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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.
This has not been my experience in any way, shape, form, or manner.
Linkedin has become absolutely insufferable since Microsoft acquired them.
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.
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."
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
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.
LinkedIn was shit before Microsoft bought it.
It is definitely worse, I ignore it entirely at this point. I would also stop using Github for different reasons, just on principle. MS needs to slink off into the night and be happy with its monopoly on dumb users who need invasive IT support.
"Has become"? When was LinkedIn not insufferable, with their constant reminder of contact requests that I was ignoring in the first place (and didn't want to log into their website to officially ignore)?
At the very least I think it is safe to say this would be good news for gitlab!
“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.
Github offers a lot more than just git. But yeah, few projects would have much difficulty moving to another system, like, say, Gitlab, if Github went rogue. Which makes me doubt that MS has any plans to turn Github rogue. There's simply not enough lock-in there.
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?
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.