Comment by aphextron
8 years ago
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?
Xamarin has improved, they've improved how git handles large repos, typescript is extremely stable...
I mean, on the consumer end they're definitely kind of failing, with the notable exception of minecraft being supported far more than any other game. Seems more like people are still stuck in the Ballmer state of mind - even Windows itself had to practically perform a 180 thanks to Ballmer's obsession with low powered tablets.
Okay, so you don't like Microsoft. But that doesn't answer the original question - why is this betrayal?
100% disagree there. microsoft has a bunch of amazing software -- vscode, visual studio, azure cloud is actually quite good, sqlserver actually runs on linux (and it's a good db!).
microsoft under satya is a great company and doesn't even compare to the ballmer days.
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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.
The GitHub founders likely did quite well. They were completely bootstrapped until they took a $100M Series A from a16z in 2012 (5 years after founding), and then took a $250M Series B valuing them at $2B from a16z, Sequoia, etc. in 2015. Figure that they gave up 12.5% in the Series B and 30% in the Series A with a 1x liquidation preference, and that they sold for $4-5B to Microsoft (it's unlikely the VCs would allow a sale that didn't at least double valuation since 2015). The three founders then split ~60% of the roughly $5B, for a cool billion dollars each.
So? The point is that millions of people are trying to create things who otherwise wouldn't.
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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.
We faced the same question, when we looked at externally hosted or on-prem.