Microsoft Is Talking About Acquiring GitHub, Says Report (zdnet.com)
The Welcome Rain shares a report from ZDNet: Microsoft officials have been talking to GitHub about possibly acquiring the company, according to a June 1 report in Business Insider. BI claims that the two have discussed the possibility of an acquisition on an on-and-off-again basis over the years "but in the last few weeks talks have grown more serious." BI is citing unnamed "people close to the companies" as its sources. "This isn't as surprising as it would have been ten or more years ago," writes The Welcome Rain. "Microsoft is investing a lot in git, including GVFS, a Git Virtual File System to help Git work with very large codebases. What might this mean for the future of Github?"
A few years ago I would have said it is the end of GitHub. Now it is most likely to be turned into a zombie
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
On the other hand LinkedIn actually got less obnoxious since MS bought them so let's see what happens.
Good luck suckers, I mean put all your 'code' up on a website! Good for Microsoft, buy up all those juicy snippets of code.
It means it's time to migrate your projects and close your Github account.
Bill Gates wants to Merge Github into the master branch.
For those of us that work on VSTS based systems and like everything all together, this is actually bad news.
I LIKE the calmness of VSTS over GitHub. (Sure, for social / open development, GitHub is great. For private, within the organisation? VSTS is just plain calmer.) Problem is, there will be this push to use private GitHub for things that are just easier in VSTS. And, often, what is technologically the best isn't really what matters, it's what people are paying attention to.
I, for one, welcome our Embrace, Extend, Extinguish overloards.
(he says while migrating to a superior free git repo host that already permits closed source projects, docker, and continuous integration.)
Microsoft is a master in killing off good services and scaring away users by bad product management.
... if this should ever happen. And exactly because I never wanted to have relevant data fall into the hands of an evil corporation like M$, I did not use anything besides pure public git hosting at github - a function that can easily be transferred elsewhere, as the data in the git repository itself is the only content.
Looks like Team Services isnt taking off..?
That's going to be a LOT of unemployed diversity hires once MS cleans house!
RIP GIT :(
I will never, EVER, link Github to some god damned Microsoft Live ID. Time to start mirroring to Gitlab I guess.
Always thought GITHUB was Google IT Hub.
As a former Microsoft developer, I can tell you, this is a really bad idea. Microsoft internally has one of the best revision control systems I've ever used (Source Depot), so we know they won't use it, but they will control how source code is managed and he who controls the keys to the repository also controls the builds. I vote really, really bad idea. Start moving your projects back to SourceForge.
So, if Microsoft is ambiguous about how it intends to handle people's confidential projects / personal code repos, and someone "deleted" all their content and wants to leave, will that actually be deleted or available to Microsoft? Hm.
Whatever happened to the not invented here syndrome? That's the impetus for innovation and multiple competing products!!!!
munch
This trial balloon is a thud. DO NOT WANT.
Another cool and working well tool that will became cr@p like all other products acquired by MS
Time for some kind of poison pill on githubs side.
What an incredibly effective way to piss off a large set of developers! The early adopters of git obviously were non-microsoft devs. Just discussing this now will be seen as a very serious threat to most of that population subset. Just look at any other product MS has purchased over the years to see what happened to the linux (or non-MS) version 1-2 years after the purchase.
E.g., anyone had any trouble using Skype in Linux over the last year, versus 3-5 years ago?
How long would it take before access to github is integrated into VisualStudio, and how long after that will the command-line version of git start failing to pull/push/etc to github? "Pull must be performed from within VisualStudio Team Explorer. Command-line version of git is no longer supported. Please upgrade to VisualStudio 2020."
Please, reanimate it. All I want is my little Subversion based system for a few people.
For Microsoft to be in charge of so much code is an existantial threat. The only thing worse if Microsoft takes over the Linux or BSD git repos or buys out the Wikimedia Foundation.
I have already said goodbye to Skype and Linked-In after they had been taken over.
If this happens, I would say goodbye to Github too for sure.
The users of Github are not sheep. They are not like Microsoft's typical users that would accept lock-in and clunky interfaces because they don't know any better.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
nch of psychotic assholes. Shit the same.
Not interested in trying to fight MS when they decide what is mine is theirs.
If Microsoft buys GitHub, I am moving all my code to GitLab or Bitbucket.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
SourceForge has an importer that will import your GitHub project https://sourceforge.net/p/forg...
QuarterDeck, OS/2, Xenix.
But Google kills off just as much. Remember the much-loved Google-Reader? Wave? Google-Talk?
I was a paying skype customer before MSFT.
I was a paying Nokia Maemo customer, before MSFT.
I was an early adopter for LinkedIn.
Cancelled my accounts in each, when Microsoft broke each of them.
until I started using Visual Studio Code. It is just so much better than Github's own editor. No competition. Now I run VSC on both my Linux workstation and my Macbook (both of which I started using to ditch the MS malware OS).
Anyway, VS Code is fantastic and it understands having different git repositories in a single project. I would actually be interested in seeing what they do with github, but I'm not a serious github user anyway. I've only ever used it so that I could say that I have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtyO4tmpPdk
It's pretty easy to set up your own git repo... I don't understand why more people don't do it.
#DeleteChrome
I get that they don't have good code in VSO to train their self-programming AI's on (just a bunch of business code with shitloads of patchwork by lots of maintenance devs - a true mess.) I also get that they want to stick stuff into GitHub's EULA bypassing any open source license or patent rights for themselves when code is uploaded to GitHub. But not a fucking chance will I continue using it if that traitorous corporation of so-pc-they-actually-fire-entire-departments-for-being-"too-white" globalist h1b hacks buys it out.
Interesting that I can't tell which one it is in this case.
First Hotmail, and now GitHub...
to see if any of it could be used to remove DRM.
It looks like your trying to share code that will circumvent DRM...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Cloud or self-hosted git : https://about.gitlab.com/
Check your Android phone, it typically will have some sort of mini Microsoft office apps on it, and those snarf your address book including email addresses. So you only think you gave up on Linked In but Microsoft continues to snarf your data for their giant professional data snarfing website..
“I am NOT a giant fish!” Oh, wait...
...that wasn’t the quote I was looking for. It can go about its business. Move along.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Once Microsoft bought it, Skype turned into the default business communication tool, but everybody else ran away.
If they buy GitHub, businesses will use it for their own development teams. But the rest of us will probably go to Bitbucket or elsewhere.
Just to be ready for MS' take over!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm not sure why you got down modded. Sure this is a pretty extreme view, but who really gives a crap whether you do this or not. Somone's an asshole and it's not you.
Running Gitlab off of Docker, so it's really easy. Linking separate instances is also very easy.
R.I.P. Github.
aaaaaaa
I have a repo in Github.
Been there for about ten years.
If MS buy GitHub, I will leave GitHub.
Anyway, being bought by MS is the kiss of death.
It is impossible for the culture in MS not to destroy GH. MS will screw up their product, the existing staff will leave, the MS staffers or new hires replace them, and you end up with another Skype or Nokia. MS are no good. They survive because of WIndows (which from natural monopoly is still used despite everything MS has done to discourage use) and Office (likewise).
Because Microsoft is so well-known for spurring development and competiton ... --.--
Remember the IE6 times?
Can you guys even think in in more than "Hitler VS Stalin" patterns anymore?
No, Hitler wasn't alright just because Stalin was even worse.
No, those are not the only choices.
Apart from shifting the discussion to exclude sane standpoints, forcing every view into an extreme caricature of itself, and being entirely one-dimensional, sharp, static and rigid...
They are well-known to starve companies, before devouring them. E.g. by simply giving out a deliberately made incompatible clone of your product for free until you die, or even offer your lead developer etc twice the salary and $50 million, so half your company is already there before you offiicially get eaten.
Seriously, I followed Microsoft since the days of Windows 3.x, and if you look at corporations as if they were people, the worst Lovecraftian sci-fi horror movies and Rob Zombie's "Devil's Rejects" got *nothing* on the shit that Microsoft has done.
If you are a writer, looking to make the most fucked-up horror movie ever, look no further!
Soon you will be able to login on github with the hotmail email account you created in the 90's... Gross....
In the event of Github selling out to Microsoft, I want to be sure I can download all issue discussion, wikis, and so on from my projects and then upload that information to a new service, say Gitlab. Could I get some people to suggest programs/scripts for accomplishing this?
links to.
If they do that is upstream functionality, not downstream where license compatibility issues lie. So they will just say replace the git transport protocols with microsoft proprietary ones, switch their version of git to using those ones, while only releasing the library as a windows 10 dll under restrictive licensing and conveniently sidestep any gpl issues while saddling everyone else with proprietary licensing issues. You can think of it as dynamic library tivoisation. The issue has always existed and there were many early discussions during the gplv1/v2 era about exactly these concerns: 'Hows does an upstream proprietary library affect downstream functionality?' and the debates went on for most of the 90s maybe even early 00s before petering off as sufficient open source functionality was available to make it no longer a major concern. As non 'true believers' have worked their way into open source however, many of these old licensing concerns are rearing their heads once more as the new generation have not learned their lessons from the history of the past and are doomed to repeat it again, with the added bonus of a closing door of hardware/software technology that may lock out opportunities for future open source development if allowed to proceed too far without communal pushback. Tivoisation, Palladium, and soon the Clipper chip will all be alive and well. What is old is new again.
captcha was 'righted': As in 'I hope they righted the ship, before it tipped over and sank them all!'
Itâ(TM)s not that I dislike Microsoft, but itâ(TM)s recent track record, that includes Skype and Nokia, suggest that they are best to leave the good stuff alone.
Buying an important stake in GitHub would be fine, but having so much control they meddle with a good thing, no thank you.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505
There may be others like that. M$ copying is not that unheard of. They're probably even proud of it ("I'm the best collector there is" or something like that...)
Microsoft isn't the 90s Microsoft anymore. They're banking on getting out of the software business and into the cloud business. Every single project they build these days beyond core Windows and Office has at least some open source component and they're already using Github to host all their code. Owning Github would be a way for them to build an even more seamless bridge into Azure for developers' applications. It's already incredibly easy to publish something through VSTS and the other 10,000 CI/CD tools out there.
That's the interesting thing about this whole Azure shift...they don't care what you run on their service as long as you pay them to use it. And, they get guaranteed monthly revenue without having to craft enterprise software agreements. It's an interesting shift to watch, because they're trying hard to not publicly indicate any sort of lock-in while leading people that way. If you're careful about tool selection you can make a totally portable application, but Microsoft is providing enough services that are easy and the path of least resistance...but also happen to run only on Azure.
As for what they would do with Github...probably nothing beyond building stronger Azure connections. They're out of the software and the phone/App Store business for the most part, so we're back to Developers Developers Developers...
We use an on-premise enterprise edition of Gitlab.
I would love for MSFT to acquire Github, simply because a lot of developers who live in a world of "Everything and everyone is on github, get there already!" would finally wake up and enable their tools to integrate with other repositories. The one in particular that I have in mind is Ansible Galaxy.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
No, this is about licensing. Part of the new ELU wil be change to assume intellectual property rights from any project posted to GitHub. Micro$oft will own everything. Then charge for it's use.
Whenever I hear of MS acquiring a company I'm reminded of that Simpsons episode where Gates buys out Homer. It doesnt appear like that reputation has changed, even after all these years and changes in the company's management. I was an avid Minecraft player and enjoyed frequent additions to the game which kept me engaged. I was skeptically optimistic when MS acquired Mojang, hoping MS would positively influence development, but that didn't seem to come to fruition and updates are less frequent than ever. When I read that MS is increasing contributions/influence in open source I can't help to wonder what their actual motivation is. Then I'm reminded again of that Simpsons episode.
I'll be gone. That's what it will mean.
Or they could rewrite the code from scratch. But that doesn't matter, because, as I pointed out at some length, nobody is locked into Github, and if they try to replace the protocol it speaks, projects will simply move somewhere else where git still works.
(And VS will have to continue to support regular git because of the many critical projects that aren't hosted on Github, or that would move off of Github if Github became MS-only.)
The only reason people use Github is because it's convenient and has a large community. Trying to turn it into something MS-specific would make it less convenient and reduce the size of its community (and give a huge boost to projects like Gitlab). If they wanted a proprietary VCS, they could have simply stuck with SourceSafe (or whatever it was called--I haven't used any MS products in decades).
This. Unless MS wants to drive users away...
Keep your dirty hands off Github you parasites.