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Comment by shagie

1 month ago

NPM Is Joining GitHub - https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/npm-is-joinin...

Some of it aged... interesting.

Top comment:

> Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.

> ...

To be fair, the vibes (at the time) were that Microsoft has changed. Probably, in some way, a zero-interest rate phenomena.

  • Young people thought M$ was changing, the old folks knew it was just another cycle of embrace, extend, extinguish.

    • Young people were… right?

      VS Code is open source. (Cursor is built on it!)

      GitHub didn’t embrace, extend, extinguish git. You can git push to a different company (e.g. Gitlab) and you’ve migrated. The biggest problems with GitHub are scaling and availability, not lock-in.

      Microsoft today is nothing like it was 30 or 20 years ago.

      Fifteen years ago we were writing HTML and JavaScript specifically for Internet Explorer. Edge is built on Chromium.

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    • Old folks are also aware that applies to every single big tech company that actually sponsors the FOSS tools many don't want to pay anything back, while expecting to be paid themselves.

      Old folks also remember the days when it was possible to make a living out of selling software tools.

    • The ruthlessness of the Microsoft that we remember was probably due to influence from Bill Gates.

      He is famous for hyper-competitiveness and strong desire to win at all costs.

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    • Microsoft has been causing a lot of problems lately but I completely disagree that it fits the pattern of "embrace, extend, extinguish".

MSFT acquisition of NPM was a massive shit show, they fired many staff engineers and people that were at github for quite a while. Top comment was a liar.

  • I was part of the npm team at GitHub. They laid off almost the entire team to focus on AI (CTO literally told us on the layoff announcement call that they're doing this to focus on Copilot)

  • > they fired many staff engineers

    Would you rather the company went under after it ran out of money and had to fire everyone instead? Not to mention a quarter of the company was laid off the year before the acquisition.

    • Uhh, I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right by it's workers rather than rat fucking them to appease corporate do-nothing leeches if I'm being frank.

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