doesn't have?
  - netsharc 1y ago
    Gotta love the genius of creating a single point of failure out of a distributed (version control) system...
    - transcriptase 1y ago
      I’ve had the same thought about crypto. The anonymous p2p financial system where the only realistic way for the average person to participate is to send photocopies of government issued IDs to one of the few remaining large exchanges who will happily provide any government with your identity and a paper trail of your actions upon request.
mvdtnz 1y ago
"Critical"? "Infrastructure"? What do you think Github is?
- zbentley 1y ago
  Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
- chamomeal 1y ago
  Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is. When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
  - 1over137 1y ago
    Wow. Why would your company do that? It's easy to self-host gitlab for example.
    - wiether 1y ago
      It's probably easy to self-host Gitlab for a small team working on a limited number of projects. It's definitely not easy to self-host Gitlab for hundreds of devs working of hundreds of projects. Especially if you use it as your CI/CD pipeline, because now you have to also manage your workers. Why company chose to pay GitHub instead of self-hosting their Gitlab instance? For the same reason they pay Microsoft for their emails instead of self-hosting them.
dboreham 1y ago
Who would disallow them to do so?
9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
Microsoft either owns or hosts on Azure a lot of critical pieces of tech infrastructure apart from just Github.
gitaarik 1y ago
They were allowed to buy it because GitHub is not licensed with an FOSS licence. How on earth did we all settle on such a propietary piece of tech infrastructure? No wonder Microsoft bought it.

How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?

by Y_Y 1y ago

How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?

Spooky23 1y ago

How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?

diggan 1y ago
They used Emojis and printed "Microsoft <3 Open Source" on posters for conferences, so clearly they really had changed...
reaperducer 1y ago
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time? There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum. They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end. I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  End of the day, PR works. Even in peak “friendly” Microsoft, they were hard nosed and noxious to negotiate with.

airstrike 1y ago

There is no law against that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. And git lives on regardless of GitHub

latexr 1y ago
> There is no law against that Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.
- bapak 1y ago
  If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it. The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
- airstrike 1y ago
  No, Adobe/Figma was stopped because it would severely reduce competition in a market where there are already very few relevant players. That's all they can block.
- dboreham 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

andrewinardeer 1y ago

Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase? Or has Microsoft turned it into critical infrastructure?

rs186 1y ago
If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.
oytis 1y ago
It was the leading git storage at the time of acquisition, for many people synonymous with git itself
daemin 1y ago
Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc. I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
diggan 1y ago
> Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase? Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.
- andrewinardeer 1y ago
  I am of the opinion that it wasn't critical infra, but it was at least unique infra. Similar to LinkedIn, which MS acquired. It wasn't that LI was critical it was because it was unique. And since the acquisition, they have built it out to be critical. Similar to what META did with Instagram. Instagram wasn't critical when META purchased it, but now it is the cornerstone of any business's online presence as it has been built out.

politelemon 1y ago

It wasn't critical at that time. But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us. It's easy to knee jerk on HN but let's try to do better than this.

gchamonlive 1y ago
When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place. > But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us. That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
topaz0 1y ago
Not me.

layer8 1y ago

GitHub isn’t critical infrastructure, it’s only real USP is network effects.

transcriptase 1y ago
If outages make headlines and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide, that’s critical infrastructure, not just network effects.
- Disposal8433 1y ago
  > If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it. Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
  - yunwal 1y ago
    > It's only a stupid git server with PRs. I feel like you’re missing a few features here
    - Disposal8433 1y ago
      Which ones and what are those exclusive features that GitLab doesn't have?
- netsharc 1y ago
  Gotta love the genius of creating a single point of failure out of a distributed (version control) system...
  - transcriptase 1y ago
    I’ve had the same thought about crypto. The anonymous p2p financial system where the only realistic way for the average person to participate is to send photocopies of government issued IDs to one of the few remaining large exchanges who will happily provide any government with your identity and a paper trail of your actions upon request.

mvdtnz 1y ago

"Critical"? "Infrastructure"? What do you think Github is?

zbentley 1y ago
Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
chamomeal 1y ago
Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is. When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
- 1over137 1y ago
  Wow. Why would your company do that? It's easy to self-host gitlab for example.
  - wiether 1y ago
    It's probably easy to self-host Gitlab for a small team working on a limited number of projects. It's definitely not easy to self-host Gitlab for hundreds of devs working of hundreds of projects. Especially if you use it as your CI/CD pipeline, because now you have to also manage your workers. Why company chose to pay GitHub instead of self-hosting their Gitlab instance? For the same reason they pay Microsoft for their emails instead of self-hosting them.

dboreham 1y ago

Who would disallow them to do so?

9cb14c1ec0 1y ago

Microsoft either owns or hosts on Azure a lot of critical pieces of tech infrastructure apart from just Github.

gitaarik 1y ago

They were allowed to buy it because GitHub is not licensed with an FOSS licence. How on earth did we all settle on such a propietary piece of tech infrastructure? No wonder Microsoft bought it.