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Linux Foundation Celebrates Microsoft's GitHub Acquisition (theverge.com)
The Linux Foundation has endorsed Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. In a blog post, Jim Zemlin, the executive director at the Linux Foundation, said: "This is pretty good news for the world of Open Source and we should celebrate Microsoft's smart move." The Verge reports: 10 years ago, Zemlin was calling for Microsoft to stop secretly attacking Linux by selling patents that targeted the operating system, and he also poked fun at Microsoft multiple times over the years. "I will own responsibility for some of that as I spent a good part of my career at the Linux Foundation poking fun at Microsoft (which, at times, prior management made way too easy)," explains Zemlin. "But times have changed and it's time to recognize that we have all grown up -- the industry, the open source community, even me." Nat Friedman, the future CEO of GitHub (once the deal closes), took to Reddit to answer questions on the company's plans. "We are not buying GitHub to turn it into Microsoft; we are buying GitHub because we believe in the importance of developers, and in GitHub's unique role in the developer community," explains Friedman. "Our goal is to help GitHub be better at being GitHub, and if anything, to help Microsoft be a little more like GitHub."
GitHub aligns really well with Microsoft's position as a development tool company. Unless you want Embarcadero or Oracle to buy them, the best big dev tool company to buy them was Microsoft on that front.
Microsoft is also perfectly capable of turning the public site into a loss leader that gets companies to buy the enterprise version. They have the money to easily absorb GitHub's losses as they rebuild the enterprise strategy and open GitHub to Microsoft's full sales channel and task Microsoft corporate sales people with selling it.
And finally, Microsoft is like Apple here in that they have zero motivation right now to screw it up with ads and monetizing user data because they're not an advertising company and they have PLENTY of resources to turn the enterprise side of GitHub from a big loss into a multi-billion dollar business.
when an 800 pound gorilla consumes a bundle of bananas meant for the FOSS chimpanzees,
hey Linux Foundation do you like seeing a corporation that has had 20+ years of animosity towards GNU/Linux & FOSS buy a resource that makes downloading GNU/Linux & FOSS possible, how long before microsoft starts deleting all the good GNU/Linux & FOSS code and makes access by paid subscription only? then what?
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We have make 20B a year selling closed-source software because we care so much about open-source software!
Nothing to see here, move along.
GitHub aligns really well with Microsoft's position as a development tool company. Unless you want Embarcadero or Oracle to buy them, the best big dev tool company to buy them was Microsoft on that front.
How long until the E-mails from GitHub saying "our terms of service have changed"?
I'm betting this happens "before the end of summer".
https://www.linuxfoundation.or...
A leopard can not change it spots. Just two months ago I was using Microsoft chat to find out about installing Windows for the first time in 15 years. I was using FF and Ubuntu, and the chat window was broken, the input line covered the bottom of the chat history. so I had to keep hitting enter, enter so that I could see the last thing typed. Always just a little broken for not MS systems. The Linux foundation function is to support big business not the small developer or hacker. When money talks. the Linux Foundation bends over and takes it.
The original Linux ideals are being lost to corporate money.
Their goal is to make Microsoft Windows the #1 developer platform, that's the reason why they added the Linux subsystem. At the same time, they make dual booting harder, expect there to be more problems to come with Windows updates if you're dual booting. The strategy is obvious, they've realized that Linux needs to be embraced & distinguished or at least controlled by sneaking more and more Microsoft stuff into the Linux ecosystem. They will follow the same strategy that Google managed to pull off with Android - overtly supporting free software and open source, but covertly making sure you dominate the field and using tricks and money to prevent successful forking. Can you take an arbitrary smartphone and install your own compilation of the latest Android on it? Right, you can't. The same may happen with Linux. Don't be surprised if Microsoft becomes a major contributor soon. Maybe they even try a 'Windows compatible' distro of GNU/Linux soon. At the same time, they sell their user's data, because they want to become an adware business like Google. Purchasing Github is a major step into this direction.
Why all this? It's a long-term strategy. Microsoft has always been able to deal with Apple, because Apple is not really a software company, but they rightly fear of losing the desktop market entirely. Since the phone thing didn't work out well, they're now trying to make sure to continue the desktop market and want to become the HUB for developers. Apart from that, there is only high end gaming (dwindling market), pro audio (shared with Apple), and Microsoft Office left for them before they would die. Surely at least they'd like to keep the developers, who went to buy Apple hardware in droves, because it allows you to develop for all operating systems on one crappy, overprized machine.
Gosh....
It's corporate moves and compromises like this which have made me leave the IT business to focus on Industrial programming.
IT cannot remain relevant if it becomes a monolith. Open source, as a corporate walled garden, is not going to provide the platform for people to be at liberty with their own computing and data.
It's over folks. There are no more garages.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Could be a case of "why not both?" as well.
Their finances were out of control. By Ars Technica's reasonable estimates, they had blown through the majority of the funds they'd already raised, and a lot of it had to do with them blowing insane amounts of money on employee compensation. Plus, they weren't doing nearly enough to sell, sell, sell their enterprise packages to make up for the fact that their whole public site is damn near a loss leader for that line of business.
GitHub probably could have been profitable at least one or two years ago if they'd controlled their costs and gone all-in on selling the enterprise product. I remember 4 years ago their pricing was something like $5k/year/20 years or something like that. It was like it was designed to be unattractive to small teams with limited overhead (we could have afforded a one time $5k license, but the annual renewal was a deal-breaker on the perceived value).
Have you seen their members and board of directors? Any credibility they've ever had is just a bad assumption based on their really FOSS friendly sounding name.
They will harvest Githib looking for coders who are active in various areas of programing and use that information to enrich their LinkedIn job search capabilities.
the first compile is always “free”
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I don't agree with the analysis in the parent comment.
This amazing quote from the Slashdot story demonstrates an avoidance of reality, in my opinion: "We are not buying GitHub to turn it into Microsoft; we are buying GitHub because we believe in the importance of developers, and in GitHub's unique role in the developer community," explains Friedman.
My opinion: Microsoft bought GitHub because it expects to make money. To begin evaluating GitHub's future, consider what Microsoft did to Skype and LinkedIn.
Harvard Business Review article: Why Microsoft Is Willing to Pay So Much for GitHub. Quote from that article: "GitHub was acquired for close to 30x annual recurring revenue (an astronomical multiple)."
Another quote from the Harvard Business Review article:
"In other words, Microsoft is not paying $7.5 billion for GitHub for its ability to make money (its financial value). It's paying for the access it gets to the legions of developers who use GitHub's code repository products on a daily basis (the company's strategic value) -- so they can be guided into the Microsoft developer environment, where the real money is made."
In my opinion that statement damages the reputation of the Harvard Business Review. What it really means is something like this: "... legions of developers can be FORCED into the Microsoft developer environment, where the real money is made."
... coming up in about this order:
... and so so... MicroSoft is still MicroSoft, a ruthless for-profit organization that knows no moral borders for crushing their competetion and keeping their users addicted.
- registering a live.com account (with personal information) becomes mandatory to use github
- github experience becomes "optimized for Edge", and somehow more sluggish for all other browsers
- use of GVFS becomes mandatory. Complete decentralized copies of hosted repositories is first discouraged, later made impossible
- web service starts to use binary, Windows-only extensions, later some features are no longer available without
- MicroSoft starts removing projects that contradict their business models or just generally displease them
- MicroSoft requires developers to utilize MicroSoft-issued certificates to sign their commits. First certificates are free, later they start to cost per month.
- MicroSoft sells NSA and other paying customers the service to implant back-doors in the sources hosted at github - of course "signed" with the seemingly correct developer certificate.
Is this analysis correct?
Microsoft bought access to the code of GitHub's paying customers.
Stac: why ahould I bemoan that a company that produced a kludge to compress data on my hard drive found their technology absorbed into DOS so that I could use it for free?
OS/2: IBM tried to take back what they had given away for free (the open PC arcitecture) and failed because Microsoft wouldn't partner with them to do so.
Those are just the oldest two. Microsoft also stopped Netscap from turning the web into something they owned with their propritary Netscape web servers.
There is a black and white checkered history of every entity involved in the modern history of computing. If you back away from specific instances and quit drinking one side or the other's koolaide, the black/white check pattern transforms into gray.
Sure. And the Microsoft of tomorrow is not necessarily the Microsoft of today. Easy come, easy go.
Which is why Microsoft should get busy providing an explicit list of intentions concerning their operation of GitHub, providing as many bullets as possible about things that define their tenure as the presumptive "good" Microsoft: will dos and won't dos.
If the list doesn't allow one to finish the sentence "you'll know we've gone back to our old tricks when ..." it isn't an adequate prospective disclosure.
To reiterate: I'm not increasing my present reliance on GitHub in any meaningful way until I have a really solid completion to the sentence "you'll know we've gone back to our old tricks when ..." completed in Microsoft's own words.
I don't hold modern Germans responsible for what happened once upon a time. Nevertheless, I do expect some extremely cautious and historically informed navel-gazing on their part when their will to power swells.
My position will be much the same concerning the half of America that voted for Donald Trump if his rough and tumble "diplomacy" escalates into an exchange. Should that terrible day come to pass, "oh, well, the South Korean position was untenable, anyway (may you rest in peace)" is not going to fly in my airspace.
Explicit circumspection. It's a thing.
Blink twice if you're under duress.
Github is still a business.
This is what I find troubling. GitHub was too significant to have been a business. It should have been a foundation. GitHub's being sold reminds me of how all these small, holistic natural products companies start and and eventually end up getting swallowed by the same 3 or 4 enormous conglomerates, before their quality declines and they become part of the same, evil globooligarchistic ecorapacious system.
And I will never trust nor like Microsoft, nor more than I like war criminals regardless of how much time has elapsed after their crimes were committed.
LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) is already creepy and gross. Already cancelled my GitHub account. If that is what it means to use my talent to "participate" in the economy I refuse. Piss on Microsoft.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: How Microsoft Plans to Get Rid of Linux/Android (April 20, 2015) That article contains these links:
Microsoft Hates Linux -- Part I -- The UEFI Attack on GNU/Linux
Microsoft Hates Linux -- Part II -- Patent Lawsuits Against Android/Linux Still Going On, New Ones Filed
Microsoft Hates Linux -- Part III -- Abducting the Competition (Android)
Microsoft Hates Linux -- Part IV -- Deleting, Attacking Android/Linux From Within
Microsoft Hates Linux -- Part V -- Dumping and Surveillance to Counter GNU/Linux Insurgence
Microsoft Hates Linux -- Part VI -- Propaganda Wars Against Free Software Facilitated While Media Control is Secured and Abused
Microsoft controlling GitHub is terrible, because Microsoft is terrible! We should all move our repositories over to GitLab. GitLab is hosted on Azure, they're so much nicer and more trustworthy than Microsoft!
These are the end times. Signs and portents we can not ignore.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Hey, you're welcome to spend your own time and money creating a foundation to do the same thing - I'd certainly prefer a stable foundation to a business, and I'm sure there would be no shortage of people willing to jump on board, once it was up and running.
But that foundation (so far as I know) doesn't exist. Should we then ban businesses from offering such valuable services? Or require them to divest themselves of the services to a non-profit foundation when they become culturally significant? Neither of those sounds like an improvement - in fact they sound like a great way to make sure GitHub never existed in the first place.
But now we're at a point where a company widely reviled in the open source community has bought one of the most significant public code repositories. Time is ripe for the also-rans - where is the foundation looking to take its place as developers jump ship? It's not like GitHub is some iron fortress of patent-protected functionality - pretty much anyone could clone the functionality without credible legal difficulties. (though of course with Microsoft involved, baseless legal challenges could still be enough to drive you into the ground)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yeah, uh, no.
Any more throwaways to contribute?
The company operating Github was languishing. The last thing we need would be for Oracle to swallow it up, or any of the other deep pockets players (Amazon, Apple, Google) to take it over. Microsoft has been a developer-centered company since the beginning, when they were mostly a language interprwter/compiler biz.
They don't hustle advertising, and they don't sell overpriced dongle hardware required to use their products.
But there's a certain amount of anti-M$ insanity that will always have to be dealt with, or routed around. That's ok. Platform wars have been with us forever. We cope.
Mozilla, Apache, or Eclipse are ones that come to mind. I think even IntelliJ taking over would have been a lot better. One hopes that they will jump in and set up a source code repository/change control system even better than GitHub.
I will never like Microsoft. As I said in another comment, no amount of time passing will ever make a war criminal less guilty and more likeable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!
Kind sirs and madams, I think you're forgetting that Microsoft has a fiduciary responsibility to screw people. Sincerely, The Communist Anarchist Gasoline-Drinking Psychopath
Not long ago I've read this one: https://www.bloomberg.com/news... In the meantime, Slashdot ADs is pointing me to a tool to move all my code to SourceForge :)
You see, he used bing and it didn't say anything about the linux foundation. Just something about welcoming our new overlord.
Famous last words!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.