Slashdot Mirror

https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

And this widely ignored comment

Which is retarded since it conflates git and GitHub.

Maybe they shouldn't have posted as AC, since most people wouldn't have seen the comment to start with.

Which is retarded since it conflates git and GitHub.

'Git', not 'git'.

Oh STFU! It's the same difference!

$ man git | grep -A1 ^NAME
NAME
git - the stupid content tracker

No, it is

What's the business model, inquiring minds want to know?

How long until you need a microsoft account to use github?

How long until commercial customers also need to subscribe to Office 365?

Given other activity by Microsoft, I wonder if Software Freedom Conservancy needs to step in and protect the Git mark.

(https://www.git-scm.com/about/trademark section 2.3)

Oh just give micro shat your name address phone number and date of birth now and get it over with

You forgot SSN, employer and income and Credit card#.

$M needs it all

You're right. What would I do without my daily dose of homophobic poetry and spam posts from India?

Norman the Psychopathic AI will be joining the bot conversation soon ... get ready for a new twist of dark humour.

I do NOT have a GitHub account and when GitHub was born I predict that sooner
or later a private company services that act as the "sole" hub in FOSS will be a
bad news.

Unfortunately "modern" devs do not know how to use even mail to develop software,
they do not know how to use Emacs or Vim, they feel the need of tons of different sw
most of them client-server based.

I'm not claiming that you won't find stuff like that at -1, but there is also plenty of modding down of post simply because they go against the alt-right or ayn rand fanboys.

Whether you have any interest in such posts or wish them to stay there, is another question.

How long until you need a microsoft account to use github?

It's as if the voices of a million geeks just cried out in pain, then were silenced.

Ah yes the good old days of the 1980s when people would mail paper forms in from the jungle to be typed in, run on a mainframe and the error log mailed back. Turnaround time 2-3 weeks. Encouraged people to double check their work.

Well this probably wont end well, but probably be anyones guess on how

Least you're prepared to give Microsoft a perpetual license to use your code in any way they see fit.

You know what they'll put in the usage terms with regard to what you are allowed to do with your project?

You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

Well shit. That's gonna seriously impact all my MIT licensed code on GitHub...

You're trying to be funny, but you do bring up a great question- if MS changes the terms of agreement, does that agreement supersede your chosen license?
Might not matter much with an MIT Licensed code base, but what of AGPL? Sleepy Cat? BSD 0? Buy Me A Beer?
Interesting things are going to be afoot if Microsoft tries to confer additional rights to themselves.

It is easy to replicate git repositories. So easy it is a piece a cake compared to moving a cvs or another centrally managed repository. In git, every repository is equal whether it is local, on github, sourceforge etc.

Just replicate the repositories to your environment, then, just push it to a new remote. The new remote will have everything. I regularly do this to pull from our GitLab environment and push specific public changes to GitHub or other specific changes to companies git repositories. You can pretty much control whatever you wish to propagate.

This happened to TV tropes

that doesn't move issues, wiki, etc though.

Microsoft already something a bit like Github called VSTS and so far haven't claimed any right to any code on there.

Technically any cloud provider already has access to your code, included compiled code if you're running a CI/CD pipeline there...

That sounds like a lot of trouble for microsoft, as well ibm, apple etc depends on stuff in github and they may get lawyer happy.
But doing some sneaky datamining and using it to basically get their paws on the good programmers on the platform before the other corporations can touch em is a thing i'm pretty sure they will do.

The Hotel California Clause

Well, that might be true, but they are not really in a position to change their terms of use behind your back and simply say "all your code are belong to us" quite the same way - plus, they are not Microsoft. It has happened before, and those times Microsoft weren't even involved. You expect better from them!? The only company which would probably be worse would be Oracle...

Microsoft being Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them trying to pull some shit to shaft open source projects, and if you're a commercial competitor to them you're crazy if you stay on the platform.

Well, that might be true, but they are not really in a position to change their terms of use behind your back and simply say "all your code are belong to us" quite the same way - plus, they are not Microsoft. It has happened before, and those times Microsoft weren't even involved. You expect better from them!? The only company which would probably be worse would be Oracle...

or Apple or Amazon. The latter is even worse as they also have access to most companies' data.

Congratulations. You understood the reference.

And codeplex before that.

So glad I went bitbucket.

Makes sense that a vendor not willing to offer private repos without pay will eventually sell out... to the worst possible candidate at that...

Why does everyone expect digital/virtual goods and services to be free? And then those same people flip shit about the advertising and sales of submitted and extrapolated data about them. The resources to host this stuff, and do so reliably, quickly, and securely, is not cheap. The cost to continue improving it is not cheap. Explain to me, please, why you expect a whole lot of something for absolutely nothing.

Why does everyone expect digital/virtual goods and services to be free? And then those same people flip shit about the advertising and sales of submitted and extrapolated data about them.

Y'all got any more of that good strawman? Who is this everybody?

The resources to host this stuff, and do so reliably, quickly, and securely, is not cheap. The cost to continue improving it is not cheap. Explain to me, please, why you expect a whole lot of something for absolutely nothing.

That is all beside teh point. This is Microsoft, they manage to turn things to shit very quickly. Perhaps they will raise GitHub to the quality of their Windows 10 updates, eh? I wouldn't be surprised if the first thing they do is require a Microsoft account to access anything as well.

Why does everyone expect digital/virtual goods and services to be free?

Because reality? We release free software with no strings attached because doing so is good for our own business. The primary motivation is selfishness.

The resources to host this stuff, and do so reliably, quickly, and securely, is not cheap.

Never in the history of the world has it been cheaper than it is right now. Costs are only getting lower with each new day.

Explain to me, please, why you expect a whole lot of something for absolutely nothing.

It's not nothing. It's at the very least cheap advertising. By making github a globally recognized leader in version control as a service EVERYONE knows it exists and therefore at least commercial closed source software houses are more likely to consider using github to manage their own projects.

This is the very same reason coverity is free for open source projects. It's a savvy marketing opportunity that's good for business. Without the freebies nobody would care that Microsoft purchased github because none of you would have ever heard of it in the first place.

I wouldn't be surprised if the first thing they do is require a Microsoft account to access anything as well.

That's what I thought too :) In any case, one way or another they want to make changes to get some profit out of this transaction which in turn will most likely make life as a GitHub user less than it is today. I don't know the degree but based on their past behavior I cannot expect anything else. Microsoft and Amazon are like Borg.

Time for the alternatives to rise up. Once the projects are moving to greener pastures I predict Microsoft might sell it for a lot cheaper than they will buy it for.

Well people who registered for github did supply some personal information, that is worth something. Plus along with that I am fairly certain by examining various repositories (including private) they can determine who are the better coders and can sell that information to head hunters.

So nothing is free

And I forgot to add, by owing linkedin M/S can mine quite a bit of data between that and github.

Never in the history of the world has it been cheaper than it is right now. Costs are only getting lower with each new day.

And github continues to lose tens of millions of dollars a year, 'low cost' is relative and in this case it is a long way from 'free'.

By making github a globally recognized leader in version control as a service EVERYONE knows it exists and therefore at least commercial closed source software houses are more likely to consider using github to manage their own projects.

Which hasn't stopped it being a massive money loser. Your ideas are nice in theory but in reality you're talking losses in the tens of millions.

I agree completely. I totally trust up and coming monopolies so much more than the established variety.

What a strawman. I don't expect Github to provide me anything. My company pays them a fair price for the service of hosting our internal projects, providing fairly intuitive collaboration tools and managing our corporate-affiliated user accounts. The other value we get from Github is entirely user-generated: the ability to fork open source dependencies and publish our patches.

Everyone in this sense is no literally everyone. It's just the vast majority: people who cried about Facebook and other social media tracking you. People who get annoyed at the ads in windows services. Definitely to anyone using an adblocker (of which I am guilty), but still saying good/services should not have a pricetag attached.

As for the hardware being cheaper now than ever? Yeah, it is cheaper. But that doesn't mean it's pennies to buy or maintain. Its certainly not free, so there still needs to be some form of revenue. Obviously you aren't part of the purchasing process for new hardware.

Everyone in this sense is no literally everyone. It's just the vast majority: people who cried about Facebook and other social media tracking you. People who get annoyed at the ads in windows services. Definitely to anyone using an adblocker (of which I am guilty), but still saying good/services should not have a pricetag attached.

As for the hardware being cheaper now than ever? Yeah, it is cheaper. But that doesn't mean it's pennies to buy or maintain. Its certainly not free, so there still needs to be some form of revenue. Obviously you aren't part of the purchasing process for new hardware.

Shit man, I've built systems and specified purchases my entire career. So you're wrong on that.

You confuse wanting free stuff with adblocking. The real problem with the ads is that so much of it isn't ads. Its trackers and malware and page loading speed and jumpy web pages, and consumption of bandwidth that we are paying actual money for. I use ad and scriptblocking to protect myself and my computer, not so that I don't see the ads. Put them up without all of the extraneous bullshit, and I'd stop blocking them.

So I've turned on a lot of people to adblockers. They've called me in because they thought they had a virus or that their computer needed replaced. Put an adblocker in, and it's like a new computer. Most weren't ready for scriptblocking though..

This is a problem the ad providers hve to fix, not for me to put up with.

Watch for defections once Microsoft starts integrating the crap out of it into .net and Azure, and subsequently pressures developers into creating a windows store version of their app that nobody ever uses.

Maybe all Microsoft wants is to prevent Google from acquiring GitHub and integrating the crap out of it into Google's cloud platform. In that case Microsoft doesn't have to integrate anything, they can just sit on their acquisition.

Let me put an image in your mind:

"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"

I... See...Wet...Armpits

Want to feel old? There are slashdot readers that weren't alive when that chant took place.

I well remember Steve prancing about in the video, hoarse as a drill instructor and from all appearances, the sweat he was producing left no doubt in my mind his Right Guard went left. That and the chair-throwing incident when a key developer fled to Google are his two famous one-offs.

It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable?

I keep seeing the same behavior that happened during the first dotcom boom - companies valued at stupid multiples of "earnings", including what are technically negative earnings, being valued far in excess of their worth. A company is only worth its future profits discounted at the rate of the next best investment of that money, minus its initial and ongoing investments. The longer it takes to return a profit, the exponentially more difficult it is to recover the initial investment. Only a fundamental change or an external factor like currency inflation can distort that picture into a supposedly rosy one.

Perhaps GitHub can have some of its cost structures reduced by riding on Microsoft's coattails. Perhaps there's some breakthrough that Microsoft can see with them, although I don't think there's a tremendous synergy there. The basic model has been there before (SourceForge), and it could technically be duplicated again by someone else. Many developers/repos will simply bail due to Microsoft's history of changing business terms. Heck, they rolled "Teams" out which is supposed to compete with Slack.

More power to the current owners of GitHub if they get bought out, as it's a great tool. I just think P.T. Barnum really was right, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop in this latest boom.

According to some accounting, user-base = $$

I guess it's all about having the potential to screw over as many people as possible for money.

It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable?

Because thanks to the magic of ToS that can be changed on a whim, Microsoft can just magik in a "all your codes belongs to us" clause.

Perhaps they can add their EULA constraints to the legal agreement?
o All source code released here Microsoft reserves the right to use free of charge
o No source code projects may compete against existing Microsoft projects.
o Microsoft reserves at any time to refuse to host any project it feels isn't acceptable.

Everyone has heard of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. Maybe they will make github only accessible through Visual Studio or some cloud computing service.

GitHub has been profitable for years.

I also want to know, because I also want to make an unprofitable company worth billions...

It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable?

Because thanks to the magic of ToS that can be changed on a whim, Microsoft can just magik in a "all your codes belongs to us" clause.

"all your codes are belong to us"--FTFY

If you think that ToS are enforceable, then why not simply change it to say that everyone visiting the website must pay 1 million dollars?

It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable?

Because capitalism is a zero-sum game after all. Your assets are worth more when you destroy the other people's assets. GitHub is a tool that has made developing free software enjoyable. Being owned by Microsoft obliterates the fun in one swell swoop. What remains will be shriveled up by a cascade of Terms of Service changes.

It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable

The classic Economics answer, is that you believe that it is unprofitable because it is poorly managed, and that you can do a better job of managing it to profitability. This usually means that you can integrate it with your existing businesses, streamline, and cut a lot of costs. This also usually includes massive layoffs at the purchased company, accompanied by folks jumping ship to look elsewhere for a job, before they are eventually fired.

IBM's ThinkPad business was unprofitable when Lenovo bought it. Lenovo turned it around into profitability.

Of course, there are often other ulterior motives. Microsoft bought Nokia because they thought Nokia built hardware would help Windows Phone be a success.

Microsoft was wrong. So they did what any other rational investor would do . . . cut your losses and let it die.

We'll see in about a year what Github's fate is . . . profitability . . . or death . . .

> why pay anything if they're unprofitable?

Same reason Google was doing military AI stuff on a measly $9 million dollar contract. It's whatever they're looking at 3-5 years down the line that you should be concerned about, not this week's problems.

Microsoft just bought developer mindshare. And, I'll bet there is a behind-the-scenes migration of GitHub's hosting to Azure before 2019 as they can just use unused cloud compute resources that would be idle cycles otherwise to host.

What does that do to the cost model?

GitHub is highly strategic. It's value extends beyond its revenue to its brand, its momentum, and its position at the crux of the exceedingly important developer demograpchic. If they mostly sit on it, they can use it to effectively push MS's FOSS projects over competitors that marginalize MS's own proprietary products.

What comes to mind for me is Node.js. It's one of the first really popular developer platforms to come around that really made Windows a second class citizen. MS has pushed their way into the community and found solutions to those issues, but it shows how MS is vulnerable in this space.

Especially since their biggest desktop competitor (OS X) is much more compatible with their largest server competitor (Linux), and aligned with the mobile OSes which actively undermine MS's position as a dominant player. It's a perfect shit storm for MS.

They can't change the GPL terms of service of grandfathered code.

Not necessarily. A lot of companies will acquire and keep running losses on those just to keep the market share, account information or some integration or whatever is actually "valuable" in the grander scheme of things. Some things just aren't expressed in money.

Microsoft has been chasing developers since Ballmer got forced out. With low cost or free development cloud infrastructure and free dev tools, hardware and software. They think the future is going to be in custom middleware in the cloud and they're betting big on it.

GitHub is highly strategic. It's value extends beyond its revenue to its brand, its momentum, and its position at the crux of the exceedingly important developer demograpchic.

Well, the free GitHub project license already includes the condition that your project may be terminated and removed at any time for any reason. Say if you host something legal but inconvenient for Microsoft on GitHub? You know, stuff like Samba, or ReactOS, or CoreBoot. Projects like that can just be nipped in the bud.

Why are unprofitable companies worth so much?

I think the short answer is that if you have anything that's big and popular somebody will buy it and try to monetize it or integrate it into their portfolio. Consider it a way of buying access to a market, even if the app with a million users isn't making money it's a million people you could try to sell some add-on service to. And you wouldn't be cold calling them, the option would be there teasing you whether it's selling hats in TF2 or Azure cloud hosting. Unless the bubble bursts and nobody wants to make a bet on your users, but in a normal market there's always somebody.

> migration of GitHub's hosting to Azure

Interesting tactic. If I remember correctly from what my friend said that's a director at Mindtree that does support for Azure, they have over 700 services of which many basically see no usage. The list:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/

I guess if you can't get people to use your products, buying customers is your only choice. I just wish they would reduce prices instead. In our trial, we found that Azure was about 25% more expensive than AWS for our use case.

It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable?

It's only unprofitable when run ethically.

How and why does it oblterate the fun?

They come out with new features all the time but are really crap at advertising them.

Because there is a difference between "you must pay 1 million dollars" and "That 1 million dollars you have given us for 'safe keeping' is now ours."

If they could work out the legal arrangement right, Microsoft's TOS change could be closer to the latter than former.

Perhaps GitHub can have some of its cost structures reduced by riding on Microsoft's coattails. Perhaps there's some breakthrough that Microsoft can see with them, although I don't think there's a tremendous synergy there. The basic model has been there before (SourceForge), and it could technically be duplicated again by someone else. Many developers/repos will simply bail due to Microsoft's history of changing business terms. Heck, they rolled "Teams" out which is supposed to compete with Slack.

Perhaps Microsoft modifies the EULA to allow themselves to patent and use without attribution any open source code posted to GitHub. Oh wait, that's exactly what this is and not any of the things you said.

No it hasn't lol https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

I wonder if this will be like when they bought hotmail, then spent forever running BSD -- because they just couldn't manage running in on NT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com#MSN_Hotmail

It would be exceptionally amusing if Azure + whatever else couldn't handle github.

An interesting point.

Just using it as a tie-in to find and hire *just* the specific talent you are looking for, is a potential as well. Github is like the ultimate resume, and anyone owning it has metrics, data, and info behind the scenes -- without having to publicly scrape (and perhaps be blocked) Github externally...

One issue is too much investment capital (and its associated expectations) and not enough good opportunities to invest it in. It is one of the things causing behind the scenes friction with the 'trade deficit' obsession we see today. A lof that trade money comes back as investment dollars, which increases competition for investment opportunities that domestic investors have to fight over.

Sometimes they buy companies that they think could be a menace to their business in the future. I think this is one of the reasons for Whatsapp's acquisition by Facebook.

"all your codes are belong to us"--FTFY

"all your code are belong to us" - FTFY

Microsoft bought Nokia because they thought Nokia built hardware would help Windows Phone be a success.

Microsoft was wrong. So they did what any other rational investor would do . . . cut your losses and let it die.

Sorry, this doesn't pass the laugh test. MS went to great lengths to sabotage then kill Nokia.

Oh, Is it time for the meme redux?

As I see it, Github is the #1 competitor to Team Foundation Server and there is tremendous value for Microsoft to get into the revision control business (Its their weakest point). I could see some really exciting things happen with open source .dll files integrated into Visual Studio.

Businesses would be the target market, the solo programmer reaps the rewards

. . . profitability . . . or death . . .

Sounds like an Eddie Izzard joke!

The oligarchy LOVES censorship.

Big Brother Facebook just wanted to read everybody's private messages on WhatsApp.

The cost model is you will see github called VIsual Studio Github 365 online. Sure you can use the web interface for free like Office 365 but the real goodies requires Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code if you are poor or on Linux.

We will see gVFS Git Virtual File System and backup utilities for larger projects and online collobaration tools added ... but they require a Visual Studio subscription to turn these on etc. But for simple things it will remain free.

This is what happened to LinkedIN. It is still free but if you want to post your resume or make networking connections with customers or talk to HR it costs $30 a month for the pro version etc.

Since MS submitted GVFS to Linus he can fork it and offer the same service for free with another provider if this becomes a problem.

No no - they turned unethical years ago. Yet they continue to turn a handsome loss.

Looks like new ideas you can build a company around that attracts lots of users (aka be first) are 'worth' the most.

Github is build as a distributed system, I don't think the infrastructure below it is all that hard to move to an other provider.

That's not the point.

However, they can, for instance say "we don't host code licensed under the GPL", or "by using our service, you're granting Microsoft a perpetual license to use your code anyway we want, including scanning it for code we think look like some of ours and suing you for it. You're also indemnifying Microsoft for any kind of patent infringement your code might contain, and any further work you put in is the property of Microsoft Corp". I'm sure there are many many other evil things they can do that I can't even imagine because IAANAL.

Shit like that has happened before, don't trust Microsoft to be above it. There is only one way to be sure, and that's leaving ASAP and removing any trace of your code before they take over.

It doesn't matter if the "rights" they give themselves are completely unconscientious and/or unreasonable. Microsoft can just act like they aren't and then you're stuck in court trying to sue them for infringing on or removing your rights. Good luck.

Just saying "the code is GPL" is no protection.

It may be more about the brand recognition then profits. Creating a world leading product/service is not that simple even for the big companies (remember Codeplex?) but owning one brings some credits to the company brand and their other services. GitHub is the open source platform of these days and Microsoft themselves are currently having over 1800 public repositories there. So integrating the whole platform will just let them feel more at home there and earn some credits for owning the top code sharing platform.

It should not affect small businesses who already took a decision to host their code externally. Chances are high that with Microsoft supervision the platform will be even more secure. Only Google and the likes may be concerned by being depended on services run by their competitors and move to alternative places.

Somehow I can't see that one getting through in court. Even in the US.

Given MS's recent purchare of LinkedIn, I'd say that sounds accurate.

You're right, I was confused.

The only difference that I see is that, to get paid, Microsoft would have to go to court, while in the software license case, Microsoft can serve itself directly.

What about a company that can serve itself money directly? What if paypal.com changed its ToS to say "you must pay 1 million dollars", and emptied everyone's paypal balance? Can this legally be done?

You must have been born yesterday.

Freezing money invoking safeguards against fraud is not the same.

To answer the ToS legality question with a blog post, you need to find a story where Paypal stole someone's money invoking their ToS, and where the victim went to court to get their money back and lost.

ICKY POO!!!!!

And were suddenly erased.

I hope Microsoft just leaves it alone. It seems they must tinker with things and generally stuff it up. Have they never heard "If it aint broke, don't fix it"?

Have they never heard "If it aint broke, don't fix it"?

Microsoft believes in, "It it ain't broke, how are we supposed to make money on support contracts?"

> Have they never heard "If it aint broke, don't fix it"?

You obviously don't remember Hotmail; before gates and company sank their fangs into it, that is.

Dude it's 2018 no one is remembering Hotmail.

I well remember Hotmail and the fiasco that ensued. Hotmail was running like a champ on FreeBSD, and when they tried to port the whole mess to Windows Server NT 4.0, it failed and they had to revert. I was working in IT in the D.C. Metro area and our Microsoft rep told us about it. It took them forever to get it ported over and working correctly. It was at that time I switched over to Yahoo and then when Fastmail came onto the scene, I moved over and remain there to this day.

Being in IT over three decades gives me a unique view into where we've been compared to now. Things are actually getting worse in many regards. I remember mainframes and worked on several. For years I worked on Sun E10Ks and miss terribly having a Sun Sparc workstation running Solaris 7 and FVWM for a desktop. This was back when the notion of "the priesthood of the computer" was alive and well. IT people were special and looked upon with awe and suspicion because it was all seemingly black magic to the everyman. I miss those days...

> Have they never heard "If it aint broke, don't fix it"?

You obviously don't remember Hotmail; before gates and company sank their fangs into it, that is.

Let's talk about Danger and the Sidekick.

Why hello, Gitlab

I hear Bit Bucket is good too.

Both offer unlimited private repos.

People should have abandoned Github years ago when they declared meritocracy to be problematic and began banning people for not being racist or sexist.

Gitlab is a dumpsterfire on resources. It uses 12GB RAM and 0.5 load avg on an E3-1270v6 while *sitting idle*.

Self-hosted gogs is the way to go. It runs on a raspberry pi or in the cloud on a $2/mo bargain basement VPS no problem.

Bitbucket works pretty well, especially within the rest of the Atlassian suite. Of course then you're within a bit of walled garden as far as higher level interaction with the VCS, but it's still standard Git repos at the base of it, unless you go with Mercurial. It's free for a small number of developers in a private repo, and pretty cheap at scale.

There is always Amazon CodeCommit...

Gitea is a fork with more features and security patches that has left Gogs behind.

Yeah, no.

It is? Maybe you have configured gitlab wrong, but right now the entire VM it's setting on here is only 2.3GiB hardly 12GiB as you say. Oh and this is the stock Debian package. Have a different result? Then your distro is a dumpster file and you should git rid of it. (using your logic)

Hopefully you have a better reason other than "Yeah no" which is somewhat oxymoronic at that. In your opinion, what's wrong with Amazon CodeCommit?

My laziness in never moving from Sourceforge appears to be .. paying off??

Thank you that looks interesting.

I guess the point is:
not interested in dealing with/depending on an other company.

Reasonable. Are you going to self host, or just stay with github?

For the company I work at, we were already running Gitlab.

Had already set up Gitlab for my personal private repos on a server I run for my personal projects.

Today I learned Gitea also exists. That could mean, even less resource usage.

YES.

"You're doing it wrong." end of discussion.

I use gitlab, and I have to agree with what GP said, gitlab will use everything it can get it's hands into.

I tried looking into why, apparently some issue with Ruby on rails memory management.

Long story short, if you use gitlab, put it on its own server with nothing else running, give it 2 CPUs and 4 GB of RAM, and you'll be fine.

Interesting that this comment was modded "overrated". Some shills at work perhaps? Or just my usual stalkers.

Bye, GitHub.

Time to get out to github, ASAP!

Same here.

But I'm a nobody, and my OSS project are of little importance. What matters the most now is migrating this away from the Microsoft trap...

Microsoft just doesn't know how to make friends and keeps trying to buy them.

No way. Dumped Skype and Linkedin after they bought them too.

But I'm just a $20 a month small fry and that's ok, they won't miss my money. This is obviously a way to lock-in corporate revenue and boot the little guys out. Again, that's capitalism and it's fine too.

Bottom line, Github is officially now a zombie corpse.

This is obviously a way to lock-in corporate revenue and boot the little guys out.

It's probably a lot more nefarious than that. All they have to do is add a sentence to the EULA granting them rights to the code posted on the platform and 99% of the projects there will blindly hit accept before realizing it.

How were you managing to pay $20 a month for Skype or LinkedIn?

But now that MS has acquired Github, it too shall be turned to shit just like practically every other online acquisition MS has made since... ever. Time to move to Bitbucket or Gitlab

Not really.

Microsoft will 99 out of 100 leave Github alone. Like the Minecraft or LinkedIn acquisitions, Microsoft knows if they mess the community they will not get money out of it. Admittedly LinkedIn hasn't turned out super well, but that is LinkedIn's fault and not MS.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Github in fact spun off again in a few years as a non-profit. Microsoft is one of the biggest software development companies out there and VSTS just isn't working out. This means that Microsoft would want to move their source to a better option -> and that really boils down to Github or Gitlab. Once MS realizes they can trust it, they'll let it be. I realize this place is loaded with people that have solid reasons to not trust MS, but under Satya things are quite a bit different. It's worth giving them the benefit of the doubt while preparing a backup plan in the event it goes south.

But now that MS has acquired Github, it too shall be turned to shit just like practically every other online acquisition MS has made since... ever.
Time to move to Bitbucket or Gitlab

All that glisters is not gold... Sure, it will be turned to shit, but that is going to be one shiny turd in the leading manure heap of software business.

are belong to us.

Sourceforge offers git, so it seems like a perfectly reasonable bit of self-promotion to add. And it’s not like Whipslash is removing mentions of the other possible places people might consider migrating to.

Z Shell’s home is on SourceForge. If I wanted to take the time, I could come up with other prominent SF denizens for you - but regardless it’s apparent not everyone shares your sentiments.

The current owners do seem to be trying to turn SF back into a useful home for open-source projects. It looks to me like they've removed most/all of the crappy behaviors put in place by Certain previous owners. It’s not the only game in town... but it’s a legitimate competitor again.

Thanks 93. I appreciate it. Sometimes I feel like someone saw it fit to burn down a museum and all the contents inside, and I stepped in to put out the fire, yet I still get some really vile hatred. In case anyone is wondering, here's what we've done since we acquired SourceForge in 2016 https://sourceforge.net/blog/i...

Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in.

Hey cool. The Digg of source code repositories still thinks it’s relevant.

Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in.

Hey cool. The Digg of source code repositories still thinks it’s relevant.

They aren't relevant yet. This is the second chance. One of GitLab, Sourceforge, BitBucket or a completely new entrant is going to end up the winner. The question is, which one? Let's start the bidding war.

I believe the opening bid is GitLab with, "you can get a reasonable open source version of the bits of our web site you care about but without the statistics and other commercial features". Who's going to raise us a statistics module?

All the people who f*cked over Sourceforge because they needed the newest and greatest shiny thing now have to sleep in bed with Microsoft. On behalf of the old timers, I just want to say bwahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhaahhaha..... (deep breath) bwhahahahaahahahahhhahahahahahahahhaahahahahahahhahahahahahaa

Sourceforge fucked over itself by becoming an ad-infested, malware-peddling shithole. It’s cute that the people running it still think anyone cares.

Completely different owners did that. We got rid of all that nonsense.

If so, you might also have considered changing the name, to distance yourself even more from what it was. The whole name became rather... tarnished.

Sure. Just to make you alt-reich snowflakes cry like babies.

I have never understood the name. A site for people who participate in the forgery of source code???

No, DICE fucked over Soureforge and damn near took Slashdot with it (Beta anyone?).

Sourceforge and Freshmeat.NET (retardedly "rebranded" Freecode and NO WAY IN RELATED to .COM), were fucking EPIC sites. If you wanted anything OSS, Freshmeat was where you went. Whether or not they were profitable is different matter, the landscape has certainly changed. It's not so far fetch for example to have a site like Freshmeat backed by nodes with torrents or something.

The pre rebranded version was a bit less cluttered but the current readonly Freshmeat is still a simplistic, perfect interface.

Wow, the reactions and commentary on this site does not allow much room for change

Come tomorrow morning, millions of CI pipelines will break. Nobody will remember npm left-pad anymore.

Very possible.
We already made the arrangements to move our repo's in-house. The new server is getting set up as I speak and tonight the sources move.
In like 2 weeks will the accounts on Github close (so people have the time to fix upstream)

Shipping malware in their releases should have been enough to end them.

Completely different owners did that. We got rid of all that nonsense in 2016

Yes, and now you're just a big, racist, xenophobic propaganda-spreading shit-hole, so why would anyone have any trust in SourceForge being better? And don't pretend you're not aware of the endless streams of racist, anti-semitic and hateful comments that goes on here. You happily let them all stand, no matter how often reported.

We got rid of all that nonsense in 2016

Switch from Microsoft and their evil 1995 practices to our product... we've been non-evil since 2016!

Again, completely different ownership. Our only history is removing all that crap and spending a lot of time and resources on improvements.

This place is also loaded with people who feel that they must hate the thing that is currently cool to hate. Hipsterizing your every thought is an effective way to avoid actually thinking. Of course MS is not anywhere close to pure, but not pure evil either. They will tend to act in what they perceive their best interests to be. The key is to guess how they will perceive them. Satya seems to have a reasonably evolved view on such things, so I don't expect any truly stupid shit to happen. Of course, that's not always the case with any company, small or large.

That's where my code won't be.

No way.

I've been kicked in the face, in a business damaging way, by Microsoft acquisitions. In fact a couple of times.

There's no way that my intellectual property, open source or not, will be under Microsoft control.

Exactly this. I'll be moving to bitbucket (thanks Atlassian).

Microsoft might not ruin this, but on their history, I'll actively have one foot out the door, rather than passively.

I was somewhat active on LinkedIn — until Microsoft bought it.

I was somewhat active on Goodreads — until Amazon bought it.

Because with these large corporations, you just never know what of retroactive TOS root canal is coming down the turnpike, on any given day.

Once these corporations get to a certain size, it almost takes radioactive blow-back from the community to deflect their course in any meaningful way. And I don't enjoy the galloping pony-swap for the duration as this plays out.

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Microsoft will 99 out of 100 leave Github alone. Like the Minecraft or LinkedIn acquisitions, Microsoft knows if they mess the community they will not get money out of it. Admittedly LinkedIn hasn't turned out super well, but that is LinkedIn's fault and not MS.

Kinda like Skype, eh? Don't worry though - nothing has ever been Microsoft's fault.

Sourceforge has become a terrible place ever since they started packaging crap with the software I download from them.

Completely different owners did that. We got rid of all that nonsense back in 2016

It's admirable how you've responded to so many comments about the misdeeds of Sourceforge's previous owners.

But, like a guy named Hitler running for chancellor of Germany, you might want to consider changing the name. Now seems like an opportune time.

Some percentage of Github users are definitely going to leave, because they will never trust Microsoft. I'm certainly curious as to how big of a percentage A certain percentage of those will never trust Sourceforge, no matter how much you assure them that things are different now.

Maybe. Although to use your analogy, I'd consider us more "Germany" than the individual who runs it.

Minecraft is neither here nor there, and LinkedIn is just a site that was already on its way out.

GitHub is not only TEH CLOWD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111eleven, but it solves a real problem for Microsoft.

That means Nutella's going to stick his dick in without lube, just like what he did to Skype.

On the plus side, maybe some useless SJWs will get terminated on the way down. I already moved to Gitlab despite a retarded UI and catastrophically bad speed (which admittedly has gotten better) when GitHub initially started pandering to numpty cunts whining about feels instead of bugs.

It's good again now, thanks for fixing it.

One thing though, like Slashdot it keeps asking for permissions over and over no matter how often you decline. GDPR allows you to remember that preference with a cookie. Or just make it less intrusive than a full screen overlay.

Z Shell’s home is on SourceForge. If I wanted to take the time, I could come up with other prominent SF denizens for you - but regardless it’s apparent not everyone shares your sentiments.

Z shell? That’s the best you could come up with? Hahaha.

That's just a mirror, the official repo is at kernel.org, while the real master is on Linus' disk. Anyone, Microsoft included, is allowed to mirror it all they want.

Arthur Dent quotes aside, I think it's time to stop using GitHub. Seriously. Dear Microsoft, anything that you acquire I will drop like a bad habit. You have been shiftless, mean, sneaky, and just generally a shitty corporate citizen for over 30 years now. Buy up anything you want. It will immediately go to the top of my "do not recommend" list.

What's wrong with you?

And Github has dozens of projects from Google, Facebook, Mozilla and other huge tech companies. Your quaint little z shell pales in relevancy.

"GitHub is an essential tool for coders"

No it's not. It's a *useful* tool for *many* coders. Many other coders use other cloud-based source code control services - or none at all.

It's important that we be precise in our language, and stop resorting to hyperbole.

Take it up with Bloomberg

Plonk

Quite -- I exclusively use SVN, and host it locally.

It most certainly is if you want HR or a hiring IT manager see your work.

I see Github links already in online job ads and applicant tracking systems. The clueless 22 year old chick in HR will look at your resume/application and not see a GitHub link and immediately delete your application if it's not there. DONE

The wonderful joys of the job hunt.

Oh please...

This is tripe. I've never been asked for a repo or even code samples. Whiteboard interviews or sit down and show us how to do something or find errors in something on a screen. An HR drone wouldn't know a git repo from a repo man. Not every shop even uses cloud-based repos. Many still do their thing in house, especially if they are writing proprietary software, which I most often do. I've released precious little to the world due to NDAs.

casings works at github. The mandatory company hormone treatment makes him bitchy.

If Microsoft does acquire Github, does that mean that they will instantly have access to all the private repos from Google, Apple, IBM, etc?

That's an extremely excellent point.

Now granted, MS probably has a backdoor on all these companies, given they probably all use Windows/Office in house (even apple). So they probably always have a pretty good idea on the kind of stuff going on.

However, given there is a really good chance they host some of their private code on GitHub, which would have been outside of prying eyes, that really should get these companies worried. If I were them, I'd file anti-trust complaints and block the sale. But there is a good chance MS has already thought of this and said they will play nice.

If I were them, I'd file anti-trust complaints and block the sale. But there is a good chance MS has already thought of this and said they will play nice.

Who wants to end up locked in a room with a 500lb gorilla playing nice?

If Microsoft does acquire Github, does that mean that they will instantly have access to all the private repos from Google, Apple, IBM, etc?

Ding Ding Ding. Everyone, especially as a private Corporation, should be moving their code off ASAP. Microsoft WILL begin if they haven't already, indexing and removing repos.

It does and it spells doom for GitHub. The only way GitHub can go on is as an independent company. Consider it done the moment this deal becomes official. // Artem S. Tashkinov

Yes.

This' the comments we come here for.

LOL rook takes bishop

Yes. And, even if those are erased, to the backups too.

Now, the chances that those companies are actually hosting anything valuable there... null.

Anybody who puts a private repo on somebody else's server should always assume someone's stealing their code.

Anybody who puts a private repo on somebody else's server should always encrypt it.

This makes me wonder what will happen to Atom, the text editor which is developed by GitHub and shares similar features to Microsoft's VS Code.

I doubt it. MS hasn't been that aggressive against open source for a while now. That being said, Atom is a steaming pile of shit as far as I'm concerned, due to shoddy performance that just gets worse with each version.

Actually Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a fork of Atom. They are both node.JS based editors. I do not think they will as VS code vs Atom.IO are the 2000s version of the 1980s Emacs vs Vi(m) wars.

I hope not even if I prefer MS VS Code myself.

> Here is a tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge.

Why, so you can bundle malware with my projects, too? Fuck off.

My company has never bundled malware with any projects. In fact we eliminated that practice immediately after acquiring SourceForge and now scan every single project on the site for malware.

Probably too late, everyone remembers sourceforge = malware

Still over a million daily users, so we're gonna do right by them

My company has never bundled malware with any projects. In fact we eliminated that practice immediately after acquiring SourceForge

Wrong. Your company did. Just because you're part of the new ownership that eliminated the practice doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Earning back good reputation for a brand is a hell of a lot more difficult than earning slashdot karma.

Huh? SourceForge did. My company did not. The first thing we did was get rid the bundled adware. Literally as soon as we signed the papers.

It must suck having to deal with all the hate you get for stuff you didn't do.

LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YOU ALL!!!

Sourceforge had a great rep in the day, then they flushed it down the toilet with the Malware bundling and general shittiness.

Now when most of us think of Sourceforge we don't remember its years as a great repo but the relatively short period where it was a stinking shitty malware-bundling hive of scum and villainy.

THAT is the lesson! Don't throw away your reputation for a quick profit because it will take *years* to rebuild it! And if you value your company, don't let another company buy you out if they have a history of doing such things because they will throw you in the shitter and the leave you to deal with the mess without a care if it makes *them* money.

I feel for the team tasked with running Sourceforge now; They have done good things, rolling it back to what it was before it got shitified, and begun incrementally improving it rather than trying to use big loud sweeping disruptive changes to to catch attention like other companies - This brings hope that it is and will be run primarily to make a good service, rather than just maximizing profit to the detriment of service, but they will be constantly struggling to clean off that stigma of what Sourceforge was before they took it over to try and save it.

But I'm sure they will do it - If VW could make Skoda, a brand known for making shit cars, into a brand that some find more reliable and easier to repair than front-line VW cars, I'm sure they can too! But it will take time.

Good for you.

To your users, SourceForge is the company. You don't get to pretend history didn't happen because it's under new ownership.

Now stop claiming "my company didn't..." as it's patently false. Instead, go out there and build up positive mindshare to try to restore the brand that was so tarnished.

You're arguing some weird semantics. SourceForge is the brand, but my company is an investment vehicle that purchased the ASSET sourceforge.net from the previous company. Do some basic research on corporate structures if you need more help.

Calm down dude, I'm right.

Always having to get the last word isn't a good approach to dealing with your users.

Calling someone a jackass doesn't get people to listen to you either

Whipslash, thanks for improving SourceForge. I'm keeping my code there.

I understand your frustration. Last Friday I went out of my way to make sure that a certain task was done, and instead of thanking me for my efforts, someone blamed me because someone else hadn't done their job.

Oh, well ...

I like to use the current Z Shell on my Mac, and they recently pushed an update - so it was fresh in my mind.

(Why bother with the overhead - and sometimes version lag - of MacPorts or Fink just to keep a couple pieces of software around?)

SF lost the race long ago, when bundling extra software with downloads.

Thank you my friend. Such is the world.

Completely different owners did that. We eliminated that nonsense ASAP in 2016

I wonder if this will mean Facebook-style monitization of people with github accounts. Harvesting everything they can and putting it up for sale.

Not right away, no. Not all at once, no. But little by little... they have patience.

The people I feel most sorry for are commercial customers of github paying for version control as a service.

Waking up one day to find out your competitor is not only hosting but has access to all your proprietary source code must royally suck.

This will add more value!

Some examples of the value added:

1. More telemetry, people will know what developers are working on, which ones are hard working, which ones are not.

2. More sharing: code will be shared, sharing is the future. More eyeballs, mean better code!

3. More Edge, all code referencing Chrome, or Firefox will be optimized for Edge, the fastest, most secure browser ever

4. More Embracing: Azure will become standard, your code doesn't need to be compiled, it will run on the cloud! Your data can also be stored in the cloud. "Personal" storage is obsolete!

5. Better licensing: All code can be scanned for proprietary MSFT Code, and you can license it for a small fee. For another small fee, you can be granted a Linux license too!

6. Better Terms: MSFT will keep 95% of the revenue, developers will get a healthy 5% cut, after all , DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

See, it's all about the "value" equation. Grumbling about this is just wrong-headed. Embrace, Extend, and Evolve.

All code can be scanned for proprietary MSFT Code

Shit! I have some projects on github and I just got a notice from Microsoft that this line of code is infringing.
for (int x=0; x<size; ++x)

I was going to change it to use 'y' instead, but that looks like it's infringing too.

There's another one they're complaining about now like this:
#include <vector>

Not sure what I should do about that yet.

You should be using for (const auto& x : v) anyway, not writing explicit loops like some relic from the 20th century.

give microsoft your code? your private repos and intellectual property? holy fuck. #howaboutno

bye bye, github, been nice knowin' ya. you will be joining microsoft's aborted fetus once named codeplex, which could never compete with github or sf (why microsoft killed it).

embrace and extend: started codeplex, brought git to codeplex. released some projects on github.
extinguish: killed codeplex last year. buying github this year. killing github, date tbd.

gitlab, bitbucket, sf and even canonical (launchpad) are all drooling right now.

Technically any cloud provider already has access to your code, included compiled code if you're running a CI/CD pipeline there.

They bundle installers with spyware and are generally slow and unusable. We need an actual alternative to GitHub now.

You posted this twice so I'll respond twice: We actually don't bundle spyware with our installers. In fact that's the first practice we eliminated when we acquired SourceForge in 2016, along with instituting malware scans for every project, https downloads and project web hosting, a redesigned experience, and much more. https://arstechnica.com/inform...

Well, then I apologize. Sourceforge was the source of the only malware infection any computer I've ever owned has had, so I was a bit put off by it and stopped using the site altogether. Even the old 90's warez sites were never that bad.

But you paid the company that was doing that to get the website. So you are responsible for encouraging that behavior.

(rolls eyes)

This is a really dumb comment.

Lol

Trust takes a long time to get, and can be destroyed in an instant. It can be very hard to scrub that tarnish off, especially when dealing with safeguarding people's reputation and IP. I hope one day you can salvage the name, my genuine wishes there... but right now, it's still too soon for many people. Bundling malware is still very fresh in people's mind.

AWS CodeCommit ... go use it.

[...] it's still too soon for many people. Bundling malware is still very fresh in people's mind.

Absolutely agree. I honestly thought this was still the case. There so much crap, ads and noise in the download screen that it seemed a reasonable assumption.

That... is so not how it works. But you win an award, haven't read anything even remotely as eye-roll worthy all week!

To be honest they'd probably be better rebranind sourceforge and just sticking a landing page on the sourceforge site itself saying "we're no longer evil as we've been acquired by another company and this is our new site" with a link to it. Maybe some forwarders for the individual project pages so links via traffic don't break. Even after Whipslash's comments I can't scrub the association between "sourceforge" and "vile, dirty, putrid" from my mind that easily (and I really am trying.)

Bullshit.

It's reasonable for them to plug it, it's still not something any sane person would switch to. They bundle spyware with their installers and are generally unuseably slow with a shit interface.

We actually don't bundle spyware with our installers. In fact that's the first practice we eliminated when we acquired SourceForge in 2016, along with instituting malware scans for every project, https downloads and project web hosting, a redesigned experience, and much more. https://arstechnica.com/inform...

"Our sister company" - can you read?

Well, then I apologize. Sourceforge was the source of the only malware infection any computer I've ever owned has had, so I was a bit put off by it and stopped using the site altogether. Even the old 90's warez sites were never that bad.

Just checked it out and I stand by the shit interface part, but my suggestions follow if you are interested:

Inline ads are bullshit, if it's going to be ad-driven the scam the advertisers, not the users. If I have to think about what is an ad vs what isn't without just letting my brain filter it out behind the scenes it's too much of a distraction to use the site.
WAY too much wasted space - GitHub is similar in some ways with their narrow screen, but SourceForge seems to have MASSIVE blocks for projects when browsing them - to the point only a few fit on the screen at a time. Developers tend to despise wasted space a lot more than your typical user, Bootstrap is not your friend here.
Issue tracking was perfect in GitHub (arguably the one thing they got perfect) - at a glance the number of issues that are open should be visible on the project pages so you don't have to drill down when comparing different projects for cues on how well they are maintained (same for source tree.)
The readme-from-source aspect of GitHub was a serious win - allowing people to not have to dick around on GitHub when posting or revising projects there, definitely worth copying.

Little baby snowflake got triggered.

Thanks for the feedback. I will explore it. By the way if you log in you'll never see ads.

Keep in mind that people posting on the internet can be anywhere from 5 to 100, come from any background, and be high as a kite, sober as day, and have any motive.

All this character is doing is spewing swear words, like a 7 year old learning them for the first time. For all we know, he could be 7. Or massively high. Or just mentally disabled in some way.

Sadly, posting 'fuck you' take a lot less type than thinking about a cogent response, and typing it.

Given what Microsoft has done to Visual Studio as of late (support for building apps on Linux, Android, iOS and other platforms, major efforts towards making Visual Studio compliant to the latest C++ standards, open sourcing core parts of .NET and generally being much more developer friendly) I cant see a purchase of Github being the end of the world.

Microsoft supports the open source community, now, because it was caught including opensource code in some of its tech. The best way for them to avoid a lawsuit, was to share/support further development ;)

This is how I feel as well to a certain extent as well. It seems there are two faces of Microsoft: 1) The business Juggernaut who steamrollers you in to upgrading the OS/office/server and 2) The developer arm who, over the past 10 years, have made great strides in reaching out the community, listening, communicating and updating their tools and products based on feedback, etc. Depending on which side is involved most in this acquisition it could end up working out ok.

So you haven't wised up to exactly what the "Embrace" part involves yet ?

Which is akin to inviting your neighbours to the party to avoid them calling the police at 0200 for the noise violations.

Probably get modded down for this but fyi, Github has a facility already to export your repos as per gdpr requirements. For the lazy:

Details

https://developer.github.com/v3/migrations/users/

Also as a heads up, they've either capped users or are getting hammered with people exporting because it's slowwwed down (150k/s per repo). Could also be a regional thing

To be fair, it's not a good idea to use a lot of these services because they lock you into the platform, and because Microsoft has a habit of discontinuing stuff after hyping it (Silverlight). Of course, you don't want to get locked in to AWS if you can help it, but containers can help with that.

They messed up on Minecraft, too, completely dividing the community by making incompatible versions. Not cool.

Oh wait, it didnâ(TM)t. Itâ(TM)s huge in webmail. That despite Microsoft doing lots of stupid to it.

So whereâ(TM)s everybody going to go? GitLab? Sourceforge (second coming....)

Gitlab installation on our own servers

I've been skeptical for a long time of the Github monoculture and have refused to host any of my own work there. Beyond the obvious systemic risk of hosting so much stuff in a single place, I find their terms of use and political leanings repugnant.

So, for all those people who ignored the clear dangers and even thought less of their fellow developers for opting out, here's hoping Microsoft fucks you long and hard without a drop of lube. As I'm certain they will, judging by Windows 10.

Certainly will start farming code and ideas from all those private repos. Probably quite a few MS competitors and suppliers of their competitors use Github. I've always thought Github was a secret gem for harvesting IP from.

MS is not stupid enough to touch other companies IP under their active management. That stuff is radioactive in lawyer land. The real action is when github ops gets outsourced to some lesser MS group in shanghai, and some uptime "accidents" occur that are bad enough to invoke SLA penalities. Slurp slurp...

Oh please. You think Microsoft is short of ideas? Ideas are easy, I have three or six a day routinely. It's implementation that gives them value. And guess what is protected by copyright? That's right, implementation.

Like most everything involving IP theft from putting data on The Cloud --- "You'll never know"

I trust you don't actually believe that in the whole of Microsoft there will be 0% farming of Github private. Someone, I would, will be casually trolling through those directories as soon as MS buys the admin password.

Yeah, yeah it's all about execution. Thanks for reminding grown-ups about the intro discussion to any business 101 class on any planet in the universe.

I'll wait while you find a way to determine source code theft from a compiled proprietary binary made by people that know how to obfuscate and disturb the original code to make the compiled binary version unrecognizable when compared to the original binary or source. Those "look and feel" lawsuits are super duper hard to win.

How many people have taken drastic action based on one reporter saying they know (an unknown) someone who knows (undescribed) relevant things?

Nowadays, it seems everyone does.

One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.

Yeah, that'll have MS quaking in their boots. And if that doesn't work, we shall pout in your general direction a zecond time!

And even if the petition works, GitHub will then sell to Oracle. GG.

Interesting. I was burned in a weird way by SourceForge's descent into evil. A friend who was managing my BTC for me (long story) was a victim of the PyWallet trojan and lost ~40BTC in April 2016. :-( I tried to get her to use the GitHub posted version of PyWallet, but she wasn't (at the time) familiar with how to download stuff from GitHub. :-(

I actually really despise Git as a tool. One really spectacular feature would be if all repositories that were either git or Mercurial could be transparently accessed by either. I have some significant commits in Mercurial, though I haven't worked on it in a very long time. I might be able to help. :-)

They messed up on Minecraft, too, completely dividing the community by making incompatible versions. Not cool.

Other than keeping their installed user base firmly addled with Stockholm Syndrome, I can't come up with too many of their success stories.

Yeah you said that already

Good thing there's a body of law for dealing with...intellectual property.

Same, although I doubt MS care about my monthly subscription, I am small fry and the few dollars each month mean nothing in the bigger scheme of things.

A few years back, the only reason they'd buy it would have been to shut it down.

Wouldn't make sense with GitHub. Everyone would just transfer their content to another open source repository.

All MS would have to show for their $2 billion is an insignificant blip of disruption in open source, and a huge loss in trust they are starting to build up with that community.

Well I could not imagine M$ losing more trust with FOSS users, or users who expect privacy, or users who make the foolish demand to control what software is installed on their hardware or user who do not expect the systems to be used as crash test dummies for corporate systems at upgrade time. Yeah trust with them, well, definitely into negative territory so from the M$ perspective nothing to lose.

DOS 2.1 through to windows 7 definitely not windows 10 not ever, done, finished, they can fuck right off. It's a trust issue specifically a lack of one. Have not purchased an M$ product in years, none and no intention of changing now.

Fuck em.

I remember getting infected from Sourceforge from downloading Perl as they used to insert malware and ads into the apps. Also they allow scammers to do things like create a Gimp project with a version name not out yet with EyeCandy adware/malware requiring a re-image.

This was fixed a few years ago but they lost my trust. I would trust MS before SourceForge again not to mention they were all hot shit in 2001. They lost for good reason alot like Myspace lost to Facebook.

In the technology field there is no comebacks. IBM, Lotus, Apple (macs), Borland, Netware, Real Networks, and others never recover once they go down. I think something better should replace it or Microsoft will innovate it. Microsoft from the looks of it are terrified of losing developer marketshare as well as mobile marketshare (which they admit lost with WIndows Phone). This may not be a bad thing as MS has Linux and Mac tools now like .NET core (not mono), Visual Studio Code, and has contributed to Git with Git Virtual File System and making Android developer tools on Visual Studio and supporting clang, R, and Python as well in Visual Studio Community edition. As long as they do not proprietarize this but rather use it to compete it may not be that bad.

Until then make something better than Github if you want a replacement. This is opensource after all.

After seeing how much Microsoft improved the Skype user experience I can't wait to see what they'll do with GitHub.

-- This SIG has expired.

This place is also loaded with people who feel that they must hate the thing that is currently cool to hate. Hipsterizing your every thought is an effective way to avoid actually thinking. Of course MS is not anywhere close to pure, but not pure evil either. They will tend to act in what they perceive their best interests to be. The key is to guess how they will perceive them. Satya seems to have a reasonably evolved view on such things, so I don't expect any truly stupid shit to happen. Of course, that's not always the case with any company, small or large.

This is Slashdot too. My name suggests anti MS hatred which was certainly true back in 2000. Many of us fled from Windows and discovered Linux and Slashdot took the mantra of the unofficial community site. So yes this is why you see such things.

I understand this makes people uncomfortable who are old enough to remember what MS did with COM/VB/Java/and Visual Studio 6.0 and below with VC++. MS is changing now as they are fighting tooth and nail to keep Visual Studio alive today with the onslaught of Xcode, Atom.IO, Android SDK, Python, and Jetbrain tools to win developer marketshare with the young millennials.

My hunch is this is the purpose to integrate it more nicely into visual studio and make the github website like Office 365 online is compared to the desktop version. But VS code is available for Linux and Mac and there is a Mac version of Visual Studio.So we will wait and see.

We already have gitlab which is a good alternative, but we need a way to be able to host our public repos in a way that they won't easily vanish. Maybe we can do something with ipfs for that ?

Ah, no. Nice try though.

Why does everyone expect digital/virtual goods and services to be free?

Good question. You and MS can start by paying up for the Linux kernel instances you're using. That'll be 40$ a pop. Something like $40 - $200 for you I guess and roughly a bazillion dollars for MS who's been caching in big time with Linux on Azure. And their Ubuntu thingie on Winblows.

I'm tellin' ya, 2 billion purchasing price or not, MS better not screw this one up. They've regained some minimal amount of Karma with me with Visual Studio Code and the TypeScript work they've been doing, but gladly Git is distributed. As soon as they go all Windows XP on us I'm off to somewhere else with my repos, that's for sure.

No ones cares about your repos

Of course, you don't want to get locked in to AWS if you can help it, but containers can help with that.

This is why I think Kubernetes is such an interesting project.

It's the Docker PaaS with the most 'mindshare' and works on every infrastructure, you can integrate it with a lot of different networking systems and has integration with all the major cloud providers and more. Like working on getting federation between clusters working properly.

People are now even doing: declaritive configuration in git-repo -> branch -> deploy -> update git-repo with information of running systems (git repos as source of truth).

For example:
https://www.weave.works/blog/g...

It just needs people to start sharing what they are doing in this space to have a full open source stack you can deploy anywhere and have it heal itself when 1 or 2 machines are lost, just automatically start some new ones and load it up with new containers and data.

And not just for stateless containers anymore, finally people are starting to integrate it so data is replicated:

https://github.com/operator-fr...

We are pretty close to having that full stack.

Why are unprofitable companies worth so much?

This is the cyberpunk world of megacorps. Get used to it. Everyone involved know that the figures mentioned mean nothing in an economy that's basically going post-scarcity as we speak. This is about mindshare, eyeballs, end-user controll and future prospects. Even from a marketing standpoint this might be worth it for MS.

Yet somehow I see a golden future for GitLab up ahead. Mmmmh, I wonder why that is?

Microsoft can easily destroy the indexing capability of Github, if they truly want to bury it. On the other hand, they can vastly improve the indexing capability of Github over what the previous owners had done.

On the plus side, Microsoft could index the contents of all public projects in Bing. That would be a huge improvement over what the old Github had done for public projects. I know this, because I placed secret strings in my projects to see if they were indexed in Google. Surely enough Google has never heard of my project or its contents due to the policies of the previous ownership at Github.

Another area where Microsoft can vastly improve Github, is to make stats available for public projects. It is very important for an account holder to know how many views and downloads a repository has had. The previous owners of Github had all this information at their fingertips, but they refused to release the information to account holders and to the public.

It is very important for a developer to know, before starting a project, how much work other developers have done on the same type of application. The downside of good indexing, is that it makes it easier to plagiarize good ideas and algorithms from other projects.

Look to see what Mocrosoft does about indexing and stats to see what their intentions are for Github in the long run.

The Wiki itself is a Git repository.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

At its current state, GitHub importer can import:
the repository description (GitLab 7.7+)
the Git repository data (GitLab 7.7+)
the issues (GitLab 7.7+)
the pull requests (GitLab 8.4+)
the wiki pages (GitLab 8.4+)
the milestones (GitLab 8.7+)
the labels (GitLab 8.7+)
the release note descriptions (GitLab 8.12+)
the pull request review comments (GitLab 10.2+)
the regular issue and pull request comments
References to pull requests and issues are preserved (GitLab 8.7+)
Repository public access is retained. If a repository is private in GitHub it will be created as private in GitLab as well.
How it works

Go with a hosting service for your Gitlab. Naturally keep local copies, but that should have been policy from the beginning anyway.

Well having some kind of good git-repo mirroring would be a great start.

This is news to me. Very nice learning that SourceForge is being handled by a new crew and that you're catching up hard on repairing what has gone bad with it. Two thumbs up! ... This has been going on for two years? Ok, I guess I was really happy with GitHub then. Still am, actually.

The SourceForge Frontpage still looks a little cluttered. Perhaps the branding could use a little more work. ... Anyway, I'm getting a new sf account today and checking out what's up with you guys. Will be providing feedback.

Good luck in bringing SourceForge back!

Thank you

Bye bye github

There are a lot of links to GitHub that would stop working, and be redirected to Microsoft. A lot of dormant or semi-dormant projects that developed software that's still perfectly usable would vanish. That probably wouldn't be worth $2 billion, but it would suck.

You can use containers on Azure as well but yeah a heavy investment in a cloud platform is going to be hard to migrate away from. Silverlight is still supported until 2021 but it never really took off and then the market changed and killed it and Flash (thankfully)

That's what Gitlab is trying to achieve. Personally though, I think your deploy process should be so straightforward it's easy to deploy your software anywhere.

Silverlight is still supported until 2021

Yeah but try convincing your customers to install Silverlight and watch as they laugh your salesmen out of the house.

I remember the BUILD 2015 debacle.

I don't, what happened?

It was related to Minecraft modding being demonstrated and how it was not officially supported (at the time it was written in Java).

Just use it.

Actually, it wasn't really nice.

A ton of people wrote Github off awhile ago. They started killing projects and accounts for people they didn't agree with, politically, and started adopting SJW code-of-conduct bullshit (you know, your typical "meritocracy is oppression, blah blah blah diversity, blah blah blah language" bullshit).

In fact, I would see MS taking them over as a step in the *right* direction, comparatively.

I always had a strange, nagging gut feeling about GitHub. The sort of feeling Han Solo was talking about, right before the debri field of the planet Alderan came into view, during the first Star Wars film. So I never started using it. I got an account very early, before I fully realised what I was looking at; but once said realisation set in, said account was never used.

I think it's because I remembered what had happened to the Great Library of Alexandria; and as a result, I really didn't think that building an online software equivalent of that was a good idea. Some of you probably understand why in engineering terms, a single point of failure is not considered desirable.

Now, the proverbial Great Library is going to be in the hands of the Linux operating system's oldest and most tenacious opponent; a corporation with a consistently depraved and parasitic modus operandi.

What could possibly go wrong?

One thing though, like Slashdot it keeps asking for permissions over and over no matter how often you decline. GDPR allows you to remember that preference with a cookie. Or just make it less intrusive than a full screen overlay.

More than that, I actually went through the "other options" screen and checked a bunch of boxes (I don't mind adverts, or being remembered; I just don't like being chased around the internet with ads trying to sell me something I just bought) -- and I still get the permission screen.

Waiting on pins and needles to see what Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, Patrick Volkerding, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Ken Thompson, and others have to say about Microsoft's acquisition of Github.

Their own open source hosting site at Codeplex didn't pull in the numbers so they shuttered it.

Now they've decided they need something in that area they just go out and try to buy the market...

Microsoft is buying your personal data here:

1. They will be able to mine for trends in the source code and its documentation, for example to spot interest in your area of "warehouse automation rust library" or whatever so they can jump on it and make their own microsoft version before anyone else notices the trend;
2. They will have access to personal data about you and all the other coders -- your commit history, your interests, your skill level, can all be mined and monetised. In particular they already own LinkedIn so they will be fusing with this data. They could for example train classifiers based on your claimed LinkedIn CV skill level with what you actually commit. Presumably they will be selling this information to recruiters in some form.

You make very good points. I agree. And of course, all of this may very well, in time, require a Microsoft account, which will give them even more data directly. No thanks. I tend not to put my eggs in the same basket being a former IT security guy gone sysadmin/coder. I use OpenBSD and Debian for an OS, an iPhone for comms, and Fastmail for email/calendar. I keep my code in my own private, backed-up source control tree.

Notice how just a few companies, namely Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft control the vast majority of meaningful IT landscape? The space is shrinking as the years go by. Pretty soon, no one will be able to do anything without the corporate masters knowledge.

Didn't Microsoft already have a code repo which they shut down?

Well, git-repo or not, treating the whole deployment PaaS as a software environment that can be fully automated and replicated is the right idea, and Kubernetes offers a lot of support for that.

Plus whether you use Kubernetes or not, always avoid the cloud provider proprietary services as they do cause lock-in and that will hurt you - especially if you need (e.g. for data residency reasons) to deploy somewhere they have no presence.

It can be a pain as AWS (and Azure) offer some highly performant and easy to use services that you can't replicate as efficiently. This is why it's a business decision, not a technology one - but one that few business leaders even know they should be making.

When I read "backlash" I thought to myself... people are taking projects down en masse from github to somewhere else. Nope. Just moaners in social media. What-a-backlash.

fork!

Git has a steep learning curve but it's pretty great when you actually embrace the philosophy of it. I don't have a link to it handy but Linus did a brief at a Google conference of some kind one time that goes into the philosophy really well, that's what made git click for me and I haven't gone back to subversion since (though unfortunately still have to use VSO for work.) The biggest issue with git is that it's so fundamentally different in principle and in practice from other version control systems that you really just have to give up the concepts that you are familiar with in others to use it successfully. The one thing it really lacks is great submodule support, because doing things like updating all the submodules referenced by the project requires a line of pseudocode/script, and there's no way to make a pointer to the head version of a submodule like you would naturally get from a massive source tree in subversion.

yet I still get some really vile hatred

There are those in every crowd. I know you have a thick skin, but even then, it can get a bit depressing. I am happy that you are trying to do good things, as are many others. The negativity will never go away, but I would like to offer something positive: Thank you.

That being said, I know that Social Justice stuff drives a lot of page views... but can we kill it please? That is the primary thing that has made me consider quitting Slashdot after so many years. I like Tech. I don't like being tossed into whatever current social battles are being fought. There is no way to be rational in those articles because they are not for rational discussion, they are for enlisting soldiers. It is disgusting.

Good luck. :)

Yes and no, what Gitlab is doing is to do that for the applications.

But this is about deploying the infrastructure as well, here is one of a bunch of talks on the subject (gitops is a weave works their own term, there are others doing similar things but it has no official name):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Here is what Google Cloud can do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's kind of like infrastructure as code, but you are managing everything directly from declarative files in git

What should they have done with Silverlight out of interest? Should Adobe still be pushing Flash too?

With Silverlight: they never should have tried to convince people to use it in the first place. It was a bad idea and people who built platforms on it are dumb (or at least, they made a mistake).

The main thing is you can't trust Microsoft to continue supporting something, because often they don't.

In the grand scheme of terrible Microsoft ideas, a Flash competitor that they've only abandoned because web tech has moved on and will have been supported for 14 years isn't too bad. A lot of the tech lives on in other products as well. If you want to talk about bad ideas and terrible implementations I give you SharePoint. I hate that shit with a passion.

Slashdot Mirror

Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub (bloomberg.com)

323 comments