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Comment by phantom_oracle

8 years ago

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

27 comments

phantom_oracle

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ajmurmann  8 years ago

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.

tomxor  8 years ago

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.

jpalomaki  8 years ago

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.

  • jononor  8 years ago

    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

timvisee  8 years ago

Although this doesn't directly have anything to do with open-source; look at what happened to Skype, LinkedIn, and other companies they acquired.

  • oblio  8 years ago

    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.

  • sb8244  8 years ago

    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

  • joering2  8 years ago

    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.

    • xt00  8 years ago

      Skype UI was changed dramatically for virtually no obvious reason and resulted in the usage of skype to be way more annoying for basically no good reason. They then rebranded Lync to be called Skype for Business which is a giant mess because like so many microsoft enterprise products it uses some strange scheme to connect to either a web-based server or to an enterprise server that invariably is not setup correctly and never works reliably. So they basically bought skype which everybody loved and turned it into something that a huge amount of people don't like now due to UI changes and created a second version of Skype that basically barely works and many people are forced to use at work..

      5 replies →

neaanopri  8 years ago

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.

  • BrandonM  8 years ago

    > 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.