Slashdot Mirror

Next, they will rebrand it "CodePlex".

Azure Github by Windows featuring Sharepoint and Skype communications.

Visual Studio Git?

Git#

#GitOutOfHere

Visual Studio already has pretty good Git integration.

Git.NET Compact Framework bindings for Excel

Azure Github by Windows featuring Sharepoint and Skype communications.

Available only on Windows Phone or Zune.

With code search by Bing!

All they need now is to acquire stackexchange, and they will control the entire means of code production.

We'll be OK as long as they leave the gender reassignment surgery to expertsexchange.com

Azure Github by Windows featuring Sharepoint and Skype communications.

Available only on Windows Phone or Zune.

So, not available then?

GitRekt
GitFucked

I use Visual Studio Code, with Git embedded.

I like it.

Just did a quick Wikipedia read...evidently it is the most popular IDE...

True, but it uses its own terminology rather than Git's, so it's confusing as hell to use. It reminds me of TortiseGit that uses SVN terminology.

Visual Studio already has pretty good Git integration.

Be sure to enjoy it, because soon nothing else will.

Azure Github by Windows featuring Sharepoint and Skype communications.

Available only on Windows Phone or Zune.

So, not available then?

After they finish killing it.

Maybe they will make Linus a VP.

ZuneHub.

Gitrdun

Just did a quick Wikipedia read...evidently it is the most popular IDE...

Just did a quick Wikipedia edit...it is no longer the most popular IDE...

I feel like when Oracle bought Sun.. something is over

I sensed a great disturbance in the FOSS, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I was getting a little nervous that all our eggs seemed to be in one basket... How many FOSS projects you do know using GitLab? Spreading out might be a good thing.

Also, LOL.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/De...

If people really cared about "FOSS" what the fuck were they doing on GitHub, a decidedly closed source platform, in the first place?

I quoted you on twitter, with source reference ;)

You can share your open source code in a number of places, let's call that number N. If you also share it on Github, you get N+1. It doesn't make your code less open, but it might give you a bit more audience. If MICROS~1 wants to steal your code, they are free (as in they can afford all the lawyers they want) to do it whether or not you use Github.

To me, Github is basically Facebook for computer geeks. We share our updates to maintain some kind of a social presence, but the real work happens elsewhere.

It's really a problem with trying to lump "free software" and "open source" together. GitHub has never been about free software... just free beer for projects willing to share their code. The business model was always based on closed source software, both to run the site and as the way to generate revenue.

While that may be fine from an "open source" perspective, it does nothing to protect Freedom #0 in the GPL... And while I'm far from a free software purist, to me the only thing that comes to mind in hearing people complain about yet another closed-source-based, for-profit business doing something to [potentially] harm "the community" is a big fat "I told you so".

If we care about freedom, we should NOT be putting our time/energy/money into things like GitHub from the get go. Same goes for Facebook. Even by using the platforms we give them more power over us-- not necessarily as individuals, but certainly as a group. Personally, I gave up on thinking my being pedantic was going to be of much use to me or the world a long time ago... so I'm not complaining when MS buys GH. I already spend most of my day working on MS technology-- which oddly enough, over the last several years, has gotten more and more open and free (as in both speech and beer).

RIP Github... what site are we going to move to next?

Why do we flock to a single source?

The question is what site are you going to move to next.
I may not use the same solution, and someone may choose something else.
Others may stay on MS GIT.

We all hate the big player in the field, but we shy away the smaller ones.

Actually that is a good question? Maybe it -is time for a cloud based solution that can track forks across offerings and likewise support PRs from any another site?

If trust is an issue, then maybe a federated solution or one that simply build trust based on keys and oauth?

Amazon CodeCommit...

Shit, I just had to google that and see it's a real thing.

Github is the big player. If this breaks its dominant position I call that good.

Account deleted and code moved to my ec2 instance. Pretty sure MS won't be buying that any time soon.

Well... at this point, I think that both of those companies have around an 800 Billion dollar market cap. I'm not sure how any antitrust committee could approve merging them at this point.

I'm so glad you moved it away from that monopolistic tech giant Microsoft.

I still don't really see the need for Microsoft to buy Github unless it wanted to make significant changes. It is quite easy for companies to integrate their development tools with Github, so it isn't like owning Github really improves any of Microsoft's existing products. And it isn't like Github is really much of a value at that price. I think LinkedIn was overpriced too, but at least there I could understand the value LinkedIn gave Microsoft's other products. I'm coming up short on this one.

So perhaps we can look forward to a number of new features which only work from within Visual Studio?

If they don't own it, GitHub can make changes that Microsoft doesn't like. That's the long and short of it.

Microsoft can easily afford this, and they see its continued existence and use as important. They're protecting an asset by assuming control of it.

Just a guess: Microsoft views themselves as a developer first company, but in this stack of software tooling their previous source control repository technology is near death. Its basically subversion like, I think past /. discussions bore this out. They probably fear shops would stop using internal servers running their technology and just move to something like github for bugs/work/source control. By purchasing github they now keep the ecosystem as a Microsoft discussion where it continues to be easy to sell Visual Studio and integrate value. This attempts to delay shops moving away from Visual Studio. Which in a Javascript world is more and more a concern.

The value is that they can control the development ecosystem.

With Github you can do a full life cycle development all on Microsoft back yard. Where they can see you, guide you, encourage you to not go too far off course.

For most development, this is actually probably a good thing, as most stuff that we make, isn't breaking the mold being something super advanced and despite what developers think of themselves they are average, not superior. Having MS Framework as a guiding hand, that will prevent too many rouge applications out there.

That said, when ever you force people to play by the rules, chances for true innovation is loss. We all hit places where the Framework just isn't flexible enough in a particular area, so we need to go outside the box. So too much guidance from MS means we cannot create something new, because Microsoft didn't think of it.

If they don't own it, GitHub can make changes that Microsoft doesn't like. That's the long and short of it.

Microsoft can easily afford this, and they see its continued existence and use as important. They're protecting an asset by assuming control of it.

There are several other big companies with a similar situation. Microsoft could have saved $4B or more by getting one or two of them together and setting up a foundation to run GitHub, dedicated to keeping it going in future in more or less the way it is going now, but, with less profit needed able to provide as much extra openness as Microsoft wishes to permit. Instead they have chosen to take control.

This is almost certainly the beginning of the true "Extend" phase for the Git ecosystem. They already have their own Git filesystem. Likely they will keep going until they find enough things to get most Git(Hub) users hooked on Microsoft special features. Then comes the "exterminate".

So first off, I am not a developer and have never needed or used any source control system. So no stake in this argument. To the people threatening to leave GitHub...I'm sure MS could care less since you never paid a cent to keep your precious GitHub running. In fact, it is losing money hand-over-fist and not likely to around much longer, anyway. They won't miss you. Now I can sort of understand why MS might want to buy an up-and-running source control shop, but it's hard to understand why they significantly overpaid for it. There's probably a common relationship going on between the current paying GitHub customer base and MS's own base. That could be worth a lot for both parties. Then this would seem to be more of a full-service offering to enterprise. It makes no difference that MS already has it's own service. It's just a choice for your customers like different grades of gasoline (car analogy here). I'm sure the other major cloud players will be either buying up the other small guys or rolling their own soon, so you'll have a really nice choice of which devil will own your soul ... if that's your attitude.

1) E. for Embrace
2) E. for Extend
3) E. For Extinguish
4) P. for Profit

If they don't own it, GitHub can make changes that Microsoft doesn't like. That's the long and short of it.
Microsoft can easily afford this, and they see its continued existence and use as important. They're protecting an asset by assuming control of it.

And within 6 months, some middle-level Microsoft manager looking for a promotion will decide to "enhance" GitHub as a means of increasing visibility within the corporate structure, but to the complete detriment of everyone using it, including Microsoft's own internal dev teams.

You only have to look at Microsoft's past behavior in order to accurately predict the future with the GitHub acquisition.

GitHub is dead. Leave now.

Microsoft can easily afford this, and they see its continued existence and use as important. They're protecting an asset by assuming control of it.

Microsoft has claimed to be different before, and have assumed control of assets and then altered the deal before. The safest bet is to assume that they will do bad things to github like they have literally every single one of their prior acquisitions. Even if they don't deliberately try to ruin it with misfeatures, they will ruin it with incompetence.

In my mind, this is the money shot: "The two companies, together, will "empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft's developer tools and services to new audiences,""

So, today, nothing changes, but we'll slowly boil the lobster with "enhancements" until the only path that remains frictionless will be the one that involves an all-Microsoft toolchain.

Already moved all my repositories to Gitlab for now and deleted anything private from Github. Also moved my personal website from Github to Gitlab static hosting. I'll really miss Github, and now I hate Micro$ucks even more than I already did for invading "my space" yet again!

If they don't own it, GitHub can make changes that Microsoft doesn't like. That's the long and short of it.
Microsoft can easily afford this, and they see its continued existence and use as important. They're protecting an asset by assuming control of it.

And within 6 months, some middle-level Microsoft manager looking for a promotion will decide to "enhance" GitHub as a means of increasing visibility within the corporate structure, but to the complete detriment of everyone using it, including Microsoft's own internal dev teams.

You only have to look at Microsoft's past behavior in order to accurately predict the future with the GitHub acquisition.

GitHub is dead. Leave now.

I think better word than "enhance" would be "monetize", which would then be provided by embedded telemetry. It also allows them to build in system level back doors for the three-letter agencies.

I suspect they have a monetization plan. You don't pay 7.5 billion dollars for something without expecting to make a lot of money off it in the future...

You only have to look at Microsoft's past behavior in order to accurately predict the future with the GitHub acquisition.

Skype is one that immediately comes to mind. It was never FOSS but they did almost exactly what you said with it!

prevent too many rouge applications

I agree. There are already plenty of makeup-related applications out there.

That said, when ever you force people to play by the rules, chances for true innovation is loss. We all hit places where the Framework just isn't flexible enough in a particular area, so we need to go outside the box. So too much guidance from MS means we cannot create something new, because Microsoft didn't think of it.

This is where Microsoft has actually been making things easier, at least in the framework they're currently pushing. They make it pretty easy to get to the Windows C APIs and native execution from .NET so you can do anything .NET doesn't do itself. C# to C/C++ is much easier than Java or Python making native calls (to be fair to Java and Python, really being cross-platform does mean some clunkyness in your native interface)

In fact, it is losing money hand-over-fist and not likely to around much longer

Uh....$200M a year is just a little bit away from "losing money hand-over-fist".

It makes no difference that MS already has it's own service

Microsoft was already using GitHub.

I'm sure the other major cloud players will be either buying up the other small guys or rolling their own soon

Actually, the trend is for the major players like Google and MS to wind down their efforts and go with...GitHub. Wonder why MS bought them.......

Currently Amazon does have a "code repository" product, but it's primarily focused on housing your private repo. It's part of their push to have to do all your coding, building, issue tracking, testing, deploying and hosting on their servers. While you could make a public repo there, it isn't their main focus.

Cool, you have no idea what you are talking about, and don't care about the results.

I am sure your opinion will be highly valued.

I wonder.. I mean they just paid 7.5B for it. I would think they would handle it very very carefully..

GitHub is dead. Leave now.

People are listening to you. Gitlab seems overloaded, it's been importing my repositories for a long time now, and except for one they are all pretty small.

That's $200M of revenue - their expenses are still substantially higher than that, making them unprofitable.

You moved to GitLab Enterprise Edition, the proprietary version?

Why not just use gitea, at https://github.com/go-gitea/gi...

Oh.....

They give VS Code away for free.... because they're afraid of people leaving VS?

The creators of TypeScript are afraid of a Javascript world? VS Code is a popular node editor fyi

Yeah but when Amazon wants you to keep your code there, use their tools to build, use their tools to deploy, and use their servers to run on, that's all cool. Because they're... not microsoft

Because I already run my private git repositories on my private server. I need github/gitlab for the repositories that I explicitly want to share.

their expenses are still substantially higher than that

[Citation Required]

'Cause if 200M/year doesn't pay for 700 employees and some bandwith, they're doing something very wrong.

Who is going to trust their code to people that are known to 'borrow' others ideas?

You mean your publicly available code that's there for anyone to just "borrow" from?

sourceforge is still a festering bloat of ads. Just opening a sourceforge download tab makes my fan spin up.

gitlab or atlassian would be the winners if any.

I say this since I have never seen any proof that this and this has ever elimiated as a possiblity. Sourceforge killed itself three years ago and this is a opportunity to come back if they step in and make the needed changes to their infrastructure and policies.

sourceforge is still a festering bloat of ads.

I guess that's why they didn't sell out to Microsoft (yet). Have you considered that?

Atlassian is a strong potential target for takeover, too.

Somehow google can live an advertising without having to make browser-killing and image-laden ads the norm.

There's a middle ground between 'free services without ads subsidized by hopefully paying customers' and 'ads that make you want to claw your eyes out'

Also, there's the fact that they can't sell out to microsoft because microsoft would have to want them in the first place.

Frankly, I'm not a big fan of Atlassian, so personally I wouldn't know how to feel. I'm subjected to their software daily and it's hard to imagine it getting more 'messed up' than it already is for my tastes. Note this isn't so much bitbucket as their other assets.

Built for managers who are afraid of losing control, not for programmers who want to get things done. (In slight defense of the managers, a lot of programmers are kids who won't get stuff done if not constantly prodded)

There's a middle ground between 'free services without ads subsidized by hopefully paying customers' and 'ads that make you want to claw your eyes out'

Speaking of which, Slashdot's ads suck hard.

Yes they do. They also glitch out the page on scroll often (how many times I've tried to scroll and it flickers right back to the top for... some reason... until I delete the sidebar and then can scroll.

Do you really not know that github projects can be private? I'm on a couple dozen myself, and every single one is private. It's a code repo, and doesn't care what license you're using. Lots of large companies use github for completely non-FOSS stuff.

Yes. What does that have to do with what I'm talking about?

That is really unfortunate, I am sorry that happened to you.

Adblock. I don't even see the ads.

Yes I have it but it's disabled for Slashdot and a couple other websites I respect.
I wished the ads on Slashdot would be relevant or even remotely tech-related. Sadly, that's not the case.

My post was to Daemonik, not you.

They used to be tech related. Lately they have gotten so bad, I gave up.

A portion of the developer community has opposed the move, with some already leaving the platform for alternative service.

A bunch of people doing the same thing, or even having the same interests, is not a "community", so let's stop putting "community" after every group. What you're trying to say is simple: Some open source developers have opposed the move, with some already leaving the platform for alternative service.

community
kmjunti/
noun

1. a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
"Montreal's Italian community"
2. the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.
"the sense of community that organized religion can provide"

I would say GitHub users share a condition of having certain attitudes or interests in common, namely, GitHub. But I get the feeling you would not know what it would be like to have something in common with someone.

"Community" semantically and historically includes a notion of "fellowship" and "association". Your dictionary entry gives examples of communities but misses the essence of what they are. The dictionary.com definition is better:

community

noun, plural communities.

a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
a locality inhabited by such a group.
a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually preceded by the):

noooooooooooo

I'm sure this wise phrase of yours has been uttered by many in the tech community around the world over the last 24 hours. Microsoft has a way of killing things off; and GitHub was always great, in part, because it WAS independent.

I use MS stuff all day long... I program in a MS language... I'm not happy about them owning GitHub.

They fuck up everything they touch: Foxbase, Skype, Wunderlist and now this. They are competing with Symantec for destruction of good things.

Honestly, both Google and IBM has MSFT beat in that department...

So how long will it be before Microsoft gives the GitHub UI the Skype treatment ?

On the plus side, Microsoft raised Nokia up to be the world leader in phones...

Will github desktop get an Octoclippy virtual assistant?

You meant a cliptopus?

Is that first p silent? ;)

Apparently, Microsoft thought the cost of licenses for all the code on GitHub was included in the price.

For those looking for alternatives, https://gitlab.com/ is open source and can easily import all your projects from github.

gitea is a good light weight alternative for those seeking to take back their repos as well:
https://gitea.io/en-US/

dont wait until Microsoft turns this into Github Professional platinum edition 2019 with Minecraft 3D integration and Azure store support.

What we have here is a problem of centralization. Switching to other centralized solutions isn't what we need. Decentralized solutions need to be invented.

git already has many of the necessary capabilities but things like search across repos is harder. Still much of what Github offers can be done with client software too.

Exactly. So why is everybody getting so wound up about GitHub. It doesn't matter what happens to it. If it disappeared tomorrow most people would just clone their local repos to some other service providing git.

Migration towards gitlab is going strong. The graph is loading very slowly now, but an hour ago it was showing a migration of about 4000 projects per hour.

https://monitor.gitlab.net/das...

Took two hours for the Gitlab confirmation email to come in, seems like they are busy.

Won't you be sad when MS buys Gitlab up! :P (just kidding, some)

gitea hosts their code on github.... so there's that

Microsoft in a nutshell.

You don't think they will do anything except completely ruin it, do you?
The fact that due to the risks, like MS suddenly declaring everything on github their "property", everybody will avoid github like the plague alone will mean its demise.
Yeah, it might be illegal, but when has that ever stopped Microsoft? They can just pay off the judge and be "punished" by infecting children... I mean givng "free" licenses to schools. (Like that costs even a single cent...)

By the wayâ¦ was github itself open source and on github? Because then we can clone it in an instant.

I have done so a while ago, the acquisition by Microsoft is just one stage in the decline, and not the first one.

All their reassurances remind me of, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

This is git. Its entire point is that it does not need a server.

If you really need public access, it's not like you can't host it on your home server on dynamic DNS, or have a static IP, or get a vServer for <$5.
(As long als you do not use "the cloud". Because in that case, please just jump onto a church tower. From a plane in the actual clouds.)

Git as a technology is distributed (well, apart from GVFS, which Microsoft drove, which centralizes Git).

The question is what development-oriented userbase will be in use in the future by 'default'

The value of github is a very common way to submit a proposed change without having to first join a project or figure out that specific projects procedures and tools. This works simply because github is popular and supports the one way to do it.

So what is going to be the popular one way to do it in the future? It might be github, might be something else.

If called for, a migration is easier because every developer has a copy of the full repository (unless they are using GVFS...)

This is git. Its entire point is that it does not need a server.

What does Git (not GitHub) use for issue tracking, including attaching a diff for code review as a "pull request"? What does Git (not GitHub) use for web-based access to a repository, to its documentation, or to a live demonstration (if the project is written in DHTML)?

it's not like you can't host it on your home server on dynamic DNS, or have a static IP

ISPs in some countries don't have a "dynamic IP leased as long as your modem is on" tier that allows dynamic DNS. Instead, the plans they offer skip straight from carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT), which puts many subscribers behind the same IPv4 address thereby blocking incoming connections, to paying an inflated monthly rate for "business class" service including a static IP.

or get a vServer for <$5.
(As long als you do not use "the cloud".)

Assuming "vServer" means a virtual private server, what's the key difference between a VPS and "the cloud"? Case in point: Amazon uses the term "Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)" for its VPS service.

OH LAWD!
It's Hotmail all over again!

Closing my GitHub accounts and projects now.

If you can't beat them, buy them.

I didn't know you could play as that Civilization. But when I play Arabia (close enough?) the religious bonuses of the Hagia Sophia are high enough that it's often worth grabbing a city that's built this so I can stack these bonuses on my civilization's base bonuses.

Or are we talking about something else?

Gogs is neat too.

Might have to look into that. While I generally like gitlab's general end result interface and capabilities, under the covers it feels like duct tape upon duct tape. When things go south, it's very hard to put humpty dumpty back together again.

Having too much code on one site made it an attractive target for acquisition. If Microsoft didn't acquire it another evil corporation would have eventually It's time to make sure projects are spread out on as many diverse hosts as possible.

>> Skype

Well that's a very interesting question. In fact the qwerp thing you should lak tossed fem is exactly tewrk. Wait, I think we lost Dave, and Darneesh. Let's give them a few minutes to reconnect. Hello? Can you hear me? Hey, can someone tell Joe to turn off his open mike?

>> 404s and Indian's giving bad advice

Did you just build a casino in Canada?

Github has devs like... https://i.imgur.com/YREcU6d.gi...

Java is a technology, while GIthub is a platform. If you don't like the acquisition, you will find moving to an alternative is much less painful than migrating Java to another language.

That is not to say all platforms are eclipsed by technologies. I think if company X obtained Wikipedia, it could be more disruptive than acquiring Ruby.

P.S. This is my personal opinion, unrelated to job in Azure.

Developers developers developers
Developers developers developers

Balmer, suit up, we need you.

And what do they cry ?

Developers, developers developers !

>> "Microsoft is a developer-first company"

Developers, developers developers !

The chair throwing is strong in this one!.

It's been clear for a long time that GitHub didn't have a sustainable business model. The question now is how does this change GitHub? Suddenly being owned by MS isn't going to fix their "giving away services for free" business model and MS isn't exactly known for it's altruism.

I imagine that in the near future, you're going to see functionality stripped from the free GitHub and moved into tiered services that cost money.

This might include stuff ilke Paywalling the collaborative features and tiering out the fancier parts... Tier 1 only has groups, Tier 2 has groups and Kanban boards, etc. Putting strict limits on this size of free repos, etc.

Let's not forget exactly how long it took before Skype stopped having a linux client.

It's been clear for a long time that GitHub didn't have a sustainable business model.

And you know this how? Do you have access to their internal finances?

Suddenly being owned by MS isn't going to fix their "giving away services for free" business model and MS isn't exactly known for it's altruism.

The "free services" model was for open source projects. They also provided paid services for corporations. $7.5 billion is a LOT for a company that isn't making money and whose clients can easily move elsewhere if they don't like the direction that Microsoft takes.

In regards to Skype, MS changed the service so all data feeds through MS servers which has the affect of 1. slowing down the service for most users, and 2. giving MS (and the US government) access to all of you Skype calls.

Thanks for the references. So from that, we can safely assume GitHub has somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in annual revenue, and that they went on a spending spree that caused them to be unprofitable, at least in 2016. Hardly the, "GitHub didn't have a sustainable business model", case.

How do you know that their business model was not sustainable? Since they were a private company before being purchased by Microsoft we do not know their costs and profits per year.

They offer many paid services in addition to their one free service. They offer personal monthly and yearly plans for private repositories as well as enterprise services sold to Fortune 500 companies. They already have tiers of service. Their free service is perfectly good for people wanting public repositories. The paid and business services are perfectly good for companies.

Skype still has a Linux client. They advertise it on the same page as the Windows and OSX downloads.
https://www.skype.com/en/get-s...
https://go.skype.com/skypeforl...

GitHub already has fees for business accounts. One of the reasons my company went with Atlassian Bitbucket because it was cheaper for a small team. (The primary reason is that we already used Jira and the integration is better.)

I got 99 problems and jira is 95 of them

I repeat... I wonder how they are going to make back $7.5M ?

Or shift the client base to be corporate first and then make it secretly run VSS and then screw over the experience for everyone else?

Thinking of Lync being rebranded Skype and the general Skype offering being gimped.

MS has always had some of the best developers tools out there, so this makes sense because they couldn't grow something like this organically and it fits their role. If they tinker with it and break functionality or breach user trust, then it they'll just kill it. However, I'll be optimistic given their support of Linux, Kubernetes, Python and R.

>> On the plus side, Microsoft raised Nokia up to be the world leader in phones...

Nope, it's the other way round.
Nokia raised Microsoft up to be the world leader in phones... for a few months, before being extinguished.
Also, this extinction was partly due to Skype.

I see everyone saying that Microsoft is just going to destroy Github, but I think they've got different plans. Skype was acquired to give them better video conferencing in O365/Teams and IP for video chat for Windows Phone, etc. Nokia was acquired because they wanted to buy their way into the iPhone/Android app store supported phone model. In neither of these cases were there any plans to keep the companies as-is. I think their overall plan is to make it even easier than it is now to consume Azure services while not touching the underlying culture around Github.

The reason for this is clear in the posts here...no one from the "open source community" trusts Microsoft. This is why they've went out of their way to let people run Linux and non-Microsoft products in Azure as first-class citizens. It's no longer about selling software; they want people to consume services monthly. They don't care what you run as long as you're paying them every month for a VM or PaaS instance to run it on, and that's a huge shift. They know that if they're not selling software licenses anymore, they need to move their focus away from enterprises and towards developers...because developers are the ones writing the new-style apps that will generate them cloud revenue.

I also think another reason they're doing this is because they're trying to establish "hipster developer cred." All the cool kids use Github. All the cool kids use open source. Therefore, if they want cool kids to pay them every month to host their code and build pipelines in VSTS, Github is the onramp. Enterprise developers with their stuffy closed source control solutions will still be supported, but they want to be seen as open to change. I've talked to a lot of people who work at Microsoft, and the change over the last 4 years has been pretty sweeping. Developers used to have private office space and they're slowly being moved into cafeteria-table workspaces to promote a DevOps culture. And they fired the QA testers and are forcing developers to do their own testing now, which is a huge change. It's all about pumping out new services in Azure and Office 365 at a breakneck pace instead of three-year OS release cycles.

Dude, let's go back to that first paragraph. Skype is now dying. I am forced to use it at work and it is genuinely worse than the MicroSoft product it replaced. Nokia is TOAST.

Microsoft may be planning many things with who knows what good intentions. They'll still gonna destroy github.

Skype is huge and growing as fast as Microsoft can sign up organisations to O365 which is also huge.

Consumers might well be flocking to WhatsApp or Snapchat but in a business setting Skype is huge.

Yea I am going to have to agree with jaseuk here. Skype is not dying. The consumer market/perception is not really important to their strategy on a lot of products. Little guys pay with little checks and that is why the consumer market is absolutely brutal. For every Snapchat or WhatsApp (to borrow the examples) there is a littered landscape of dead applications or attempted copycats (*cough*Instagram*cough*). Meanwhile, MS realized a long time ago that businesses will pay big bucks for productivity software, and you don't even have to sign up that many before the product is in the black.

Then, because of the difficulty in shifting an entire company off of a particular technology it usually takes a monumental fuck-up or need before they get off of it (not to mention a real competitor). Some employees might hate it, but enough like it or the execs like it and it doesn't matter. Lync was perfectly fine in a lot of ways, and Skype for Business is basically re-branded Lync with some upgraded libraries from the acquisition. Originally, MS abused a lot of first-to-market features and tech (or at least they were the best of the first crop) and made TONS of money from it. Now? They can BUY the first to market/dominate market group if they don't capture it and as long as there is a clear path to business level monetization, it is worth it. Didn't work out with the phone division because they made a really bad strategic error and bought the company that was already on decline in that area. The one thing I am not sold on their strategy at the moment is the amount of money Nadella is paying for some of this stuff. I agree with other poster's that they are overpaying for GitHub, but that doesn't really feed into my post's main point.

Skype is plenty big in the business world. Especially with them bundling it into their O365 subscriptions and everyone looking at it as mild added value at the very least. Hell, even companies that use WebEx still have Skype often times. So the idea that Skype is dying is pretty poorly informed. MS business strategy is not to capture the consumer market so much, that is just a nice side-effect to them (hence the amount of stuff they are giving out free now to non-enterprise customers). Their strategy is to make money from businesses and be sure to keep enough of the consumer market engaged with their entire portfolio to make it more profitable for businesses to sign up with MS in general. Skype just so happens to be something they don't really care about in the consumer space it appears.

There is a difference between reason and result. Just look at Nokia. No matter the reason, the result is that it is dead.

The department that bought it and thoae who had the idea of what to do with it will not be the same as those who are responsible for it.

The reason for this is clear in the posts here...no one from the "open source community" trusts Microsoft.

There's a reason why, and it isn't because the open source community is a bunch of dirty hippies. It is because Microsoft has spent 30 years proving they cannot be trusted with anything.

you let a small group of people have this much money they can buy out pretty much any competitor. Money is power. Wealth inequality means power inequality. A certain amount is fine, but I don't think anyone would argue that it's gone too far in one direction when a company can blow $7.5 billion on a code repository.

The problem is poor organizations without capital/funding/profits get easily snatched up when money starts getting waved around in the faces.

Not that FOSS or low profit companies like this accomplish much in most cases. They don't.

If GitHub was turning a profit it would have been insulated from this.

This was exactly Disney's strategy in the early 2000's when they were afraid of getting bought out by a network. I'm sure there's a lot of the basement marxists on here that decry the hundred $s or whatever it costs to get into Disney, but they never got bought out and in fact ended up buying a major US network (ABC) among other high-grossing IPs.

Please someone fork that quick ; many open sourcers should follow.

New comment guidelines? No offensive language. No political speech?

I guess it's still cool to hate on Microsoft.

When you have as much money as Apple, Google or Microsoft, it's just "if you can't buy them, increase the offer."

I suspect part of what Microsoft is doing here is seeing who downloads what, in what order, after what stimulus, from what referencing page, etc.

Using this allows them to figure out what FOSS software to steal/rebrand, and what communities can be disrupted by messing with what FOSS product.

If this is the case, a starting point as a defense would be to set up a bounce site which pulls github for you, so no referrer/cookies passed. Such a site could, over time, replace github, but replacing github would take work and money, whereas partially insulating us from microsoft tracking would be trivial.

Not necessary. If you want to find what are the popular FOSS projects, just scrape all the hosting sites. Count the number of downloads, followers, committers, etc.

All in on Open Source eh?

why not open source Windows?

Why not open source all the protocols?

What MSFT really means, is "we get coders who will work for free, contributing specs and protocols which we will use as we see fit, without credit or attribution, and a closed proprietary license".

No one is fucking forcing them to shit out DX12 instead of switching to Vulkan like a non-predatory actor would have done. Maybe they can't open source the Windows kernel, but like, whatever. When Microsoft sees an opportunity to enforce lock-in, they do it, by any means necessary.

Remember what happened with Hotmail (well, if you're old like me), Skype, Nokia etc.

You mean $7.5B. Most likely by leveraging GitHub to crush the open source community (modifying the EULA to grant themselves the ability to copy/paste into proprietary software, or even patent rights or coownership, tracking what open source projects to target/disrupt, etc.) They're masters at two things: marketing and crushing the little guy. Their tactics are numerous.

Yeah, look how well it worked out for Nokia. MS buys it, then jacks around and does NOTHING for a couple years, while the guys that sold it, are under agreement to NOT do anything related. (for 7.5 billion I'd do a lot of nothing too)...then MS silently KILLS it.

Yeah, look how well it worked out for Nokia.
MS buys it, then jacks around and does NOTHING for a couple years, while the guys
that sold it, are under agreement to NOT do anything related. (for 7.5 billion I'd do a lot
of nothing too)...then MS silently KILLS it.

Yes, Microsoft killed the Nokia cell phone as a product, but they get what they wanted.... the patents, R&D, and designs.

Anyone following the cell phone market, Nokia, and the acquisition by Microsoft knew that Nokia phones were already dead, including Microsoft. With iPhone and Android phones, there wasn't any room for a third mobile phone OS competitor. What Microsoft was buying was Nokia's patent portfolio. With all of the lawsuits over cell phone patents, Microsoft wanted arrows in their quiver for future mobile products.

For example, Microsoft just came out with the Surface Pro LTE version. It also looks like Microsoft is developing a Surface Phone (slated for 2018) that will run Windows 10. The point is that Microsoft isn't done with the mobile market just yet and what they bought from Nokia was just the foundation of things to come....

They bought the division from Nokia, it feels like no one here who isn't Finnish doesn't realise Nokia makes and continues to make things that are more than just mobile phones. They're still a huge company here, and they've had mobile devices on the market for years.

Well no as MS didn't acquire the patents. They got the device and services part of Nokia. Nokia still retains their patent portfolio.

They also made it soNokia's patent royalties go to ms.

Do you have a citation for that as that seems illogical for Nokia to keep the patents and not the royalties from said patents.

Well no as MS didn't acquire the patents. They got the device and services part of Nokia. Nokia still retains their patent portfolio.

Yes, Microsoft did buy design patents. But I probably used a poor choice of words when I said that they received the patent portfolio. What they did get was "...8,500 of Nokia’s design patents"

You are right in one respect, they didn't buy ALL of Nokia's patents

"It bought the design patents outright but will license Nokia's 30,000 utility patents patents for 10 years. By not acquiring the entirety of Nokia's patents, Microsoft was able to keep the acquisition cost of the Devices and Services down while preserving future assets for Nokia"

https://readwrite.com/2013/09/...

Yes, Microsoft did buy design patents. But I probably used a poor choice of words when I said that they received the patent portfolio. What they did get was "...8,500 of Nokia’s design patents"

To me that means that no one can make Lumia phones. The cell phone technology patents are probably still in Nokia's portfolio. Can MS use their patents to sue? Yes but it's limited.

They bought the division from Nokia, it feels like no one here who isn't Finnish doesn't realise Nokia makes and continues to make things

It is difficult to keep track of the intricacies of corporate takeovers. Especially when the companies obfuscate the issue by licensing their brands and the journalists lie in their headlines.

and continues to make things that are more than just mobile phones.

But most of those things aren't products that are visible to your average consumer or even your average techie. They are products and services sold to Niche markets.

I guess the Finnish media reports more on the ongoing happenings related to Nokia, so people realise that the "Nokia sold to Microsoft" headlines were a lie, while those same happenings don't get reported so much in the global tech-consumer press because they don't relate to any of the hot-button tech consumer issues of the day.

and they've had mobile devices on the market for years.

My understanding is that with the exception of the N1 tablet (which was not sold in the west and seems to have been discontinued) all of the "Nokia" mobile devices on the market since 2014 are/were either from Microsoft or from "HMD global" (who bought part of Nokia's former handset division from MS).

This should clear it up for you.

Every drop of code will be scraped and cloned for abuse/misuse. And by them having the backups, its already too late to jump ship... You'd have to have left months ago. :-(

Wait until you see how you feel when Oracle buys Microsoft. :)

GitHub is not open source.

Git is open source.

github as it exists now was never going to last forever. At some point the VC firms that funded github were going to cash out. They'd either take it public or arrange an acquisition. That's how this works.

20 million github users, I'm guessing a large percentage of those are inactive or rarely used. $200million in yearly revenue.

Microsoft has paid $375 per user. I think they have hugely overpaid.

My take is that this is just another data point showing that Microsoft is now run by accountants who only care able the figures at the end of the financial year.

"Windows 10 is causing a significant number of people to decide their next computer will be a macbook?, we don't care, software testing costs money, respecting the users privacy won't help us make the numbers this year."

"We are overpaying for github, we don't care, it's stock not money from the balance sheet, it won't hurt us _this_ year."

How could $7.5bilion possibly be justified?

I think they are doing it to gain more credibility in the Enterprise.
Compared to AWS, they have the world's most popular code repository.

Integrating it with Azure is simple. And they'll be able to give Azure users special advantages and support.

a question for me:

If you are 'all in with open source', when are you going to start releasing source code for unsupported legacy releases of windows under an FOSS license so that people who REQUIRE them to run undocumented and unmaintained proprietary source code and drivers will be able to fix and maintain it themselves for whatever length of time it continues to make sense?

And if you are *NOT* willing to put in the time, money, or effort to do that, how can you tell us with a straight face that you are 'all in with open source'?

captcha was 'notarize'.

Now Microsoft has a revision control system maybe their code quality will get better?

Embrace,
Extend,
Extinguish

As soon as I saw the headline here on Slashdot, I googled "delete github account" and I have just completed the process of downloading my meager repos and nuking it.

I do not wish to be part of any club which would have Microsoft as a member, let alone one run by Microsoft.

I'm sure you have a hotmail account.

I hope not, I tried to delete that, too. A while back I decided that Microsoft was getting too invasive with gaming data, so I put away my 360 (eventually sold it, and got decent money for my 360 stuff too since I bought so many games at ultra low prices) and terminated my XBL account, and the hotmail account linked to it.

As soon as I saw the headline here on Slashdot, I googled "delete github account" and I have just completed the process of downloading my meager repos and nuking it.

I do not wish to be part of any club which would have Microsoft as a member, let alone one run by Microsoft.

You might want to stay away from Linux then.
Linux Foundation - Corporate Members

As I am not a member of the Linux Foundation, this is not a problem. Try again, son.

Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects -- and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.

Rember this from just a couple of years ago? https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

Embrace, extend, extinguish

Luckily as a tiny consolation, even if GitHub gets extinguished, Git it self as a repo technologgy is distributed, so any content on GitHub is basically already replicated across thounsands of laptops.

Yup, we will miss on some of the advanced (and much appreciated) features that GitHub did provide : issue tracking, organisation tools (Projects), and the whole social network aspect.

But at least the code currently hosted there will live on, no matter what happens.

Never rely to much on a centralized solution (even more so if it's one you don't own). the Git distributed concurrent version system is guaranteed resilient to this part.

> git status
Would you like clippy to find products related to 'status' ?

Clippy: "I can see you are writing code for AWS? Would you like to migrate to Azure?" Select Yes or Yes.

"No"

"Ok, you have decided to delete your code, working"

i guess sourceforge is still good

You can't say "still good" because sourceforge was only good at the beginning. Then they started doing things like trimming old projects. Even I have personally had code swallowed by sourceforge. Maybe the new owners will MAKE it good, but I never hold my breath for that sort of thing.

...Data removed and github account deleted.

This is why Google Hangouts is good. The owner can mute people if they have mic issues, it shows who is talking on the screen so there is no confusion and people talk over each other less, and it seems less glitchy. Plus it works with a browser so no need for a stupid app.

Apparently, Microsoft thought the cost of licenses for all the code on GitHub was included in the price.

Well, given that all the (publicly visible*) code on GitHub is licensed under some opensource license (most likely GPL or BSD).
The monetary cost of code under these licenses is traditionally zero (0) dollars**.

The 7.5 billion dollars they paid for GitHub also includes a sum of zero (0) dollars.

So they have paid the whole zero dollars it takes to license all the opensource code currently on GitHub.

It only remain to be seen if they'll also pay the non-monetary** cost that is required by the licensing.

---

* - Yes, I know, there are commercially paid repos that can be closed course. My joke only works for the publicly visible part of GitHub.

** - Though yes, *copyleft* license like *GPL* comes at a different, *non monetary, costs*.
It costs zero dollar to get the source and this covers anything you might want to do/edit/experiment, but it comes at the cost that you *MUST* keep the same freedom to do/edit/experiment as you want to anyone else to whom you further give copy.
Hence the "cancer" moniker that Microsoft was throwing around not so long ago.

github is an SJWhub.
Do you remember the ocalm incident?
Do you remember the "webm for retards" case?

The best part about SJWhubs is that they die slowly and they have a miserable death.
gitgud

Satya is their daddy now. So I'm sure MS, as a good corporate citizen, will address any and all of GitHub's shortcomings. Get ready for major policy updates! After that, well... it appears MS is goin' back to their same o' use to be. GitHub is the leading software development platform, and as such is a major influence in the future of IT. How long before the clarion call to abandon ship?

how do they make 7.5 billion back from github? unless this is about extinguishing competition then why bother?

One of my big concerns with github has been that companies use it for hosting their proprietary apps' source code. In my consultant role I've always pushed my client companies to keep their stuff on a private gitlab server instead.

I wonder if having (or at least controlling) access to damned near everybody's source code for pretty much everything will give them a competitive advantage?

1. Its not real money, just MSFT stock. I'm sure many shareholders are shaking their heads, but most of them aren't devs, all they know is Satya says its good, and the stock price is up today.

2. Given MSFT's basic nature (remember, DOS was just a bad knock off of CP/M!), they're not buying the service. Even MSFT could build their own github knockoff for a few million. Given the performance of the gitlab site today, I'm guessing MSFT may not be getting the audience they thought they were buying, but they had to know many/most serious devs would bail out PDQ (as I'm doing today). So the only value left is the content.

"When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

So the only value left is the content.

It was my understanding that you could pull your own submissions off of GitHub. As some developers have threatened to do. At any rate, the content is/was free for the taking.

Same question here - even with stock options/etc, 7.5B seems insane. I bet if you are Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc, you are laughing all the way to the bank today, because not only has Microsoft proven you are worth a lot more than you thought, any developers paying attention will be flocking to your solution!

Maybe they are planning to train an AI to write code or at least assist in writing code. That's the only business case I can come up with where spending 7.5 billion on github turns a profit.

Well, the content is, as it stands, subject to licensing and copyright.

In theory, MS could change the terms to say that MS has rights to all code under licensing terms of their choosing, in addition to whatever licensing the project chooses to offer everyone else.

This is the same company that once had ambitions of organically providing their own, but dictated things like licensing (codeplex forbade GPLv3 as one example, until 2013). The license was always a drop down, not freeform, so you didn't get to pick your license freely.

In practice, it's probably more about the social aspect than the code assets. Any move to do anything remotely worrisome with terms and conditions would sink the site faster than you can say 'sourceforge'.

There is every chance that the vast majority will not abandon github just at the MS annoucement. Sure there will be some, those will be very vocal and in fact given the community, a higher percentage than those who abandoned linked in, for example.

Yes, you can delete your repos, and your account. But those bits on backup storage are persistent. And for those of us with private repos, its a serious potential breach, given M$FT's lifetime of "innovation appropriation".

subject to licensing and copyright

Going forward maybe. But my understanding of GPLx licenses (and many other OS licenses as well) is that you can't take the content 'private' once it has been licensed and released. And derivative works are covered as well. Something something viral something.

The holder of the copyright can take the content 'private' once licensed and released. They are unable to restrict users of their previously acquired software in such a way.

So if MS says 'new projects must not be GPL' or 'your project must change away from GPL or get removed or set read-only', then people can in fact go away from GPL from that point forward.

This is frequently infeasible for many projects (unable to reach copyright holders to agree to a license change) unless that project also had copyright assignment as a contribution condition (which when required by companies is generally booed, but the FSF requires copyright assignment so ironically the FSF could kill GPL for all projects it provides).

All this is speaking to a hypothetical I seriously doubt. I assume MS is not stupid and realizes just how little 'stickiness' there is in the github userbase, and that any change that would scare off users could kill the platform within a few weeks. It's as much about marketing their image as it is about the revenue stream.

Yes. And this is worrying. I currently trust the FSF, but changes happen. It's worried me from the start. But I also see the reasons, and the lack of good alternatives.

The only thing that occurs to me is that people should be making checkpoint dumps say, once a year. So no more than a year's worth of coding is lost. But actually I think this happens. Red Hat and Debian, at least, have backups more frequently than that, and probably also Gentoo, and Slackware and most of the other major distributions.

the FSF requires copyright assignment so ironically the FSF could kill GPL for all projects it provides

Note: they couldn't kill it for any code already provided, just for future code they decide to write.

Well, they couldn't kill it for copies already downloaded, but they can re license new downloads of the exact same code.

GitHub is a for-pay service with a free version for public code.

What we have here is a problem of centralization. Switching to other centralized solutions isn't what we need. Decentralized solutions need to be invented.

You might have missed it, but the parent poster did mention that GitLab is opensource.
That means you can also deploy locally to your own server.
You don't need to host everything at http://gitlab.com/ you could be hosting on you own server as https://gitlab.ethz.ch/ or https://gitlab.sib.swiss/ did.

It's a possible solution for semi-decentralized hosting.

And the GIT DCVS is fully *decentralized* by definition, as pointed by others.

Gitlabs community edition is open source.

We used it for a few months. Then we moved to github enterprise

They will scan all code on GitHub for potential copyright violations and start legal action.

That's almost four Minecrafts worth!

On the plus side, Microsoft raised Nokia up to be the world leader in phones...

On the plus side, Microsoft raised Nokia up to be the world leader in Windows phones...

Too bad nobody bought any . . .

This is good for the community, because they'll finally have access to the enterprise-grade SourceSafe version control system.

In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Nadella said today the company is "all in with open source," and requested people to judge the company's commitment to the open source community with its actions in the recent past, today, and in the coming future.

I just finished watching a history of civilization video in which the British history (of world history) commented that when he grew up, all the high school history textbooks concerning Great Britain stopped at 1850 (British peak influence and affluence); he then claimed he had spoken to his American colleagues, who assured him that all their high school history textbooks stopped at 1950 (American peak influence affluence & greatest hit on the Welcome Back Codger campaign tour, as portrayed by the Pussy Grabber Elect, who, under Sharia law, would now be larger than life with a real hook and a real eye patch, mostly moaning about his once-legendary golf game, but still surprisingly agile on Twitter, typing with two fingers and one stump—Trump benefits far more from western-democratic social progress than he's honest enough to admit).

America: Try not to judge us by how we treated Native Americans before we had the complete run of the place.

And I'm not talking about the normal violence in the clash of technological haves and have-nots. I mean abdicating their treaty responsibilities when the Nez Perce actually came to the bargaining table. I mean all that forked tongue business where the early European Americans said "if only the natives were more civilized, they'd have better outcomes" until they actually had such a case on their hand, and—nope—the Nez Perce got buggered just as badly as everyone else. You see, the politicians in Washington meant well, but they were too preoccupied with their own internecine bun fights to actually send the troops to protect the Nez Perce (as promised) in exchange for their negotiated concessions. "I mean, good God, you can't expect us to organize troops in the middle of a Washington bun fight—just how naive can these people be!"

And so, judge us by how we've behaved lately, rather than what we did before, and how we originally obtained the grand stature we now enjoy and exploit, in our new-found wisdom and kindness and open arms.

United States incarceration rate

[*] A real historian can take issue with my depiction of the Nez Perce (which is shallow) or wield the same superior knowledge to supply another dozen examples, most of them even better than my dimly recalled case in point.

In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.

Ah, yes, you've come such a long way, America, indeed.

An SJW with a time machine could do worse than going back in time to warn the Incas and the Aztecs (and the eastern, coastal, northern tribes) to convey every disease-riddled Spanish explorer, conquistador, and missionary directly into the soup pot, by the most ruthless and expedience methods available, for a minimum 30-minutes of hard boil, including all personal effects, and then to pile all the bones and dental remains together, along with their ships and equipment, to then construct a bonfire to rival Texas A&M (which, however, now lies on a thoroughly deactivated, counterfactual time line; the Europeans would probably have arrived anyway—perhaps in some D-day scale continental invasion of the 1700s—to glorious rid the Dark Continent of the heathen, infidel, blood-thirsty cannibals once and for all; moral of the Native American story: damned if you do, damned if you don't—the kind, established European Mr Nice Guy surely won't make his gentle entrance until long after all your corn rows R belong to us).

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You missed the sarcasm tag.

Linux? Sure. OS X? The relative number of applications available for OS X vs. Windows suggests this is, in fact, not the case.

Microsoft has been a huge contributor to git in the last couple years. Maybe it's time you update your antiquated preconceived ideas.

You don't 'steal' open source code. You just lock it down to inconvenience the developers. Get ready to fire up VisualStudio and SourceSafe as the only working interfaces to GitHub content. It's not about stealing the code. Microsoft could always grab their own copies of anything they wanted. And it's not about funding the site. They could have kicked in cash as a major user/contributor of the site without taking an ownership/control position. This is about dragging everyone else down to their level.

Bucket of crabs.

..so long as Microsoft controls it completely, so it's not competing with their paid products, I'm sure. One word: Crippleware.

If you are familiar with British Slang there seems to be no need for any rebranding. Indeed, 'git'hub might be considered to be far more appropriate now that it was before!

Microsoft has been a huge contributor to git in the last couple years. Maybe it's time you update your antiquated preconceived ideas.

Look, see! The leopard has removed his spots!

A more directly relevant comparison in some ways is Microsoft acquiring Skype. It was not FOSS but, like FOSS, the latest and greatest version used to be available on all OS platforms (which is why it was so useful) before MS acquired it and broke that so that now Skype is only a shadow of its former self. I seem to remember comments about it also being planned to be kept relatively independent too.

Just remember, it was the bad guy who made that speech in The Matrix, not the good guy.

Remember the idea behind where the Mac came from? If you don't know ask the folks at Xerox.

And it blew it. Not once but multiple times. I do not trust them, they have shown no signs of apologizing for the "Truth" tour, they have shown no signs of apologizing for the fraudulent video in their antitrust trial, they have violated their agreement with the EU regarding browser choice, they have shown no intent of honouring the GPL, the code quality of Linux is inversely proportional to the Microsoft submissions in that release.

Case closed.

I will be copying off those projects of interest to me, along with my own, then deleting my GitHub account.

The leopard has removed his spots!

Wrong OS.

modifying the EULA to grant themselves the ability to copy/paste into proprietary software, or even patent rights or coownership,

The biggest part of GitHub, i.e.: what is publicly visible (except for a few paid projects) is explicitely opensource.

- For the BSD and other permissive-style licensed code : that's already the case. You can do pretty much everything you want with this code (and Microsoft has already done in the past. If I remember correctly, 1they've used bits of BSD-licensed Unix BSD code in their networking tools and stacks.)

- For the GPL and other copyleft-style licensed code : nope, that's not legally possible. GPL explicitely forbids hiding code/making it user-inaccessible (the GPLv2 and GPLv3 were on purpose designed to address ways that company have imagined to circumvent this forbidding)
GPLv2 and up mandate that the patents should be licensed for free to be used together with the GPL code.
The only way would be re-license the software under a new license that allows it.
And that impossible in practice for some pieces of software (e.g.: Linux kernel. Each chunk of code is still the copyright of whomever happens to have written it. Re-licensing the Linux kernel would require tracking every single last damn author and ask each one individually if they agree to relicense their small chunk of the code under something else than the GPLv2 (strictly version 2) that it was initially released under. That's what it takes. That one part of the various reasons why Linus did never ever consider switching the kernel to GPLv2+ or GPLv3(+) ).
If Microsoft were to merely add an attribution clause (similar to Ubuntu's CLA) it would only grant them copyright owner ship of any *up-coming* new contribution which was assigned to them. It would have no way to work retro-actively on past code (so Linux kernel remain GPLv2), nor code that wasn't assigned to them (anything contributed to Freedesktop's Gitlab and merely mirrored on github won't be affected either. The original contributors did not agree to the Microsoft attribution).

tracking what open source projects to target/disrupt, etc.

That's the only strategy that microsoft could try (and has been trying for several decades) : try to immediately propose something better to attract attention away from the opensource project. There are lots of recent exemples that Microsoft is critically failing on the "better" part.

Wish I could bet money on this search term going up https://trends.google.com/tren...

Actually, no, they haven't. They rate poorly on just about every metric.

Microsoft's tools are available for Linux, but the Top500 list and NASA's recommended tool list feature Intel, LLVM and GCC, not Microsoft.

Microsoft's networking code is not compliant with IETF standards.

If you want highly reliable code, you are more likely to use VST.

Microsoft contributed Z3 to software provers, but Why3 is still the one dominantly used.

Can you tell me the status of Microsoft support for D, Tcl/Tk, Ada/Spark, Prolog, Occam and Objective C? You can talk all you like about them being uncommon, but I can find RAD tools and IDEs for them, along with compilers. If you can't do what I need, you're the worse at what I use.

Na. They have pretty great development tools.
Now if you want to get into the specific performance and idiosyncrasies of their compiler, I'm on board.
Their IDE however is world-class, and earns its spot as the most popular IDE in use. Their debugger is also the nicest debugger I have ever used.
Your arguments are pretty lame, really. You list a bunch of niches that Microsoft apparently doesn't care about or attempt to compete in, and say that's why they rate poorly.

You suck because you've never gotten a medal in the special olympics.

So how long will it be before Microsoft gives the GitHub UI the Skype treatment ?

On the plus side, Microsoft raised Nokia up to be the world leader in phones...

Yes, you are correct. Microsoft razed Nokia.

PC applications is the least of what is being developed today. It's all about phone apps and web crap, both of which can be developed equally well on Linux and macOS.

Xerox willingly gave the technology to Apple, not realizing how valuable it was. Just like Bill Gates got IBM to willingly let him license the OS to other computer makers. Apple did not grant Microsoft the right to clone the software it had polished.

Note that github has never been open source. They have facilitated open source projects, but they have kept their code proprietary.

It's an interesting set of expectations. When self-hosted, people would care about the open source nature of it. If you *only* host, no one seems to have any expectation of how open or closed your software is.

Sun had products, income, etc. GitHub was just a repository. Was GitHub an actual business? I never used it but I always assumed it relied on donations and such to cover the cost of hosting. Buying a company with no revenue for $7.5B I would expect the actual value to Microsoft would be to spy on the software and copy the bits they like.

(or maybe Microsoft is trying to emulate Google by buying companies for 100 times what they're actually worth?)

The problem is people shaping this as a 'Windows' thing rather than a 'Microsoft' thing, or even broadly a 'big corp owns everything' thing.

It's healthy for them to move beyond self-delusion that they can always make Windows the answer, but in a way this makes them a bigger threat to the industry at large. The ideal end game for them is regardless of your technology choices, you give Microsoft money. Everything they do is in pursuit of that goal.

Again, it's also worth being worried more broadly about the industry trend of consolidation. It's why we currently only have 4 opinions to reconcile in the US cellular networking market (the leaders of the 4 providers). We should worry about Microsoft, but we also should be at least as worried about Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Microsoft invests in git. Slashdots look for the hidden catch. Failing to find one, they invent some. This might be seen as helping Microsoft in their evil designs, except that all of the ideas are so dumb that they couldn't be regarded as useful even by the inventors of the Zune.

Microsoft gives git the capability to deal with huge codebases, which had been a noted weakness of that system. Slashdots whine that the initialism of the name they gave it conflicts with some obscure GNOME project. According to them, this was some 4-D chess move to injure the GNOME project, which self-administers footbullets using automatic weapons.

Microsoft throws money at Github so it can remain viable. Slashdots fulminate about the implications. Banner ads? In your repo? It's more likely than you think.

You forget that people have reasons to distrust Microsoft. They are not compared to the Evil Empire or The Borg due to their public love of SciFi.

"Don't get in bed with Microsoft unless you want to be fucked" is a good rule-of-thumb.

It is fine to be skeptical. It is silly to be intractably so. I don't see any way for MS to earn your trust, and I'm not sure why they should care; it seems unlikely that they can.

The problem with absolutes is that they seem like strong stances, but actually they are brittle and weak. No one has any incentive to cooperate with such people, and so you become irrelevant in their calculations.

Sooner or later we have to stop treating for-profit businesses as though they were public co-operatives. Time to start supporting our collectives and our own people; just opposing any organization and hoping skilled people will donate unlimited time has failed.

...or on the equivalent, current version of it.

Double the amount of hardware required to run the mill.

Frantically restore the original setup from the backups.

Come up with a new name, like StandPoint.

Deploy a brand new interface with lots and lots of unused space... poor responsiveness... cumbersome workflows... automatic error correction... Clippy integration ("I see you are coding in Python. Do you want to try C#?")...

Time to update the list of pro's of GitLab.

This is why Google Hangouts is good.

Does that still exist? I used that once and it was quite good, so I naturally assumed they'd squished it.

Hey, I thought they were going to fuck up everything great about Minecraft when they acquired that... and thus far, they haven't. They did insist on porting it to more platforms, but they haven't bungled the Java version.

I don't think they bought it so much to make the money back as to buy the brand.

I haven't ready all the comments here yet but I haven't seen anybody point it out: GitHub itself is hosted on github. In other words ANYONE, including Microsoft, could literally clone the github website and have their own version of it up and running in...what? Inside 12 hours? It's not the site that's worth the money, it's the "good will" associated with the name that's worth the money.

Not sure why everybody is acting like this is the end of the world that MS bought the name since as I said literally anyone can literally clone the site at literally any time. Might be expensive if it's starts to get popular. The point is it's possible.

MS has had a number of open source projects on github for years btw. Visual Code seems like it's well regarded. And not that I'm that far into the Minecraft community but that seems to be doing fine under MS. They even released it for competing game consoles (like switch). Still not clear why everybody is freaking out over this. Look at the past 10 years of history for MS and it doesn't seem like they're evil. Seems more like their a "declining empire" trying to stay relevant (but that's an unrelated thought).

It's Microsoft that bought it, not Google.

Since I already refuse to use Microsoft for anything, I'd only hope that it contributes to Oracle going bankrupt. (I can't imagine the MS would sell itself for a fair price.)

That's an interesting insight.

Could you point at how that works?

So Microsoft cannot buy Linux or Linus, but the closest thing they can do is to acquire a company based on software that Linus wrote. MS have also taken note of developers on the internet, they need a means to collaborate and I see the purchase of github as a way of buying that collaboration platform. Metadata will be lost in the collaboration tool, all the history will be stored in an import-only tool. This was true when it was github alone, but I fear that MS will employ predatory tactics and make this an issue as they may decide to modify the standard git tools a little in their favour, perhaps making things noticeably harder to work with if you don't use their brand (see HTML-ised email and their versions of javascript in the earlier days).

Greater focus on ease-of-use in the toolkit

Beat commodity protocols / services

Linux's homebase is currently commodity network and server infrastructure. By folding extended functionality into today's commodity services and create new protocols, we raise the bar & change the rules of the game.

http://www.catb.org/esr/hallow...

Congratulations, open source programmers, Microsoft couldn't be the empire it is & another $7.5 billion couldn't have been added to Sunnyvale housing prices without your sacrificed evenings, weekends, & jobs. I never got into gitbug, still using sourceforget all these years. Looks like once those shares vest, gitbug will be joining Microsoft's other thriving acquisitions like hotmail.com, skype, & linkedin. Can't wait for hackaday.io to get acquired by Microsoft. My custom sandals should get at least a couple rhinestone bathtubs for the CEO's mansion.

Neo got everyone killed or kicked out of Eden... or at least that was his goal and after the breakdown of the alliance between the architect and himself and the failed invasion of Zion, we're left to assume that all the humans in the Matrix were purged....for purely selfish purposes. He also reprogrammed Smith to give him the ability to overwrite human minds, which was done. So, is he really that good?

I don't have to judge a company by a carefully chosen slice of its overall history. I'd rather give new companies a shot instead, ones that don't have decades of abusive anti-competitive behavior.

If Microsoft wants to get away from its past, it is free to close its doors, rename itself, or formally apologize with sincere acknowledgement of responsibility, wrongdoing, and regret.

They aren't going to make back $7.5M, much less the $7.5B they paid.

I am sure some executive at MS thinks they are going to get people to buy in to MS lifecycle products and switch over to some disaster like TFS.

Just don't get nuked by Gandhi.

What people at GitHub care about and what the VCs who owned it care about are not necessarily the same things.

Well, not totally selfish purposes I suppose. He was willing to kill the human race to save one woman.

I have seen many comments on why Microsoft acquired GitHub, but at least one argument I found missing. On GitHub software that is not Microsoft's thrives. It is obviously benificial for MS to have the power to screw with this competitive ecosystem of software and developers.

As for me, I consciously chose to not use GitHub to host my projects. I use Savannah for this, an alternative that was also prominently missing in the comments so far.

And Linus won't see a dime from the purchase.

What if Gmail had been designed by Microsoft?

Actually, I stopped using Skype as soon as Microsoft acquired it, so I have to ask how long it took for MS to dump the Linux version of Skype? Also, is there or was there ever a Mac OS version? (I didn't buy my first (and possibly last) Mac until afterwards.)

I'm guessing your insightful mod was for the business model part of it. Rubs me the wrong way because I think there actually are solutions and GitHub could have found a viable financial model, but never will now. Once in Microsoft's tender clutches there is no escape.

My favored solution approach for OSS remains the Charity Share Brokerage, which is really a form of project management in disguise... Approaching it from that perspective, the appeal to a wannabe developer is help in learning what kinds of projects can be accomplished. Oh well. Time for ADSauPR, atAJG.

I remain "pure" in the mathematicians' or physicists' sense of "pure". Implementation is a problem for the engineers to fuss with.

The IDE is cluttered, gets in the way and is painful to use. It is tedious, requiring the user to build each environment independently. I have to hardcode options, I can't use discovery tools to see what exists or where it is. As an autoconf/cmake replacement, it sucks.

It's slow. Given the choice of VS or Emacs, I would use Emacs every time. Much less overhead, much more real estate.

And that's central to an IDE, your real estate. It's mostly wasted in VS, no matter what you do.

Auto builds slow the computer down and are a bad design choice.

Probably the best IDE I have ever seen for any language on Windows was Borland Turbo Pascal 3's. The Inmos folding editor was superb, Ada's GPS and Eiffel's GUI are decent. Vi and Notepad++ are brilliant (tools should never get in the way). Really, for programming help, Norton Guides were the best I've ever seen.

Their debugger is dreadful. If that's the best you've used, I pity you. I don't use it, even if using VS.

Indeed, I think you'll find Notepad++ beats VS in popularity. More people might own VS with Windows but that's because you can't separate it from the compiler and most competing compilers oblige you to install VS even if you never use it. That's not popularity, that's antitrust.

That was with beta software. The whole point of having people try your software early is to gather data on how it performs. Are you trying to spread FUD that they will insert code into projects or something?

Stealing source code is 20th century. In the 21st century, you steal entire communities.

Sometimes you do it by embrace/extend or even replace. Certainly Microsoft got plenty of data from their Skype purchase. And, not to blame just Microsoft, finding gamers who lived on Mumble was trivial a few years ago, but nowadays proprietary chat replacements such as Discord and Curse (now just Twitch, which is Amazon) are host to a variety of actual real conversations, all loggable, seachable, and whateverable.

I think they'll do what they can to make github useful, because their real gains are the second order effect of holding the beating heart of the free and open source communities.

Look, see! The leopard has removed his spots!

So, Edge is standards-compliant?

(I can't imagine the MS would sell itself for a fair price.)

If that happens, it would turn out like Yahoo did: a lame-duck negotiation process that they can't win. It will be a long time before that happens though, since Microsoft is still growing.

It's like the Muslims stealing the Hagia Sophia

Mod up.

Github has enterprise accounts for private repositories that had subscription fees. It's quite expensive compared to other services. They had cash coming in.

That is annoying, I agree. You do get used to use Cmd+Home, even though it makes no sense. I curse fairly loudly whenever I accidentally hit 'home' and end up at the top of a source file.

So... No :P

The IDE is cluttered, gets in the way and is painful to use. It is tedious

That's like, your opinion, man. And a minority opinion, at that.

I have to hardcode options, I can't use discovery tools to see what exists or where it is. As an autoconf/cmake replacement, it sucks.

Good god. You still use autoconf?

It's slow. Given the choice of VS or Emacs, I would use Emacs every time. Much less overhead, much more real estate.

Yes, and you'll never get a real job as a programmer. I love Emacs too. I use it for all of my scripting, and even small and simple linux C projects. Emacs isn't even an IDE when compared to the IDE functionality of VS. It's a really bitchin extensible text editor with some language punctuation and highlighting features. I'm beginning to wonder if you're even serious, here.

And that's central to an IDE, your real estate. It's mostly wasted in VS, no matter what you do.

Yawn. Your real estate is what is central to your IDE? I'm starting to piece something together here. What you need is a text editor. I'm wondering if you're really qualified to be forming opinions about what makes a good IDE when you're quite clearly an amateur.

Auto builds slow the computer down and are a bad design choice.

Again, are you serious? I don't know whether to attack the literal falsity of that, or the obvious solution to it.

Probably the best IDE I have ever seen for any language on Windows was Borland Turbo Pascal 3's. The Inmos folding editor was superb, Ada's GPS and Eiffel's GUI are decent. Vi and Notepad++ are brilliant (tools should never get in the way). Really, for programming help, Norton Guides were the best I've ever seen.

TP3 and BCB were both good products. Very similar to VS, but in a lot of ways better. But still, everything that you love about them, you hate about VS. Weird.
As for the rest of that horseshit, again... with the text editors. I'm sorry VS has too much functionality for you. I'm sorry you work on simple software projects, and are confused a lot of tools in your face. That's fine. Stick to your text editors, and the professionals will continue to use professional tools.
Next up, jd tells us about using Gimp for professional post processing.

Their debugger is dreadful. If that's the best you've used, I pity you. I don't use it, even if using VS.

Again, that's like, your opinion, man. And you're again a minority. But yes, using GDB is a fucking thrill [rolls eyes]

Indeed, I think you'll find Notepad++ beats VS in popularity.

Mmmh, no. As a text editor? Sure. Probably. VS is a little heavy for simply editing files. It is, after all, a fucking IDE- something that notepad++ *is not*.

More people might own VS with Windows but that's because you can't separate it from the compiler and most competing compilers oblige you to install VS even if you never use it. That's not popularity, that's antitrust.

Poppycock. You can develop for windows without VS. Furthermore, you can separate VS from the compiler as well. Hell, you can use GCC if you want. It's just a fucking IDE. It also, unsurprisingly, ships with compilation and linking tools, derp.

I'd love to start picking apart all the ways your selected software sucks, but not a single fucking one of them were an IDE, so I'm kind of at a loss here. Since they are pretty good text editors, I can't really shit on them too badly. What I can say, is you didn't have a single good point, your opinion is not only a minority one, but also ridiculously bone headed. And finally, you need to look up the definition of antitrust.

Microsoft has been a huge contributor to git in the last couple years. Maybe it's time you update your antiquated preconceived ideas.

That is fair. Let's do that.

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

Preconceived ideas about MIcrosoft confirmed.

Wow the reverse FUD machine is really roaring along. haven't seen this much sabre rattling and gnashing of teeth in a decade!.Very entertaining!

( longtime bitbucket user, taking a wait-and-see approach w/r/t github )

I'm sorry, but The Matrix 2 and 3 were complete shit, and I deny they were ever made. Neo is the good guy, and Agent Smith was the bad guy.

Yeah well if people want to live on past actions let's start hating white people again for all those decades of racism. We all know you're just itching if given half a chance to start it all over again, which is the same logic being used against Microsoft.

Except that Microsoft has promised - and broken the promise - of being better a couple times already, and that it is still the same company unlike people who are not the same. I am not my grandfather, but Microsoft is still Microsoft.

I'm not sure you've actually seen that video. The quote isn't famous because it showed Balmer "got" developers, it's famous because it showed Balmer being a dim witted ape hopping around stage flailing his arms.

This is kind of weird. Richard Stallman also hated Tcl. It's pretty dead. It was my first main professional programming language... 20 years ago. Those are all largely dead, only Objective C was big in recent years.

I don't know what windows/linux is relevant here? If it is, just look to ubuntu on windows in the windows store for running it. If it is for development? Well you can run .net core on windows or linux. You can write it in VS Code, running on either. You can connect to sql server. Running on either OS now. Or easily connect to it from java, ruby, node, php, python, whatever (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/connect/sql-connection-libraries?view=sql-server-2017). VS Code is used heavily for node and golang dev in my company

You're talking about visual studio. I'm pretty meh on it. The new Jet Brains .net IDE is nicer for C#. VS has too much legacy. You can totally separate it from the compiler though. This complaint is a few years outdated, we do all our compilation using the dotnet cli nowadays, from psake (powershell make) files, so that Jenkins builds can exactly match our local builds.

VS Code though is amazing, and popular for all kinds of languages where people previously may have used Sublime Text or similar. A lot of times this is all I use for small changes to c# projects - text editor and command line cli

True... But that's because we have an app for every stupid thing on mobile. Which both makes sense, and is infuriating. But PCs are hardly going away. It's just that Linux is great for some things, Windows for others. I have not run into anything that Macs are superior for in quite some time. iOS is limited by policy (and there are good reasons for this... Mostly tied to its user base methinks). Android, in most cases is superior overall for my needs, and most of the needs of those I know. I work in IT, and I can honestly say most of my coworkers despise iPhones.

Speechless, I know selling out to the highest bidder would eventually happen, but Not MS!!! GitHub is doomed! What part of github will MS destroy first; so it will Only work with MS OS's... I can't say enough cuss words in a row to state my displeasure with this acquisition!!! Dumping my account, and building my own Git Repos; who needs a cute web interface anyway?!?! Sick to my stomach! Who cares if MS bought Skype & Visio; good products, but mainly MS only... Github is OPEN; today, but it's future is extremely bleak...OS developers paying extortion fees for MS to handle their code...nice...who's code will be MS's next copyrighted / licensed application??? Not to mention weaving GitHub into their O365 and dev studio crap... NEVER trust MS!

Many thanks :^)

Slashdot Mirror

Microsoft Acquires GitHub For $7.5B (microsoft.com)

269 of 493 comments (clear)