I spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear.
With all that said, things have changed a lot over at GitHub over the past 2-3 years, so I can't say I'm all that surprised that this was the outcome. Restructures, scandals, and some crazy comments over the few years has led me to believe that GitHub probably isn't the same company that the development community embraced. For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft mess with GitHub then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years, it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service (i.e. GitLab).
This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby, I can't see them wanting to switch things up from a tech perspective. GitHub is stable, and it's tech stack is capable of staying up despite some major DDoS attacks.
If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams, and to finally resolve the issues that stop Windows from being a first-class citizen in the Ruby world. If they can do this through both Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux then I think they'll be on to a winner. It's a capture of a much-loved service, and an opportunity to bring a mature set of tools into their domain.
I have lived and worked in SV for a decade, and still don't know a single "Silicon Valley hipster" developing with WSL or VS Code.
I do know the power of analytics and control over prominent backend systems, and the allure of being "gatekeeper" with the power to extract value from integrations.
> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
I can tell you from experience that that will never, ever happen.
The most likely outcome is that GitHub will slowly but surely start to bleed open source projects to alternatives like GitLab. And GitHub will continue to live on, like LinkedIn and Skype before it, but it will lose mind share and will no longer be the epicenter of open source development.
> Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating
Not sure what you mean here.
They've never specifically targeted non-Apple developers as a core constituency. It was mainly due to the fact that OSX was UNIX derived that the platform became popular at all.
I think WSL is a great idea and it also works very well, if we ignore minor bugs and oddities. But the acquisition of github is AWFUL. Microsoft gave the choice of "take it or leave it, my way or the highway".
There was no way for me to associate with the move so I was gone from github after 10 years.
Linux subsystem for windows is garbage, it brings all the same issues with running a linux VM on windows with no more benefit than cygwin gave and who exactly is apple alienating? This sounds like opinion since apple profits are doing just fine and waking into any incubator will show you who the dominant player is. also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes
I also spent years working with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies. The reality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was still alive and well as late as 2011 when I mostly stopped dealing with them. Since that time they have definitely taken a new direction, with increasing adoption of Linux in particular, but I have trouble belieiving the corporate DNA has been so thoroughly overwritten in the last few years that this does not spell the imminent demise of Github as the broadly useful plarform that we know it as today.
Their "corporate DNA" was established when the desktop was supreme and they could steer the direction of the industry based on thier Windows dominance.
Times are different, mobile is more important, cloud hosting is a real thing and technology changes. They had to evolve or die. Saying you can't trust MS in 2018 based on the way the world was years ago is like saying that Netflix could only ship DVDs to people's houses, Amazon can't be trusted to do cloud hosting because they only sell books, and that a minor niche computer maker should never be trusted to sell phones.
I guess it depends what side of Microsoft we get working with GitHub, whether it's the friendly outreach side alongside the .NET Foundation, or whether it's the internal software team that want to integrate GitHub into internal tooling and start moving their platform onto theirs.
My dream scenario is the former, where Microsoft provide leadership to a company that's still reeling from its own scandals, and use GitHub as a platform for promoting open-source, rather than as a way of mining their access to the open-source world to benefit their own tooling.
Microsoft is one of Linux Foundation biggest donors, which means they have leverage over them. They are invited to discuss new Linux developments, products, etc...
Except now they have billion dollar data centers they need your servers on and don't care if you use their software as long as they turn a profit from the hosting. Bill G is probably kicking himself for not renting servers decades ago.
Hmmm... Windows Subsystem for Linux... the 1998 Microsoft-vs-Linux report... hmmmm.
While I'm currently picturing a pacman trying to eat a dot a bit bigger than it expected, I do wonder what kind of hilarity Microsoft have planned for, presumably, 5-10 years from now (I'd presume they're in the Embrace/Extend period if my conspiracy theory is right).
[Small edit: currently at -1; interesting | Edit 2: Now at -4! Anybody care to actually comment? I'm interested in why people disagree!]
Skype wasn't ruined because they attempted to merge it into their other platforms. Skype was just flat out ruined with bloat, horribly inefficient code, turning it into a spying tool and not listening to their vocal users. Everyone was rioting after every update and it just got worse. To add insult to injury the last major update they have tried turning it into Snapchat. Their incompetence knows no bounds. If you think the same middle managers that ruined Skype aren't there anymore, you don't know how big companies like Microsoft work.
I wonder if pre-acquisition Skype was one of the hardest software the Windows team had to deal with. For example, at one point they used SYSENTER directly to make system calls!
> For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms.
Maybe not now, but what about after the next reorganization or the next CEO? If it's no longer in MS' interests to keep a relationship with this audience somewhere down the road, why would they leave them alone?
For Github there was always uncertainty; if MS didn't take over, investors would've, or another (less capable) competitor (like I dunno, Yahoo?). I'm confident in MS keeping github running smoothly and moving forward.
Is it? I imagine VSS and their cloud source control offering (don’t remember the name) probably aren’t doing all that well in the face of GitHub.
They want to be a player in that game, so they’ll transition off they are old product which isn’t that popular onto a new one they purchased that has all the mind share.
As long as they don’t screw it up, and recent Microsoft seems to me like a company that won’t, it will benefit them. And perhaps it will benefit the user some to do have a company with deep pockets behind it.
The timing is suspect, because Google has been pushing Cloud Source Repositories as a private Git repository recently [1]. So, GitHub will most likely be part of Azure portfolio. Developers might be fickle, but they are fully locked into their respective cloud platforms in the recent years.
Kallithea doesn't support SVN, only RhodeCode does which Kallithea forked. SVN support amongst many other security fixes and features were added at a later stage into RhodeCode.
It's why I'm surprised at the timing, since GitHub has had its own issues over the past few years, with a founder and other staff members leaving over harassment, and some questionable comments coming from members of their new team. I've felt for a while that GitHub had peaked, and that we weren't far away from seeing it push towards breaking the product to satisfy investors that want a return.
With an acquisition, most of this becomes amplified, based on how Microsoft treat GitHub. IMO, leaving them alone to do their own thing could be just as bad as being too controlling. I'd like to see someone like Scott Hanselman, a well-liked developer in the development community be given the opportunity to sit in GitHub and to use Microsoft's resources to improve the open-source community.
It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity.
The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.
The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.
That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been banging the centralization drum for a while. His take is the sheer scale of the internet imbues tremendous value to any centralized service that can organize it (e.g. what Google does for web pages or Facebook does for your friends).
If this is the case then the internet may end up more centralized than previous forms of media and communication. I hope that's wrong, but it seems to be happening right in front of us.
I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms.
There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook.
Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.
Maybe we can eventually achieve something like decentralized ownership of centralized web resources.
While not quite decentralized ownership, Wikipedia is at least a non-profit that everyone contributes donations to. Where's the Wikipedia for code? Where's the non-profit donation-based social network?
> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,
It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.
In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.
For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.
> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it.
Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful.
What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization.
You can easily migrate your repo to a different service, so having lots of developers rely on GitHub isn't really a big deal. Many large projects have GitHub mirrors.
I'd say the biggest issue is that Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases. Compare that to Fossil [0], which lets you bundle up everything into a single file. If there was better built-in support you could migrate everything more easily to self-hosted alternatives like Gitea [1]. Regardless, it's possible to migrate manually, even if it's a bit more work.
> Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases
I feel like a lot of these features could be handled with git-notes[1]. For example git-appraise[2] uses the git-notes feature for a code review system:
I'm glad to see Fossil mentioned here. Yet the real problem is not in the technical aspects and possibilities of project hosting migration, it's the dependence of the majority of open-source developers on GitHub's centralized social network.
Well, centralisation also has a huge number of benefits, so it's not really a surprise.
The more important thing is to be in a position that makes it harder to be locked-in to a centralised provider. Fortunately Git makes that relatively easy – I could switch all of my work to Gitlab or Bitbucket with relatively little work.
There's more obviously a problem where Github is being used for issue tracking, PRs, and the general open-source community. I'm sure there will be a few scripts available to make migrating issues etc. to another provider relatively painless, since there's no great distributed solution for this at the moment. That just leaves the community aspect, which is going to be the hard bit…
I think the network effect is too great to ignore. I would guess the number of potential contributors you get just by using GitHub, where many people have an account and know the workflow/UI, is bigger than any other place.
5 years from now when GitLab is acquired by Google we'll have to migrate again.
Or export you projects to someone else running GitLab. All the functionality to run a forge in GitLab is open source and export/import is open source as well.
I think we all trusted github because of git: we know that worst case was that github disappeared overnight, erasing all repositories, and in that case we all would still have distributed backups to restart it.
So we had limited trust in the centralized missions we gave it: communications, issues, pull requests.
I am sure that as soon as a good tool allows to do that in a decentralized fashion, we will switch to it.
If Git/Github is the epitome of the developer's centralised experience, then I full heartedly welcome that.
As others have mentioned, there's certainly advantages to centralised systems like Github's network graph, issues, etc. But at the end of the day, everyone on GitHub still cares a whole lot more about the code, and due to the very nature of the protocol that's something that'll always be able to be taken elsewhere. It's not like "if they announce shut down you can export your data", there's a very high lightlyhood you have already done that and you have the full repo on your local machine.
I feel like Github is the best possible compromise - centralised network and features that's built on a decentralised protocol and easily able to be taken elsewhere.
>Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
Absolutely no chance, and I'm fine with that. Sorry, but I don't feel like spinning up a slhit server and managing all that goes along with it. I just want my code hosted somewhere that others can access. These meta issues are just noise and don't bother me (or 95%+ of the people using GH) one bit.
And there it is. "Git" "hub" could be considered an oxymoron. The adoption of this proprietary closed-source veneer over git by FOSS developers has always been ironical to the point of farcical. Now the other shoe has dropped.
Good point. It's not too crazy to have people behind major open-source efforts get their own VPS's and run Phabricator or Gitlab. With a universal login akin to OAuth maybe it's doable.
That's insane, not only do developers and maintainers devote a huge part of their life to major open-source efforts, now they are expected to spend more time and money setting up, admining, and securing their own private servers? That's a great way to destroy Open Source projects. Very few people would be able/willing to put that much effort into it.
Decentralization is a wonderful idea. It brings with it benefits that are technical, architectural, and social. Yet is also carries with it its own set of costs and risks.
Bluntly, I doubt this will shock the world of software development into being less centralized. The practical benefits of centralization are, apparently, too large to be readily overcome.
(shameless plug) I recently built a tool (SIT, https://sit.fyi) that has decentralizes issue tracking and similar workflows, giving full days ownership and independence of storage and transport. Can be (and actively being) used with Git, or other SCMs.
This. As with so many things, laziness has driven developers to be using Github as single point of truth. And it is cringeworthy to see how few developers actually know what git is and that Github is just a company monetizing opensource software. About time everyone got a wakeup call.
To be fair, github provides a lot of value-add on top of plain git. Having UI for access control and integration with issue tracking and CI tools gives you a lot that you would not get out of the box with git.
That said, I have always been uneasy with one central player hosting a huge percentage of open source projects.
> In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub
Nearly all. I never got into the swing of it - always expecting a thing like this to happen sooner or later. Honestly, I shall not be sad if the world starts beating a path to somewhere else now.
Humans* aren't built for decentralization. We can only keep so many unique names in our head a time, only so many connections. I don't have any papers to link to on this, but I think it's safe to say that's how things are - if not we wouldn't have created cities, national identities, and of course, newsgroups, message boards, centralized package managers and distributions, and yes, source code repositories.
There is something nice about knowing, with a high degree of certainty, that any given open source project (or any thing) is in one of a few places, and if I don't know where that is I can ask for help to find those places by their names.
That's mixing up a whole lot of concepts. Centralization is about power.
Cities generally have very little centralization. Almost no interactions in a city go through a central entity, similarly for countries. Concentration is something different than centralization.
Newsgroups have very little centralization. Everyone reads and writes through different servers, and you can trivially switch servers without any impact on who you can communicate with. Agreeing on names and federation is something different than centralization.
...
There is absolutely no need to have software development happen on one proprietary platform in order to be able to search for software project in one centralized location. What you need for that is a search engine. Or even multiple competing search engines that can all index the same set of software projects.
Many humans are apparently not, but I had a much easier time navigating (and contributing to!) projects when each of them had their own website with integrated scm links etc.
GitHub is a grey mass, project branding is lost, the tracker is chaotic for large projects.
It's just Sourceforge, better executed but with the same disadvantages.
I think that's quite a stretch, the reasons for decentralized version control (practical use) are far different than a decentralized internet (humanitarianism).
It’s not just about efficiency, it’s about responsibility. I love decentralization when I can avoid dealing with BigCo, I hate it when I’m responsible for fighting spam, ensuring my services stay up, not getting hacked, and so on. All of these tasks are a requirement as soon as collaboration is in the picture.
I disagree. The popularity of GitHub amongst the programming community means that ease of use / convenience is more important than the notion of “decentralization”. Otherwise, people would already be setting up their servers for hosting git repos.
Totally agree. For me decentralized means desktop clients or own cloud. Own cloud is more expensive to maintain. Desktop app are more expensive to develop and maintain too.
This is a completely smart purchase on Microsoft's part. I can't imagine more synergy between two companies:
- Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players (Google has been a great contender for this position since 2010).
- Microsoft has moved most of their open source projects to Github.
- Microsoft is a major contributor to Git, including massive infrastructure projects to make it possible to host the NT kernel on Git.
- Microsoft has tried to do open source git hosting in the past (Codeplex?) but it never succeeded. Also: Microsoft partnered with Github when they shut down to migrate Codeplex projects to Github.
- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.
- Github are the champions behind the electron project, with a lot of institutional knowledge about that technology + native web apps/PWAs in general. Microsoft is making a huge push toward writing UWP apps as PWAs.
Time will tell how they handle this merger. They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin, Mojang come to mind) and others horribly (Skype, Yammer, Nokia).
This "synergy" seems to be pretty one-sided. Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users? That's kind of the problem with this acquisition, which is why few Github users are excited for it.
It also doesn't feel like Microsoft understands developers or even end users consistently. VSCode is a nice editor, but not the only one. The MSDN docs and site is awful. Azure is okay, but Windows 10 is somehow more annoying than macOS.
Meanwhile Github is in a tricky position, because for most people there's nothing but "community" keeping them on it. Github has some decent features, but nothing so great it would stop me from using their competitors. And they don't even have a CEO to provide the vision. The only thing in their favour is inertia.
I think that the biggest loser is going to be IBM clearcase. Especially in government/defense work the developers want to use git, but can’t get it because of lack of security reviews. I can guarantee you that Microsoft sales people are already calling every software group manager at all the defense contractors.
Well, clearcase is a horrible monster and it would benefit just about everyone on Earth if it dies.
How many drivers on the road would be less likely to cut someone off or road rage if they didn't have to deal with ClearCase again? I'm sure that number is greater than zero.
I'm only being partially facetious. ClearCase truly is the worst.
They can't "depreciate" an OSS project just because it's hosted on a platform they own. Atom will live on one way or another, and it was never exactly tied at the hip with GitHub anyway.
Atom is open source though isn't it? So I'm sure it won't ever disappear. I wouldn't want to move to VS Code though. I use a Mac and have heard good things about it, but I'm sure it will always be a second class citizen.
It has allowed LinkedIn to remain free for one customer base (professional networks) while expanding sales and recruiting tools (navigator) without compromising user information (InMail rather than your private email unless you've opted as such).
I would put money on it if the merger goes through. There's very little reason for both to exist, and VSCode is absolutely a superior project. Atom has its advantages, but most of them could easily be manifested by collaborating with the Atom team and bringing those features in.
I'm starting to get really frustrated with Atom and it pegging my CPUs at 100%. I honestly don't see VSCode as that much better considering they're both bloated electron apps.
I've started going back to Sublime, and found I missed some of the really helpful tools in Atom.
I think the entire atom/vscode thing is going to be really curious should this acquisition go through. I'm going to guess they're going to keep running both teams; or really they'll probably keep running Github as it is.
Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories, I thought that was devdiv trying to migrate their code back to MS land. Wonder if that's what sparked the conversations.
> Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories
Is this public knowledge? They shutdown their public repos service a while back and I had a manager at Microsoft admit that getting public repo traction was insanely hard. GitHub literally has a strangle hold on the public repos space.
What? Microsoft is the biggest developer advocate? Apple gives X Code away for free and made Swift an open source, platform agnostic product among many other things.
I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github.
Agreed on both points. The shift will bring a lot of opportunity to build a more decentralized repo base. I think something like (Keybase)[http://keybase.io] might be interesting.
I'd recommend running your own FossilSCM server. It supports full code repo, wiki, bugtracking, and more. And it's free software to boot.
I'm looking to see if it's feasible to write a github->fossil layer to make it easy for programmers to dump to local. Right now, Git is easy to dump... but those issues and wiki support isnt dumpable yet..
How profitable would they be if they didn’t pursue “growth at all costs” and built GitHub with a small and focused team like Stack Overflow or WhatsApp?
As a startup, worrying about competition from Microsoft hasn't been a big deal for almost a decade. I would be more worried about Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
the history of Microsoft is the reason why we all reacting this way. But encouraged by the move they made lately coming into Linux, even though other players have forced their hand
I'm all for FOSS (Git webgui) solutions, but they were absolutely not competitive until recently. Even now, with less trust, the social effect and the lack of need of maintenance and setup is attractive.
Probably because its fairly low-risk. I have ~270 Github repos. About a year ago I made a ~5 line Python script that added Gitlab as another origin to each repo. I still use (used) Gitlab as my main host, I'm a paying customer - but for me to flick over to Gitlab is a one-liner.
Well, Google recently also purchased Kaggle, another major open-source repository for code. It hasn't really changed anything for now, but Microsoft's purchase will be in the same vein. I think that Microsoft's contribution to the open-source community in the last few years kind of makes sense for why they are purchasing it, just like Google purchased Kaggle because of their contribution to ML.
Your dream of “neutral” VCS is misfounded. Websites like GitHub are massive bandwidth and storage hogs and needs huge cash burn just for dev ops. Unfortunately they can’t be reasonably profitable as well because revenue sources are rather tiny. This means every vcs company out there offering free for all plan is bound to be sold or go bankrupt.
For GitHub I would have wished Google bought them because there is huge synergy both ways. With Microsoft, eventually some CVP there will realize that there is no profitability and they will leave it to rot.
This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.
Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).
True, but Windows users would find it odd if an app didn't suck. It has to match the overall Windows experience.
Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.
I'm sure they'll try to 'Microsoft' it. They could never keep their hands off any UI in any product, no matter if it works or not, and especially lately, leaving a rather spectacular trail of destruction in their wake.
"because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities"...what are you talking about? They are a company with a purpose to make money. And when I think about some of the other possible buyers, I am fine with Microsoft.
The GP means they were neutral with respect to the tech giants' ecosystems. They didn't favor Amazon or Microsoft or Google's tech. Consider that Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had GitHub organizations and hosted code there. That's what they're talking about
Were it a consumer product I'd agree. But this is a developer tool and MS have been doing fairly well in that regard the last few years with azure and vscode.
Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.
It sucks. We had as you said a neutral site everyone used. Now the big guys will move their code. Hopefully we will get a new common GitHub that is neutral and they will use. Sounds like it might be gitlab.
Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.
Do you think Gitlab will stay independent? They’re burning money. They’ll in all likelihood be acquired in the coming decade as well.
Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.
I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why?
Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software.
Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle that:
That's assuming people here care deeply about open source and it's philosophy. It's probably fair to say that most people on HN care a lot more about how building the next Atlassian or GitHub and conveniently being able to use OSS for that than about those philosophical values.
I love open source, but it doesn't mean I think absolutely everything must be open source... the most important part here _is_ (git), github was (omg I'm already speaking past tense) a decent platform sprinkling some nice simple collaboration on top and convenience, it's not vital, and it's replaceable (so we have choice), and for a long time it was the best there was.
People are disappointed because many of us don't trust or like MS and want nothing to do with them, people complain about Google removing their "do no evil" clause, Microsoft basically has a fucking "do evil" clause but they will always tell you the opposite, they are probably even being sincere, it's just not true though.
One could argue that both Atlassian and Github were to some extent successful, because they kept the open source competitors away by giving out free licenses to open source projects.
With these free options available, people in community were less interested in putting effort to free (as in speech) alternatives for these closed source products.
LinkedIn? The network everyone loved to hate? I don't think anything has changed in that regard, if anything, Microsoft are probably 1% more trustworthy compared to the super-shady LinkedIn management of old.
Microsoft is opening LinkedIn up to other tools while completely maintaining their goal of not sharing your data (Iframe integrations so no data is shared). They're expanding capability without selling out users
Did i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn’t changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.
As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better.
I don't use any microsoft tools (and I _hate_ all windows after 7), so Microsoft integrating with GitHub has no appeal to me.
I think the best case scenario for me personally is that nothing changes. None of the github changes in the past few years have added anything noticeable for me (not sure if others agree, be interested to know). And the best case scenario being "nothing changes" is pretty damning. I know it's overwrought, but Skype was perfect, and 2010s-Microsoft fucked them up. And if we're seriouslyhaving the best case scenario be "nothing changes", that's bad.
And it also just seems part of the bullshit mindset of startups being about the exit, and not about making a new, sustainable company.
GitHub didn't need to do this, but they did, to justify their reportedly insane burn rate. Microsoft still won't let them get away with that, they'll just take the heat for the inevitable layoffs.
Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ?
If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet.
As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.
It is shockingly bad. The fact that you can't code search in a fork blows my mind. How have they not fixed this basic, important feature after so many years? What could possibly make it more difficult than a few person-months of effort?
Maybe avoiding the costs associated with keeping the indexes available for every fork? I believe they use elastic search so maybe someone with more experience with that can comment.
SourceGraph tries to fix it, and the experience of searching, jump-to-definition and generally getting to grips with a codebase is way better there IMO. They also have browser plugins with integration to GitHub. I recommend you to check it out.
Sourcegraph CEO here. Glad you like Sourcegraph! Regardless of what happens with GitHub and Microsoft, we agree that developers need great code search.
They don’t index forks. Cloning a fork just to search through it locally is always fun. Very annoying when a fork becomes the de facto project because it’s the one being maintained.
As one of my pet projects, I'm trying to resurrect Google's Code Search (a fast search indexer that supports regular expressions).
It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.
Search seems to be surprisingly bad at a lot of companies. I don't know about github but reddits search is so bad it cannot even find something when you type it character for character.
I'm super curious to what all these companies are using for search because they are so atrocious that tend to not even work in a basic substring search solution.
Exactly. I can’t search my own tweets on Twitter. Facebook doesn’t know how to rank people when I do people search there. Search is terrible across the internet except Google.
That doesn't make sense. Ruin the feature to potentially help someone who made a mistake with security? Why wouldnt they just run the search to find keys themselves and remove them from search results.
It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.
That would be really great.
To improve looking through new repos at least a litte bit I like the browser plugin [Octotree](https://github.com/buunguyen/octotree), it adds a tree view of the code and eases jumping between files.
Sure, MS visual code is open but as a few players get more and more power we all become subject to their whims and not them to ours.
MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment, or will it’s data be useful to MS for those ads?
What sort of integrations can we expect to see with other MS products that encourage a more closed ecosystem?
This may all seem alarmist but with so many companies having so much power this sort of behavior get through unchecked.
The only recourse people suggest is “well then don’t use it” but what options do employees have when higher ups mandate technologies? What about most users who just go with the wind and just let these snowballing large companies skate by? It all makes me very sad...
The problem is that virtually all startup wants an exit. They have employees sitting on stock options for years while forgoing their market rate. They have investors wanting 10X return. This would work out for insanely profitable businesses like Google but for the rest they have built huge expectations on business models tha t are unworkable so buyout by a sucker is the only viable outcome for them. Coincidentally Microsoft has recently decided to become that sucker with LinkedIn and now GitHub.
Definitely, investors don't give you money just for kicks, they want a payday. It shapes the community... people who take that money get a head start, crowd out competition. Everyone needs to grow huge, get bought, or die.
What could change this? People refusing money? Some encouragement to stay mid sized? Wonder if that will ever happen...
GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft.
I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I’ve had paid private account since forever).
GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
And therefore I will vote with my $$$ and stay on GitHub until there is a real reason to do otherwise (and at that point enjoy the benefits of standards like git).
Alas, like several others have pointed out, this doesn’t scale to GitHubs other services like GH Pages, or their Wiki, issue tracker, etc.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
Out of topic, but how often do you have the ear of CEO: sytse, one specific wish for Gitlab that I have: please enable 'one-click' automatic LetsEncryptNow certificate creation for GitLab Pages with custom domain names (just like GitHub is doing it today) instead of me having to go out of my way to go get a X.509 from a CA for my TLS/SSL enabled site[1].
So you largely have the same problems GitHub had. I’ve seen you say this exact same thing multiple times in the past day, but what exactly is different?
EDIT: When I say “seen the same thing said multiple times” I’m referring to multiple linkages of the relevant page in the handbook by others, and in the CEO’s own recent blog post about the acquisition.
If anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.
> I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is?
I imagine most HN readers are paying customers either directly or indirectly(their company/startup).
As a private customer, I wouldn’t object to an increase in the price if that meant they stay independent. If they get acquired by MS I am definitely stopping my subscription.
Heck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.
Gitlab also lets you register private gitlab-runners on gitlab.com, which is a killer feature for running CI on setups that aren't plain docker-in-the-cloud (such as integration-testing apps that require resources on our LAN, or macOS/iOS builds with private keychain items that is much easier to configure on a local Mac). (A side bonus is that you don't even have to pay for any CI "minutes")
If you ever get something for free, remember something somewhere is subsidizing it. Whether that's the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced, VC funding (which will eventually run out), or your data is sold.
I can't speak for Gitlab, but offering free Bitbucket should easily pay for itself as introduction to the Atlassian ecosystem.
Our experience went like this: We got Bitbucket for out project for the good free private repos (and a few other reasons). When it came to choosing a ticket system, being on Bitbucket made choosing Jira a no-brainer (one of the best ticket systems, good integration with Bitbucket, familiar interface). Then we needed a better wiki for internal documentation, so we naturally went with Confluence.
So getting free Bitbucket heavily influenced our decision to buy two other products from the same company, and we are about to buy into their CI system (Bitbucket Pipelines, not the other one). We don't regret any of those choices, but they might have looked different if we were on Github.
...the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced,...
That doesn't follow. If the paid accounts are selling, then they must be priced appropriately relative to their competition and the value they provide. The cost doesn't factor into it - and free accounts are just a marketing cost, like putting up a billboard.
I switched jobs and went from Github to Bitbucket about 6 months ago. I've found bitbucket to be consistently and noticeably slower than github both in its web UI and in pushes/pulls, with more downtime. You pay for those private repos one way or another.
I too felt this pain. UI feels "heavy" in comparison to Github.
There are obvious, simple updates that could be made to the UI to fix significant pain points. This one [1] brought me much pain every time I installed a new package via yarn.
But in more ways than just the users. If you want tu use most of the popular integrations, the often github-only. Things like TravisCI are suddenly what makes me open a new project on GH rather than GL.
I expect it'll happen to Gitlab at some point, but the beauty of self-hosted is that I can cut ties with the organization and continue using their software anyway because it's entirely running on my machine.
Which, incidentally, is just one reason I usually strongly prefer self-hosted options over SaaS. You're not signing a pact to become beholden to the business whims of a third party.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
I would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
I could make the same concern for a bunch of other companies who were to buy GitHub. Indeed, my main concern with GitHub being bought by anyone is the uncertainty of its future, and the fact that it no longer will be 'neutral' ground, so to speak.
It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
Agreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
I've heard claims that Skype is no longer peer to peer but runs on msft networks/infrastructure and performance has suffered. Can anyone confirm or shed any more light on that?
LinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.
I had a pretty similar experience with skype. I lost access to my connected email account and was essentially locked out of my account forever - repeated emails to support were met with silence, alas! Then I connected my facebook account to use skype instead... then they discontinued support for that. Now it's got to a point where attempting to create a new account on the OSX desktop version just shows an error screen every time, so I'm stuck unable to use skype forever. I've moved on to other, better solutions, naturally :)
If Microsoft does to github what they did to Skype, pushes will go into the wrong repo without authentication for no reason just like Skype had contacts and messages jump from one account to another for no reason. Pretty much everything they touch software wise is a disaster. I wonder if there will be ads or how exactly they will fuck it up, but I know for sure they will. Gitlab is fairly equivalent in features and much better in their pricing and plans anyway so I expect a lot of projects to move.
"Consider what happened to LinkedIn" Where are you going with this? LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%. Only good things have happened at LinkedIn (I'm an employee) since the MSFT acquisition. If LinkedIn is not doing something, then it sure will consider doing it now, with the vast resources it has available to it now.
"LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%."
I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh.
Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve.
"with the vast resources it has available to it now"
This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
If Github does die out will be a slow and painful one. Skype was more of a radical change to the core technology. Of course anything is possible. I'm guessing many companies paying for Github's enterprise products are more concerned about the implications of Microsoft owning the company that hosts their proprietary code.
And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
True in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.
>At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
Me too. I'm waiting for the official transaction to be done and i'm preparing a plan b in case i have to migrate everything.
More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
Isn't that one of the strengths of Git? The whole decentralization means that it is ridiculously simply to take the whole shebang and migrate to another service or even just self host on a cheap VPS.
GitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
Microsoft is big, with different divisions you can consider what it did with consumer apps, but you'd be better off considering what it has done with developer tools.
There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
Exactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace [0] app Pull Reminders [1] and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
GitLab has always demanded too much faith from its users.
First with CI, it was the all-or-nothing approach where you couldn't use GitLab CI with any other provider. Lately they have tried to fix this but it was a half-hearted development after a lot of complaints.
Lately with their DevOps approach, it's exactly how you've said.
I don't have trust in GitLab leadership and their product feels way too bloated.
This is a sad day for Open Source and software in general. What makes Github great is that its a neutral place where anyone can host their code. Now that its owned by a Big Corporation, the values that Github has built will be abandoned in favor of making money for the corporation.
So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.
To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."
Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!
This seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub’s biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub).
You see, whether or not it’s justified, some projects invariably will leave GitHub simply because it’s Microsoft. And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where most projects exist. And really, GitHub isn’t perfect: projects overlook a lot of minor imperfections in GitHub’s actual product because there are so many projects on GitHub and the usefulness of the networking outweighs the warts here and there.
They don't call them "exits" for nothing - once a company is acquired, you have exited the market and no longer care about the future of the company, except insofar as it affects your payout at acquisition time.
There will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.
This is pretty conflicting. Github is nice on its own, but business wise they haven’t been profitable, so sooner or later some change had to happen. In my experience, Github is great for public code storage and small private projects (easy to manage developers that already have github accounts), but it does become pretty expensive and I don’t necessarily think the ROI is worth it compared to a self-hosted solution. For opensource and personal portfolios, the “network effect” or first mover advantage sort of set the stage for github’s popularity over gitlab, but for a paid enterprise solution I think gitlab does a better job and offers more value per dollar. Partially what sucks is having to have separate github/gitlab accounts/repositories since that’s now 2 things to manage. I’ve tried codecommit and bitbucket as well, but those were kinda meh (in my opinion).
Typically when “the Microsoft touch” is added it’s for the worse, so the expectations bar is pretty low. But who knows. I can definitely see them leveraging github to further go after AWS by giving Azure a leg up over codecommit. VSCode has also been pretty good, if they add in the “social integrations” of github to VSCode that also competes against Cloud9 on AWS. Right now AWS is solidly winning the cloud race, but if this puts price/service competitive pressure on amazon I won’t complain.
I also wonder what will happen with all the code and personal data from github. I really don’t want to have to make a microsoft account to access github. As long as the switching costs from github to a viable alternative (right now gitlab) remain low, I would not have a problem with jumping ship.
I stopped trusting them when they stole the intellectual property of numerous small companies years before the _NSAKEY debacle. I know, I know, Bill Gates is supposed to be some kind of good guy now (malaria, etc.) but I can't think of any good reason to trust any robber baron, based on the past histories of robber barons. Even Andrew Carnegie was an asshole in the final analysis.
Microsoft is basically the corporate version of the ship of Theseus at this point. The have a lot of questionable stuff in their history, but the leadership and the culture at large has shifted drastically since those days. At a certain point it is worth reevaluating one's opinions and question whether it is still worth hanging on to those old grudges.
I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
This may just be paranoia but if I were competing with Microsoft on something that I'd have private code for hosted on GitHub, I'd be pretty worried right now.
Microsoft doesn't have the time or resources to give a fuck about yours or other's shitty private repos. Besides, if they really wanted to compete, they would just utilise their massive engineering team to extinguish the competition.
Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty frontend.
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
Linus invented git because Linux needed a new code repo thingie. He was only focused on one project - Linux. He released git as GPL. GitHub n Co are value add sites with fees for services and are more than welcome to use GPL software for obvious reasons.
Actually my real point was: scratch an itch and find you have lice living off you. No, err that's not it.
It is genuinely nice to see hard work pay off. Github have seriously put their back into it to create an environment that a lot of people feel comfortable with. I sincerely hope that MS do not fuck it up and wish them both all the best.
We still have git itself - that has never changed. That is the power of open source software.
The way GitHub is developed (remote) and culture, this is pretty much death of GitHub and if most developers leave it will become a mess quite quickly.
That's extremely doubtful. First, having to login to different Gitlab instances is terrible UX. Second, you cannot easily reference another instance's issues. Hosted Gitlab is also unreliable and slow and comes with no publicly mentioned SLO of any kind.
I'd be surprised to see any big projects going away from GitHub in the coming years, unless Microsoft actually manages to tarnish the GitHub brand in a meaningful way.
The typical tinfoil head probably never trusted GitHub anyways, whether they're owned by Microsoft or not.
Just when it looked like GitHub was "sustainable" through revenue ... greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") and they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! :-(
Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? I would buy a few (thousand) shares ...
Who else would buy stock/shares if they remained independent?
> greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble")
That's their job. They put hundreds of millions of dollars into GitHub 3 (Series B) or 6 (Series A) years ago, and their sustainable business relies on selling those investments for a profit.
> "a DPO is attractive to small companies and companies with an established and loyal client base. A DPO is also known as direct placement."
GitHub has the "established and loyal client base" with many millions in recurring revenue.
GitHub's principal VCs, Sequoia and A16z can both afford to wait for a return. everyone could sell in the "DPO" so VCs could liquidate if they needed cash ...
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github
This point exactly. To me the move is a clear symptom that GitHub leadership has lost touch with the original vision/philosophy that made the platform popular in the first place.
If this goes through Microsoft basically gets access to all the private proprietary code of so many companies. I would have never expected Github founders to even entertain the notion. I guess times change.
The Skype buy was seven years ago, and it was a pretty user hostile piece of software before that.
Post Balmer we've seen a more open (in the transparent, consultative, community sensitive sense) attitude, with genuine contributions to free software.
People also seem to be citing LinkedIn as an example, but that doesn't feel like it got any more unpleasant since the buyout.
Hey, GitLab, if you want to push a big migration from GitHub, inundate the GitHub design team with requests for a ribbon UI on github.com and to move the subscription system to Office 365.
I am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way.
Another issue:
Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository.
Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I still will be moving away right now.
Although I completely agree with you, pointing at LinkedIn as a success story is kind of weird.
Microsoft's new future is to be a cross-platform vendor for developers. I see absolutely zero incompatibility between Github and Microsoft and a need to shut it down. I think the Satya's Microsoft is smart enough not to ruin it.
Microsoft screwed up Skype by trying to “make it more Microsoft” whereas LinkedIn is being left to operate as before (tough MSFT is using the data for something). My guess is that GitHub will continue as before with the main change being that MSDN subscribers will likely get private GitHub repos as part of their package.
Now MSFT just needs something along the lines of Jira to replace the dog’s breakfast that is VSTS Agile project management tooling. I don’t suppose the folks in Redmond are looking to acquire Atlassian next...?
It's good that there is such an alternative as GitLab, because there is a slight but still not unsignificant risk that MS will not do the right thing. I think they will though since they are power users of their own product. I'm hoping they know this space.
Looking at Windows 10, with stuff like telemetry that's impossible to disable completely and hidden behind every dark pattern imaginable, or ads in Start menu?
True, they went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either.
Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
I simply have little trust in MS. They did improve in some areas, but not enough to gain overall trust. They are still not on the same page with many FOSS efforts.
Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
Not surprising. Microsoft has made a big deal of partnering with GitHub, showing off how well their Azure-based CI/CD products and services integrate with code hosted at GitHub. Not to mention that .NET Core and many companion libraries are hosted at GitHub, not on VSTS.
I am really sick of monopoly and centralization of internet. For last few years many of important projects changed hosting to GitHub... Now this? We have alternatives, and good ones (one may argue much better than GitHub), but where is all of this going?
And Microsoft going around devouring open-source community. To some extent we are the responsible ones. But on the other hand I am getting really tired of this. Then people ask me why I use Emacs... it's free and immortal as of now...
I hope this encourages people to fight vendor lock-in a bit and move to self-hosted git portals. With SaaS there is always the danger of acquisitions and degradation of service. The solution is open software, self hosted and portable. Git itself is absurdly easy to self host, but self-hosted alternatives to github deserve more attention, both in terms of use and development effort.
I worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.
1. Electricity cost
2. Need for constant electricity
3. Internet cost
4. Need for constant Internet access
5. Cost of hardware
6. Heat generated by the running hardware
7. Noise generated by the running hardware
8. Space occupied by the hardware
9. Need to update and maintain hardware/software
10. Worse discoverability for your repos
11. ISP asking questions
12. Government asking questions
13. Police asking questions
Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
If you self-host you will probably never get outside contributions. For most people it isn't worth taking the time to figure out whatever system you use. I'd like to see a federated system like GNUsocial/Mastodon for git. I've thought about trying to make such a system but I don't know much about federation.
I'm not sure what exactly you're reacting to, but a lot of us absolutely do not want to self-host our github repos. Because it's work, because we don't need it, because we like using github/gitlab/other as a "marketplace"
Absolutely, and this has been the case for many years. Microsoft has contributed to open source heavily for a long time, but it won't stop a lot of people that have been burned in the past from not trusting Microsoft.
It's worth noting that the same goes for Apple. They have tons of closed source stuff, but they also make huge contributions to the open source world. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have LLVM or Clang as they exist today. WebKit is another big one.
I used to be a big fan of Atom in the beginning, but there’s nothing Atom does that VS Code does not do better. I wouldn’t see a purpose in merging the two, but I could see them killing Atom.
I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot of individual developers are biting at that price.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.
VSTS does a lot of things that GitHub does not. VSTS takes the workflow roles of Jenkins, GitHub, Jira, and has a few additional features that I don't know what open-source equivilant exists for (staged production, push to cloud - maybe done as Jenkins plugins?). It's highly unlikely VSTS will be shut down, especially in favor of a project which does very few things that VSTS does.
I agree on the VSTS front, but a lot of people use Atom and I can see many of them being put off by being forced onto VS Code.
Lately, based on comments made while promoting .NET Core, it sounds like Microsoft don't want to consolidate tooling, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Atom and VS Code co-exist as entirely separate entities/teams.
What different purposes? They're both text editors / lightweight IDEs focusing on plugin extensibility built on top of Electron. They're literally the same thing.
Atom has a whole team under Github. If they're both run by Microsoft, that seems like a clear cost-cutting measure; why develop two vastly similar electron-based code editors when you could just move that team + all of the interesting tech into VSCode?
I use neither, and I can see that the two take fairly different approaches, but why would you say they're build for different purposes. I don't think it's clear why a single org (though very far apart) has two approaches for a code text editor.
Microsoft being an owner here doesn't bother me that much.
The Azure integrations are inevitable. I guess we'll see if Microsoft has learned that strong-armed vendor lock-in makes people not like them. At this point, I am more glad they were acquired by Microsoft than Amazon. Still - there is still so much Microsoft ill-will, that this will take away the aura of 'software purity' from the GitHub.
Microsoft, please be a kind steward... I don't want to waste time migrating.
Putting aside my general dislike for Microsoft for a moment, I still believe this is bad for the tech industry.
It was great having a neutral player running the site, I don't think anyone should own them. GitHub would be best as a nonprofit, though unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen.
Imagine if CNN for example bought Twitter, would other news companies use Twitter still? Probably not.
Will Google, Amazon etc. move their code elsewhere? Maybe. But we will no longer have a centralised git repo, whether that's a good or bad thing.
GitLab have already said they're having 10x the amount of normal traffic migrating GitHub repos to them.
Will employers now ask to see your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket profiles?
I consider this a huge waste of money on Microsoft's part.
Why did they create and then shutter codeplex in the first place? Why can't we have multiple competing platforms (Google Code, Github, Codeplex, Sourceforge, bitbucket, etc.)?
If I were Microsoft I'd rather invest a smaller amount of money (it surely is much cheaper than acquiring Github!) into making Codeplex the best platform.
And then I'd just do a traditional way of forcing people a bit: Why did Microsoft put their software on Github, a competitor? Why not force people a little bit into your ecosystem? Why give up the fight for winner takes it all every single time??? If I were Microsoft I were a bit more proud to use Codeplex, Windows phones, Windows instead of Mac, etc...
Why shutter MSN messenger for Skype? Why making apps for iphone first before Windows phone? Why does Microsoft not simply fund their projects (Windows Mobile had a head start and was abandoned, tablet PCs were already there with XP) and try to compete and create an ecosystem full of solutions working together?
Of course it's kind of nice to see Microsoft embracing github and being more open etc. But where's the fight? Why give up all the time?
Why letting codeplex die when all we need is a bit competititon.
If you're thinking of moving off GitHub, one thing that I have heard about that might help you is you can ask GitHub to mirror repos, the way https://github.com/moodle/moodle looks -- note it says:
moodle/moodle
mirrored from git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
That way any URLs to your GitHub repo should carry on working. People can even clone and pull this repo. That may ease migration, especially if some tools assume code is on GitHub and don't allow you to specify the full URL to the repo.
Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reasons, now no tech company who hosts its codebase on GitHub would want to continue doing that if its MSFT-owned.
It's already happening: https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632
> Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reason
My former employer, a major e-commerce player in Europe and a direct competitor of Amazon, had basically their entire infrastucture on AWS. You might want to reconsider your definition of “no”.
My guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.
Does it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit.
Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
Hop, that's one thing less to do tomorrow! ... of course it was just a matter of time before it happened, github have stood on the other side of the mirror for a long time now, they just happend to have kept that not-for-profit/garage-built-startup image for some time, kinda like twitter. Or reddit and even y combinator. And yet people comment stuff like "let's switch to {gitlab,bitbucket,gogs}". We need to understand that making a self-hostable floss clone of a service that has been designed for a monopoly captive market is not gonna change anything durably. Build something based on small friend-to-friend networks. Something that doesn't need to be big to suceed. That will slowly change the way people think about collaborative tools and get people out of the "giant ad-based ex-startup owned; `free' (as in beer) to use; hosted service" mental model. Please stop building services and start sharing collaborative tools with your peers.
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace app (https://pullreminders.com) and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
But that Microsoft has changed, I see the most what people are complaining about is telemetry that is send, for following up on their biggest product. But all companies do this ( eg. https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not-just-you-clicking-... ), also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this.
Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too, because I think they have more to lose if they fail with GitHub then when they succeed (with more integration for visualstudio.com probably)
> I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
And because of how Microsoft was in the 2000s, and the 2010s. Ballmer was after the 90s. Did they ever stop suing Android manufacturers for using FAT, or open up exFAT after managing to get it as part of the SDXC standard?
> also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this
...Yeah, Ubuntu did that. Not Debian. Not Fedora. Not Arch. Not Gentoo. Even RHEL barely phones home enough to check its license and get updates. And in Ubuntu, the single Linux distro to have done this, you could toggle it off in 5 minutes and it would actually respect your choice, rather than "accidentally" resetting to the most invasive set of options every other update after you spend hours hunting the latest set of registry hacks that make it better.
> Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too
I agree that they want to show that they've changed. I even agree that the current ecosystem is forcing them to change some. I also expect them to pull something the moment they think they can get away with it.
Being evil is a natural state for any large corporation. Trying to be not evil is always either fake or temporary. Microsoft cannot change, until it is split into hundreds of companies. Neither can Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple.
I wonder what the reaction would have been with Apple being the acquirer. Microsoft still receives lots of hate, sometimes justified, but often just baseless. On the other hand, whenever Apple fucks devs (or users) over, they're just "protecting users" or "making business decisions". I feel there's a strong bias in the dev community.
I bet the reaction would have been largely the same; a megacorp monopoly is a megacorp monopoly.
That being said, Apple did make a few nice moves lately -- e.g., open-sourcing FoundationDB (when was the last time Microsoft opened up anything it acquired?).
Apple being the acquirer wouldn't change the potential conflicts of interest or the trend towards monopolization, which is what a lot of people are upset about. Animosity toward large corporations isn't unique to Microsoft.
If github ends up running completely on Azure infrastructure; how likely will microsoft's competitor's be to host large projects there.
that said, I'm not sure the impact will be too negative if google or _______'s open source being on some other git-based system if it includes decent github / gitlab like collab tools.
...And in the comments, a thousand developers suddenly realize GitHub is a plain old business rather than some kind of core infrastructure service altruistically provided by Free Software Elves and their Infinite Bandwidth Rainbow.
My dissenting opinion is that this is good. I am not a Windows user and only peripherally use their services however ironically I believe Microsoft is now the challenger if monopolies:
- Bing is one of the only english search engines with a big userbase; provides a google alternative. I like ddg but it isnt mainstream yet.
- Provides alternative to gmail and enterprise services
- a big 3 cloud provider, competes with AWS and GC. Likely why this github acq makes sense
- runs linkedin to keep fb in competition
There are a lot of examples where they drop the ball, but they are surprisingly the challenger in a lot of new markets providing an alt to the leader/incumbent
People unwilling to pay for a service they think is important for their work, yet lose their shit when the the said service does what is best for them. That is, to be sustainable.
AFAIK, GH charges for private repos and yet they are not-profitable. Gitlab offers free private repos, how will the story end differently?
Oh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube).
Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.
I was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)
Videos get demonetised for questionable or non reasons
Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time).
Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything.
Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today).
Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site.
Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant.
Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them.
YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections.
And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.
You didn't use Youtube before it was acquired? I vividly remember finding a lot of cool videos and music that I couldn't otherwise have found. Now once you watch a few garbage videos it's all Youtube autosuggests to you. Also if you start exploring videos they'll probably be mostly around the same what you've already seen and not diverge too much from what's popular. Anything novel and out-of-ordinary is pushed to the bottom in most cases.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is different but the freshness of it is gone. I don't expect anymore to find anything super-interesting and the same old stuff that I've already watched is being suggested to me again and again.
According to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.
I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.
I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.
I talked to a VP from MSFT last year. He asked how MSFT could do a better job appealing to the open source community and start up community. I said just keep doing what you are doing. It is going to take time for those of us that were around during the Balmer days to be willing to believe that MSTF has turned a corner. I think that they are on the right path, but I certainly don't judge anyone who is skeptical about the future of github. I've been on gitlab since 2011 so it don't make much difference to me.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion around here but I see nothing but positives in this announcement.
This move towards a "good" Microsoft has been going on for a decade, ASP.NET MVC was released as Open Source in 2009. Seeing where they're going with .NET core, VSCode and TypeScript makes me pretty confident they will be good stewards of the site.
Microsoft had their own open source hosting solution Codeplex but closed it and migrated all their stuff to GitHub so they could be where the community was. That was a bold move and I think demonstrates how they see the community now. This isn't the Microsoft of the 90's.
GitHub is great but it's not profitable and I'm sure there are lots of improvements they could make with a bit of a cash injection.
On the flip side if Microsoft stuff it up or there is an exodus from Microsoft because people hate Microsoft, that's not such a bad thing either.
There are great alternatives out there, it's not the same landscape as when GitHub launched, everyone's learnt from GitHub, GitHub's biggest feature is the network effect. Everyone has an account and it's super low friction to contribute there. If we can break that a bit and everyone has an account at 2 or 3 places I think we might see some great innovation as competitors try to differentiate themselves.
Every business that built their service around the GitHub ecosystem will get massively screwed. They should immediately start to integrate as many GitHub competitors as possible or Microsoft will just eat them within the next months. GitHub always wanted to concentrate on the code hosting, not the CI/CD, code quality, code analysis, etc parts but Microsoft will soon start to extend GitHub to support Azure's services directly.
GitHub was never conceived as a charity. But this didn't stop people to put half of the world's open source code centrally on this one platform. Now they are crying/worried because this platform is being sold. Can't really understand your point, guys. That is the way it often goes with commercial enterprises. It's quite an irony that free/open source makes this platform so financially interesting to buy.
I use it for work like everybody else here, but being so comfortable and happy with it, I paid $7/month for a few private repos which maybe used $.02/month in their resources. Just a shame companies and the developers paying for it wasn't enough
GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it?
So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.
Point taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA:
"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."
But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."
> and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github
Linux isn't hosted on github, it's hosted on their own cgit instance: https://git.kernel.org/
There was a short period of time, back in 2011, when kernel.org went down for some time (from late August: https://lwn.net/Articles/457142/ to early October: https://lwn.net/Articles/461465/), so Linux was temporarily hosted on github. After that, the repository on github was kept as a mirror of the official kernel.org repository, but it's a one-way flow.
Some years ago I wrote "The Github Threat" https://carlchenet.com/the-github-threat/ and I'll be delighted to update the conclusion with this quite predictable and logical outcome.
Personally, I think this is great news given the investment Microsoft has made in hosting their open source projects on GitHub. I'm heavily invested in the Microsoft stack so I'm kind of excited to see where they take this.
Also, I'm excited because I'm in the middle of launching a product that aims to build people in to Git experts, or at the bare minimum build up your comfort level with Git to make you productive.
I'd love for you to check it out. This open source version is kind of the basis for my upcoming commercial project.
And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google.
I am forced to use Windows for gaming, and let me tell you what Microsoft has done to me lately.
- Forced updates are a travesty. I should be able to delay or ignore updates indefinitely as I own my computer.
- I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program, despite having no need of one. I can only temporarily pause Windows Defender's real-time checks before they'll helpfully turn it back on for me. This results in a loss of gaming performance.
- Turning off their spying telemetry is essentially impossible and will helpfully turn itself back on.
- They hold some good games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows (Halo Master Chief Collection) since they don't take gaming seriously on PC.
- Every once in a while, they become dedicated to PC gaming again which simply means they will use their power to force something awful onto the community, like the Windows Xbox Game Bar, Games for Windows Live, etc. in their quest to make my gaming PC into an Xbox.
- UWP is trash and greatly restricts what the user can do with their game, such as mods or fan patches to fix bugs developers ignore.
- The Windows Store is horrible in and of itself and is full of even more low quality software. Instead of releasing their games on Steam, Origin, GOG, or even UPlay, they force them into this dumpster fire.
- They install Candy Crush and other drivel by default on a fresh copy of Windows, and sometimes it magically reappears.
Just because Microsoft has put on the "I'm changed!" act recently by releasing some FOSS and donating some money does not mean they have actually stopped being a negative influence.
Check the recent history of computing. They willingly botched many good standardization efforts and devalued many by throwing their industry weight around - all in the name of self-interest.
And oh, their software sucks. Sometimes it's kinda bizarre even how much their software sucks, bad engineering abound.
Have you tried updating Windows 7 recently?
They took over the world of computers and made people believe that computers suck and are boring, which they do when they run Windows.
They brainwashed so many corporations and governments to use their stupid solutions for every problem and plague tech people with incredible headache in the process.
It's even worse in the "developing" world, where every single comapny is like: "Oracle! Microsoft! Oracle! Microsoft!". You will never know till you experience it.
- LinkedIn
- Skype
- Lies around Windows 10 semi-forced upgrade
- Nokia
- The hell that is Office365
- Vermeer
- Groove
- Rare
- Visio
- Hotmail
- FASA
- Firefly
I don't mind their strategy from a business perspective, but from a human perspective I mind they have crushed the goodness out of so many companies they have acquired. It's analogous to the chinese cultural revolution, or if some 3rd rate florentine artist got to buy out Botticelli et al. just as they got started. I know this is not only Microsoft (Cisco, Google et al.) but MS are not innocent and don't deserve to have their slate wiped clean (yet)
I don't use any product from Microsoft. I understand Microsoft is for-profit, but there's no way they can get a single dime from me, and I don't want to become a second-class citizen. That's why I would be leaving.
Ask yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github?
I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github!
Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, it might be too late for github now, but I will myself conduct a review of the free services that I use regularly and reconsider pitching in, since I value independent businesses.
EDIT: looks like my experience may be atypical, that’s good!
Just for anecdata, would you include where you live as part of your replies? In my case it’s central europe.
I’ve paid for private repos on my personal GitHub account for years, and many of the companies I work for/with have paid organization accounts for GitHub, since the integrations and access control / management is really slick vs. setting it up internally. I can see many of these orgs (and myself) determining it’s worth the effort to move to GitLab / self-hosted depending on what Microsoft does.
My company (SAP) has a GitHub Enterprise installation that, given the number of active users, is going to be a very pleasant revenue stream for GitHub.
I know several small, medium, large companies paying github to keep their repos private. Also, github offers on-premises installation of their product.
Another sample of one: I pay for a personal account, although I don’t really have any projects that couldn’t be public, and my company pays for company account.
I may be in the minority. I’ve had a change of heart over the last 5 years or so towards Microsoft. They’ve changed a lot of the practices that used to make me not like them. They’ve embraced open source a lot more than in the past and have clamped down a lot on the anti competitive practices they used for decades. I also have a good friend that works there and I’ve seen how the sausage is made from the inside a bit. They treat their employees really well and from what I’ve experienced they’re a good company to work for.
I don’t have a hard opinion on this acquisition for the OSS community, but it will be good for the employees and I’m hopeful that not much will change with Github as a service and somethings may even get better. Time will tell of course.
Can you imagine how this story would have gone over on Slashdot in 1998? Microsoft was the Borg, Linux was the nerd's favorite OS and Google was a benevolent and powerful new search engine. How the tables have turned...
Great news ! Maybe now people will understand why github was the wrong was to do things.
Using a designed to be decentralized development tool and flocking all in one place, centralizing free software development on proprietary centralized platform is the epitome of not doing things the way they should.
Hopefully people will catch the difference between opensource which microsoft is surfing on in a PR effort to regain prestige and free software which is a nemesis of microsoft.
Now let's see projects scramble to find another centralized place to migrate to in order to keep doing things wrong, and see which ones do not care enough to even do this.
But what would be the alternative then? I mean, GH serves as the de facto opensource social network, it allows private and public collaboration and integrates with many tools creating a web of transparency and free flow of knowledge.
How do we make a similar or comparable service that is decentralized yet transparent and instantly accesible to millions of people across the globe?
So it's time to move on, is gitlab up for the job? or bitbucket? or everyone should run a gitea/gogs container on their $5 vps?
While I use vscode sometimes for web hacking, I use geany/vim for anything else, other than that, I have nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever, and yes, I run linux as my desktop for the last 15+ years.
Money talks, Microsoft is embracing OSS because it's defeated by OSS, it never liked OSS, and it does all these moves just because it has no better options.
And, who knows,it might be the modern Trojan to ruin us all when time comes, I have no doubts on this when I recall how hostile MS has been to OSS.
I don't mind this, as long as the side of Microsoft which has been on GitHub so far as the side of Microsoft who ends up dealing with GitHub in the future.
But this will definitely end the concept of GitHub as a single-source place to find code. Microsoft's competitors will likely move their code, at the least, and of course, the crowd who will never trust Microsoft will leave as well, regardless of how well they manage it.
All-in-all, I don't think that's a bad thing for anyone: Software shouldn't all come from one site, and the industry was becoming far too centralized around GitHub.
We've been lamenting the github-centralization of open-source for years now, this might be the wake-up call people have been waiting for. Rightly so. Gitlab ops people might be in for a treat tonight.
Any plans to make backups/archives before Microsoft takes over? There is an enormous volume of useful open source code from individual authors on Github. A pleasing respite from the world of team-developed commercial software. It is difficult to imagine Github could remain the number distribution channel for individual authors of non-commercial code when it is run under the auspices of a large, proprietary enterprise and consumer software company.
Since its inception, I have been using simple tcp/http clients and text-only browsers to download and browse source code from stable Github urls, as I did throughout the 90's with Freshmeat, Sourceforge, etc. To its credit, Github has always been very accessible.
What are the chances this kind of accessibilty will continue to be possible if Github is being administered by Microsoft.
Direct downloads of small, source code files, many with no licensing restrictions, no sign-ups, no web browser required, no hassle... Microsoft has never managed anything like that. Microsoft has always done the opposite. Indirect downloads of large collections of binaries, often coupled with installers, licensing restrictions, usually requiring some sign-up or click-through agreement, and today, possibly with telemetry.
I hope I am wrong to be concerned about this takeover. Will Github continue to be the respository service of choice amongst authors of free source code? Perhaps some will pull out and move their code elsewhere.
IMO, Microsoft will most likely take a hands-off approach. They would not want some people's frights to be realized, and they would appreciate developers being okay with their acquisition.
I was really hoping GitHub would focus on a IPO vs. acquisition. I honestly think we would be saying the same things about Google/Apple if they had decided to swoop in and make a deal here (so none of what I say is directed specifically at Microsoft).
I think the general consensus is that we want a new, independent org, that genuinely cares about OSS but has the mind to create/maintain a sustainable business model and ensure the long-term success of an OSS platforms is extremely important (and now we'll look to Gitlab and others for that).
Microsoft will, no doubt, have their fingers all over this platform in short order. It's what they're paying for; and it's an extremely smart move (EXTREMELY). Some of GitHubs product offerings have competitors within the Microsoft ecosystem already, which may spell bad times for those long-term. Atom directly competes with VSCode and it simply doesn't make sense to continue development of two, independent, IDEs. Electron utilizes Chromium under the hood, and I'd be hard pressed to thunk Microsoft wouldn't want to try and inject Edge/Chakra into that platform somehow.
It makes good business sense to consolidate efforts once a company is acquired. I give it, at most, 12-18 months before you start seeing major changes to both of those platforms that reflect Microsofts own interests.
To everyone switching to GitLab or considering it: Theres a feature on GitLab where you can import all your GitHub repos in on go. Or you can do it one by one if you want.
Based on the way Microsoft has been “punishing” their on-prem customers since they started pushing O365 this has me a bit concerned about the fate of GitHub Enterprise.
I can't believe Microsoft isn't aware an exodus (at some level) will occur and Github will no longer be what it is if they buy it.
But apparently they don't care. Demonstrating they have not changed as so many claim but are still the same old M$.
I'll be closing my account as soon as this is official. As for clients who decide to stay, sorry, I won't be able to help them as I won't have a Github account. But I will walk them through moving if they like.
It looks like you’re trying to issue a Pull Request! Would you like to use Visual Studio Azure Github for Windows 2000, Enterprise Edition with Skype & Linkedin Integration?
As [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.
If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.
Smart and inevitable, to secure dominance in the talent vertical. I remember walking into an org where none of the engineers or UX folks had Linkedin accounts. They didn't need it to land in a healthy workplace w/ a decent salary. They were active on GitHub instead, had Angellist profiles. One of them mentioned LI's InMail tool drove him away. Another said he can network just fine with Meetup and twitter.
I'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice...
As for me, I also dislike Github being owned by Microsoft. Big conflict of interest. Microsoft core business is closed-source software.
But, it's not wrong to give Microsoft a chance to cultivate Github. Yes, Microsoft have a long track record of being disproportion with open source products. This is also true with other companies.
Good thing to point out is, there are alternatives.
"The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work."
Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?
Microsoft's own hosted platform Visual Studio Team Services is nuetral. It supports hosted and on prem build and deployment agents for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are easy to use plug ins for building and deploying on both Azure and AWS. You can use Github now for hosted git repositories in VSTS and still use Microsoft's other build and release tools.
Thier Wiki is Markdown based and they have a very visible link that lets you pull down your entire Wiki using git clone.
They also have free private repos, 40 hours of hosted builds, up to five users for free, project management features that are at least as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) as the other project management tools - again free for up to five users. You can also host your own private Nuget, NPM, and Maven feeds for free.
For non open source projects, you can't beat the value. Additional users over 5 are $5 a month.
What is Github's reason for this? I'm looking for some salient reason why they'd sell their company. Is it investor pressure or founder apathy, or ...? It seems to me like creating and running a product as admired as Github is a bigger prize than just cash in the game of life?
“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though, it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.”
If somebody of the size of GitHub can't manage to stay a standalone company it's a pretty sad state of affairs. We really need more players in this industry. It's becoming more and more a monoculture (not sure what the term is for a few players that together pretty much have monopoly. Oligopoly?)
I'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft to begin with, but I definitely see a reason to be wary about this. I don't really want any Microsoft integration into GitHub, and really the best case would be for them to not change much with the site at all, although I don't see this being the case.
My fear in this is that MS may require MS passport or whatever it is called ID system to log in to GitHub, with their really unreasonable 16 character max password length restrictions.In general MS websites are poor in usability, and littered with marketing copy, difficult to find useful information.
Does this remind anyone else of the back to the future movie where Biff is the free worlds leader and just a pompous asshat with the power to keep being a pompous asshat?
Having watched Microsoft over the years steal ideas from smaller companies (not purchase them then bastardize and part them out mind you), but actually steal their ideas and make them standard in their operating system.
Some examples are CDR/CDRW now standard after small companies in the late 90's developing the standard.
The bastardized implementation of Active Directory after Novell's Netware platform and the later implementations of OpenLDAP and the standards that were spurned.
What about the MIT Kerberos authentication mechanisms after Microsofts MsCHAPv2, MsCHAP & NTLM roll your own crypto schemes were found easily crackable and exploitable?
I can go on but actually have to do some work today...
I read about this as a hypothetical a few days, but it really moved to done deal quicker than I expected.
I started to look for alternatives to host private repos and found that Amazon CodeCommit has a plan that's even much better than the GitHub plans. Does anybody have experience on how well this works?
I’ve got a couple of code commit repos for various purposes, and it’s high friction. Uploading a large repo with a plain git push will likely fail. The user management is way more complicated and enterprisey than github. It does work, but it feels awkward.
I think instead of moving everything to one new (central hosted) silo like GitLab.com, we should move to self hosted git instances, with some GitHub like web interface to do remote comments/pull requests (e.g. gitea/gogs with some simple modifications).
There probably won't be (m)any noticeable changes for the open source and devs running personal private repos and possibly the same for GitHub team plans. However, I'd bet Microsoft will plan on a sunset timetable for TFS and push their licensing and sales machine toward GitHub for Enterprise. I'm glad my group isn't on GitHub for Enterprise because after seeing this news I'd be looking to migrate away ASAP. I can envision the the potential for their draconian licensing lock-in and TOS language spawning a nightmare for teams that are running GH Enterprise. These GH enterprise installations will likely be required to purchase MSDN licenses.
Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? I use both and there is barely any overlap in features. GitHub is only code storage + a rudimentary issue manager. There is very little release management, test management, CI/CD etc.
If anything I’d expect them to integrate better and of course integrate more with Azure (e.g one-click setup of build/test on azure from any Github project)
Admittedly I've been away from TFS for a number of years, however, it seems that GitHub Enterprise is a natural fit product wise for revenue stream via licensing thru MSDN to get organizations onboard with GitHub that weren't before. If they were to sunset TFS and provide a migration path, it would end up giving them significant licensing dollars.
The more important point I was trying to make is that orgs that are now on GitHub Enterprise would need to subscribe to MSDN enterprise licenses for a bunch of things that aren't relevant and get locked into TOS that they hadn't been previously.
Regardless of sunsetting TFS/VSTS, I think that Github Enterprise will be only available through a MSDN enterprise/premium license or whatever that is now in 2018.
Agreed. I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting.
VSTS is awesome, and quite feature-packed. Maybe Microsoft will use GitHub specifically for repo hosting, while offering VSTS as an CI/CD/ALM platform.
This is the "extend" phase, in case anyone is keeping track. The embrace was "MS loves Linux!", switching Windows to use git, and putting tons of near random libraries and projects on github publically (vscode, chakracore, etc).
I just love how anyone that cards had been actively avoiding walled garden proprietary services like this and were using gitlab, phabticator, etc for years saying this or anything similar (could have just been github starting to sell user data themselves) but only when big evil MS comes along to put the reality in peoples faces that you don't bet your software infrastructure on some proprietary non interoperable web service.
For people looking for alternatives, I've started to write code forge tools in Salut à Toi (on top of XMPP).
It's decentralized, already working (tickets and merge requests), based on standards, and written in a popular language (python), help would be more than welcome!
It is also agnostic of the tools, I'm using it with Mercurial, but Git implementation will of course follow.
I'm kind of happy with this happening as it seems to me that this can cause the VCS hosting arena to diversify a little bit. The "monopoly" of github always worried me as a huge freaky single point of failure.
Well, let's say I wouldn't switch away from github at once (I have a paid account with private repos and all), but consider the Skype precedent: from a mostly working native application, now it's an Electron abomination that takes 100% CPU and is a lot harder to use than the previous versions. But it has social networking!
It's very likely they will "improve" github in the same way. I don't think they dare to make the site explicitly not work on anything but IE, but I expect subtle incompatibilities to pile up over time...
IMO, I think Microsoft will take a hands off approach, they don't want some of people's fears to be realized, and they really would want a friendly attitude towards their acquisition.
The negativity in here is crazy. It‘s not even official yet everyone already seems to know that Microsoft will destroy Github.
Microsoft tried really hard to improve their relationship with developers in the last couple of years and they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again.
I can understand the scepticism and that people dislike the fact that Github is not independant anymore, but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
Are they still trying to extort "licensing fees" from Android device manufacturers? Have they apologized for ever doing that and promised never to do that again? Until that, I won't even consider it. Fuck Microsoft. They're horrible and their recent attempt to go back to the "embrace" part of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deserves absolutely zero good will.
I hate when people accuse others of negativity when manifestly negative thing happen.
"Hey, stop punching me in the face!"
"Why are you being negative?"
There are very good reasons people aren't happy about this. Microsoft's track record for one. And the loss of independence of major repo source for another. Not being happy about this isn't being "negative". It's entirely understandable.
> they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again
The old MS — and I'm not trying to comment on how different or similar the current MS is to the old one — did indeed spend a lot of money to screw developers and the developer community, including developers who bought into the MS stack.
> but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
I don't think many people are worried MS will ruin GitHub, per se. I think what most people are worried about is that MS will change GitHub enough to inject MS-specific stuff in there.
GitHub is the website 90% of the packages I use are hosted on. All our company code and hundreds of hours are invested into whats hosted on it. I would hate to see this change...
This might be a stupid question, I did Cmd+F to search if it had already been asked and answered and it hasn't, so it might actually be stupid.
I'm guessing it's very illegal (IANAL) and that it's not the intention of Microsoft (IANACEO), but what are the ramifications relating to IP (GitHub's customer's IP, rather than the GitHub's IP) - has Microsoft essentially bought access to a massive stash of IP/trade secrets in the form of private repositories?
I'm wondering this too - private repos might be a goldmine of intellectual property, which businesses assumed would stay "private", i.e., not in the hands of companies like Microsoft.
Not judging if this is a good or bad thing but in general it's annoying to be dependent on a single company. While git is decentralized, github's social platform features are centralized and lock users to github. I would love to see more solutions that allows users to migrate freely between platforms without losing their social contacts. See https://fejoa.org for more information.
Centralized and proprietary unfortunately are two key attributes to Github. That fits the old school MS bill. But it also fits the new “we have changed hype”.
It’s most unfortunate, because git made decentralized revision control popular.
My future Tooling bets are on sustainable open source.
Good for MS, though. It’s a smart move for them. And Github has been struggling for years, anyway. Scandals, new structure, more hierarchy. It’s probably easier to pick up now than three years ago.
Guys. Enough with the FUD please. I myself don’t even believe I’m saying this but clearly Satya Nadella != Steve Ballmer. Dude has seen the light and is trying to put the company on the right path.
Every time they do something good all the tinfoil hats come out. Give them a chance. They’ve turned over a new leaf. And until and unless we see otherwise we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt.
What Microsoft acquisition has been a "success"? Because there are quite a lot that got worse under MS. They have a long track record and it'l take years before they can begin to counter all the stuff they've done.
Would have rather seen an investment or partnership in github than a purchase. Recognizing the desire for github to stay neutral but supporting it to continue would have been a much better received move and done far more to build up reputation.
We will have to start migrating our software there into a more neutral platform.
I don't like the consolidation in Software in which there are only 5-6 huge players. It means politics and private interest of the conglomerate take precedence over everything else, like competence, and freedom.
Those oligopolies can just send their lawyers against competition or just buy them to stop the threat.
I wonder how Microsoft can manage to commercialize all the projects on GitHub. Maybe by providing an universal installer that works through the Windows Store. Maybe by adding a few mandatory patches to each project that improve compatibility. Maybe by making a much improved version of Git with a proper GUI interface. The possibilities are endless!
Perhaps there is a market for a really simple Git based issue tracker, which doesn’t require Ruby. This acquisition feels like Freshmeat / SourceForge v2; the hardcore OSS enthusiasts will begin their exodus.
Is there an argument for actually building simple issues management into Git itself with a simple API for pull requests?
Netlify is great! I also found them via HN at some point and use them for a couple customer projects. Totally moving my personal stuff to them too now.
Funnily enough a friend of mine and I migrated some of our projects over to GitLab right before this original story broke. It’s really unfortunate though that this will probably go through since GitHub was/is really the staple site for social programming and project management, something that GitLab is certainly lacking.
"Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class." [A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark, 022]
Big five representatives of the vectorialist class are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple.
feel like if any of the other companies made this acquisition less people would care. It’s just trendy and good for your hacker creds to oppose microsoft as people did in the 90s. No one is crying about AWS hosting all applications.
If it's true, I'm cancelling my paid account immediately. A monopolist tried and found guilty of monopolization shouldn't own the company where many of their future competitors have their private repositories, it's frankly rather disturbing they think it's a good idea.
If this is true, it is really sad news. Remembering what Microsoft did with Skype, turning it from one of the most usable communication platforms to a pile of unusable crap, I can't help but wonder if it's time to prepare a migration strategy right now.
What specific user-affecting changes would the new overlords make that suck for developers? I don't doubt that there are good answers to this. They could treat it like a cash cow and just start charging more for less, but I mean functional changes.
Of all the big players who could have acquired GitHub, I'm most glad that it's MSFT. Their open source initiatives of late have been fantastic, and they really get developers. Visual Studio is a 10/10 IDE. Congrats GH and co :)
If anyone could stay independent, it should have been them. If it weren't Microsoft but someone else, it would be almost the same to me. There are so much things they could do to improve the experience and make it more profitable.
Color me naive but it can't be that bad, maybe they will surprise the FOSS community by opensourcing the NT kernel. Satya has said it is a possibility. And he is probably the only CEO who has been friendly toward FOSS.
I’m sure they paid a good chunk of change but this looks like more of a soft landing than an acqusition. Even the language: “Microsoft agreed to acquire” dampens the enthusiasm. I wonder how this worked out for investors.
I wonder what this will mean for VSTS? That has it's own public/private git repositories. Though they're more 'enterprise integrated ci/cd' than github's 'portfolio'
I don't think the big loss here is GitHub-the-software, but this short sweet period in time where everyone, from Microsoft to Apple, had their source code on the same platform. I doubt that e.g. Swift would have moved to GitHub if it had already been owned by Microsoft.
If is true, this is one of the saddest news I've heard in the last 5 years. Please Github don't allow this. Look of what crap Skype became to be... look at what crap LinkedIn became to be...
I really like Microsoft, but this is a TERRIBLE idea for GitHub. Some rich bastard needs buy GitHub and then make it community owned. Why is GitHub a for-profit? It should be considered a utility.
Interesting that you say this. If the price was 3x what it was (for both individuals and organizations), I feel both parties would still find it valuable enough.
I am so happy to see this moving forward. Microsoft will provide the proper management to drive innovation again in GH. Start by creating a replacement for the astronomically priced Travis
Used to seeing these kind of reactions on HN. Saw this during FB React licensing issue. Angry Engineers moving to Vue or whatever was non-react, only to move back to usual in few weeks.
I surely become tired of becoming the product for someone else's overly inflated bottom line after having an option to feel it is "safe" to be a part of a community...
Microsoft got me using IDE's it was a nice cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good .... likely they will turn it into shit like everything else.
I wonder if instead Apple had acquired GH and today morning introduce laptops with 32 GB RAM, discreet GPU and fully tinkerable laptops for geeks to recapture losing mindshare.
Microsoft had codeplex which was older than github. They are probably going to spend 4 or 5 billion buying Github. They most likely write down the value a few years later.
So a lot of people mention GitLab as an alternative. Would anyone with experience with that platform care to chime in and list some pros & cons compared to Github?
I like that is also has CI/CD and other features, and that you can host it yourself (also for free). I do keep hearing about database issues on their hosted version though.
In general: haven't had problems with it, am cheaper than hosted GitHub, cheaper and works better than (self-)hosted Atlassian software.
GitLab appears to be the default choice for migration for many people... I wonder though if this might prompt some folks to go old-skool and move back to SourceForge?
I'm hoping this puts the times of people with political agendas stearing the GitHub message well behind us. They weren't really neutral anymore when the CEO stepped asside and they got the business guy to take over...
I suspect MS is aware of the delicate situation in regards to alienation the user base. If this goes through I expect them to address this directly and with perhaps some creativity.
As a bonus Microsoft did some great work scaling git for the Windows codebase. That and other great engineering efforts making there way into GitHub could be great for the community.
I also think that Microsoft is very aware of this situation. They should already work on the communication part of this. And if true that maybe Nat Friedman will take over, they will handle it the right way. He has shipped his Mono team and the later Xamarin stack through four companies with success and stability for the product and the team.
Good. I don't understand the hundreds of comments invested in a company that provides one of the most fungible services around, with the weakest features and no profitability. The only other option for them was dying a slow death on the public markets if they did an IPO.
There are dozens of git hosting companies, including GitLab, BitBucket, Microsoft's own VSTS, repos by all the major clouds, and many others. Microsoft has every incentive to not screw this up but even if they did, so what? Nothing happens. Switch to something else and you're all set.
I wonder as well. If linkedin is any indication, Microsoft hasn’t affected their engineering culture really at all yet. In fact linkedin still routinely poaches Microsoft engineers and used slack and google drive and bluejeans instead of skype. If anything linkedin has gone on a massive hiring spree on Microsoft’s dime.
I'm not one to praise Microsoft without reason - I've worked the last 2 decades with their tech.
However, I don't see this as a negative thing. Provided they don't trash it like most of their acquisitions - and bear in mind they sort of depend on github themselves.
I feel this will prevent github from going like sourceforge now that someone with deep pockets can support it.
They have a lot of PR to lose if they screw this one up. Generally, migration is a only few git commands away.
sourceforge, github...these platforms have their moments but are almost always superseded by something else that is more of the moment and useful.I can't see this msft move, which has been in the works for what feels like years, will help github to stay in the position it's been in for the last 3 years or so...
The chinese government tried to force Github to censor shadowsocks and the NY times repository. But back then it would have to block the whole site with other resourceful content.
My guess is that when Github is with Microsoft, the communist party in China has far more leverage as Microsoft has to follow Chinese laws, e.g., for selling Windows (even a special government-version), and bc China is an important market. I hope I'm wrong.
A shitty free browser developers still have to deal with today because enterprises refuse to fix their garbage in-house software..I'm not bitter at all.
Petitions don't pay bills; GitHub is bleeding money. The solution is not signatures, but for developers to start paying for all the free hosting GitHub has given them. The open-source community itself is strapped for cash, so this is an excellent time for all the users of that open-source software (especially companies) to start chipping in for hosting and development costs. However, the cynical side of me says that ain't going to happen. :/
That was my original idea but if the deal is already closed it is too late. I've been paying for years even though I never needed it only to support Github's amazing work. And now this :/
I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Someone explain the extreme feeling
of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
There is not a single Microsoft product/tool/service I like. Including the ones they aquired. So I expect them to turn GitHub into something I don't like too.
What does Github have to do with free software? It's a closed-source, non-free SaaS. Free software repos can (mostly) relocate to any other hoster as they wish.
Microsoft has a history of taking the open source philosophy out of their products. Github is one of the few large, commercially successful platforms that have not only embraced, but built their entire platform around those fundamental values.
It's not a surprise we feel unease, and to hope that Microsoft is actually going in a direction that aligns with those values, instead of simply twisting them for it's own continued success - that's being a bit naive.
We'll all see what happens, but honestly, I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
There are plenty of examples that stick to the core philosophy of open source software and open ideas, but there are rarely examples that manage to become extremely successful and maintain that success without drowning in the confusion created through their own influence.
What a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do things?
And yet, pure open-source / community initiatives don't seem to have the strong centralized control that appears to be needed to make good, user-focused software. Alterantives?
(I wonder if projects that reach a certain size shouldn't basically be nationalized. Private enterprise is great at innovating, not so good at maintaining w/o slipping into bullshit exploitation / ruining what was good in the first place. Obviously you'd have to be careful to do this in a way that still left enough of a payoff to not discourage new private enterprises.)
Well, the difference is the users had and have the choice which kingdom, if any, to inhabit or build. If Github goes the way of Microsoft something of value will be lost, namely the relatively open - as far as any centralised resource can be open - culture of a non-affiliated source repository. The actual functionality which Github offers is by no means unique and can be achieved in many different ways.
To be honest I don't think Github, or any other centralised resource, is the way to go. Now that Github may fall on the list of locations to host your projects it is worth thinking about alternatives to this centralised system. Self-hosted gogs, gitea or gitlab is probably the easiest option right now, I've had a gogs/gitea instance running for a few years which mirrors my activities at Github and can be used as a substitute at short notice. These mirrors are not complete though, I currently do not mirror the issue tracker nor the wiki. I guess I better start doing this as well to really have a turn-key Github alternative for when the time comes for us to part ways.
I've been giving the concept of distributed ownership some thought. None of it's concrete and I certainly don't currently possess the wealth of knowledge or experience necessary to make it work or form it into something less abstract.
At anyrate the thoughts are along the lines of distributing shares of a company either eveningly to everyone or depending on how much an individual contributes will be returned with some increase in shares. Anyone participating in any form of company is at least immediately given some share. For example if you helped produce something that the company sells you're given some ownership. However additionally shares of ownership can be attained by directly buying the product that has been produced.
Idealisticly the goal is a company, or companies, where every one benefits from the interactions/transactions and not a small number of individuals that have direct incentives to consolidate more.
Because Microsoft wrecks almost everything it touches lately, including its own sacred-cow products like Windows itself, in an effort to force it to serve the company’s interests over those of its (paying!) customers?
Today, there is far more connection between contribution to society and personal wealth than in the past. If you have good ideas about how to make this connection stronger, share them in a blog, research paper, book, talk. If you have nothing to contribute, then don't complain and enjoy the improvements that happened over the past centuries.
Do they really get more wealthy than the greatest kings who ever lived in history? I can name a few Roman emperors (kings all but in name, ironic as I'm being pedantic) who had a whole lot more money, respective of their peers and the times. Same with a lot of European monarchs, historically and in the present day.
Do you mean that Github shareholders will benefit from users that are hosting their projects on Github? Isn't "content is king" true for all platforms?
I was using gitlab anyway. But it's significant that Microsoft is taking another step towards destroying open source and the community around it (while making it look like they are embracing it, of course).
Months before I mailed Whitehatservices@programmer.net, I have really been battling with a bad report and was feeling skeptical about the whole fix process online seeing my mom been ripped. Though My colleague recommended whitehatservices to me, I still didn’t feel right contacting them cause I’ve previously seen them online. Finally, with my fingers crossed, I gave it a try and here I am recommending you Whitehatservices@programmer.net. The best part of the story; No upfront payment, though it took me almost a month but I’m good.
Everyone is leaving this platform because Microsoft is a spyware OS (NSA OS). To be honest, they are going to put Malware tracking in your code. Something big is coming inside your machine..... Warning : stay away from any acquired platforms of Microsoft (LinkedIn (Resume tracking), github (project code tracking), Skype ( Voip tracking), etc.......). They can't innovate anymore, and the weak dev work for money instead of building the next big thing..... Anyway.... Gitlab is the answer
Wait a minute. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so it has prime access to recruitment. It now also owns GitHub, where it can run anything they want to find the best programmers. I don’t know what Microsoft plans to do, but those are good wats to find all kinds of talent.
I wonder now that Microsoft controls LinkedIn and Github what kind of synergies can form between the two to better serve recruiters looking for software developers.
It just seems odd that a company that threatens to sue companies for using Linux, unless they pay their patent licensing extortion royalties, may control GitHub.
Open source or NO open source? Never thought Github would sell itself one day. Always thought it to be a treasure from divine sources that need no money.
Good! Getting rid of Atom for Visual Studio Code should make things a lot better (and allow them to free up some staff). And if they eliminate they head of "community" that makes public repository owners have to tiptoe around any sensitive snowflake's sensibilities, that will fix most of the remaining problems.
Think Microsoft will use this opportunity to throw some people in jail for whats in their github repos, like they did with the poor guy offering freely available recovery CDs?
One of the company i work for is using microsoft stack, it's the worst nightmare i ever had to deal with, microsoft is the devil of the internet era, we should all quit github if this happen
Microsoft got me started using IDE's. It was a good cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good and more likely turning into shit.
GitLab is also venture funded. What's the end game there? Wouldn't GitLab's investors, including YC, be ecstatic to see the company achieve a similar outcome? Wouldn't they consider basically any other outcome to be a failure?
The bigger question is why GitHub didn't IPO. They have name recognition and prominence such that it wouldn't really be a surprise to hear that they were doing so. I don't have any internal details, so maybe the numbers just didn't line up, but that would've been the investor-approved exit that allowed it to maintain some neutrality.
That leads to the next question: if GitHub didn't/couldn't IPO with all of its name recognition, why should anyone expect that GitLab will?
While Atlassian's open-source pedigree is much weaker, they own BitBucket, and they're a bootstrapped startup that focuses on developer tools. They IPO'd a few years ago. They're probably the best bet for developers interested in a "neutral" hosting platform.
I am a [full-time open source developer](https://github.com/ahmadawais) working as a core developer of WordPress contributed to every single major version for the last couple of years.
I am also well versed in JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem and have a deep interest in DevOps, Cloud, and the new serverless tech. I care very deeply about Developer Experience and most of my open source work is related to dev-tooling.
Now that you know this about me, it's easier for you understand why I am writing this post, and maybe why I think my opinion matters. Below is a copy-paste from the Twitter thread that I created on this topic:
1️⃣ @Microsoft is about to acquire @GitHub. A lot of folks are skeptical. But I have a different view. Many of you know I am building a course on VSCode.pro for that, I've seen firsthand, how 🆚@Code repo is one of the best #OpenSource repos out there
2️⃣— Once I created a GitHub issue at 🆚@Code repo for markdown and I was impressed by how vscodebot auto-assigned @MattBierner (who works on Markdown of VSCode) to the issue and then @tonybrix from MarkedJS helped me out. It was best GitHub automation WITH results ever!
3️⃣— Don't "@" me coz I know about @Microsoft's history with #OpenSource. I am a full-time open sourcerer and I can't sit here quiet instead of supporting what looks like the new @Microsoft — @SatyaNadella's moving the company from @Windows dependant to in-house @Linux dev
4️⃣— Every other day I find/meet people working at @Microsoft using Linux/Mac based devices — even bought by the company for them. Guess what? 1,000 MSFT Employees pushing open source code on GitHub. This is a BIG 🆕 change. Taking it lightly in 2018 would be tomfoolery.
5️⃣— I've been most inspired by teams behind 🆚@Code (@auchenberg ) and @Azure — I think that @JeffSand has built an incredible team of @AzureAdvocates folks like @ashleymcnamara @sarah_edo @jawache @burkeholland @simona_cotin @_clarkio @John_Papa @holtbt @film_girl @TommyLee
6️⃣—I'm a big fan of "Dev Experience" (DX) that's why I pay $200 for a font I use in 🆚Code & have built s of #OpenSource dev-tooling github.com/ahmadawais—Teams at @Azure are doing a lot to make DX better for the cloud → @AzureFunctions + @Code integration is impressive!
7️⃣— GitHub's been struggling to find a new CEO for a year. What if?
It's my primary code hosting company. It's helped me go full-time open source with the support from awesome dev community/companies. Safe to say that @GitHub has made #OpenSource better
8️⃣— @Microsoft has done a lot for #OpenSource in the last 4 years with @SatyaNadella.
🆚 @Code's love.
@Linux Subsystem on @Windows.
Draft.sh for @kubernetesio didn't have a Windows version and still offers @MacHomebrew as the go-to way of installing it!
9️⃣—@GitHub is not exactly a cash-cow. @Microsoft has put money where their mouth is — out of 1.5 Million organizations on GitHub MSFT has most GitHub contributors to its repos, it's the biggest company with over 1000 employees contributing code to GitHub →proof of good faith!
— I think @Microsoft is changing for good. The intent here's to connect with developers and not offend them by disrupting a good company. MSFT won't change a lot but this acquisition might make GitHub a lot better. Also, MSFT will jump into ROR. It's high time for #OpenSource.
What are your thoughts on this whole thing?!
Peace! ️
Can the old CEO be sued for 'breach of trust'?
At least they must have to give prior notice before any of our sensitive data (trusted to github) falls into the hands of MS (untrustworthy)?
Guys and girls, I really don’t get this. It’s 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content?
Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.)
Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon’s store, Google’s search engine, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s social network ... don’t you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers?
Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we’re upset. Oh no, what’s the new owner going to do?
With a network that no one controls, we wouldn’t worry about that.
We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It’s a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to “the cloud” ie some servers owned by someone else.
Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.
We don't use Github to host Git repos alone. We use it as a tool for collaboration - to track bugs, host some documentation, do code reviews, track workflow and so on. And, most of all, we use it for discoverability. It's easy to find things on Github.
> Why did we stop at DNS?
A lot of companies host their domain servers on AWS because Route 53 makes it convenient.
A real successor to Github would allow all the extras around Git, but in a federated way. We'd deploy a server for our projects, different addresses for our repos and all members of this federation would agree on an API and share data with each other.
It's doable, but, unless it's easier than other options, it won't fly.
Reading through replies to this and especially about "the death of free software" makes me ask, "Was software ever free?"
From my perspective, any software that has made it to production use ended up supported by some large for-profit corporation.
Java<-Oracle
Linux<-multiple distro's with paid-for enterprise support
And IBM and other companies hiring developers to work on "free software".
Without the support of corporations, most software just dies.
So Github is losing money and can't figure out a model to become profitable. They could start charging for all repositories. They could go public, but then they're beholden to some small set of investment groups.
Microsoft, under Nadella, has been about as pro-open source as you can get.
The only change I expect from Microsoft re: Github is that they will very likely bake DevOps into their tools (Code/Visual Studio) and their cloud (Azure) so that developers can be more productive.
The illusion of free software has always been just that. An illusion.
This isn't even about free software... github is closed. It's SaaS. It just became a defacto standard interface, a sort of facebook for git. git is free and will stay that way.
I spent eight years building software on .NET, so I have a lot of time for Microsoft, but I fully understand why a lot of people aren't happy with this news. It's been good to have a leader in open-source that is unaffiliated with anyone but the tech they chose to use (Ruby/Rails). For me, it doesn't matter who takes it over - it's just sad to see a neutral player disappear.
With all that said, things have changed a lot over at GitHub over the past 2-3 years, so I can't say I'm all that surprised that this was the outcome. Restructures, scandals, and some crazy comments over the few years has led me to believe that GitHub probably isn't the same company that the development community embraced. For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft mess with GitHub then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years, it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service (i.e. GitLab).
This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
This was largely my thought behind the move.
Given that GitHub is quite proudly built on Ruby, I can't see them wanting to switch things up from a tech perspective. GitHub is stable, and it's tech stack is capable of staying up despite some major DDoS attacks.
If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams, and to finally resolve the issues that stop Windows from being a first-class citizen in the Ruby world. If they can do this through both Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux then I think they'll be on to a winner. It's a capture of a much-loved service, and an opportunity to bring a mature set of tools into their domain.
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I have lived and worked in SV for a decade, and still don't know a single "Silicon Valley hipster" developing with WSL or VS Code.
I do know the power of analytics and control over prominent backend systems, and the allure of being "gatekeeper" with the power to extract value from integrations.
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Yeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.
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> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux, VS Code, and Microsoft’s ongoing play to capture the Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating.
I can tell you from experience that that will never, ever happen.
The most likely outcome is that GitHub will slowly but surely start to bleed open source projects to alternatives like GitLab. And GitHub will continue to live on, like LinkedIn and Skype before it, but it will lose mind share and will no longer be the epicenter of open source development.
Remember SourceForge? Yeah, that's right.
> Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem that Apple is alienating
Not sure what you mean here.
They've never specifically targeted non-Apple developers as a core constituency. It was mainly due to the fact that OSX was UNIX derived that the platform became popular at all.
> This dovetails nicely with Windows Subsystem for Linux
Interix/SFU/SUA has always existed. WSL is just the latest iteration of it. And nobody uses it now just like nobody used it before
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221777 and marked it off-topic.
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Can you elaborate on what the Silicon Valley "hipster development ecosystem" is?
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Not quite so.
I think WSL is a great idea and it also works very well, if we ignore minor bugs and oddities. But the acquisition of github is AWFUL. Microsoft gave the choice of "take it or leave it, my way or the highway".
There was no way for me to associate with the move so I was gone from github after 10 years.
Linux subsystem for windows is garbage, it brings all the same issues with running a linux VM on windows with no more benefit than cygwin gave and who exactly is apple alienating? This sounds like opinion since apple profits are doing just fine and waking into any incubator will show you who the dominant player is. also windows is not even close to comparable to macos except that they’re both OSes
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I also spent years working with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies. The reality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was still alive and well as late as 2011 when I mostly stopped dealing with them. Since that time they have definitely taken a new direction, with increasing adoption of Linux in particular, but I have trouble belieiving the corporate DNA has been so thoroughly overwritten in the last few years that this does not spell the imminent demise of Github as the broadly useful plarform that we know it as today.
Their "corporate DNA" was established when the desktop was supreme and they could steer the direction of the industry based on thier Windows dominance.
Times are different, mobile is more important, cloud hosting is a real thing and technology changes. They had to evolve or die. Saying you can't trust MS in 2018 based on the way the world was years ago is like saying that Netflix could only ship DVDs to people's houses, Amazon can't be trusted to do cloud hosting because they only sell books, and that a minor niche computer maker should never be trusted to sell phones.
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I guess it depends what side of Microsoft we get working with GitHub, whether it's the friendly outreach side alongside the .NET Foundation, or whether it's the internal software team that want to integrate GitHub into internal tooling and start moving their platform onto theirs.
My dream scenario is the former, where Microsoft provide leadership to a company that's still reeling from its own scandals, and use GitHub as a platform for promoting open-source, rather than as a way of mining their access to the open-source world to benefit their own tooling.
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Microsoft is one of Linux Foundation biggest donors, which means they have leverage over them. They are invited to discuss new Linux developments, products, etc...
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Except now they have billion dollar data centers they need your servers on and don't care if you use their software as long as they turn a profit from the hosting. Bill G is probably kicking himself for not renting servers decades ago.
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> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Hmmm... Windows Subsystem for Linux... the 1998 Microsoft-vs-Linux report... hmmmm.
While I'm currently picturing a pacman trying to eat a dot a bit bigger than it expected, I do wonder what kind of hilarity Microsoft have planned for, presumably, 5-10 years from now (I'd presume they're in the Embrace/Extend period if my conspiracy theory is right).
[Small edit: currently at -1; interesting | Edit 2: Now at -4! Anybody care to actually comment? I'm interested in why people disagree!]
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This, I was trying to think of the right way to state this. Looks like I’ll be looking for alternatives.
Tossing out Ballmer has greatly improved things, but it's hard still hard to ever trust them.
Maybe when Ballmer is dead and buried.
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Skype wasn't ruined because they attempted to merge it into their other platforms. Skype was just flat out ruined with bloat, horribly inefficient code, turning it into a spying tool and not listening to their vocal users. Everyone was rioting after every update and it just got worse. To add insult to injury the last major update they have tried turning it into Snapchat. Their incompetence knows no bounds. If you think the same middle managers that ruined Skype aren't there anymore, you don't know how big companies like Microsoft work.
The client was mismanaged, but forcing the backend onto their abysmal Lync stack did ruin reliability as well as privacy.
I wonder if pre-acquisition Skype was one of the hardest software the Windows team had to deal with. For example, at one point they used SYSENTER directly to make system calls!
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> For that reason, I can't see Microsoft doing a "Skype" and merging GitHub into their platforms.
Maybe not now, but what about after the next reorganization or the next CEO? If it's no longer in MS' interests to keep a relationship with this audience somewhere down the road, why would they leave them alone?
This is the uncertainty people are afraid of.
For Github there was always uncertainty; if MS didn't take over, investors would've, or another (less capable) competitor (like I dunno, Yahoo?). I'm confident in MS keeping github running smoothly and moving forward.
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I completely agree with your comment. As much as I love Microsoft, this is a weird development.
It’s like if Google bought Mozilla and Firefox became just another Google browser.
What isn't commonly known is that GitHub was never profitable and was getting closer and closer to insolvency every day.
Microsoft rescued them.
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Is it? I imagine VSS and their cloud source control offering (don’t remember the name) probably aren’t doing all that well in the face of GitHub.
They want to be a player in that game, so they’ll transition off they are old product which isn’t that popular onto a new one they purchased that has all the mind share.
As long as they don’t screw it up, and recent Microsoft seems to me like a company that won’t, it will benefit them. And perhaps it will benefit the user some to do have a company with deep pockets behind it.
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The timing is suspect, because Google has been pushing Cloud Source Repositories as a private Git repository recently [1]. So, GitHub will most likely be part of Azure portfolio. Developers might be fickle, but they are fully locked into their respective cloud platforms in the recent years.
[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Cloud-Source-Re...
It makes that Gitlab graph https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/forrester-ci-wave... even more interesting.
Try https://kallithea-scm.org/ supporting not just git but also hg and svn.
Kallithea doesn't support SVN, only RhodeCode does which Kallithea forked. SVN support amongst many other security fixes and features were added at a later stage into RhodeCode.
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Of course they will mess with it. Just slowly so developers dont leave. This is Microsoft. Read up on their tactics. It works.
It's why I'm surprised at the timing, since GitHub has had its own issues over the past few years, with a founder and other staff members leaving over harassment, and some questionable comments coming from members of their new team. I've felt for a while that GitHub had peaked, and that we weren't far away from seeing it push towards breaking the product to satisfy investors that want a return.
With an acquisition, most of this becomes amplified, based on how Microsoft treat GitHub. IMO, leaving them alone to do their own thing could be just as bad as being too controlling. I'd like to see someone like Scott Hanselman, a well-liked developer in the development community be given the opportunity to sit in GitHub and to use Microsoft's resources to improve the open-source community.
It's a real disaster.
People ten years ago did not sign up for a MS github, so why should they now want to stay?
It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity.
The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.
The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.
That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.
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Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been banging the centralization drum for a while. His take is the sheer scale of the internet imbues tremendous value to any centralized service that can organize it (e.g. what Google does for web pages or Facebook does for your friends).
If this is the case then the internet may end up more centralized than previous forms of media and communication. I hope that's wrong, but it seems to be happening right in front of us.
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I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms.
There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook.
Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.
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Maybe we can eventually achieve something like decentralized ownership of centralized web resources.
While not quite decentralized ownership, Wikipedia is at least a non-profit that everyone contributes donations to. Where's the Wikipedia for code? Where's the non-profit donation-based social network?
> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,
It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.
In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.
For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.
Hmm, of those, if I could specify "pick one of these 20 DNS resolvers at random for each query" I might...
Sorry, tangential thought, I agree with your main point, and the others are much tougher.
> Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization
How so? Centralization is merely enforced by the government and incentivized by the system it exists in.
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> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it.
Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful.
What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
You can easily migrate your repo to a different service, so having lots of developers rely on GitHub isn't really a big deal. Many large projects have GitHub mirrors.
I'd say the biggest issue is that Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases. Compare that to Fossil [0], which lets you bundle up everything into a single file. If there was better built-in support you could migrate everything more easily to self-hosted alternatives like Gitea [1]. Regardless, it's possible to migrate manually, even if it's a bit more work.
[0] https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi...
[1] https://gitea.io/en-US/
> Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases
I feel like a lot of these features could be handled with git-notes[1]. For example git-appraise[2] uses the git-notes feature for a code review system:
[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes
[2]https://github.com/google/git-appraise
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I'm glad to see Fossil mentioned here. Yet the real problem is not in the technical aspects and possibilities of project hosting migration, it's the dependence of the majority of open-source developers on GitHub's centralized social network.
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I wouldn’t want git to have built in wiki’s, bug trackers etc. I think it’s better to have separate tools.
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I’m glad to see Gitea commented here. I’ve been using Gitea at work for about 3 months now and really enjoy it.
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Is someone doing this for the entire website?
Give it 7-10 years before it is riddled with advertisements or has a subscription fee for 'premium' downloads.
Unless I misunderstand the need you describe, git can in fact bundle in at least two single-file formats.
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Well, centralisation also has a huge number of benefits, so it's not really a surprise.
The more important thing is to be in a position that makes it harder to be locked-in to a centralised provider. Fortunately Git makes that relatively easy – I could switch all of my work to Gitlab or Bitbucket with relatively little work.
There's more obviously a problem where Github is being used for issue tracking, PRs, and the general open-source community. I'm sure there will be a few scripts available to make migrating issues etc. to another provider relatively painless, since there's no great distributed solution for this at the moment. That just leaves the community aspect, which is going to be the hard bit…
I think the network effect is too great to ignore. I would guess the number of potential contributors you get just by using GitHub, where many people have an account and know the workflow/UI, is bigger than any other place.
5 years from now when GitLab is acquired by Google we'll have to migrate again.
Or export you projects to someone else running GitLab. All the functionality to run a forge in GitLab is open source and export/import is open source as well.
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At least Gitlab can be forked in case of disaster. You can't do it for Github.
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I think we all trusted github because of git: we know that worst case was that github disappeared overnight, erasing all repositories, and in that case we all would still have distributed backups to restart it.
So we had limited trust in the centralized missions we gave it: communications, issues, pull requests.
I am sure that as soon as a good tool allows to do that in a decentralized fashion, we will switch to it.
The decentralization advantage of Git over prior VCSes is technical, not political. You could always stand up a competing SVN instance.
If Git/Github is the epitome of the developer's centralised experience, then I full heartedly welcome that.
As others have mentioned, there's certainly advantages to centralised systems like Github's network graph, issues, etc. But at the end of the day, everyone on GitHub still cares a whole lot more about the code, and due to the very nature of the protocol that's something that'll always be able to be taken elsewhere. It's not like "if they announce shut down you can export your data", there's a very high lightlyhood you have already done that and you have the full repo on your local machine.
I feel like Github is the best possible compromise - centralised network and features that's built on a decentralised protocol and easily able to be taken elsewhere.
> Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
People say this every time stuff like this happens, and yet people never learn :/.
> Talks about a decentralized environment
Keeps his tools related to Cydia closed-source...
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Indeed. It would be awesome if GitLab could make use of ActivityPub to create such decentralized network (à la Mastodon)...
This is currently being investigated: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517
Saw this on another post related to gitlab proposal for federation support. That would bring us closer to a much nicer ecosystem
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517
>Maybe this event will finally shift things back into a decentralized direction.
Absolutely no chance, and I'm fine with that. Sorry, but I don't feel like spinning up a slhit server and managing all that goes along with it. I just want my code hosted somewhere that others can access. These meta issues are just noise and don't bother me (or 95%+ of the people using GH) one bit.
And there it is. "Git" "hub" could be considered an oxymoron. The adoption of this proprietary closed-source veneer over git by FOSS developers has always been ironical to the point of farcical. Now the other shoe has dropped.
Good point. It's not too crazy to have people behind major open-source efforts get their own VPS's and run Phabricator or Gitlab. With a universal login akin to OAuth maybe it's doable.
That's insane, not only do developers and maintainers devote a huge part of their life to major open-source efforts, now they are expected to spend more time and money setting up, admining, and securing their own private servers? That's a great way to destroy Open Source projects. Very few people would be able/willing to put that much effort into it.
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Decentralization is a wonderful idea. It brings with it benefits that are technical, architectural, and social. Yet is also carries with it its own set of costs and risks.
Bluntly, I doubt this will shock the world of software development into being less centralized. The practical benefits of centralization are, apparently, too large to be readily overcome.
(shameless plug) I recently built a tool (SIT, https://sit.fyi) that has decentralizes issue tracking and similar workflows, giving full days ownership and independence of storage and transport. Can be (and actively being) used with Git, or other SCMs.
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This. As with so many things, laziness has driven developers to be using Github as single point of truth. And it is cringeworthy to see how few developers actually know what git is and that Github is just a company monetizing opensource software. About time everyone got a wakeup call.
To be fair, github provides a lot of value-add on top of plain git. Having UI for access control and integration with issue tracking and CI tools gives you a lot that you would not get out of the box with git.
That said, I have always been uneasy with one central player hosting a huge percentage of open source projects.
> In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub
Nearly all. I never got into the swing of it - always expecting a thing like this to happen sooner or later. Honestly, I shall not be sad if the world starts beating a path to somewhere else now.
Humans* aren't built for decentralization. We can only keep so many unique names in our head a time, only so many connections. I don't have any papers to link to on this, but I think it's safe to say that's how things are - if not we wouldn't have created cities, national identities, and of course, newsgroups, message boards, centralized package managers and distributions, and yes, source code repositories.
There is something nice about knowing, with a high degree of certainty, that any given open source project (or any thing) is in one of a few places, and if I don't know where that is I can ask for help to find those places by their names.
That's mixing up a whole lot of concepts. Centralization is about power.
Cities generally have very little centralization. Almost no interactions in a city go through a central entity, similarly for countries. Concentration is something different than centralization.
Newsgroups have very little centralization. Everyone reads and writes through different servers, and you can trivially switch servers without any impact on who you can communicate with. Agreeing on names and federation is something different than centralization.
...
There is absolutely no need to have software development happen on one proprietary platform in order to be able to search for software project in one centralized location. What you need for that is a search engine. Or even multiple competing search engines that can all index the same set of software projects.
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Many humans are apparently not, but I had a much easier time navigating (and contributing to!) projects when each of them had their own website with integrated scm links etc.
GitHub is a grey mass, project branding is lost, the tracker is chaotic for large projects.
It's just Sourceforge, better executed but with the same disadvantages.
I think that's quite a stretch, the reasons for decentralized version control (practical use) are far different than a decentralized internet (humanitarianism).
This is why GH is popular it's vakue is in supporting a central hub for oss projects
> Git was built to be decentralized in the first place
Git was built to track changes and resolve collisions, if I get it right.
The whole world's demanding it. No one really knows how to do it efficiently, it seems.
It’s not just about efficiency, it’s about responsibility. I love decentralization when I can avoid dealing with BigCo, I hate it when I’m responsible for fighting spam, ensuring my services stay up, not getting hacked, and so on. All of these tasks are a requirement as soon as collaboration is in the picture.
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I disagree. The popularity of GitHub amongst the programming community means that ease of use / convenience is more important than the notion of “decentralization”. Otherwise, people would already be setting up their servers for hosting git repos.
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Most ISPs don't let you forward ports, so decentralization is difficult for most people.
Most people also don't have a server running constantly, so a centralized service is convenient.
Totally agree. For me decentralized means desktop clients or own cloud. Own cloud is more expensive to maintain. Desktop app are more expensive to develop and maintain too.
Where is the Github on Blockchain project?
Why would a blockchain be necessary, (as opposed to a simpler distributed storage mechanism for git repos)?
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https://github.com/cryptix/git-remote-ipfs
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http://oscoin.io/ a team in Berlin is working on it for some time.
https://github.com/axic/mango
Git?
Tremendous point.
This is a completely smart purchase on Microsoft's part. I can't imagine more synergy between two companies:
- Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players (Google has been a great contender for this position since 2010).
- Microsoft has moved most of their open source projects to Github.
- Microsoft is a major contributor to Git, including massive infrastructure projects to make it possible to host the NT kernel on Git.
- Microsoft has tried to do open source git hosting in the past (Codeplex?) but it never succeeded. Also: Microsoft partnered with Github when they shut down to migrate Codeplex projects to Github.
- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.
- Github are the champions behind the electron project, with a lot of institutional knowledge about that technology + native web apps/PWAs in general. Microsoft is making a huge push toward writing UWP apps as PWAs.
Time will tell how they handle this merger. They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin, Mojang come to mind) and others horribly (Skype, Yammer, Nokia).
This "synergy" seems to be pretty one-sided. Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users? That's kind of the problem with this acquisition, which is why few Github users are excited for it.
It also doesn't feel like Microsoft understands developers or even end users consistently. VSCode is a nice editor, but not the only one. The MSDN docs and site is awful. Azure is okay, but Windows 10 is somehow more annoying than macOS.
Meanwhile Github is in a tricky position, because for most people there's nothing but "community" keeping them on it. Github has some decent features, but nothing so great it would stop me from using their competitors. And they don't even have a CEO to provide the vision. The only thing in their favour is inertia.
You answered it yourself. Github gets money to stay alive, and resources and leadership to actually start building again.
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> Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users?
I would say the one that keeps Github alive. That's a pretty major one.
GitHub subscriptions included in msdn?
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> Microsoft has always been the largest developer advocate of any of the major tech players
That just means that none of the major tech players have been doing a whole lot in this regard.
I miss the comprehensive programming docs from MSDN.
I think that the biggest loser is going to be IBM clearcase. Especially in government/defense work the developers want to use git, but can’t get it because of lack of security reviews. I can guarantee you that Microsoft sales people are already calling every software group manager at all the defense contractors.
Well, clearcase is a horrible monster and it would benefit just about everyone on Earth if it dies.
How many drivers on the road would be less likely to cut someone off or road rage if they didn't have to deal with ClearCase again? I'm sure that number is greater than zero.
I'm only being partially facetious. ClearCase truly is the worst.
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Can you elaborate on this? Why does using git preclude security reviews?
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I had forgotten about the Atom and VS Code angle of this. I wonder if MS will deprecate Atom in favor of VS Code now...
They can't "depreciate" an OSS project just because it's hosted on a platform they own. Atom will live on one way or another, and it was never exactly tied at the hip with GitHub anyway.
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Forgot about that too.
Atom is open source though isn't it? So I'm sure it won't ever disappear. I wouldn't want to move to VS Code though. I use a Mac and have heard good things about it, but I'm sure it will always be a second class citizen.
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How has the LinkedIn acquisition benefited LinkedIn users or Microsoft users?
It has allowed LinkedIn to remain free for one customer base (professional networks) while expanding sales and recruiting tools (navigator) without compromising user information (InMail rather than your private email unless you've opted as such).
Well, there haven't been any more password leaks...
That’s an interesting point about Atom and VS Code. Do you think we’ll likely see Atom die in favor of VS Code?
I would put money on it if the merger goes through. There's very little reason for both to exist, and VSCode is absolutely a superior project. Atom has its advantages, but most of them could easily be manifested by collaborating with the Atom team and bringing those features in.
Atom is already dying imo. And if for a reason even a 5 year old can appreciate : it's simply too slow.
I'm starting to get really frustrated with Atom and it pegging my CPUs at 100%. I honestly don't see VSCode as that much better considering they're both bloated electron apps.
I've started going back to Sublime, and found I missed some of the really helpful tools in Atom.
I think the entire atom/vscode thing is going to be really curious should this acquisition go through. I'm going to guess they're going to keep running both teams; or really they'll probably keep running Github as it is.
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Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories, I thought that was devdiv trying to migrate their code back to MS land. Wonder if that's what sparked the conversations.
> Interestingly enough they're actively working on public vsts repositories
Is this public knowledge? They shutdown their public repos service a while back and I had a manager at Microsoft admit that getting public repo traction was insanely hard. GitHub literally has a strangle hold on the public repos space.
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>- Github has the Atom team, which would have some great synergies to combine with the VSCode team.
Yes, I'm sure one company will support both editors in the long term.
> They've handled a few pretty well (Linkedin,
what? linkedin became garbage, it's worse facebook with more ads and stupid emails not related to anything I do.
I also see GitHub profile playing well with LinkedIn profile. I've been asked to share my GitHub profile several times during interviews.
What? Microsoft is the biggest developer advocate? Apple gives X Code away for free and made Swift an open source, platform agnostic product among many other things.
> gives X Code away for free
Free with the purchase of Apple hardware. Not exactly "free," is it?
VS Code works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.
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And it also charges you 100$ a year plus half of what you earn on their app store.
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VS community is free, as is SQL Express. Net Core is also open source and platform agnostic.
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I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github.
Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.
I could see developers ditching GitHub with the acquisition for a perceived conflict of interest. It's really easy to change your remote.
I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.
Changing the remote doesn't migrate anything in the issue tracker, merge requests, webhooks, pages or wiki
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This is also why I put my documentation in markdown files in the repo instead of using the Github wiki. I knew it would save me hassle later.
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Agreed on both points. The shift will bring a lot of opportunity to build a more decentralized repo base. I think something like (Keybase)[http://keybase.io] might be interesting.
Only way to disrupt monopoly is to use something else. I am going to migrate all my projects from GitHub. Be an example you want the world to be.
I'd recommend running your own FossilSCM server. It supports full code repo, wiki, bugtracking, and more. And it's free software to boot.
I'm looking to see if it's feasible to write a github->fossil layer to make it easy for programmers to dump to local. Right now, Git is easy to dump... but those issues and wiki support isnt dumpable yet..
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If there are other things to use, it isn't much of a monopoly.
They weren't profitable. So the problem perhaps is these cool free tools that some people rely on just don't have a clear way to make money.
How profitable would they be if they didn’t pursue “growth at all costs” and built GitHub with a small and focused team like Stack Overflow or WhatsApp?
As a startup, worrying about competition from Microsoft hasn't been a big deal for almost a decade. I would be more worried about Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
the history of Microsoft is the reason why we all reacting this way. But encouraged by the move they made lately coming into Linux, even though other players have forced their hand
I would be as worried if it was AWS or Google.
Github should remain a neutral ground in my opinion.
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Yes, particularly because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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Microsoft has slain giants before. They will try to do it again. No one is too big to fail.
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Why did the F/OSS community put all their eggs in one basket? Hell a lot of big companies did also. I wonder how they're going to react to this?
Simple answer: GitHub is good to use
I'm all for FOSS (Git webgui) solutions, but they were absolutely not competitive until recently. Even now, with less trust, the social effect and the lack of need of maintenance and setup is attractive.
Probably because its fairly low-risk. I have ~270 Github repos. About a year ago I made a ~5 line Python script that added Gitlab as another origin to each repo. I still use (used) Gitlab as my main host, I'm a paying customer - but for me to flick over to Gitlab is a one-liner.
Exactly. Code.google.com even provided links for porting repos to GH. Will Google revive it's own code repository in light of this move?
> monopolization
Conglomeration, unless you hated github before which I wouldn't object too.
I agree with you anyway.
Well, Google recently also purchased Kaggle, another major open-source repository for code. It hasn't really changed anything for now, but Microsoft's purchase will be in the same vein. I think that Microsoft's contribution to the open-source community in the last few years kind of makes sense for why they are purchasing it, just like Google purchased Kaggle because of their contribution to ML.
Your dream of “neutral” VCS is misfounded. Websites like GitHub are massive bandwidth and storage hogs and needs huge cash burn just for dev ops. Unfortunately they can’t be reasonably profitable as well because revenue sources are rather tiny. This means every vcs company out there offering free for all plan is bound to be sold or go bankrupt.
For GitHub I would have wished Google bought them because there is huge synergy both ways. With Microsoft, eventually some CVP there will realize that there is no profitability and they will leave it to rot.
Why is it important? What are you relying on? It's just git. Dozens of other services that do the same thing, many that arent losing money every year.
Embrace
Extend
Extinguish
This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.
> I hope they don't discontinue Atom
Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...
Atom is open source though. One company can not decide to kill it.
https://github.com/atom/atom
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I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)
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> I hope they don't discontinue Atom
Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).
How many build from source as opposed to downloading binaries from atom.io?
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If it’s any consolation, Apple Music is terrible on iOS and MacOS as well.
True, but Windows users would find it odd if an app didn't suck. It has to match the overall Windows experience.
Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.
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I'm sure they'll try to 'Microsoft' it. They could never keep their hands off any UI in any product, no matter if it works or not, and especially lately, leaving a rather spectacular trail of destruction in their wake.
LinkedIn still feels like it's old self to me. Not that that really matters one way another to me.
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"because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities"...what are you talking about? They are a company with a purpose to make money. And when I think about some of the other possible buyers, I am fine with Microsoft.
The GP means they were neutral with respect to the tech giants' ecosystems. They didn't favor Amazon or Microsoft or Google's tech. Consider that Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had GitHub organizations and hosted code there. That's what they're talking about
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GitHub has had more ethics fails in the past few years than MS.
Care to elaborate?
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We'll eventually see what happened to Skype happen to GitHub. Not sure how it will manifest itself, but the bloat will find its way in somehow.
Were it a consumer product I'd agree. But this is a developer tool and MS have been doing fairly well in that regard the last few years with azure and vscode.
Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.
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It sucks. We had as you said a neutral site everyone used. Now the big guys will move their code. Hopefully we will get a new common GitHub that is neutral and they will use. Sounds like it might be gitlab.
Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.
Do you think Gitlab will stay independent? They’re burning money. They’ll in all likelihood be acquired in the coming decade as well.
Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.
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I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why?
Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software.
Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle that:
> Open Source software needs Open Source tools
That's assuming people here care deeply about open source and it's philosophy. It's probably fair to say that most people on HN care a lot more about how building the next Atlassian or GitHub and conveniently being able to use OSS for that than about those philosophical values.
Isn't the entire point of the "open-source" movement to throw out all the philosophical baggage that comes with "free software"?
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I love open source, but it doesn't mean I think absolutely everything must be open source... the most important part here _is_ (git), github was (omg I'm already speaking past tense) a decent platform sprinkling some nice simple collaboration on top and convenience, it's not vital, and it's replaceable (so we have choice), and for a long time it was the best there was.
People are disappointed because many of us don't trust or like MS and want nothing to do with them, people complain about Google removing their "do no evil" clause, Microsoft basically has a fucking "do evil" clause but they will always tell you the opposite, they are probably even being sincere, it's just not true though.
One could argue that both Atlassian and Github were to some extent successful, because they kept the open source competitors away by giving out free licenses to open source projects.
With these free options available, people in community were less interested in putting effort to free (as in speech) alternatives for these closed source products.
Yes this is likely. However we can have our cake and eat it too, companies can host an instance of an open source service. Like Gitlab does
EDIT, yes I am aware that there are some non open parts in Gitlab.com
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Although this doesn't directly have anything to do with open-source; look at what happened to Skype, LinkedIn, and other companies they acquired.
LinkedIn? The network everyone loved to hate? I don't think anything has changed in that regard, if anything, Microsoft are probably 1% more trustworthy compared to the super-shady LinkedIn management of old.
Microsoft is opening LinkedIn up to other tools while completely maintaining their goal of not sharing your data (Iframe integrations so no data is shared). They're expanding capability without selling out users
I can't see any big changes in LinkedIn really.
Nokia?
Did i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn’t changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.
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As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better.
I don't use any microsoft tools (and I _hate_ all windows after 7), so Microsoft integrating with GitHub has no appeal to me.
I think the best case scenario for me personally is that nothing changes. None of the github changes in the past few years have added anything noticeable for me (not sure if others agree, be interested to know). And the best case scenario being "nothing changes" is pretty damning. I know it's overwrought, but Skype was perfect, and 2010s-Microsoft fucked them up. And if we're seriouslyhaving the best case scenario be "nothing changes", that's bad.
And it also just seems part of the bullshit mindset of startups being about the exit, and not about making a new, sustainable company.
GitHub didn't need to do this, but they did, to justify their reportedly insane burn rate. Microsoft still won't let them get away with that, they'll just take the heat for the inevitable layoffs.
It's just fucking depressing all round.
> As a github user, i don't see any way the acquisition could possibly make my user experience better.
It sounds like they were running out of money. So I guess it makes your experience better in that you get to keep using it.
Well, demonstrably, it doesn't.
Looking at you Atlasian.
Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ?
If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet.
As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.
It is shockingly bad. The fact that you can't code search in a fork blows my mind. How have they not fixed this basic, important feature after so many years? What could possibly make it more difficult than a few person-months of effort?
Maybe avoiding the costs associated with keeping the indexes available for every fork? I believe they use elastic search so maybe someone with more experience with that can comment.
Um, have you actually tried doing anything about this? https://help.github.com/articles/searching-in-forks/
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SourceGraph tries to fix it, and the experience of searching, jump-to-definition and generally getting to grips with a codebase is way better there IMO. They also have browser plugins with integration to GitHub. I recommend you to check it out.
Sourcegraph CEO here. Glad you like Sourcegraph! Regardless of what happens with GitHub and Microsoft, we agree that developers need great code search.
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Sourcegraph is great, but I had to disable the browser plugin because it opens a new tab on every github search. So annoying.
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Their search is really frustrating, I agree. I feel like they only index a small percentage of files, so results are always bad.
They don’t index forks. Cloning a fork just to search through it locally is always fun. Very annoying when a fork becomes the de facto project because it’s the one being maintained.
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The fact that you can’t search within a branch too...
As one of my pet projects, I'm trying to resurrect Google's Code Search (a fast search indexer that supports regular expressions).
It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.
So we're asking the creators of Bing to fix it?
Or whoever implemented the start menu search.
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Bing is actually quite good. Not as good as Google, but much better than Github.
Search in Windows is horrible too.
Search seems to be surprisingly bad at a lot of companies. I don't know about github but reddits search is so bad it cannot even find something when you type it character for character.
I'm super curious to what all these companies are using for search because they are so atrocious that tend to not even work in a basic substring search solution.
Exactly. I can’t search my own tweets on Twitter. Facebook doesn’t know how to rank people when I do people search there. Search is terrible across the internet except Google.
I think they purposely weakened the search because people were using it to find secret keys.
That doesn't make sense. Ruin the feature to potentially help someone who made a mistake with security? Why wouldnt they just run the search to find keys themselves and remove them from search results.
I cannot agree more with this.
It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.
Huh.... GitHub only searches head for me. This is confusing as I've often wanted to search other branches and can't find a way to...
Microsoft should be able to leverage Bing to do good deep searches across all code. This would be a big win for everyone (and Bing!)
That would be really great. To improve looking through new repos at least a litte bit I like the browser plugin [Octotree](https://github.com/buunguyen/octotree), it adds a tree view of the code and eases jumping between files.
Yes they could, since they already have reasonable code search for VSTS [1].
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/project/search/code-se...
Github won't let you do a code search in a forked repository. Clone & grep is literally the only option!
Part of the reason GitHub search is so bad is to mitigate people uploading their AWS keys and passwords.
Yea, Microsoft should acquire sourcegraph too.
Can anything exist anymore without
A) Getting acquired by a multinational
B) Becoming one
Sure, MS visual code is open but as a few players get more and more power we all become subject to their whims and not them to ours.
MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment, or will it’s data be useful to MS for those ads?
What sort of integrations can we expect to see with other MS products that encourage a more closed ecosystem?
This may all seem alarmist but with so many companies having so much power this sort of behavior get through unchecked.
The only recourse people suggest is “well then don’t use it” but what options do employees have when higher ups mandate technologies? What about most users who just go with the wind and just let these snowballing large companies skate by? It all makes me very sad...
The problem is that virtually all startup wants an exit. They have employees sitting on stock options for years while forgoing their market rate. They have investors wanting 10X return. This would work out for insanely profitable businesses like Google but for the rest they have built huge expectations on business models tha t are unworkable so buyout by a sucker is the only viable outcome for them. Coincidentally Microsoft has recently decided to become that sucker with LinkedIn and now GitHub.
Probably a direct consequence of VC funding.
Definitely, investors don't give you money just for kicks, they want a payday. It shapes the community... people who take that money get a head start, crowd out competition. Everyone needs to grow huge, get bought, or die.
What could change this? People refusing money? Some encouragement to stay mid sized? Wonder if that will ever happen...
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>Can anything exist anymore without...
See the recent post about ghost (it has a structure that can't be sold) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228
Not really the same. The Ghost foundation exists purely to fund John O Nolan’s digital nomad lifestyle.
Product hasn’t changed a lot since launch.
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GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft.
I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I’ve had paid private account since forever).
GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
TANSTAAFL
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574 [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com
> I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
Either they eventually fail/become evil, or they don't. If they do, just move somewhere else. If they don't, good.
(Benefits of non-proprietary software and standards like git.)
And therefore I will vote with my $$$ and stay on GitHub until there is a real reason to do otherwise (and at that point enjoy the benefits of standards like git).
Alas, like several others have pointed out, this doesn’t scale to GitHubs other services like GH Pages, or their Wiki, issue tracker, etc.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
Out of topic, but how often do you have the ear of CEO: sytse, one specific wish for Gitlab that I have: please enable 'one-click' automatic LetsEncryptNow certificate creation for GitLab Pages with custom domain names (just like GitHub is doing it today) instead of me having to go out of my way to go get a X.509 from a CA for my TLS/SSL enabled site[1].
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_starte...
EDIT: typos
So you largely have the same problems GitHub had. I’ve seen you say this exact same thing multiple times in the past day, but what exactly is different?
EDIT: When I say “seen the same thing said multiple times” I’m referring to multiple linkages of the relevant page in the handbook by others, and in the CEO’s own recent blog post about the acquisition.
If anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.
> I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is?
I imagine most HN readers are paying customers either directly or indirectly(their company/startup).
As a private customer, I wouldn’t object to an increase in the price if that meant they stay independent. If they get acquired by MS I am definitely stopping my subscription.
Heck, I already prefer Gitlab and/or Bitbucket because they let me run free (or at least self-hosted in Gitlab's case, not sure what their hosted option's like) private repos. Github's just got the mindshare going for it. But maybe now that'll change.
Gitlab also lets you register private gitlab-runners on gitlab.com, which is a killer feature for running CI on setups that aren't plain docker-in-the-cloud (such as integration-testing apps that require resources on our LAN, or macOS/iOS builds with private keychain items that is much easier to configure on a local Mac). (A side bonus is that you don't even have to pay for any CI "minutes")
If you ever get something for free, remember something somewhere is subsidizing it. Whether that's the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced, VC funding (which will eventually run out), or your data is sold.
I can't speak for Gitlab, but offering free Bitbucket should easily pay for itself as introduction to the Atlassian ecosystem.
Our experience went like this: We got Bitbucket for out project for the good free private repos (and a few other reasons). When it came to choosing a ticket system, being on Bitbucket made choosing Jira a no-brainer (one of the best ticket systems, good integration with Bitbucket, familiar interface). Then we needed a better wiki for internal documentation, so we naturally went with Confluence.
So getting free Bitbucket heavily influenced our decision to buy two other products from the same company, and we are about to buy into their CI system (Bitbucket Pipelines, not the other one). We don't regret any of those choices, but they might have looked different if we were on Github.
> your data is sold
It's now easier to see some of this, with the GDPR rules.
The Gitlab cookie page lists 80 "marketing" cookies which may be set: https://about.gitlab.com/privacy/cookies/
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I use a huge amount of open-source software which I do not believe is subsidized.
Some is, eg some linux/gnome devs are paid to contribute. But many smaller projects/components are volunteer-only.
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...the other paid accounts, which therefore must be uncompetitively priced,...
That doesn't follow. If the paid accounts are selling, then they must be priced appropriately relative to their competition and the value they provide. The cost doesn't factor into it - and free accounts are just a marketing cost, like putting up a billboard.
A public and a private repo costs the same to host, so I don’t see your point
I'd say +1 for GitLab. I just checked it out and like the UI better than GitHub anyways. I'm switching over and not looking back.
That's one big reason why we switched.
The other was the self hosted option.
I switched jobs and went from Github to Bitbucket about 6 months ago. I've found bitbucket to be consistently and noticeably slower than github both in its web UI and in pushes/pulls, with more downtime. You pay for those private repos one way or another.
I too felt this pain. UI feels "heavy" in comparison to Github.
There are obvious, simple updates that could be made to the UI to fix significant pain points. This one [1] brought me much pain every time I installed a new package via yarn.
1 - https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/7086/add-the-abilit...
> Github's just got the mindshare going for it.
But in more ways than just the users. If you want tu use most of the popular integrations, the often github-only. Things like TravisCI are suddenly what makes me open a new project on GH rather than GL.
I'm sure GitHub will introduce free private repos soon enough.
I'd be surprised if the announcement didn't also come with that change. Easiest way to even the field.
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Especially since Microsoft's own version control thing has this.
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They do have free private repos for academic researchers already.
What makes you think the same thing won’t happen to GitLab?
No one would’ve dreamed of this happening 5-10 years back.
I expect it'll happen to Gitlab at some point, but the beauty of self-hosted is that I can cut ties with the organization and continue using their software anyway because it's entirely running on my machine.
Which, incidentally, is just one reason I usually strongly prefer self-hosted options over SaaS. You're not signing a pact to become beholden to the business whims of a third party.
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GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
Change to Keybase git
Doesn’t get more neutral than private key encrypted source control
I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
I would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn
> what actually happened with LinkedIn?
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
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LinkedIn remains as pointless as ever.
I could make the same concern for a bunch of other companies who were to buy GitHub. Indeed, my main concern with GitHub being bought by anyone is the uncertainty of its future, and the fact that it no longer will be 'neutral' ground, so to speak.
It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.
as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.
> what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.
I think that's his point. He's saying that LinkedIn has the opportunity to do lots of interesting things, and appears to be squandering it.
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As I also replied to a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17222045):
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
Agreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
I think it has actually improved. They added messaging and now I can get real-time recruiter spam to ignore.
I've heard claims that Skype is no longer peer to peer but runs on msft networks/infrastructure and performance has suffered. Can anyone confirm or shed any more light on that?
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LinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.
I had a pretty similar experience with skype. I lost access to my connected email account and was essentially locked out of my account forever - repeated emails to support were met with silence, alas! Then I connected my facebook account to use skype instead... then they discontinued support for that. Now it's got to a point where attempting to create a new account on the OSX desktop version just shows an error screen every time, so I'm stuck unable to use skype forever. I've moved on to other, better solutions, naturally :)
Could you tell us what "other, better solutions" would you recommend?
If Microsoft does to github what they did to Skype, pushes will go into the wrong repo without authentication for no reason just like Skype had contacts and messages jump from one account to another for no reason. Pretty much everything they touch software wise is a disaster. I wonder if there will be ads or how exactly they will fuck it up, but I know for sure they will. Gitlab is fairly equivalent in features and much better in their pricing and plans anyway so I expect a lot of projects to move.
Ads like this no doubt. https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/1002879517751414784
"Consider what happened to LinkedIn" Where are you going with this? LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%. Only good things have happened at LinkedIn (I'm an employee) since the MSFT acquisition. If LinkedIn is not doing something, then it sure will consider doing it now, with the vast resources it has available to it now.
"LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%."
I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh.
Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve.
"with the vast resources it has available to it now"
This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
If Github does die out will be a slow and painful one. Skype was more of a radical change to the core technology. Of course anything is possible. I'm guessing many companies paying for Github's enterprise products are more concerned about the implications of Microsoft owning the company that hosts their proprietary code.
proprietary code which is hosted on git hub enterprise is customer-run on premise, there’s no outside access
And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
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True in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.
Yes, serious chance of GitHub fading like SourceForge did.
Agree. And I had a similar issue with Skype.
>At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
Me too. I'm waiting for the official transaction to be done and i'm preparing a plan b in case i have to migrate everything.
More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
Isn't that one of the strengths of Git? The whole decentralization means that it is ridiculously simply to take the whole shebang and migrate to another service or even just self host on a cheap VPS.
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GitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
Microsoft is big, with different divisions you can consider what it did with consumer apps, but you'd be better off considering what it has done with developer tools.
There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
Exactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace [0] app Pull Reminders [1] and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
[0] https://github.com/marketplace [1] https://github.com/marketplace/pull-reminders/
GitLab has always demanded too much faith from its users.
First with CI, it was the all-or-nothing approach where you couldn't use GitLab CI with any other provider. Lately they have tried to fix this but it was a half-hearted development after a lot of complaints.
Lately with their DevOps approach, it's exactly how you've said.
I don't have trust in GitLab leadership and their product feels way too bloated.
This is a sad day for Open Source and software in general. What makes Github great is that its a neutral place where anyone can host their code. Now that its owned by a Big Corporation, the values that Github has built will be abandoned in favor of making money for the corporation.
R.I.P. Github. Your move, Gitlab.
Ouch.
So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.
To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."
Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!
This seems like an odd move that I would have expected investors in GitHub to oppose for the sake of preserving one of GitHub’s biggest advantages: its large number of projects (to the point where it seems like practically everything is on GitHub).
You see, whether or not it’s justified, some projects invariably will leave GitHub simply because it’s Microsoft. And then, GitHub will no longer feel like a place where most projects exist. And really, GitHub isn’t perfect: projects overlook a lot of minor imperfections in GitHub’s actual product because there are so many projects on GitHub and the usefulness of the networking outweighs the warts here and there.
Why would investors care? It's a payday for them.
Current investors are going to be bought out in cash or MSFT stock.
They don't call them "exits" for nothing - once a company is acquired, you have exited the market and no longer care about the future of the company, except insofar as it affects your payout at acquisition time.
They have reached the end goal of the big buyout. What more could they possibly want?
Personally, I can't wait for GitHub360 Professional for Sharepoint 360.
“Hi, I’m Gitty! I see you are having difficulty submitting your large file. Would you like some help with that?” [YES] [NO]
Clippy was last activated by default back in 2001 (!). When are we going to let go of this old joke?
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"Please wait while we're updating your repo" ... 30-60 mins ... connection timed out
Finally someone with the right attitude. I am waiting for a change in the URL ... https://GitHub.NET
Enterprise Edition with Cortana.
With VoiceCommit(tm)
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With CandyCrush™ included in all free-tier repos!
Candycrush soda pop saga ?
> Sharepoint
Don't you even dare think about it much less tell MS about this idea
I'm wrestling with Sharepoint as I type. I don't see why all you lot shouldn't have to suffer too.
Personally, I can't wait to start doing git push and pulls using HoloLens.
There will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.
BizSpark is discontinued.
Not the best example... BizSpark has been discontinued.
Can you maybe elaborate a little on BizSpark and how it was helpful?
"Please sign in with your Microsoft account".
"Requires Windows 10".
"Best viewed with Microsoft Edge".
"This project violates our terms of service by competing with a Microsoft product."
OK, where do we move everything?
This is pretty conflicting. Github is nice on its own, but business wise they haven’t been profitable, so sooner or later some change had to happen. In my experience, Github is great for public code storage and small private projects (easy to manage developers that already have github accounts), but it does become pretty expensive and I don’t necessarily think the ROI is worth it compared to a self-hosted solution. For opensource and personal portfolios, the “network effect” or first mover advantage sort of set the stage for github’s popularity over gitlab, but for a paid enterprise solution I think gitlab does a better job and offers more value per dollar. Partially what sucks is having to have separate github/gitlab accounts/repositories since that’s now 2 things to manage. I’ve tried codecommit and bitbucket as well, but those were kinda meh (in my opinion).
Typically when “the Microsoft touch” is added it’s for the worse, so the expectations bar is pretty low. But who knows. I can definitely see them leveraging github to further go after AWS by giving Azure a leg up over codecommit. VSCode has also been pretty good, if they add in the “social integrations” of github to VSCode that also competes against Cloud9 on AWS. Right now AWS is solidly winning the cloud race, but if this puts price/service competitive pressure on amazon I won’t complain.
I also wonder what will happen with all the code and personal data from github. I really don’t want to have to make a microsoft account to access github. As long as the switching costs from github to a viable alternative (right now gitlab) remain low, I would not have a problem with jumping ship.
Why I'll never trust Microsoft ever again.
"postmaster@nsa.gov"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
I stopped trusting them when they stole the intellectual property of numerous small companies years before the _NSAKEY debacle. I know, I know, Bill Gates is supposed to be some kind of good guy now (malaria, etc.) but I can't think of any good reason to trust any robber baron, based on the past histories of robber barons. Even Andrew Carnegie was an asshole in the final analysis.
For the avoidance of doubt, the postmaster@nsa.gov address has nothing do to with _NSAKEY.
Somebody used this address in a joke, and then a Wikipedia editor took it seriously and put it in the article. sigh
Don't forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
I don't think anyone on HN has forgotten considering it's repeated ad nauseum on every single Microsoft story on here.
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Microsoft is basically the corporate version of the ship of Theseus at this point. The have a lot of questionable stuff in their history, but the leadership and the culture at large has shifted drastically since those days. At a certain point it is worth reevaluating one's opinions and question whether it is still worth hanging on to those old grudges.
I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
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This may just be paranoia but if I were competing with Microsoft on something that I'd have private code for hosted on GitHub, I'd be pretty worried right now.
That's not paranoia. That is completely reasonable considering Microsoft's history.
Microsoft have a history of corporate espionage against their customers?
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Said by people who probably cheerfully use AWS.
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Microsoft doesn't have the time or resources to give a fuck about yours or other's shitty private repos. Besides, if they really wanted to compete, they would just utilise their massive engineering team to extinguish the competition.
Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty frontend.
MS buys GitHub for $5B.
Funny old world.
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
There’s a reason MS bought GitHub and not GitLab
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof
Linus invented git because Linux needed a new code repo thingie. He was only focused on one project - Linux. He released git as GPL. GitHub n Co are value add sites with fees for services and are more than welcome to use GPL software for obvious reasons.
Actually my real point was: scratch an itch and find you have lice living off you. No, err that's not it.
It is genuinely nice to see hard work pay off. Github have seriously put their back into it to create an environment that a lot of people feel comfortable with. I sincerely hope that MS do not fuck it up and wish them both all the best.
We still have git itself - that has never changed. That is the power of open source software.
Because GitLab doesn’t have 5 Billion dollars? I mean, you act as if there’s a singular reason here.
You'll be surprised to learn who has is primarily sponsoring git's development for the past years.
(It's Google.)
Aye:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junio_Hamano
The way GitHub is developed (remote) and culture, this is pretty much death of GitHub and if most developers leave it will become a mess quite quickly.
GitLab just got big boost.
That's extremely doubtful. First, having to login to different Gitlab instances is terrible UX. Second, you cannot easily reference another instance's issues. Hosted Gitlab is also unreliable and slow and comes with no publicly mentioned SLO of any kind.
I'd be surprised to see any big projects going away from GitHub in the coming years, unless Microsoft actually manages to tarnish the GitHub brand in a meaningful way.
The typical tinfoil head probably never trusted GitHub anyways, whether they're owned by Microsoft or not.
Just when it looked like GitHub was "sustainable" through revenue ... greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble") and they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices! :-( Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future? I would buy a few (thousand) shares ... Who else would buy stock/shares if they remained independent?
> they sell out to the worst software Monopoly notorious for stifling software creativity through anti-competitive practices!
Right? It's like your wife leaving you for your high school bully.
> Can't GitHub just sell stock/shares to the GitHub community to secure their own independent future?
No. Unless they want to go for an IPO, they are only allowed to sell to accredited investors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor).
> greed for a "payout" (VCs wanting to exit the "bubble")
That's their job. They put hundreds of millions of dollars into GitHub 3 (Series B) or 6 (Series A) years ago, and their sustainable business relies on selling those investments for a profit.
@asernik I was referring to the idea of them doing a "Direct Public Listing" ("DPO") as opposed to an IPO (similar to what Spotify recently did...) http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/spotify-ipo/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-difference-between-ip...
> "a DPO is attractive to small companies and companies with an established and loyal client base. A DPO is also known as direct placement."
GitHub has the "established and loyal client base" with many millions in recurring revenue.
GitHub's principal VCs, Sequoia and A16z can both afford to wait for a return. everyone could sell in the "DPO" so VCs could liquidate if they needed cash ... https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github
> relies on selling those investments for a profit.
There are more ways to make money than selling out
This point exactly. To me the move is a clear symptom that GitHub leadership has lost touch with the original vision/philosophy that made the platform popular in the first place.
If this goes through Microsoft basically gets access to all the private proprietary code of so many companies. I would have never expected Github founders to even entertain the notion. I guess times change.
Microsoft has access to the running systems of so many companies.
Notably Google banned Windows years ago and every startup I know is 99.9% Mac.
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That’s not too different than Azure/Office 365, is it?
From at least two angles this is great news for Gitlab.
But it feels a bit like the Atlassian / Trello arrangement, which has had little impact on users.
From recent behaviour I'd expect Microsoft to have a very light touch here.
I'm not familiar with recent behaviour anything in particular? (My memory goes to Skype...)
Minecraft, LinkedIn as examples. While LinkedIn has not gone super well, it has been left to make the decisions that it made on it's own.
Minecraft has also gone untouched - it's still hosted on AWS in fact.
The Skype buy was seven years ago, and it was a pretty user hostile piece of software before that.
Post Balmer we've seen a more open (in the transparent, consultative, community sensitive sense) attitude, with genuine contributions to free software.
People also seem to be citing LinkedIn as an example, but that doesn't feel like it got any more unpleasant since the buyout.
They bought xamarin and then made it open source and free. They also have continued to support mono despite having .net core
Hey, GitLab, if you want to push a big migration from GitHub, inundate the GitHub design team with requests for a ribbon UI on github.com and to move the subscription system to Office 365.
We'll not spam GitHub. But we see people #movingtogitlab
I think your company has a great product, but your shitty hashtag spamming surely won't make me adopt it.
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Honestly, the draw for Github is the volume of direct integrations that are out there. Soon as Gitlab catches up there it will be a quicker decision.
I am very interested in what will happen with these accounts (t name a few) the next few weeks / months:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/mozilla https://github.com/google
What do you think will happen?
What advantage would any change bring for Microsoft?
(/torvalds/linux is not the upstream, btw)
I am expecting the owners of these sort of accounts to just move away. I am certainly not expecting MS to mess with the accounts in any way.
Another issue: Lets say I am a small business competing with MS on some very small niche market. Lets say all my code is on a private github repository. Would I stay on GitHub for a moment after this news? I mean I know these are separate companies (Microsoft and GitHub), but I still will be moving away right now.
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Do you seriously expect anything to happen to these accounts? On what grounds?
I'm guessing: access to all private repos.
I guess it's time to move to Gitlab.
I am gonna wait and see. I know they messed up Skype really bad, but LinkedIN for example they havent touched and destroyed. I will wait and see..
LinkedIn is kinda hard to make worse though tbh
Although I completely agree with you, pointing at LinkedIn as a success story is kind of weird.
Microsoft's new future is to be a cross-platform vendor for developers. I see absolutely zero incompatibility between Github and Microsoft and a need to shut it down. I think the Satya's Microsoft is smart enough not to ruin it.
Microsoft screwed up Skype by trying to “make it more Microsoft” whereas LinkedIn is being left to operate as before (tough MSFT is using the data for something). My guess is that GitHub will continue as before with the main change being that MSDN subscribers will likely get private GitHub repos as part of their package.
Now MSFT just needs something along the lines of Jira to replace the dog’s breakfast that is VSTS Agile project management tooling. I don’t suppose the folks in Redmond are looking to acquire Atlassian next...?
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Or you can move immediately like many others. What would you gain by staying until it's too late?
It's good that there is such an alternative as GitLab, because there is a slight but still not unsignificant risk that MS will not do the right thing. I think they will though since they are power users of their own product. I'm hoping they know this space.
MS has had an 180 degree turn in policy since Balmer left.
Lately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.
Looking at Windows 10, with stuff like telemetry that's impossible to disable completely and hidden behind every dark pattern imaginable, or ads in Start menu?
Microsoft of today is more Microsoft than ever.
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True, they went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either.
Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
I simply have little trust in MS. They did improve in some areas, but not enough to gain overall trust. They are still not on the same page with many FOSS efforts.
Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
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They really haven't. Maybe like a 150 degree turn at best.
Honest question: do the still threaten Linux-related companies with suing for violations of unspecified Microsoft patents?
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And TypeScript <3!
As i know it started under Balmer, but he have to left because the failed phone OS.
I thought many people did after the infamous incident at Github.
I think the majority of the Github users started using the platform in the time since that, and don't even know much about Github's history.
What incident?
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Some did, but this will be another major incentive.
Not surprising. Microsoft has made a big deal of partnering with GitHub, showing off how well their Azure-based CI/CD products and services integrate with code hosted at GitHub. Not to mention that .NET Core and many companion libraries are hosted at GitHub, not on VSTS.
I am really sick of monopoly and centralization of internet. For last few years many of important projects changed hosting to GitHub... Now this? We have alternatives, and good ones (one may argue much better than GitHub), but where is all of this going?
And Microsoft going around devouring open-source community. To some extent we are the responsible ones. But on the other hand I am getting really tired of this. Then people ask me why I use Emacs... it's free and immortal as of now...
I hope this encourages people to fight vendor lock-in a bit and move to self-hosted git portals. With SaaS there is always the danger of acquisitions and degradation of service. The solution is open software, self hosted and portable. Git itself is absurdly easy to self host, but self-hosted alternatives to github deserve more attention, both in terms of use and development effort.
See here for some alternatives: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-manag...
(Funny that this list is hosted on github.)
I worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.
Except for the social part as far as I know, I hope that Bitbucket could see this as a big opportunity and expand that aspect of their platform.
Why not self-hosting?
1. Electricity cost 2. Need for constant electricity 3. Internet cost 4. Need for constant Internet access 5. Cost of hardware 6. Heat generated by the running hardware 7. Noise generated by the running hardware 8. Space occupied by the hardware 9. Need to update and maintain hardware/software 10. Worse discoverability for your repos 11. ISP asking questions 12. Government asking questions 13. Police asking questions
Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
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For us (sqlitebrowser.org), self hosting the code, comments, and similar should be achievable with something like Gitea (Open Source GitHub clone).
Hosting our downloads though... hmmm... that could be more tricky.
Our releases generally have ~180k downloads a month, with each being (very) roughly 15MB in size.
That's only 2.5TB/mo, but the downloads aren't evenly spaced throughout the day.
We'd probably need a small cluster of servers with unmetered bandwidth or something. Scaleway might suit.
Its very hard to open issues or PRs etc on many self-hosted setups, as they don't have a way to create logins, or accept other identities.
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If you self-host you will probably never get outside contributions. For most people it isn't worth taking the time to figure out whatever system you use. I'd like to see a federated system like GNUsocial/Mastodon for git. I've thought about trying to make such a system but I don't know much about federation.
I'm not sure what exactly you're reacting to, but a lot of us absolutely do not want to self-host our github repos. Because it's work, because we don't need it, because we like using github/gitlab/other as a "marketplace"
But what about the social / code sharing / collaboration part, which is arguably the most interesting part? We need a quality central meeting place.
People want the nice UI of Github as opposed to just a hosted .git folder, and self-hosting Gitlab is a hassle compared to using a SaaS.
Microsoft was the second most frequent contributor on Github (to Google)[1].
[1] https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...
Absolutely, and this has been the case for many years. Microsoft has contributed to open source heavily for a long time, but it won't stop a lot of people that have been burned in the past from not trusting Microsoft.
It's worth noting that the same goes for Apple. They have tons of closed source stuff, but they also make huge contributions to the open source world. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have LLVM or Clang as they exist today. WebKit is another big one.
Tbh, I like this move. I hope they will merge Atom with VS Code and shutdown VSTS in favor for GitHub.
I used to be a big fan of Atom in the beginning, but there’s nothing Atom does that VS Code does not do better. I wouldn’t see a purpose in merging the two, but I could see them killing Atom.
I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot of individual developers are biting at that price.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
> I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure.
Well, it's Microsoft, so more complex tiering and tie in to MSDN should be on the road map.
> Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers.
How so?
> I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper.
Perhaps, so what? That's an unrelated service.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Their competitors do that to build a user base and mind share in the face of GitHub’s huge advantage in network effects.
But what if they increase the price or add more plans...
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I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.
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VSTS does a lot of things that GitHub does not. VSTS takes the workflow roles of Jenkins, GitHub, Jira, and has a few additional features that I don't know what open-source equivilant exists for (staged production, push to cloud - maybe done as Jenkins plugins?). It's highly unlikely VSTS will be shut down, especially in favor of a project which does very few things that VSTS does.
I agree on the VSTS front, but a lot of people use Atom and I can see many of them being put off by being forced onto VS Code.
Lately, based on comments made while promoting .NET Core, it sounds like Microsoft don't want to consolidate tooling, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Atom and VS Code co-exist as entirely separate entities/teams.
Atom and VS Code are both built on Electron. No need to kill Atom as it and VS Code are built for different purposes.
What different purposes? They're both text editors / lightweight IDEs focusing on plugin extensibility built on top of Electron. They're literally the same thing.
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Atom has a whole team under Github. If they're both run by Microsoft, that seems like a clear cost-cutting measure; why develop two vastly similar electron-based code editors when you could just move that team + all of the interesting tech into VSCode?
I use neither, and I can see that the two take fairly different approaches, but why would you say they're build for different purposes. I don't think it's clear why a single org (though very far apart) has two approaches for a code text editor.
I wonder if they will merge VSTS or shutdown VSTS, or maybe just add CI and CD from VSTS to github
If they shut down vsts they would have to make github have vsts’ level of issue management, ci/cd, test management, ...
I think most people who use github would NOT want that.
Why do you hope for this outcome?
Probably less redundant work and overall a better editor/IDE?
Microsoft being an owner here doesn't bother me that much.
The Azure integrations are inevitable. I guess we'll see if Microsoft has learned that strong-armed vendor lock-in makes people not like them. At this point, I am more glad they were acquired by Microsoft than Amazon. Still - there is still so much Microsoft ill-will, that this will take away the aura of 'software purity' from the GitHub.
Microsoft, please be a kind steward... I don't want to waste time migrating.
Putting aside my general dislike for Microsoft for a moment, I still believe this is bad for the tech industry.
It was great having a neutral player running the site, I don't think anyone should own them. GitHub would be best as a nonprofit, though unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen.
Imagine if CNN for example bought Twitter, would other news companies use Twitter still? Probably not.
Will Google, Amazon etc. move their code elsewhere? Maybe. But we will no longer have a centralised git repo, whether that's a good or bad thing.
GitLab have already said they're having 10x the amount of normal traffic migrating GitHub repos to them.
Will employers now ask to see your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket profiles?
yeah but frankly 10x of a small number is still a small number. we still have to see what the real numbers are.
I consider this a huge waste of money on Microsoft's part.
Why did they create and then shutter codeplex in the first place? Why can't we have multiple competing platforms (Google Code, Github, Codeplex, Sourceforge, bitbucket, etc.)?
If I were Microsoft I'd rather invest a smaller amount of money (it surely is much cheaper than acquiring Github!) into making Codeplex the best platform.
And then I'd just do a traditional way of forcing people a bit: Why did Microsoft put their software on Github, a competitor? Why not force people a little bit into your ecosystem? Why give up the fight for winner takes it all every single time??? If I were Microsoft I were a bit more proud to use Codeplex, Windows phones, Windows instead of Mac, etc...
Why shutter MSN messenger for Skype? Why making apps for iphone first before Windows phone? Why does Microsoft not simply fund their projects (Windows Mobile had a head start and was abandoned, tablet PCs were already there with XP) and try to compete and create an ecosystem full of solutions working together?
Of course it's kind of nice to see Microsoft embracing github and being more open etc. But where's the fight? Why give up all the time?
Why letting codeplex die when all we need is a bit competititon.
You need to reach a critical mass of users. In contrast to Github, neither Codeplex nor Windows phone did that.
Just depends on the product. Microsoft decided to create Teams in house instead of acquiring slack.
If you're thinking of moving off GitHub, one thing that I have heard about that might help you is you can ask GitHub to mirror repos, the way https://github.com/moodle/moodle looks -- note it says:
That way any URLs to your GitHub repo should carry on working. People can even clone and pull this repo. That may ease migration, especially if some tools assume code is on GitHub and don't allow you to specify the full URL to the repo.
This will certainly be one of the first features to be deprecated once the deal goes through. Quietly deprecated, of course.
how do you do this? I can't find this option anywhere
Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reasons, now no tech company who hosts its codebase on GitHub would want to continue doing that if its MSFT-owned. It's already happening: https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1003388106626629632
> Just like how no e-commerce/retailer wants to use AWS for competitive reason
My former employer, a major e-commerce player in Europe and a direct competitor of Amazon, had basically their entire infrastucture on AWS. You might want to reconsider your definition of “no”.
Just because someone did it, it doesn’t mean it’s wise and advisable. Just saying.
I don't understand how GitHub has been unable to become profitable. Anyone know more and want to share some details?
It is weird, isn’t it? GitHub was the first SaaS I ever subscribed to out of my own pocket. Spotify was the next one.
My guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.
The costs of the fancy office and the workforce should be quite high as well.
The cash flow is probably good but even with a million customers at $5 a month, that's not enough to sustain a large company.
The weird part is that they were actually profitable before they started taking funding. [1][2]
[1]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... [2]: https://a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-developme...
Plus they have very large private enterprise instances of github.
Does it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit.
Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
Hop, that's one thing less to do tomorrow! ... of course it was just a matter of time before it happened, github have stood on the other side of the mirror for a long time now, they just happend to have kept that not-for-profit/garage-built-startup image for some time, kinda like twitter. Or reddit and even y combinator. And yet people comment stuff like "let's switch to {gitlab,bitbucket,gogs}". We need to understand that making a self-hostable floss clone of a service that has been designed for a monopoly captive market is not gonna change anything durably. Build something based on small friend-to-friend networks. Something that doesn't need to be big to suceed. That will slowly change the way people think about collaborative tools and get people out of the "giant ad-based ex-startup owned; `free' (as in beer) to use; hosted service" mental model. Please stop building services and start sharing collaborative tools with your peers.
I recently built a GitHub Markeplace app (https://pullreminders.com) and have been really impressed by GitHub's ecosystem strategy. They seem to taking lessons from Slack's success and doubling down on supporting integrators who provide valuable apps and features built on top of GitHub (ie. TravisCI, ZenHub). I hope this direction continues under new ownership.
GitLab on the other hand is focused on solving every facet of the development lifecycle within their core product. From their blog post about GitHub's acquisition:
> ... instead of integrating multiple tools together, we believe a single application, built from the ground up to support the entire DevOps lifecycle is a better experience leading to a faster cycle time.
It will be interesting to see how the different strategies play out.
P.S. Here's the GitHub Marketplace: https://github.com/marketplace
I bet GitLab is getting infrastructure ready in anticipation of the exodus.
The exodus began a number of days ago when this was just a rumor.
I bet the first thing GitLab is going to do is put the word out that they're looking for a "strategic partner".
We're starting to scale up as I type this #movingtogitlab
I’m happy there are alternatives. But can you please leave the hashtag campaign for Twitter? This is your third such comment in minutes.
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Seriously? Where is the “congratulations” message?
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I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
But that Microsoft has changed, I see the most what people are complaining about is telemetry that is send, for following up on their biggest product. But all companies do this ( eg. https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/its-not-just-you-clicking-... ), also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this.
Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too, because I think they have more to lose if they fail with GitHub then when they succeed (with more integration for visualstudio.com probably)
> I think a couple of people will change to gitlab or alternatives because of how Microsoft was in the 90's.
And because of how Microsoft was in the 2000s, and the 2010s. Ballmer was after the 90s. Did they ever stop suing Android manufacturers for using FAT, or open up exFAT after managing to get it as part of the SDXC standard?
> also open source applications eg. Ubuntu,.. do this
...Yeah, Ubuntu did that. Not Debian. Not Fedora. Not Arch. Not Gentoo. Even RHEL barely phones home enough to check its license and get updates. And in Ubuntu, the single Linux distro to have done this, you could toggle it off in 5 minutes and it would actually respect your choice, rather than "accidentally" resetting to the most invasive set of options every other update after you spend hours hunting the latest set of registry hacks that make it better.
> Microsoft has changed and I think they want to show it too
I agree that they want to show that they've changed. I even agree that the current ecosystem is forcing them to change some. I also expect them to pull something the moment they think they can get away with it.
> Microsoft has changed
Changed? What makes you say that?
From the tiny interaction I have with MS I don’t think this is the case.
E.g. In my wife’s PC I have Firefox as the default browser, however:
1. If she clicks on one of the login manager wallpaper photos, the page opens in MS Edge.
2. Every time there is an update, MS Edge reappears as an icon on the desktop.
No, MS hasn’t changed. Their PR may have, but at core they are as evil as ever.
Being evil is a natural state for any large corporation. Trying to be not evil is always either fake or temporary. Microsoft cannot change, until it is split into hundreds of companies. Neither can Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple.
I wonder what the reaction would have been with Apple being the acquirer. Microsoft still receives lots of hate, sometimes justified, but often just baseless. On the other hand, whenever Apple fucks devs (or users) over, they're just "protecting users" or "making business decisions". I feel there's a strong bias in the dev community.
I bet the reaction would have been largely the same; a megacorp monopoly is a megacorp monopoly.
That being said, Apple did make a few nice moves lately -- e.g., open-sourcing FoundationDB (when was the last time Microsoft opened up anything it acquired?).
Apple being the acquirer wouldn't change the potential conflicts of interest or the trend towards monopolization, which is what a lot of people are upset about. Animosity toward large corporations isn't unique to Microsoft.
I doubt that Google or Amazon will use GitHub to opensource anything two years from now.
I was just thinking the same thing.
If github ends up running completely on Azure infrastructure; how likely will microsoft's competitor's be to host large projects there.
that said, I'm not sure the impact will be too negative if google or _______'s open source being on some other git-based system if it includes decent github / gitlab like collab tools.
...And in the comments, a thousand developers suddenly realize GitHub is a plain old business rather than some kind of core infrastructure service altruistically provided by Free Software Elves and their Infinite Bandwidth Rainbow.
My dissenting opinion is that this is good. I am not a Windows user and only peripherally use their services however ironically I believe Microsoft is now the challenger if monopolies:
- Bing is one of the only english search engines with a big userbase; provides a google alternative. I like ddg but it isnt mainstream yet.
- Provides alternative to gmail and enterprise services
- a big 3 cloud provider, competes with AWS and GC. Likely why this github acq makes sense
- runs linkedin to keep fb in competition
There are a lot of examples where they drop the ball, but they are surprisingly the challenger in a lot of new markets providing an alt to the leader/incumbent
Get ready to merge your Github account with your Office 365 and Skype accounts
doesn't seem like something that will happen, just look at LinkedIn, they don't even have MS Account logins
Maybe this is an unpopular question.
People unwilling to pay for a service they think is important for their work, yet lose their shit when the the said service does what is best for them. That is, to be sustainable.
AFAIK, GH charges for private repos and yet they are not-profitable. Gitlab offers free private repos, how will the story end differently?
EDIT: Typo
Oh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube).
Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.
Youtube would probably be dead if not for Google.
Google acquired Youtube so early on, how could you know what it would be like without them?
I was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)
Videos get demonetised for questionable or non reasons
Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time).
Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything.
Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today).
Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site.
Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant.
Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them.
YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections.
And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.
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You didn't use Youtube before it was acquired? I vividly remember finding a lot of cool videos and music that I couldn't otherwise have found. Now once you watch a few garbage videos it's all Youtube autosuggests to you. Also if you start exploring videos they'll probably be mostly around the same what you've already seen and not diverge too much from what's popular. Anything novel and out-of-ordinary is pushed to the bottom in most cases.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is different but the freshness of it is gone. I don't expect anymore to find anything super-interesting and the same old stuff that I've already watched is being suggested to me again and again.
According to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.
I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.
I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.
I talked to a VP from MSFT last year. He asked how MSFT could do a better job appealing to the open source community and start up community. I said just keep doing what you are doing. It is going to take time for those of us that were around during the Balmer days to be willing to believe that MSTF has turned a corner. I think that they are on the right path, but I certainly don't judge anyone who is skeptical about the future of github. I've been on gitlab since 2011 so it don't make much difference to me.
This is seriously depressing. GitHub had such massive network effects that you'd think if anyone could stay independent it would be them.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion around here but I see nothing but positives in this announcement.
This move towards a "good" Microsoft has been going on for a decade, ASP.NET MVC was released as Open Source in 2009. Seeing where they're going with .NET core, VSCode and TypeScript makes me pretty confident they will be good stewards of the site.
Microsoft had their own open source hosting solution Codeplex but closed it and migrated all their stuff to GitHub so they could be where the community was. That was a bold move and I think demonstrates how they see the community now. This isn't the Microsoft of the 90's.
GitHub is great but it's not profitable and I'm sure there are lots of improvements they could make with a bit of a cash injection.
On the flip side if Microsoft stuff it up or there is an exodus from Microsoft because people hate Microsoft, that's not such a bad thing either.
There are great alternatives out there, it's not the same landscape as when GitHub launched, everyone's learnt from GitHub, GitHub's biggest feature is the network effect. Everyone has an account and it's super low friction to contribute there. If we can break that a bit and everyone has an account at 2 or 3 places I think we might see some great innovation as competitors try to differentiate themselves.
Finally on that point. Bitbucket is awesome, you can build apps that are integrated directly into the UI https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/
In case you haven't seen it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
TL;DR, Microsoft's known strategy is to feign goodness, then use the goodwill to kill competition, especially in the open standards/open source area.
Every business that built their service around the GitHub ecosystem will get massively screwed. They should immediately start to integrate as many GitHub competitors as possible or Microsoft will just eat them within the next months. GitHub always wanted to concentrate on the code hosting, not the CI/CD, code quality, code analysis, etc parts but Microsoft will soon start to extend GitHub to support Azure's services directly.
GitHub was never conceived as a charity. But this didn't stop people to put half of the world's open source code centrally on this one platform. Now they are crying/worried because this platform is being sold. Can't really understand your point, guys. That is the way it often goes with commercial enterprises. It's quite an irony that free/open source makes this platform so financially interesting to buy.
I use it for work like everybody else here, but being so comfortable and happy with it, I paid $7/month for a few private repos which maybe used $.02/month in their resources. Just a shame companies and the developers paying for it wasn't enough
At least it's not Oracle
I searched through the comments to see if anyone else had the same thought I did.
Or Google.
Gitlab is a good solution for most folks. They have a for profit business powered by open source software.
GH also had a for-profit business. Apparently the profits weren't enough, but they were profitable and bootstrapped in their early days
It says in the article:
GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work.
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Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it? So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.
Linux doesn't use GitHub for anything other than a mirror, and Linus famously hates GitHub.
(More reading: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/)
Point taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA:
"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."
But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."
> and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github
Linux isn't hosted on github, it's hosted on their own cgit instance: https://git.kernel.org/
There was a short period of time, back in 2011, when kernel.org went down for some time (from late August: https://lwn.net/Articles/457142/ to early October: https://lwn.net/Articles/461465/), so Linux was temporarily hosted on github. After that, the repository on github was kept as a mirror of the official kernel.org repository, but it's a one-way flow.
See also the following article: https://lwn.net/Articles/464233/
The official git repo of the kernel is git.kernel.org. The github one is just a mirror and it's just sad that is returned as a first result on Google.
From a recent github blog post: "Millions of developers trust us with their data—and protecting their privacy is a top priority for us."
Now these millions of developers will face a dilemma.
Some years ago I wrote "The Github Threat" https://carlchenet.com/the-github-threat/ and I'll be delighted to update the conclusion with this quite predictable and logical outcome.
Personally, I think this is great news given the investment Microsoft has made in hosting their open source projects on GitHub. I'm heavily invested in the Microsoft stack so I'm kind of excited to see where they take this.
Also, I'm excited because I'm in the middle of launching a product that aims to build people in to Git experts, or at the bare minimum build up your comfort level with Git to make you productive.
I'd love for you to check it out. This open source version is kind of the basis for my upcoming commercial project.
https://github.com/ryanrodemoyer/git-evangelism.
Also, let's connect if you're in the Denver area. You can find my email through my GitHub account or comment on my message.
Speaking of fickle developers, I'm already planning my exit.
Any mention of Microsoft is enough to turn me off, I have seen enough - I have had enough.
And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/microsoft-fort...
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/
I am forced to use Windows for gaming, and let me tell you what Microsoft has done to me lately.
- Forced updates are a travesty. I should be able to delay or ignore updates indefinitely as I own my computer.
- I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program, despite having no need of one. I can only temporarily pause Windows Defender's real-time checks before they'll helpfully turn it back on for me. This results in a loss of gaming performance.
- Turning off their spying telemetry is essentially impossible and will helpfully turn itself back on.
- They hold some good games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows (Halo Master Chief Collection) since they don't take gaming seriously on PC.
- Every once in a while, they become dedicated to PC gaming again which simply means they will use their power to force something awful onto the community, like the Windows Xbox Game Bar, Games for Windows Live, etc. in their quest to make my gaming PC into an Xbox.
- UWP is trash and greatly restricts what the user can do with their game, such as mods or fan patches to fix bugs developers ignore.
- The Windows Store is horrible in and of itself and is full of even more low quality software. Instead of releasing their games on Steam, Origin, GOG, or even UPlay, they force them into this dumpster fire.
- They install Candy Crush and other drivel by default on a fresh copy of Windows, and sometimes it magically reappears.
Just because Microsoft has put on the "I'm changed!" act recently by releasing some FOSS and donating some money does not mean they have actually stopped being a negative influence.
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Check the recent history of computing. They willingly botched many good standardization efforts and devalued many by throwing their industry weight around - all in the name of self-interest.
And oh, their software sucks. Sometimes it's kinda bizarre even how much their software sucks, bad engineering abound.
Have you tried updating Windows 7 recently?
They took over the world of computers and made people believe that computers suck and are boring, which they do when they run Windows.
They brainwashed so many corporations and governments to use their stupid solutions for every problem and plague tech people with incredible headache in the process.
It's even worse in the "developing" world, where every single comapny is like: "Oracle! Microsoft! Oracle! Microsoft!". You will never know till you experience it.
In bed with the NSA, telemetry, forced W10 migration, just off the top of my head.
That said, I do appreciate their recent strategy decisions. Lets hope at some point the two hemispheres of MS converge.
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I don't mind their strategy from a business perspective, but from a human perspective I mind they have crushed the goodness out of so many companies they have acquired. It's analogous to the chinese cultural revolution, or if some 3rd rate florentine artist got to buy out Botticelli et al. just as they got started. I know this is not only Microsoft (Cisco, Google et al.) but MS are not innocent and don't deserve to have their slate wiped clean (yet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
I guess it'll just take a lot longer for this generation to see MS as anything but embrace, extend, extinguish.
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https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-requiring-...
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/06/03/0626246/microsoft-s...
I don't use any product from Microsoft. I understand Microsoft is for-profit, but there's no way they can get a single dime from me, and I don't want to become a second-class citizen. That's why I would be leaving.
>And... what has Microsoft done to you lately?
Skype.
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Ask yourself and ask your dev friends, who is paying for Github? I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool. And yet every single person that I know && that can code is more than acquainted with github!
Now this could be the result of a lack of business acumen on github's part or stubborness from the users. In any case, it might be too late for github now, but I will myself conduct a review of the free services that I use regularly and reconsider pitching in, since I value independent businesses.
EDIT: looks like my experience may be atypical, that’s good! Just for anecdata, would you include where you live as part of your replies? In my case it’s central europe.
> I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool.
You're looking at the wrong people. It's companies who are paying for GitHub.
And yet the article mentions losses, companies might not be enough
I’ve paid for private repos on my personal GitHub account for years, and many of the companies I work for/with have paid organization accounts for GitHub, since the integrations and access control / management is really slick vs. setting it up internally. I can see many of these orgs (and myself) determining it’s worth the effort to move to GitLab / self-hosted depending on what Microsoft does.
I know plenty of orgs paying for Github. I don't know if your experience is typical.
My company (SAP) has a GitHub Enterprise installation that, given the number of active users, is going to be a very pleasant revenue stream for GitHub.
Oh wow. That's a monster of an account to land.
I know several small, medium, large companies paying github to keep their repos private. Also, github offers on-premises installation of their product.
Another sample of one: I pay for a personal account, although I don’t really have any projects that couldn’t be public, and my company pays for company account.
I pay for it for my business's private codebase; live in the SF Bay.
I may be in the minority. I’ve had a change of heart over the last 5 years or so towards Microsoft. They’ve changed a lot of the practices that used to make me not like them. They’ve embraced open source a lot more than in the past and have clamped down a lot on the anti competitive practices they used for decades. I also have a good friend that works there and I’ve seen how the sausage is made from the inside a bit. They treat their employees really well and from what I’ve experienced they’re a good company to work for.
I don’t have a hard opinion on this acquisition for the OSS community, but it will be good for the employees and I’m hopeful that not much will change with Github as a service and somethings may even get better. Time will tell of course.
GitLab's prayers have been answered. Hopefully they can make GitLab easier to use.
Can you imagine how this story would have gone over on Slashdot in 1998? Microsoft was the Borg, Linux was the nerd's favorite OS and Google was a benevolent and powerful new search engine. How the tables have turned...
Great news ! Maybe now people will understand why github was the wrong was to do things.
Using a designed to be decentralized development tool and flocking all in one place, centralizing free software development on proprietary centralized platform is the epitome of not doing things the way they should.
Hopefully people will catch the difference between opensource which microsoft is surfing on in a PR effort to regain prestige and free software which is a nemesis of microsoft.
Now let's see projects scramble to find another centralized place to migrate to in order to keep doing things wrong, and see which ones do not care enough to even do this.
But what would be the alternative then? I mean, GH serves as the de facto opensource social network, it allows private and public collaboration and integrates with many tools creating a web of transparency and free flow of knowledge.
How do we make a similar or comparable service that is decentralized yet transparent and instantly accesible to millions of people across the globe?
So it's time to move on, is gitlab up for the job? or bitbucket? or everyone should run a gitea/gogs container on their $5 vps?
While I use vscode sometimes for web hacking, I use geany/vim for anything else, other than that, I have nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever, and yes, I run linux as my desktop for the last 15+ years.
Money talks, Microsoft is embracing OSS because it's defeated by OSS, it never liked OSS, and it does all these moves just because it has no better options.
And, who knows,it might be the modern Trojan to ruin us all when time comes, I have no doubts on this when I recall how hostile MS has been to OSS.
The final step will be acquiring StackOverflow. After that, nearly every developer will find their next job via Microsoft.
I don't mind this, as long as the side of Microsoft which has been on GitHub so far as the side of Microsoft who ends up dealing with GitHub in the future.
But this will definitely end the concept of GitHub as a single-source place to find code. Microsoft's competitors will likely move their code, at the least, and of course, the crowd who will never trust Microsoft will leave as well, regardless of how well they manage it.
All-in-all, I don't think that's a bad thing for anyone: Software shouldn't all come from one site, and the industry was becoming far too centralized around GitHub.
Github to Gitlab migration:
https://gitlab.com/import/github/new
EDIT: the old links were useless:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
I'm stuck here:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/github.html
what is the gitlab Authorization callback URL?
We've been lamenting the github-centralization of open-source for years now, this might be the wake-up call people have been waiting for. Rightly so. Gitlab ops people might be in for a treat tonight.
Any plans to make backups/archives before Microsoft takes over? There is an enormous volume of useful open source code from individual authors on Github. A pleasing respite from the world of team-developed commercial software. It is difficult to imagine Github could remain the number distribution channel for individual authors of non-commercial code when it is run under the auspices of a large, proprietary enterprise and consumer software company.
Since its inception, I have been using simple tcp/http clients and text-only browsers to download and browse source code from stable Github urls, as I did throughout the 90's with Freshmeat, Sourceforge, etc. To its credit, Github has always been very accessible.
What are the chances this kind of accessibilty will continue to be possible if Github is being administered by Microsoft. Direct downloads of small, source code files, many with no licensing restrictions, no sign-ups, no web browser required, no hassle... Microsoft has never managed anything like that. Microsoft has always done the opposite. Indirect downloads of large collections of binaries, often coupled with installers, licensing restrictions, usually requiring some sign-up or click-through agreement, and today, possibly with telemetry.
I hope I am wrong to be concerned about this takeover. Will Github continue to be the respository service of choice amongst authors of free source code? Perhaps some will pull out and move their code elsewhere.
IMO, Microsoft will most likely take a hands-off approach. They would not want some people's frights to be realized, and they would appreciate developers being okay with their acquisition.
I was really hoping GitHub would focus on a IPO vs. acquisition. I honestly think we would be saying the same things about Google/Apple if they had decided to swoop in and make a deal here (so none of what I say is directed specifically at Microsoft).
I think the general consensus is that we want a new, independent org, that genuinely cares about OSS but has the mind to create/maintain a sustainable business model and ensure the long-term success of an OSS platforms is extremely important (and now we'll look to Gitlab and others for that).
Microsoft will, no doubt, have their fingers all over this platform in short order. It's what they're paying for; and it's an extremely smart move (EXTREMELY). Some of GitHubs product offerings have competitors within the Microsoft ecosystem already, which may spell bad times for those long-term. Atom directly competes with VSCode and it simply doesn't make sense to continue development of two, independent, IDEs. Electron utilizes Chromium under the hood, and I'd be hard pressed to thunk Microsoft wouldn't want to try and inject Edge/Chakra into that platform somehow.
It makes good business sense to consolidate efforts once a company is acquired. I give it, at most, 12-18 months before you start seeing major changes to both of those platforms that reflect Microsofts own interests.
To everyone switching to GitLab or considering it: Theres a feature on GitLab where you can import all your GitHub repos in on go. Or you can do it one by one if you want.
Based on the way Microsoft has been “punishing” their on-prem customers since they started pushing O365 this has me a bit concerned about the fate of GitHub Enterprise.
I can't believe Microsoft isn't aware an exodus (at some level) will occur and Github will no longer be what it is if they buy it.
But apparently they don't care. Demonstrating they have not changed as so many claim but are still the same old M$.
I'll be closing my account as soon as this is official. As for clients who decide to stay, sorry, I won't be able to help them as I won't have a Github account. But I will walk them through moving if they like.
It looks like you’re trying to issue a Pull Request! Would you like to use Visual Studio Azure Github for Windows 2000, Enterprise Edition with Skype & Linkedin Integration?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/suranyami/works/32080448-it...
As [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.
If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.
Smart and inevitable, to secure dominance in the talent vertical. I remember walking into an org where none of the engineers or UX folks had Linkedin accounts. They didn't need it to land in a healthy workplace w/ a decent salary. They were active on GitHub instead, had Angellist profiles. One of them mentioned LI's InMail tool drove him away. Another said he can network just fine with Meetup and twitter.
Edited those typos.
Deleting my accounts tonight. I just can't stomach a future Microsoft Github Azure™ 365 Enterprise Edition with LinkedIn™ integration. Fucking gross.
Microsoft paying $2B for a company based on Linus Torvalds' work, unreal.
It's probably not for the platform, but for the user base and the community.
I'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI
As for me, I also dislike Github being owned by Microsoft. Big conflict of interest. Microsoft core business is closed-source software.
But, it's not wrong to give Microsoft a chance to cultivate Github. Yes, Microsoft have a long track record of being disproportion with open source products. This is also true with other companies.
Good thing to point out is, there are alternatives.
"The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work."
Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?
Extinguish.
I mean, if I had wanted to troll. Still..almost everything about MS's choices in Win10 (aside from Linux Subsystem) bother me.
Microsoft's own hosted platform Visual Studio Team Services is nuetral. It supports hosted and on prem build and deployment agents for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are easy to use plug ins for building and deploying on both Azure and AWS. You can use Github now for hosted git repositories in VSTS and still use Microsoft's other build and release tools.
Thier Wiki is Markdown based and they have a very visible link that lets you pull down your entire Wiki using git clone.
They also have free private repos, 40 hours of hosted builds, up to five users for free, project management features that are at least as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) as the other project management tools - again free for up to five users. You can also host your own private Nuget, NPM, and Maven feeds for free.
For non open source projects, you can't beat the value. Additional users over 5 are $5 a month.
I think you ascribe different meaning to "neutral" than most others here
I ascribe "neutral" to technology. VSTS supports every major platform/OS and the tools are on par for all of them.
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What is Github's reason for this? I'm looking for some salient reason why they'd sell their company. Is it investor pressure or founder apathy, or ...? It seems to me like creating and running a product as admired as Github is a bigger prize than just cash in the game of life?
“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though, it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.”
~ Adam Smith
If somebody of the size of GitHub can't manage to stay a standalone company it's a pretty sad state of affairs. We really need more players in this industry. It's becoming more and more a monoculture (not sure what the term is for a few players that together pretty much have monopoly. Oligopoly?)
I'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft to begin with, but I definitely see a reason to be wary about this. I don't really want any Microsoft integration into GitHub, and really the best case would be for them to not change much with the site at all, although I don't see this being the case.
My fear in this is that MS may require MS passport or whatever it is called ID system to log in to GitHub, with their really unreasonable 16 character max password length restrictions.In general MS websites are poor in usability, and littered with marketing copy, difficult to find useful information.
Does this remind anyone else of the back to the future movie where Biff is the free worlds leader and just a pompous asshat with the power to keep being a pompous asshat?
Having watched Microsoft over the years steal ideas from smaller companies (not purchase them then bastardize and part them out mind you), but actually steal their ideas and make them standard in their operating system.
Some examples are CDR/CDRW now standard after small companies in the late 90's developing the standard.
The bastardized implementation of Active Directory after Novell's Netware platform and the later implementations of OpenLDAP and the standards that were spurned.
What about the MIT Kerberos authentication mechanisms after Microsofts MsCHAPv2, MsCHAP & NTLM roll your own crypto schemes were found easily crackable and exploitable?
I can go on but actually have to do some work today...
I read about this as a hypothetical a few days, but it really moved to done deal quicker than I expected.
I started to look for alternatives to host private repos and found that Amazon CodeCommit has a plan that's even much better than the GitHub plans. Does anybody have experience on how well this works?
I’ve got a couple of code commit repos for various purposes, and it’s high friction. Uploading a large repo with a plain git push will likely fail. The user management is way more complicated and enterprisey than github. It does work, but it feels awkward.
Keybase has encrypted git for free https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone
Are Amazon considered less evil than Microsoft these days?
I can imagine the people at GitLab being very excited about this! Perhaps sytse would like to comment?
I think instead of moving everything to one new (central hosted) silo like GitLab.com, we should move to self hosted git instances, with some GitHub like web interface to do remote comments/pull requests (e.g. gitea/gogs with some simple modifications).
Moving all my projects to gitlab. For those wondering why gitlab is different see this comment from another HN thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yogthos
There probably won't be (m)any noticeable changes for the open source and devs running personal private repos and possibly the same for GitHub team plans. However, I'd bet Microsoft will plan on a sunset timetable for TFS and push their licensing and sales machine toward GitHub for Enterprise. I'm glad my group isn't on GitHub for Enterprise because after seeing this news I'd be looking to migrate away ASAP. I can envision the the potential for their draconian licensing lock-in and TOS language spawning a nightmare for teams that are running GH Enterprise. These GH enterprise installations will likely be required to purchase MSDN licenses.
Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)? I use both and there is barely any overlap in features. GitHub is only code storage + a rudimentary issue manager. There is very little release management, test management, CI/CD etc.
If anything I’d expect them to integrate better and of course integrate more with Azure (e.g one-click setup of build/test on azure from any Github project)
> Why would they sunset TFS (Or VSTS)?
Admittedly I've been away from TFS for a number of years, however, it seems that GitHub Enterprise is a natural fit product wise for revenue stream via licensing thru MSDN to get organizations onboard with GitHub that weren't before. If they were to sunset TFS and provide a migration path, it would end up giving them significant licensing dollars.
The more important point I was trying to make is that orgs that are now on GitHub Enterprise would need to subscribe to MSDN enterprise licenses for a bunch of things that aren't relevant and get locked into TOS that they hadn't been previously.
Regardless of sunsetting TFS/VSTS, I think that Github Enterprise will be only available through a MSDN enterprise/premium license or whatever that is now in 2018.
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Agreed. I see MSFT keeping GitHub as a "simple" choice for repo hosting.
VSTS is awesome, and quite feature-packed. Maybe Microsoft will use GitHub specifically for repo hosting, while offering VSTS as an CI/CD/ALM platform.
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This is the "extend" phase, in case anyone is keeping track. The embrace was "MS loves Linux!", switching Windows to use git, and putting tons of near random libraries and projects on github publically (vscode, chakracore, etc).
I just love how anyone that cards had been actively avoiding walled garden proprietary services like this and were using gitlab, phabticator, etc for years saying this or anything similar (could have just been github starting to sell user data themselves) but only when big evil MS comes along to put the reality in peoples faces that you don't bet your software infrastructure on some proprietary non interoperable web service.
Gitlab must be really happy. I know my team will move out of Github if Microsoft buys it.
For people looking for alternatives, I've started to write code forge tools in Salut à Toi (on top of XMPP).
It's decentralized, already working (tickets and merge requests), based on standards, and written in a popular language (python), help would be more than welcome!
It is also agnostic of the tools, I'm using it with Mercurial, but Git implementation will of course follow.
You'll find details and a demo at https://www.goffi.org/b/9555cc02-6a87-4b6b-af85-20f1c0736722...
I'm kind of happy with this happening as it seems to me that this can cause the VCS hosting arena to diversify a little bit. The "monopoly" of github always worried me as a huge freaky single point of failure.
Now we need a GitLab alternative, just in case MS decides GitHub isn't enough.
So it looks like Github is going to be the next sourceforge! Onward to gitlab!
Well, let's say I wouldn't switch away from github at once (I have a paid account with private repos and all), but consider the Skype precedent: from a mostly working native application, now it's an Electron abomination that takes 100% CPU and is a lot harder to use than the previous versions. But it has social networking!
It's very likely they will "improve" github in the same way. I don't think they dare to make the site explicitly not work on anything but IE, but I expect subtle incompatibilities to pile up over time...
Lets just hope Microsoft has learnt how they tend to kill good products by merging them into their ecosystem and won't do that.
If Microsoft honestly wants to improve GitHub, they should ask the community first.
IMO, I think Microsoft will take a hands off approach, they don't want some of people's fears to be realized, and they really would want a friendly attitude towards their acquisition.
The negativity in here is crazy. It‘s not even official yet everyone already seems to know that Microsoft will destroy Github. Microsoft tried really hard to improve their relationship with developers in the last couple of years and they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again. I can understand the scepticism and that people dislike the fact that Github is not independant anymore, but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
Are they still trying to extort "licensing fees" from Android device manufacturers? Have they apologized for ever doing that and promised never to do that again? Until that, I won't even consider it. Fuck Microsoft. They're horrible and their recent attempt to go back to the "embrace" part of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deserves absolutely zero good will.
I hate when people accuse others of negativity when manifestly negative thing happen.
"Hey, stop punching me in the face!"
"Why are you being negative?"
There are very good reasons people aren't happy about this. Microsoft's track record for one. And the loss of independence of major repo source for another. Not being happy about this isn't being "negative". It's entirely understandable.
> they surely don‘t want to spend a lot of money just to destroy the relationship again
The old MS — and I'm not trying to comment on how different or similar the current MS is to the old one — did indeed spend a lot of money to screw developers and the developer community, including developers who bought into the MS stack.
> but saying that Github will be ruined? We should be better than this.
I don't think many people are worried MS will ruin GitHub, per se. I think what most people are worried about is that MS will change GitHub enough to inject MS-specific stuff in there.
GitHub is the website 90% of the packages I use are hosted on. All our company code and hundreds of hours are invested into whats hosted on it. I would hate to see this change...
This might be a stupid question, I did Cmd+F to search if it had already been asked and answered and it hasn't, so it might actually be stupid.
I'm guessing it's very illegal (IANAL) and that it's not the intention of Microsoft (IANACEO), but what are the ramifications relating to IP (GitHub's customer's IP, rather than the GitHub's IP) - has Microsoft essentially bought access to a massive stash of IP/trade secrets in the form of private repositories?
I'm wondering this too - private repos might be a goldmine of intellectual property, which businesses assumed would stay "private", i.e., not in the hands of companies like Microsoft.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DezCaWaUYAAa5ih.jpg:large
What's a tool for moving every GitHub repo to GitLab?
Not judging if this is a good or bad thing but in general it's annoying to be dependent on a single company. While git is decentralized, github's social platform features are centralized and lock users to github. I would love to see more solutions that allows users to migrate freely between platforms without losing their social contacts. See https://fejoa.org for more information.
Centralized and proprietary unfortunately are two key attributes to Github. That fits the old school MS bill. But it also fits the new “we have changed hype”.
It’s most unfortunate, because git made decentralized revision control popular.
My future Tooling bets are on sustainable open source.
Good for MS, though. It’s a smart move for them. And Github has been struggling for years, anyway. Scandals, new structure, more hierarchy. It’s probably easier to pick up now than three years ago.
I'm hopeful. I like typescript and Visual Code. I like their linux subsystem on windows granted that I don't use it since I'm not a windows user.
Guys. Enough with the FUD please. I myself don’t even believe I’m saying this but clearly Satya Nadella != Steve Ballmer. Dude has seen the light and is trying to put the company on the right path.
Every time they do something good all the tinfoil hats come out. Give them a chance. They’ve turned over a new leaf. And until and unless we see otherwise we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt.
This is not our childhood Microsoft.
Ballmer didn't turn Windows into spysare the way Nadella has. Windows 10 is basically a rootkit that phones home about your every activity.
So much parroting going on in here.
Microsoft has been doing amazing things recently for devs. Wait to see what their plans actually are before you start to freak out.
What Microsoft acquisition has been a "success"? Because there are quite a lot that got worse under MS. They have a long track record and it'l take years before they can begin to counter all the stuff they've done.
Would have rather seen an investment or partnership in github than a purchase. Recognizing the desire for github to stay neutral but supporting it to continue would have been a much better received move and done far more to build up reputation.
> GitHub preferred selling the company [in this case to a public company --jrochkind] to going public
Anyone have any comments on what might drive this preference?
Microsoft ruined Skype, why wouldn't I think a company whose main source of income is from closed-source software wouldn't ruin GitHub?
It was good while it lasted.
We will have to start migrating our software there into a more neutral platform.
I don't like the consolidation in Software in which there are only 5-6 huge players. It means politics and private interest of the conglomerate take precedence over everything else, like competence, and freedom.
Those oligopolies can just send their lawyers against competition or just buy them to stop the threat.
So, where should I switch to now? I dumped LinkedIn and Skype since MS acquired it, next is GitHub. Hosting own GitLab? Something else?
I'll probably quit github once they add their horrible login system. Have you experienced the login on azure portal or skype ?
I wonder how Microsoft can manage to commercialize all the projects on GitHub. Maybe by providing an universal installer that works through the Windows Store. Maybe by adding a few mandatory patches to each project that improve compatibility. Maybe by making a much improved version of Git with a proper GUI interface. The possibilities are endless!
Perhaps there is a market for a really simple Git based issue tracker, which doesn’t require Ruby. This acquisition feels like Freshmeat / SourceForge v2; the hardcore OSS enthusiasts will begin their exodus. Is there an argument for actually building simple issues management into Git itself with a simple API for pull requests?
Will it go the way of Nokia, LinkedIn, Skype or the way of ... err... did they have any really successful acquisitions ever?
I hope they keep GitHub Pages, even if it's not free anymore. It's so convenient to host small static sites there.
Netlify does this for free along with a path to hosting larger sites as well. I found them via HN and have seen them recommended here many times.
Netlify is great! I also found them via HN at some point and use them for a couple customer projects. Totally moving my personal stuff to them too now.
Now is the time to move to Fossil https://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
Issue tracking & wiki built in.
You can use its git integration to ensure recruiters/employers can find you.
Funnily enough a friend of mine and I migrated some of our projects over to GitLab right before this original story broke. It’s really unfortunate though that this will probably go through since GitHub was/is really the staple site for social programming and project management, something that GitLab is certainly lacking.
Microsoft ruined Hotmail, JellyFish, Skype, LinkedIn, Yammer ... and now they want to ruin GitHub? :/ Noooooo
Some HN reaction reminds me of...
"Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class." [A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark, 022]
Big five representatives of the vectorialist class are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple.
Not very much on topic, but is the book worth reading? I started a couple of times but always kinda tuned out at some point.
It is not an easy, pleasurable read, maybe too intellectual. But it is worth for the truth and insight it provides.
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feel like if any of the other companies made this acquisition less people would care. It’s just trendy and good for your hacker creds to oppose microsoft as people did in the 90s. No one is crying about AWS hosting all applications.
If it's true, I'm cancelling my paid account immediately. A monopolist tried and found guilty of monopolization shouldn't own the company where many of their future competitors have their private repositories, it's frankly rather disturbing they think it's a good idea.
I hope this deal results in Visual Studio Team Services somehow getting support for public projects. It is amazing for private ones.
Also, paid tiers of GitHub moving to (or on top of) VSTS would not be a bad thing IMHO.
I hope both GH and VSTS benefit from this and I'm inclined to think they will.
Long live https://notabug.org
If this is true, it is really sad news. Remembering what Microsoft did with Skype, turning it from one of the most usable communication platforms to a pile of unusable crap, I can't help but wonder if it's time to prepare a migration strategy right now.
I guess now this makes sense:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/03/31/shutting-...
Relevant https://help.github.com/articles/about-archiving-content-and...
Citation needed ?
https://octoverse.github.com/2016/ under Organizations with the most open source contributors
What specific user-affecting changes would the new overlords make that suck for developers? I don't doubt that there are good answers to this. They could treat it like a cash cow and just start charging more for less, but I mean functional changes.
This doesn't bother me at all. I'd be far more worried if Oracle acquired GitHub.
Of all the big players who could have acquired GitHub, I'm most glad that it's MSFT. Their open source initiatives of late have been fantastic, and they really get developers. Visual Studio is a 10/10 IDE. Congrats GH and co :)
Gitlab is seeing 10x the normal daily amount of repositories
https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200?s=19
If anyone could stay independent, it should have been them. If it weren't Microsoft but someone else, it would be almost the same to me. There are so much things they could do to improve the experience and make it more profitable.
Prediction: 5 years from now github will be a memory for anyone but the Enterprise.
Color me naive but it can't be that bad, maybe they will surprise the FOSS community by opensourcing the NT kernel. Satya has said it is a possibility. And he is probably the only CEO who has been friendly toward FOSS.
Microsoft 2016' new year resolution [X] Join bigest open source community and get right to vote #linuxfoundation
[X] Acquire the largest open source community #github
[X] Do not share even bit of valuable open source (*do not count azure toolkits)
.. completed in 2018
I’m sure they paid a good chunk of change but this looks like more of a soft landing than an acqusition. Even the language: “Microsoft agreed to acquire” dampens the enthusiasm. I wonder how this worked out for investors.
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...
Done or not, at least Github's wikipedia entry has already been updated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
I wonder what this will mean for VSTS? That has it's own public/private git repositories. Though they're more 'enterprise integrated ci/cd' than github's 'portfolio'
This the end of an era. GitLab, BitBucket, self-hosted options, here we come!
Step 1: Embrace.
I think they're on step 2 now.
They already embraced it by adding 1k repos. They're now going to extend it.
We'll soon have an msgit, which is git with extensions that only github will support.
You mean like the current extensions in the .github folder (pull request template, etc)?
We still have Gitlab if MSFT decides to do anything malicious.
I don't think the big loss here is GitHub-the-software, but this short sweet period in time where everyone, from Microsoft to Apple, had their source code on the same platform. I doubt that e.g. Swift would have moved to GitHub if it had already been owned by Microsoft.
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If is true, this is one of the saddest news I've heard in the last 5 years. Please Github don't allow this. Look of what crap Skype became to be... look at what crap LinkedIn became to be...
Time to move to gitlab.
I wonder what Linus thinks about this. He has a mirror of the Linux kernel on GitHub: https://github.com/torvalds
Probably doesn't give a crap. Microsoft have their Linux disto for embedded stuff already.
Maybe this means Netlify will speed up adding GitLab support to their CMS.
I really like Microsoft, but this is a TERRIBLE idea for GitHub. Some rich bastard needs buy GitHub and then make it community owned. Why is GitHub a for-profit? It should be considered a utility.
Previous discussion re:acquisition talks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208293
GitHub became too expensive. I’m curious to see the new pricing model.
Look at Amazon Prime. For ONLY $99 free video, deals, free shipping, and many more.
This purchase is about increasing 365 value. They'll make the pro version free with office 356 subscription.
Interesting that you say this. If the price was 3x what it was (for both individuals and organizations), I feel both parties would still find it valuable enough.
I am so happy to see this moving forward. Microsoft will provide the proper management to drive innovation again in GH. Start by creating a replacement for the astronomically priced Travis
Why Github can't host the Linux kernel community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872
This is great for Gitlab. I'm going to try to use more and more.
Used to seeing these kind of reactions on HN. Saw this during FB React licensing issue. Angry Engineers moving to Vue or whatever was non-react, only to move back to usual in few weeks.
I surely become tired of becoming the product for someone else's overly inflated bottom line after having an option to feel it is "safe" to be a part of a community...
Microsoft got me using IDE's it was a nice cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good .... likely they will turn it into shit like everything else.
I wonder if instead Apple had acquired GH and today morning introduce laptops with 32 GB RAM, discreet GPU and fully tinkerable laptops for geeks to recapture losing mindshare.
Well I can wish!
Microsoft had codeplex which was older than github. They are probably going to spend 4 or 5 billion buying Github. They most likely write down the value a few years later.
So a lot of people mention GitLab as an alternative. Would anyone with experience with that platform care to chime in and list some pros & cons compared to Github?
I like that is also has CI/CD and other features, and that you can host it yourself (also for free). I do keep hearing about database issues on their hosted version though.
In general: haven't had problems with it, am cheaper than hosted GitHub, cheaper and works better than (self-)hosted Atlassian software.
That is for a developer duo.
GitLab appears to be the default choice for migration for many people... I wonder though if this might prompt some folks to go old-skool and move back to SourceForge?
Microsoft is also heavily "embracing" Python. CPython is on GitHub, the infra is partly controlled by MSFT employees and the CI moves to MSFT as well.
Caveat emptor.
Could have been great to see the GAFAM agree to finance GitHub to remain an independant platform.
Now, I can't imagine the GAFA let their open source projects on GitHub...
GitHub UI is terrible in recent years. The launch of discovery was a mistake; now they finally made the newsfeed "simpler" and cleaner, thank god.
Are there any projects in the "blockchain" / "decentralize everything" industry that's tackling the source control problem?
I'm hoping this puts the times of people with political agendas stearing the GitHub message well behind us. They weren't really neutral anymore when the CEO stepped asside and they got the business guy to take over...
I suspect MS is aware of the delicate situation in regards to alienation the user base. If this goes through I expect them to address this directly and with perhaps some creativity.
As a bonus Microsoft did some great work scaling git for the Windows codebase. That and other great engineering efforts making there way into GitHub could be great for the community.
I also think that Microsoft is very aware of this situation. They should already work on the communication part of this. And if true that maybe Nat Friedman will take over, they will handle it the right way. He has shipped his Mono team and the later Xamarin stack through four companies with success and stability for the product and the team.
Good. I don't understand the hundreds of comments invested in a company that provides one of the most fungible services around, with the weakest features and no profitability. The only other option for them was dying a slow death on the public markets if they did an IPO.
There are dozens of git hosting companies, including GitLab, BitBucket, Microsoft's own VSTS, repos by all the major clouds, and many others. Microsoft has every incentive to not screw this up but even if they did, so what? Nothing happens. Switch to something else and you're all set.
90% of this comment section could have been copied from a Slashdot post in 1999. Ironic, all the FUD being thrown here.
Really showing HN's selective myopia.
This is a little unfortunate but I think theres a possibility this could turn out to be a positive thing for both MS and GH. I hope so at least.
Soonds like a good time for gitlab to go fundraising!
I'm a CTO in the genomics sector. I'll hastily be looking for an alternative. I've long ago abandoned the Microsoft morass.
Google open source ERP and realize what a gold mine github data will be to an enterprise play like Microsoft.
As acquisitions go, it's pretty brilliant.
Part of me likes the possibly new native Windows-Git integration projects to come for developers.
Part of me wishes some companies were non-profit entities.
good. github sucks and i don't want to be forced to use it just because everyone uses it. if microsoft buys it it will slowly die.
Good. Can we make a distributed GitHub now please?
Anyone know the easiest way to migrate to GitLab?
Click on “import from GitHub” when you create a new repo.
A lot of GitHub employees are remote. All of the big tech companies are allergic to remote teams. I wonder if that will change now?
I wonder as well. If linkedin is any indication, Microsoft hasn’t affected their engineering culture really at all yet. In fact linkedin still routinely poaches Microsoft engineers and used slack and google drive and bluejeans instead of skype. If anything linkedin has gone on a massive hiring spree on Microsoft’s dime.
9 hours ago: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub
6 hours ago: GitLab sees huge spike in project imports
I think that says all there is to be said.
I'm not one to praise Microsoft without reason - I've worked the last 2 decades with their tech.
However, I don't see this as a negative thing. Provided they don't trash it like most of their acquisitions - and bear in mind they sort of depend on github themselves.
I feel this will prevent github from going like sourceforge now that someone with deep pockets can support it.
They have a lot of PR to lose if they screw this one up. Generally, migration is a only few git commands away.
I'm probably being silly, but it is ironic to me that Microsoft will own the service that hosts the Linux codebase.
That's just a mirror. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... is where it's at.
sourceforge, github...these platforms have their moments but are almost always superseded by something else that is more of the moment and useful.I can't see this msft move, which has been in the works for what feels like years, will help github to stay in the position it's been in for the last 3 years or so...
I wouldn't be surprised that the first thing they do is open source it. Removing the advantage of its competitors.
was this when they decided, nah fk it let s just aquire the thing https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...
Well, they must be over the moon at GitLab!
I hope that we will never read "X Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Stack Exchange" With X being a GAFAM.
I wonder if Stallman will be right, again, and whether we will see the rise of the Fossil SCM? (Or a similar clone)
Unhappy about this. If TFS and Github are ever glued together, you'll see the end of github as a platform.
They can finally join github and LinkedIn
<shudder>
https://sivers.org/horses
Just in case people are looking for one more alternative, it looks like no one has mentioned codegiant.io yet.
We’ll be migrating everything off GitHub this week.
This is good, because I’ve been wanting to dive into GitLab for a while.
Git is great, but it has a few social features missing
Centralised git is great, but becomes a target
Is this the perfect blockchain pairing?
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......
That means I could finally get to cancel my multiple subscription and setup gitlab.
I love this! Maybe the absolute fetishism over the overrated GitHub and Git will finally cease.
Why lump git into this?
It is a matter of concern for private repositories (of Microsoft's competitors) in GitHub.
Was GitHub under monetary duress? I thought their private Git hosting business was doing well.
I expect partial geoblocking and more censorship.
The chinese government tried to force Github to censor shadowsocks and the NY times repository. But back then it would have to block the whole site with other resourceful content.
My guess is that when Github is with Microsoft, the communist party in China has far more leverage as Microsoft has to follow Chinese laws, e.g., for selling Windows (even a special government-version), and bc China is an important market. I hope I'm wrong.
If this is true, I delete my account immediately.
The last thing I want is my code to fall into the hands of MS.
If you've used GPL then you have nothing to worry about.
80% of github projects here are hidden, inhouse trustworthy secret private projects! This is such horrible news!
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don't worry, I'm sure they've got backups
Fair enough. After all, they did ship a free web browser with their operating system, 24 years ago.
Some things you can just never forgive.
A shitty free browser developers still have to deal with today because enterprises refuse to fix their garbage in-house software..I'm not bitter at all.
Github harassment in 2014, Microsoft potentially (at time of writing) buying Github.
Mountains, molehills.
Why microsoft and google ruin the things developer loves? First Kaggle and than Github.
what happened to Kaggle?
Is this a done deal, or could GitHub (maybe after seeing the backlash) still back out?
At least it wasn't Oracle.
You want to buy gitignore.io? I'll sell it for a fair and reasonable price :).
I'm losing faith that people are in tech for anything more than the payday.
RIP Github.
I can't wait to see Skype, OneDrive and Office integration in GitHub......
Seems like a big boost to their recent ML offering that suggests source code.
Will it mean that we will see Atom and VS code merging in the near future?
Finally, we will be able to use the same login for both Skype and GitHub.
We've all seen how it ended with Skype... Terrible news indeed.
"Nothing speaks louder than money; except more money."
I can already see gitlab and bitbucket jumping up in popularity.
Horrible and sad news.
Just posted the petition on Hacker News:
> Github petition: please remain independent
https://github.com/independent-github/petition
Petitions don't pay bills; GitHub is bleeding money. The solution is not signatures, but for developers to start paying for all the free hosting GitHub has given them. The open-source community itself is strapped for cash, so this is an excellent time for all the users of that open-source software (especially companies) to start chipping in for hosting and development costs. However, the cynical side of me says that ain't going to happen. :/
That was my original idea but if the deal is already closed it is too late. I've been paying for years even though I never needed it only to support Github's amazing work. And now this :/
What are the goals Microsoft wants to achieve with this?
790b9db572a6a819f11ad0e0cac7d261 --- will update later.
What's this?
Why isn't all this code on 'the chain'?
Alot of MSFT codebase was moved to Git in 2016 and this just makes sense. Wow.
Wonder how hiring/firing is going to be now at Git. They are pro-remote, while most MSFT positions are going no longer remote.
Git != Github
I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
I feel the same. It's not the end of free software, but the end of free software as we knew it (or something, still trying to rationalize).
Someone explain the extreme feeling of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
There is not a single Microsoft product/tool/service I like. Including the ones they aquired. So I expect them to turn GitHub into something I don't like too.
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What does Github have to do with free software? It's a closed-source, non-free SaaS. Free software repos can (mostly) relocate to any other hoster as they wish.
Microsoft has a history of taking the open source philosophy out of their products. Github is one of the few large, commercially successful platforms that have not only embraced, but built their entire platform around those fundamental values.
It's not a surprise we feel unease, and to hope that Microsoft is actually going in a direction that aligns with those values, instead of simply twisting them for it's own continued success - that's being a bit naive.
We'll all see what happens, but honestly, I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
There are plenty of examples that stick to the core philosophy of open source software and open ideas, but there are rarely examples that manage to become extremely successful and maintain that success without drowning in the confusion created through their own influence.
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and .. we will start seeing Linkedin ads on Github.
Right click and publish to Azure. For the win!!
GitLab > Import all repositories from GitHub
Better than getting bought by Dice at least.
I'm really looking forward to IPFS ...
Future often rhymes with the past (Skype).
Good for Github. Bad for Github users.
Can't help but notice the announcement aligns with Apple's WWDC this week. Wonder it'll take a bite out of Apple's PR.
Might be the other way around: Apple's event overshadows this one, and Microsoft quietly acquires GitHub with many being none the wiser.
welp, bye github, it's been fun.
Hello gitlab.
Alternatives and no not bitbucket
Gitlab.com is what I was already slowing moving to, because their code is open source. This will just hasten that migration.
https://gitea.io/
Have YET to turn a profit?! Wow.
Well. There’s always bitbucket.
Time to migrate to SourceForge.
What a betrayal. I'm starting to get really sick of this whole economic paradigm in general. A few lucky smart people who were in the right place at the right time become fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of the greatest kings who ever lived in history, off the work and contributions of millions of users creating all of the content for free, with absolutely no say in anything. Is this really the best way to do things?
If you cared this much today you shouldn't have put your code on GitHub yesterday :/.
It's a real problem.
And yet, pure open-source / community initiatives don't seem to have the strong centralized control that appears to be needed to make good, user-focused software. Alterantives?
(I wonder if projects that reach a certain size shouldn't basically be nationalized. Private enterprise is great at innovating, not so good at maintaining w/o slipping into bullshit exploitation / ruining what was good in the first place. Obviously you'd have to be careful to do this in a way that still left enough of a payoff to not discourage new private enterprises.)
Well, the difference is the users had and have the choice which kingdom, if any, to inhabit or build. If Github goes the way of Microsoft something of value will be lost, namely the relatively open - as far as any centralised resource can be open - culture of a non-affiliated source repository. The actual functionality which Github offers is by no means unique and can be achieved in many different ways.
To be honest I don't think Github, or any other centralised resource, is the way to go. Now that Github may fall on the list of locations to host your projects it is worth thinking about alternatives to this centralised system. Self-hosted gogs, gitea or gitlab is probably the easiest option right now, I've had a gogs/gitea instance running for a few years which mirrors my activities at Github and can be used as a substitute at short notice. These mirrors are not complete though, I currently do not mirror the issue tracker nor the wiki. I guess I better start doing this as well to really have a turn-key Github alternative for when the time comes for us to part ways.
I've been giving the concept of distributed ownership some thought. None of it's concrete and I certainly don't currently possess the wealth of knowledge or experience necessary to make it work or form it into something less abstract.
At anyrate the thoughts are along the lines of distributing shares of a company either eveningly to everyone or depending on how much an individual contributes will be returned with some increase in shares. Anyone participating in any form of company is at least immediately given some share. For example if you helped produce something that the company sells you're given some ownership. However additionally shares of ownership can be attained by directly buying the product that has been produced.
Idealisticly the goal is a company, or companies, where every one benefits from the interactions/transactions and not a small number of individuals that have direct incentives to consolidate more.
> What a betrayal.
Why is this a betrayal?
Because Microsoft wrecks almost everything it touches lately, including its own sacred-cow products like Windows itself, in an effort to force it to serve the company’s interests over those of its (paying!) customers?
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Today, there is far more connection between contribution to society and personal wealth than in the past. If you have good ideas about how to make this connection stronger, share them in a blog, research paper, book, talk. If you have nothing to contribute, then don't complain and enjoy the improvements that happened over the past centuries.
Do they really get more wealthy than the greatest kings who ever lived in history? I can name a few Roman emperors (kings all but in name, ironic as I'm being pedantic) who had a whole lot more money, respective of their peers and the times. Same with a lot of European monarchs, historically and in the present day.
Do you mean that Github shareholders will benefit from users that are hosting their projects on Github? Isn't "content is king" true for all platforms?
Sure. It motivates millions of young developers to try to become kings.
> Sure. It motivates millions of young developers to try to become kings.
... so VCs can profit.
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There are other options for hosting code on the Internet, and people will definitely take advantage of them, if a non-neutral party purchases GH.
Besides, what is wrong with someone who created a business later selling that business for a profit?
The problem is that our data is in there now, and it costs time and effort to get it out.
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GitLab++
Time to move to Gitlab...
/me moves to GitLab
End of an era for sure.
guess it's time to move away from github.
O-boy! I hope they'll make GitHub as awesome as Skype.
A monopolist wants to buy a monopolist. Linuxers disagree.
Pack it in boys
"Open season on open source"
Dammit!!!
Oh, fork
So long, and thanks for the fish!
The irony. 404 comments.
RIP GitHub.
Oh crap.
Disaster.
RIP
All good things must come to an end. We had free software before Github and we will have free software after Github.
I was using gitlab anyway. But it's significant that Microsoft is taking another step towards destroying open source and the community around it (while making it look like they are embracing it, of course).
Months before I mailed Whitehatservices@programmer.net, I have really been battling with a bad report and was feeling skeptical about the whole fix process online seeing my mom been ripped. Though My colleague recommended whitehatservices to me, I still didn’t feel right contacting them cause I’ve previously seen them online. Finally, with my fingers crossed, I gave it a try and here I am recommending you Whitehatservices@programmer.net. The best part of the story; No upfront payment, though it took me almost a month but I’m good.
Everyone is leaving this platform because Microsoft is a spyware OS (NSA OS). To be honest, they are going to put Malware tracking in your code. Something big is coming inside your machine..... Warning : stay away from any acquired platforms of Microsoft (LinkedIn (Resume tracking), github (project code tracking), Skype ( Voip tracking), etc.......). They can't innovate anymore, and the weak dev work for money instead of building the next big thing..... Anyway.... Gitlab is the answer
If it's true, it's the moment that GitLab will see a major boost and replace GitHub within 2-4 of years
Horrible news. Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.
Wonder where the big tech companies will move their projects to? GitLab?
We finally has a single, neutral site for code and which everyone uses and MS messes it up.
I do hope once and for all we can put to rest this idea MS has changed. Clearly these actions show they have not change.
Wait a minute. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so it has prime access to recruitment. It now also owns GitHub, where it can run anything they want to find the best programmers. I don’t know what Microsoft plans to do, but those are good wats to find all kinds of talent.
I wonder now that Microsoft controls LinkedIn and Github what kind of synergies can form between the two to better serve recruiters looking for software developers.
It just seems odd that a company that threatens to sue companies for using Linux, unless they pay their patent licensing extortion royalties, may control GitHub.
Open source or NO open source? Never thought Github would sell itself one day. Always thought it to be a treasure from divine sources that need no money.
Not surprised, someone had to acquire github, it was only a matter of time. I’d rather it be Microsoft than Facebook or Google.
A spokesman for Microsoft said "Buying GitHub was cheaper than paying for all our private repositories."
This is amazing. I hope they build in support for Azure and let us have free private repos.
Congratulations to Microsoft!
This is terrible news. Big guys will have to move code elsewhere. We finally has a single and neutral site and MS destroys it.
Swear MS does not want us to have nice stuff.
Good! Getting rid of Atom for Visual Studio Code should make things a lot better (and allow them to free up some staff). And if they eliminate they head of "community" that makes public repository owners have to tiptoe around any sensitive snowflake's sensibilities, that will fix most of the remaining problems.
I wonder what will happen to Atom, considering that Microsoft makes VS Code..?
Seems like something that would have been more fitting for Google...
unhappy...! Fuck Microsoft....
u know what iam not in the mood / energy/... to talk about this right now...(at 2:50 am at my country) u shuld get it...
Why would they when they have VSTS already?
Never used github. Always used bitbucket.
Time to move everything off GitHub...
微软又毁一公司
microsoft should die for this
Hell is coming
well, this may be too late, but it's a top 10 trending repo: https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT
let 'em know.
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
Think Microsoft will use this opportunity to throw some people in jail for whats in their github repos, like they did with the poor guy offering freely available recovery CDs?
One of the company i work for is using microsoft stack, it's the worst nightmare i ever had to deal with, microsoft is the devil of the internet era, we should all quit github if this happen
Microsoft got me started using IDE's. It was a good cover for all the shit underneath. Now they are taking something good and more likely turning into shit.
Thanks for mentioning GitLab as the next big one. We're seeing people #movingtogitlab
GitLab is also venture funded. What's the end game there? Wouldn't GitLab's investors, including YC, be ecstatic to see the company achieve a similar outcome? Wouldn't they consider basically any other outcome to be a failure?
The bigger question is why GitHub didn't IPO. They have name recognition and prominence such that it wouldn't really be a surprise to hear that they were doing so. I don't have any internal details, so maybe the numbers just didn't line up, but that would've been the investor-approved exit that allowed it to maintain some neutrality.
That leads to the next question: if GitHub didn't/couldn't IPO with all of its name recognition, why should anyone expect that GitLab will?
While Atlassian's open-source pedigree is much weaker, they own BitBucket, and they're a bootstrapped startup that focuses on developer tools. They IPO'd a few years ago. They're probably the best bet for developers interested in a "neutral" hosting platform.
Should be the big winner as the big guys move off of GitHub. Hopefully they will all go to a common site.
Finally had a single site and MS destroys it.
I am a [full-time open source developer](https://github.com/ahmadawais) working as a core developer of WordPress contributed to every single major version for the last couple of years.
I am also well versed in JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem and have a deep interest in DevOps, Cloud, and the new serverless tech. I care very deeply about Developer Experience and most of my open source work is related to dev-tooling.
Now that you know this about me, it's easier for you understand why I am writing this post, and maybe why I think my opinion matters. Below is a copy-paste from the Twitter thread that I created on this topic:
1️⃣ @Microsoft is about to acquire @GitHub. A lot of folks are skeptical. But I have a different view. Many of you know I am building a course on VSCode.pro for that, I've seen firsthand, how 🆚@Code repo is one of the best #OpenSource repos out there
2️⃣— Once I created a GitHub issue at 🆚@Code repo for markdown and I was impressed by how vscodebot auto-assigned @MattBierner (who works on Markdown of VSCode) to the issue and then @tonybrix from MarkedJS helped me out. It was best GitHub automation WITH results ever!
3️⃣— Don't "@" me coz I know about @Microsoft's history with #OpenSource. I am a full-time open sourcerer and I can't sit here quiet instead of supporting what looks like the new @Microsoft — @SatyaNadella's moving the company from @Windows dependant to in-house @Linux dev
4️⃣— Every other day I find/meet people working at @Microsoft using Linux/Mac based devices — even bought by the company for them. Guess what? 1,000 MSFT Employees pushing open source code on GitHub. This is a BIG 🆕 change. Taking it lightly in 2018 would be tomfoolery.
5️⃣— I've been most inspired by teams behind 🆚@Code (@auchenberg ) and @Azure — I think that @JeffSand has built an incredible team of @AzureAdvocates folks like @ashleymcnamara @sarah_edo @jawache @burkeholland @simona_cotin @_clarkio @John_Papa @holtbt @film_girl @TommyLee
6️⃣—I'm a big fan of "Dev Experience" (DX) that's why I pay $200 for a font I use in 🆚Code & have built s of #OpenSource dev-tooling github.com/ahmadawais—Teams at @Azure are doing a lot to make DX better for the cloud → @AzureFunctions + @Code integration is impressive!
7️⃣— GitHub's been struggling to find a new CEO for a year. What if? It's my primary code hosting company. It's helped me go full-time open source with the support from awesome dev community/companies. Safe to say that @GitHub has made #OpenSource better
8️⃣— @Microsoft has done a lot for #OpenSource in the last 4 years with @SatyaNadella.
🆚 @Code's love. @Linux Subsystem on @Windows. Draft.sh for @kubernetesio didn't have a Windows version and still offers @MacHomebrew as the go-to way of installing it!
9️⃣—@GitHub is not exactly a cash-cow. @Microsoft has put money where their mouth is — out of 1.5 Million organizations on GitHub MSFT has most GitHub contributors to its repos, it's the biggest company with over 1000 employees contributing code to GitHub →proof of good faith!
— I think @Microsoft is changing for good. The intent here's to connect with developers and not offend them by disrupting a good company. MSFT won't change a lot but this acquisition might make GitHub a lot better. Also, MSFT will jump into ROR. It's high time for #OpenSource.
What are your thoughts on this whole thing?! Peace! ️
Oh well. Github was great while it lasted. What's next?
People moving to a alternative just because they can't handle change is hilarious. Good riddance!
Can the old CEO be sued for 'breach of trust'? At least they must have to give prior notice before any of our sensitive data (trusted to github) falls into the hands of MS (untrustworthy)?
Guys and girls, I really don’t get this. It’s 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content?
Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.)
Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon’s store, Google’s search engine, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s social network ... don’t you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers?
Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we’re upset. Oh no, what’s the new owner going to do?
With a network that no one controls, we wouldn’t worry about that.
We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It’s a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to “the cloud” ie some servers owned by someone else.
Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.
We don't use Github to host Git repos alone. We use it as a tool for collaboration - to track bugs, host some documentation, do code reviews, track workflow and so on. And, most of all, we use it for discoverability. It's easy to find things on Github.
> Why did we stop at DNS?
A lot of companies host their domain servers on AWS because Route 53 makes it convenient.
A real successor to Github would allow all the extras around Git, but in a federated way. We'd deploy a server for our projects, different addresses for our repos and all members of this federation would agree on an API and share data with each other.
It's doable, but, unless it's easier than other options, it won't fly.
Back in 2011 I saw this problem — that social networking (profiles, ratings, collaboration of all kinds) is all based on centralized platforms.
Even github as you said provides all the social layer on top of git and you jusy have to trust them.
There was no good software to take care of that stuff. So we built it. It’s exactly the federated API layer you’re talking about!
Here it is:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
Can you provide more details on how IPFS/SAFE can help and if there are any interesting projects?
Yes. Any centralization/single point of failure developing on the internet is a bug.
Reading through replies to this and especially about "the death of free software" makes me ask, "Was software ever free?"
From my perspective, any software that has made it to production use ended up supported by some large for-profit corporation.
Java<-Oracle Linux<-multiple distro's with paid-for enterprise support
And IBM and other companies hiring developers to work on "free software".
Without the support of corporations, most software just dies.
So Github is losing money and can't figure out a model to become profitable. They could start charging for all repositories. They could go public, but then they're beholden to some small set of investment groups.
Microsoft, under Nadella, has been about as pro-open source as you can get.
The only change I expect from Microsoft re: Github is that they will very likely bake DevOps into their tools (Code/Visual Studio) and their cloud (Azure) so that developers can be more productive.
The illusion of free software has always been just that. An illusion.
This isn't even about free software... github is closed. It's SaaS. It just became a defacto standard interface, a sort of facebook for git. git is free and will stay that way.