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I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different

• bulbar 1mo ago
  Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.
  • unsungNovelty 1mo ago
    ... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.
  • petterroea 1mo ago
    The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
    • bulbar 29d ago
      I'm not convinced that's the case. GitHub was like that forever, they were well established and the change happened not long after Microsoft bought them. There was no global shift to gitlab instances or Atlassian as far as I am aware. You can dislike an entity or an action and still acknowledge it also had some positive effects.
  • lopis 1mo ago
    Overall GitHub still got significantly worse since the acquisition. Downtime was essentially zero before.
    • dyauspitr 1mo ago
      Usage was 5% of what it is now before.
      • tehbeard 1mo ago
        It was unreliable post acq. and before the slop-tsunami, the latter has just multiplied the underlying issue of their ipv4 only half assed azure migration.
    • bulbar 27d ago
      I only ever used GitHub for private (and a few public) repos, so for me personally it got significantly better, being able to have private repos for free. Pretty bad tradeoff of course, improving the situation for non paying people while making it bad for paying customers.
• akulbe 1mo ago
  Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.
• alansaber 1mo ago
  The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc
• alightsoul 1mo ago
  Yeah I'm afraid they will only keep cuda support for their software. Good thing it's all Open source
• blihp 1mo ago
  I'm sure it'll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you'll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)
• 1123581321 1mo ago
  Apple buying Workflow (became Shortcuts). Its users have a better, faster tool and got it soon after acquisition. And it has many more users now.
  • sixothree 1mo ago
    Was Workflow available on every platform running on every hardware provider?
    • 1123581321 1mo ago
      I’m not sure your point, sorry.
      • pests 1mo ago
        I think that it was already iOS only, so making it free was just flipping a flag etc. I'm not sure how that helps his point tho.
      • addag 1mo ago
        That specific example might be relevant to the case "I don't see any acquisition being good for the users", but not for the specific case of the HuggingFace buyout. Workflow was already operating within the bounds of the closed Apple ecosystem. Huggingface is providing models not only for Nvidia chips but for their competitors hardware (Apple Silicon, AMD GPUs, ...).
      • sixothree 1mo ago
        I was not making a point. I was trying to clarify the example. But after the answers, I do think his example is poor. Models available at HF have many purposes and will run on many platforms. Commenters here are suggesting this will no longer be the case. Whereas the example Workflow (iOS only) -> Shortcuts (iOS only), there was no change in that regard.
        • 1123581321 1mo ago
          I see; thanks.
• skohan 1mo ago
  Is huggingface profitable? I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.
• spider-mario 1mo ago
  Nokia buying Qt in 2008 brought an LGPL option.