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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.

Azure Github by Windows featuring Sharepoint and Skype communications.

Available only on Windows Phone or Zune.

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...

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.

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

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?

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.

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)

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.

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" 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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

If you can't beat them, buy them.

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.

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.

>> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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....

This should clear it up for you.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The leopard has removed his spots!

Wrong OS.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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