It's Official: Microsoft Pays Out $7.5 Billion For GitHub, Nat Friedman Becomes The CEO

[jrch2k8]

Github was never that great to begin with. It always had this condescending view of its users being based on a closed source platform. I couldn't understand why people like it so much considering it has this condescing "Youre a fool so youre not worthy to look at the source code for this" view of its users, when we have other open source sites such as Sourceforge (Apache Allura) and Gitlab.

This sale is not very inconsistent with Githubs arrogant and condescending closed source attitude.

This sale is good news for Gitlab and Sourceforge, and for open source in general, now people hopefully will use these open source based alternatives now.

I agree but I guess it was mostly because it was earlier(at least to the public mass audience of devs) and have a lot of support from tutorials and other sites, hence most developers starting into many tools and new languages assume github is needed or required or easier because the documentation / tutorials use it more often than not.

For example, I'm retaking this web app stuff and back in the day I used AngularJS, so retaken it I've noticed pretty much every Angular6 site/tutorial included instructions pretty much exclusively for GitHub, hence if you are new and learning is pretty safe to assume GitHub is the best or something and stop looking.

hence GitHub have a lot better marketing than the competition hence got huge faster

[jrch2k8]

You just listed 3 worries that have nothing to do with privacy.

the second is privacy related in case it wasn't blatantly obvious enough.

[jpg44]

Anyway i think any developer should use his own server and install git on it, making his own git server. You can buy a nice cloud server from google for example...costs you like 10 euro a month. Works very nice. On my server i have a few websites running and many git repositories. I would say: life is beautiful.

This is actually a really bad idea, because of how many developers just stop paying for hosting and the thing disappears into the aether. Hosting on a site like sourceforge and gitlab at least allows other people build on what you've done even if your no longer hosting and maintaining it. At least make mirrors on gitlab, sourceforge and github. This prevents the software from vanishing

[karolherbst]

Again stop assuming privacy equals "ohh you put you home address and credit card numbers in Github, hey is your fault", sure that is face of privacy but come on, stop trying to stretch reality here because no one will do that(almost, since I'm statistically sure someone somewhere did since idiots are extremely creative in new ways of being idiots).

but that's still true and oh what do you know. There are plenty of examples where important passwords were found inside the git history and so on. Maybe less credit card numbers, but all kind of sensitive data is stored inside git repositories and all that goes to MS now.

And then, can you be sure a force push deletes those things on the servers? What about backups? Wouldn't they still contain your private data even after you deleted it with a force push until that backup gets deleted? I can see a lot of issues here, but it all resulted from the mistakes of the repository owner in the first place and this issue is still present with gitlab or any other cloud git repository and it doesn't change much about who owns it, because you have no control over their infrastructure and how they save backups and when they delete data for real and so on.

My worries are simply as follow:

1.) certainty that Microsoft won't force in some way a vendor blockade on some features into their platforms or specifically isolate new technology that could compete against some Microsoft only product on the platform(they've done this in the past in every possible way known to mankind, so an simply nah! they won't do it this time is not enough).

2.) shady monetization of certain usage patterns with ad companies and other backstage means, if they do it with Windows I won't simply believe "nah, GitHub is safe from this because reasons"

3.) simply and suddenly absorb GitHub into their .NET/Azure cloud "platform"(which is probably where their big $$$ share will come) and screw everyone else like they've done with dozens and dozens of businesses before.

Sure, I expect you to think this CEO is different, they don't do that anymore, is 7.5B they won't do it, etc.etc.etc but in 20+ years I've heard that and many many more excuses and still happened, sure you guys maybe right this one time but again my point is why take any risk if there are other platform almost or equally good, hence I moved on to those.

okay sure 2. is a valid privacy concern. Currently we don't have ads on github afaik (I wouldn't know either way) and yeah, so this could/might change indeed.

[jpg44]

It's nice to see someone has realised that Microsoft is no longer trying to fight Linux. The fight is over: Microsoft lost.

With Desktop markets shrinking every year, Microsoft knows that they need to change and adapt to stay viable - and frankly they've done a great job of it. There's a reason they're the biggest contributor to Github - they've produced a lot of great open-source work. .net core is a fantastic development platform and you don't have to pay Microsoft a penny to use it.

Most people should realise that Microsoft's future is in Azure. That's what this acquisition is really all about. Expect a "one-click-deploy-to-azure" button to appear on repositories, expect tighter integration with Azure but I doubt much else will really change in the short term.

Why doesn't Microsoft just go ahead and open source Windows, if they really have changed?

[karolherbst]

You just listed 3 worries that have nothing to do with privacy.

2. has. Usage pattern is quite the big thing. You can extract when you work from that, maybe even when you go to sleep or how much you still work when on holidays or travel somewhere.

Anyway, it might be not important to you, but I can see that some might be able to extract valuable data from that.

[PsynoKhi0]

The fact they paid so much more than originally anticipated makes me more concerned. I'm a bit curious about what makes GitHub so enticing that they'd spend so much to acquire it...

For one thing, AFAIK they're on their way to becoming a trillion company, so I guess they can afford to just stomp any potential bidder.

Second, I think it fits their current acquisition strategy: big data/profiling, and bashing users over the head with brand recognition - until you kick the bucket.

They already have the bits in place with the OS, the office suite, xbox, and VoIP/conferencing (Skype)
They targeted kids by acquiring Minecraft and by offering the primary IDE for BBC micro:bit SBC - granted, not as bit of a splash at the RPi, but still...
They targeted the job market with linkdin.
Also I remember reading they developed the infotainment system for Volvo's latest V90, including navigation - hello GPS data... (Also self-driving cars are all the rage, and Volvo probably have a nice patent portfolio related to car safety... I wouldn't be surprised if they were in MS's line of fire TBH.)

Finally, I'd argue the GitHub brand has the most mindshare, while still having a proprietary backend. Perfect fit.

[Michael_S]

Hey everyone, you're looking at this all wrong. This is great news. Hooray!

It's criminal that the great bulk of the open source software in the world would be hosted by one enormous proprietary software company. So Microsoft has graciously decided to fix the problem. They'll buy that hosting platform, make it suck, and then users will naturally migrate to the decentralized hosting model that git was designed to facilitate in the first place. No more "Github is down, I can't work."

This isn't quite as good as Github donating itself to the FSF, but it's the closest we were going to get in the real world.

(Edit: more seriously, you can bet there will be an explosion of adoption and investment in Gitlab, Gogs, gitea, Kallithea, Gitbucket, and maybe some brand new additional alternatives to Github.)

[jpg44]

Sorry, but then you don't seem to have a clue what you're doing on GitHub anyway. Whatever license you've given your code will continue to be its license and nobody can take this away from you. If you there have no trust then you shouldn't make your code open source in the first place.

Some people act like Microsoft is going to replace all license files with a Microsoft license.

No, not at all. Nobody in their right mind thinks Microsoft will try to steal the code by violating your licenses. What worries people is that Microsoft is going to close down access to the code behind a paywall, require proprietary software that only works on Windows and Edge to access "advanced features", etc etc. Given that a huge amount of code is located on github, the real concern is that the archive of open source software will be lost, the big value in github is that other people can find the software even if the maintainer of the software is no longer interested in the code and maintaining it, and that the code just doesnt disappear because they dont pay for some kind of "premium account".

A lot of the early software code for many older programs was lost because the ftp sites that hosted the code went down and the software just vanished. Despite the problems with Github, A warning against Self Hosting, its a BAD IDEA, Self hosting code/cloud/paid account is probably the worst thing anyone can do because then if they don't pay the hosting bill any more or turn on the server in their den any more, the software is lost for people who may be interested, even if only for historical preservation. You want your code hosted on a site that is maintained by a large number of people that will hopefully be around for a long time, the sale of github casts some doubt on that. But self hosting/cloud/paid account in my experience virtually gaurantees the code will vanish because nearly all self hosted repositories I have ever seen do not last more than a few years.

What I recommend is people put their code on several sites, github, gitlab, sourceforge, etc, for redundancy, this is the best you can do to make sure your code is preserved.

[ParticleBoard]

I guess everyone forgot about this this and this among many other missteps by github. To hell with them, I hope this is the final nail on the coffin.