Comment by PascLeRasc
8 years ago
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
In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.
RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing. I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.
(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)
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Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.
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Someone has to maintain it.
I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)
No, it's not a fork. They both run on Electron, so they share a common runtime environment, but they share no editor code.
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VSCode is built on top of the same framework as Atom, Electron, which was previously called Atom-shell.
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Well, answering myself... Looks like it uses the Electron Shell project which was part of Atom
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...
No, not at all. The only common component (I think) is Electron (Atom shell).
It’s not. They are both web-based but otherwise unrelated.
> 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?
Someone can just make `libreatom` and start distributing binaries. The MIT license is nice like that.
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.
What. Windows apps are far from sucking. There is still no OSS match for Windows Explorer.
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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.
Just after acquisition, Linkedin started systematically shutting down available API resources, and removing CRM support. Microsoft reigns in eventually. source:https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/linkedin-state-of-crm-2014/
redacted: i mistook the acquisition date
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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
yeah, I'm curious if those other big companies will now move their repos off of GitHub because of this. I guess these two will be the ones to watch: https://github.com/google https://github.com/apple
GitHub has had more ethics fails in the past few years than MS.
Care to elaborate?
I remember reading that they employ some muppet to check that nobody uses "hate language" and their naive "check all words in text files against this list" spotted the word "retard" as in "fire retardant" and locked the project. Appealing for common sense, or even escalating the problem to someone with a functional grasp of English didn't succeed.
You don't remember when the co-founder had to step down over harassment issues? This was all over HN a few years ago. A female developer claimed she sexually harassed and discriminated against and the company then conspired to push her with the founders' wife (not an employee) leading the charge. That guy is a billionaire now.
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/an-executive-depar...
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.
I dunno, as an Azure user, they've launched good products like Azure Insights, that were really good, which they deprecated or merged with PowerBI etc... that totally tanked them.
So I'm not super hopeful.
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.
Hopefully. The problem is the site has to be neutral. Might end up we just have the big tech companies like Google host their own which sucks but you can't blame them.
Right now looks like GitLab will just become the new GitHub.
We were just so lucky we had basically a single site with GitHub and now that will not be true any longer. We really did not have a single site for very long.
Really just wish this news was not true. But I am sure MS just could not resist.
What bothers me is I really like how the newer tech companies are all about moving the entire industry forward while helping themselves.
So Google shared Map/Reduce, K8s, TF and open source just about everything. They spend tons of money finding all the vulnerabilities and then tell their competitors when they have a problem and even help mitigate. They do it all for free and expect nothing from the companies. What Google did for Cloudflare for example with Cloudbleed is how I love it being.
I am old and remember the old days. But as MS has become less relevant those old ways have been dying.
But then it is like MS sticking in their head in the fun of the new way and mess it up. They should just do their own thing and leave the new culture alone.