Microsoft Has Reportedly Reached A Deal To Acquire GitHub

[PackRat]

https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200 "We are seeing 10x the normal amount of daily repositories. We are scaling our fleet to keep up" lol

[cybertraveler]

[Delgarde]

Hahaha man you guys are paranoid. Microsoft acquiring Github will have absolutely zero effect. 1. Open Source will continue with/without github. 2. Copyright remains with project creators. 3. It's dead easy to shift your git tree to another hosting service. 4. Microsoft Loves Money and won't look to kill their golden goose. Companies use github and are paying cash to do so. There is nothing to worry about.

I tend to agree, though don't underestimate the difficulty of migrating away. Yes, it's trivial enough to get the code out, because that's just standard git functionality. But a github project is more than just the code... it's the issue-tracking system that would need to be data-migrated to something else, and the tools for branch management and pull requests, things that are critical parts of developer workflow. They *can* be replaced, but it's not a small exercise.

Just for contrast, look at Gnome, having recently migrated from their own in-house infrastructure to GitLab – a project that's taken more than a year to complete. Migrating the code, that was trivial enough, but converting data from Bugzilla, figuring out permissions issues, figuring out how to provide an acceptable workflow for all the developers accustomed to the old one... that's a huge effort.

[JeansenVaars]

Am I the only one with a little bit of hope towards M$? I mean, The M$ who released windows 8 and the beginning of windows 10 is not the same than today's M$. I feel communication is better, more customization, more Linux and open source support, better virtualization, etc.

With the change of M$ management I've seen things going a bit into the right direction lately..

Maybe i'm becoming crazy, even Edge browser works superb on my laptop and drains smaller battery than other browsers (April creators update)

[paupav]

Am I the only one with a little bit of hope towards M$? I mean, The M$ who released windows 8 and the beginning of windows 10 is not the same than today's M$. I feel communication is better, more customization, more Linux and open source support, better virtualization, etc.

With the change of M$ management I've seen things going a bit into the right direction lately..

Maybe i'm becoming crazy, even Edge browser works superb on my laptop and drains smaller battery than other browsers (April creators update)

you are crazy

[cybertraveler]

Am I the only one with a little bit of hope towards M$? I mean, The M$ who released windows 8 and the beginning of windows 10 is not the same than today's M$. I feel communication is better, more customization, more Linux and open source support, better virtualization, etc.

With the change of M$ management I've seen things going a bit into the right direction lately..

Maybe i'm becoming crazy, even Edge browser works superb on my laptop and drains smaller battery than other browsers (April creators update)

I wish I could look fondly at their technical achievements (including the lean and more standards compliant Edge browser and their recent Open Source contributions), but Microsoft is an organism which has evolved a set of survival traits which are hostile to privacy, freedom of choice, standards and the FOSS ecosystem. These traits (including the famous Embrace Extend Extinguish) have served the company extremely well financially. What reason could their be for them shedding these traits? What evidence is there that they have changed?

I think that if we're to come out of the next wave of extinguishing relatively unharmed, we need to be far more resilient, sceptical and resistant to Microsoft's warm embrace.

Right now Microsoft are very much embracing our tech. They're saying "hey guys! check out this Open Source stuff we did! Cool ey!" and "Guys! We're investing in your companies (GitHub) and non-profit projects (Linux and Apache)! We're here to help you guys".

If Microsoft haven't changed, then what we will see next are... the "improvements". They will add extensions to our favourite tools and services which only work well or reliably with Microsoft products. They'll be corresponding marketing spent advertising how "to be sure that everything will just work, you should probably just buy/use the Microsoft version".

This is not to mention Microsoft's recent escalation of mass surveillance. They were never great when it came to privacy, but they are now worse than ever. You can safely assume that every service Microsoft own and operate is tied into their virtual panopticon.

[enihcam]

Come on people! The new Microsoft is different from the old one. The CEO is not SB.

[shmerl]

Come on people! The new Microsoft is different from the old one. The CEO is not SB.

New or not, MS supported Oracle against Google to claim that APIs are copyrightable. They never reversed their stance. How do you think many FOSS projects should feel about it, especially hosted on Github? MS will have a massive conflict of interests, with hosting projects that either directly compete with them, or break their lock-in. And many of them use MS APIs.

[brrrrttttt]

with git, it's pretty trivial to migrate to a different provider. I'm going to start looking for a different git host, but I'm not in a desperate hurry just yet.

You're thinking only of source. A large proportion of projects have at least CI, issue tracking, contribution process, followers/watchers, and maybe website to migrate.

[brrrrttttt]

Sad day for GitHub. I guess I first need to migrate all my private repos and cancel my subscription... then the public stuff. What a waste of time.