I simply have little trust in MS. They did improve in some areas, but not enough to gain overall trust. They are still not on the same page with many FOSS efforts.
Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
Looking at Windows 10, with stuff like telemetry that's impossible to disable completely and hidden behind every dark pattern imaginable, or ads in Start menu?
Eh. Windows today might be more Microsoft than ever, but the rest of the org is spending lots of effort creating cross platform developer tools that's preparing Microsoft to remain relevant in a world that doesn't involve Windows PCs.
True, they went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either.
Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
Microsoft screwed up Skype by trying to “make it more Microsoft” whereas LinkedIn is being left to operate as before (tough MSFT is using the data for something). My guess is that GitHub will continue as before with the main change being that MSDN subscribers will likely get private GitHub repos as part of their package.
Now MSFT just needs something along the lines of Jira to replace the dog’s breakfast that is VSTS Agile project management tooling. I don’t suppose the folks in Redmond are looking to acquire Atlassian next...?
You dont pay 2 Billion, and leave it untouched, they see an earnings potential in the company given the right management and shareholders expect ROI that is higher then the average market return
The earnings are getting people who already have code in GitHub to also buy into Visual Studio App Center, Azure, all other Microsoft value-adds. By not leaving GitHub untouched otherwise reduces the chances of spooking the current patrons of GitHub. Makes nothing but sense to me.
Most of the discussio here is just centered around Microsofts goodwill and trustworthiness, mostly ignoring that MS wouldn't make this investment without a solid plan and path to profitability.
That doesn't have to be bad per se, I guess there are a lot of options like integrating Github well with Azure and providing alternatives to AWS CodeCommit / pipelines, ...
Although I completely agree with you, pointing at LinkedIn as a success story is kind of weird.
Microsoft's new future is to be a cross-platform vendor for developers. I see absolutely zero incompatibility between Github and Microsoft and a need to shut it down. I think the Satya's Microsoft is smart enough not to ruin it.
It's good that there is such an alternative as GitLab, because there is a slight but still not unsignificant risk that MS will not do the right thing. I think they will though since they are power users of their own product. I'm hoping they know this space.
What different purposes? They're both text editors / lightweight IDEs focusing on plugin extensibility built on top of Electron. They're literally the same thing.
And there are many who would say a sedan and a crossover are basically the same thing, but the devil is in the details.
Atom is extensible to a fault. A plugin can do just about everything and anything. FFS tabs are actually a plugin! While that means that performance will suffer, many (myself included) use Atom because of that insane freedom that plugins have to do what they need to do.
VSCode on the other hand is much more "if you want to do X, use this API". It's much more controlled, much more opinionated about how things "should" be done using VSCode as a platform.
From 30,000 ft, they are the same. But their goals and details differ, and I always prefer more choice rather than less.
I use neither, and I can see that the two take fairly different approaches, but why would you say they're build for different purposes. I don't think it's clear why a single org (though very far apart) has two approaches for a code text editor.
Atom has a whole team under Github. If they're both run by Microsoft, that seems like a clear cost-cutting measure; why develop two vastly similar electron-based code editors when you could just move that team + all of the interesting tech into VSCode?
I used to be a big fan of Atom in the beginning, but there’s nothing Atom does that VS Code does not do better. I wouldn’t see a purpose in merging the two, but I could see them killing Atom.
I agree on the VSTS front, but a lot of people use Atom and I can see many of them being put off by being forced onto VS Code.
Lately, based on comments made while promoting .NET Core, it sounds like Microsoft don't want to consolidate tooling, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Atom and VS Code co-exist as entirely separate entities/teams.
I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot of individual developers are biting at that price.
I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.
It's a convenience thing for me. As a hobbyist solo dev it'd be nice to have a place to work on code across different devices in private and then open it up when I feel the code is mature enough and the time is right to put it out there under an open source license.
Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.
I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:
- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.
- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.
- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.
- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.
The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
VSTS does a lot of things that GitHub does not. VSTS takes the workflow roles of Jenkins, GitHub, Jira, and has a few additional features that I don't know what open-source equivilant exists for (staged production, push to cloud - maybe done as Jenkins plugins?). It's highly unlikely VSTS will be shut down, especially in favor of a project which does very few things that VSTS does.
Not surprising. Microsoft has made a big deal of partnering with GitHub, showing off how well their Azure-based CI/CD products and services integrate with code hosted at GitHub. Not to mention that .NET Core and many companion libraries are hosted at GitHub, not on VSTS.
I don't think the big loss here is GitHub-the-software, but this short sweet period in time where everyone, from Microsoft to Apple, had their source code on the same platform. I doubt that e.g. Swift would have moved to GitHub if it had already been owned by Microsoft.
Agreed. Having GitHub be the place for OSS code has definitely been beneficial and convenient. That being said, I don't feel like it would be the end of the world if some of the projects moved to competing platforms.
Tangentially related, but maybe microsoft could actually do that : why is github's search so terribly bad ?
If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet.
As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.
They don’t index forks. Cloning a fork just to search through it locally is always fun. Very annoying when a fork becomes the de facto project because it’s the one being maintained.
I’m not even talking forks. I’m talking largish projects hosted on GitHub (100k+ loc). The actual results will contain less than half the results you’d see with grep, and even then the indexed content may even be out of date. This is exacerbated even more when database migrations are kept in source control, with older migrations archived, and the only search results you get for eg a stored proc search will be a version of the sp from 6 months ago.
That would be really great.
To improve looking through new repos at least a litte bit I like the browser plugin [Octotree](https://github.com/buunguyen/octotree), it adds a tree view of the code and eases jumping between files.
It is shockingly bad. The fact that you can't code search in a fork blows my mind. How have they not fixed this basic, important feature after so many years? What could possibly make it more difficult than a few person-months of effort?
Maybe avoiding the costs associated with keeping the indexes available for every fork? I believe they use elastic search so maybe someone with more experience with that can comment.
SourceGraph tries to fix it, and the experience of searching, jump-to-definition and generally getting to grips with a codebase is way better there IMO. They also have browser plugins with integration to GitHub. I recommend you to check it out.
Sourcegraph CEO here. Glad you like Sourcegraph! Regardless of what happens with GitHub and Microsoft, we agree that developers need great code search.
Sourcegraph CEO here. There was always a toggle for that feature, but it was too hard to find. It is now off by default and you can enable it in the browser extension settings. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I hope we get another chance to give you an awesome code search experience.
That doesn't make sense. Ruin the feature to potentially help someone who made a mistake with security? Why wouldnt they just run the search to find keys themselves and remove them from search results.
As one of my pet projects, I'm trying to resurrect Google's Code Search (a fast search indexer that supports regular expressions).
It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.
It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.
Search seems to be surprisingly bad at a lot of companies. I don't know about github but reddits search is so bad it cannot even find something when you type it character for character.
I'm super curious to what all these companies are using for search because they are so atrocious that tend to not even work in a basic substring search solution.
Exactly. I can’t search my own tweets on Twitter. Facebook doesn’t know how to rank people when I do people search there. Search is terrible across the internet except Google.
I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
LinkedIn is excellent as it is; its a utility to keep your CV updated and connect with professionals. We don't want FB-like functionality here, thank god.
It's a shit platform for that. Users who are attempting to read these "groundbreaking insights" are subjected to a deluge of tracking code and other malicious behavior. There are plenty of excellent platform for people to share ideas, LinkedIn is absolutely not one of them.
LinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.
I've heard claims that Skype is no longer peer to peer but runs on msft networks/infrastructure and performance has suffered. Can anyone confirm or shed any more light on that?
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
Agreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
Me too. I'm waiting for the official transaction to be done and i'm preparing a plan b in case i have to migrate everything.
More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
Isn't that one of the strengths of Git? The whole decentralization means that it is ridiculously simply to take the whole shebang and migrate to another service or even just self host on a cheap VPS.
Yes but with services like Issues and Wiki built into GitHub and Gitlab ... If you made use of the extra services by the Platform Provider, then you possibly have alot of non-trivial project dependencies to move around ... like your Issue history for the project.
Yes but you still have configurations and docs referencing the repo to change. Then find a mean to alert all interested persons. And then write a script to migrate the issues.
It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
I would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
It does bug me that they pollute search results with login-required resources. Search engines should treat that as abuse, or at the very least default to freely available resources, otherwise they just become a menu without prices.
>At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
True in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.
I could make the same concern for a bunch of other companies who were to buy GitHub. Indeed, my main concern with GitHub being bought by anyone is the uncertainty of its future, and the fact that it no longer will be 'neutral' ground, so to speak.
It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
"Consider what happened to LinkedIn" Where are you going with this? LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%. Only good things have happened at LinkedIn (I'm an employee) since the MSFT acquisition. If LinkedIn is not doing something, then it sure will consider doing it now, with the vast resources it has available to it now.
"LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%."
I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh.
Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve.
"with the vast resources it has available to it now"
This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
Perhaps modifying code is out of the question, but consider how many juicy credentials / private keys etc must be tucked away in all those private repos...
A hash collision in git lets you show somebody one change, then substitute it for a different change (with the same hash) in a version others see that appears (to the first person) to be the same code.
This is a very narrow opportunity. It is _probably_ viable for a very powerful adversary (such as the NSA) to successfully trick someone working with binary blobs, like firmware for a black box. You can imagine a developer who (unusually) assiduously checks the firmware they're provided to see that it works as intended, then uploads a new version to github, and the NSA trap is sprung, they substitute a modification with the same hash but different firmware that, perhaps, causes your billion dollar spy satellite to point its cameras at the sun, destroying it.
But if the developer is less assiduous this was all pointless, just send the "burn spy sat" firmware to the original developer and lie.
Or if the spy camera owners decide not to take this mysterious last-minute update, or they try it on their ground-based prototype first to check it works... bzzt, your hugely expensive SHA-1 trick was a waste of time.
Yes, SHA-1 is broken. Nobody should use it for anything new, and things that already use it should have been migrating already _before_ the official announcement from Google et al. But, Merkle-Damgard hashes have done this before, and will do it again, and so we know how this goes. You get a collision but don't get anything else, critically you don't get second-pre-image.
This means, the NSA doesn't gain a way to substitute other stuff in a repo. They can only _collide_ their own things, by carefully choosing the inputs. So a plan where you just replace the _real_ firmware can't work.
Also, the nature of this MD attacks smashes up the input state, which for git will usually be source code. A mysterious anonymous contributor is surprising enough, but when their proposed patch adds dozens of bytes of what seems to be binary noise, you know something is up. That's why my example attack above involved firmware, where this might be less suspicious.
So yes, Git should have transitioned off SHA-1, and a window of opportunity for bad guys does exist, but it's not the sort of gaping window you imagine.
I had a pretty similar experience with skype. I lost access to my connected email account and was essentially locked out of my account forever - repeated emails to support were met with silence, alas! Then I connected my facebook account to use skype instead... then they discontinued support for that. Now it's got to a point where attempting to create a new account on the OSX desktop version just shows an error screen every time, so I'm stuck unable to use skype forever. I've moved on to other, better solutions, naturally :)
GitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
If Github does die out will be a slow and painful one. Skype was more of a radical change to the core technology. Of course anything is possible. I'm guessing many companies paying for Github's enterprise products are more concerned about the implications of Microsoft owning the company that hosts their proprietary code.
If Microsoft does to github what they did to Skype, pushes will go into the wrong repo without authentication for no reason just like Skype had contacts and messages jump from one account to another for no reason. Pretty much everything they touch software wise is a disaster. I wonder if there will be ads or how exactly they will fuck it up, but I know for sure they will. Gitlab is fairly equivalent in features and much better in their pricing and plans anyway so I expect a lot of projects to move.
Microsoft is big, with different divisions you can consider what it did with consumer apps, but you'd be better off considering what it has done with developer tools.
There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
Exactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?
I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Someone explain the extreme feeling
of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
There is not a single Microsoft product/tool/service I like. Including the ones they aquired. So I expect them to turn GitHub into something I don't like too.
Everyone says on here that VSCode is way faster than Atom but I've found the opposite every time I've tried, Atom opens faster and feels slicker when editing, especially multiline. I'm also not a fan of the VS UI and its icon.
What does Github have to do with free software? It's a closed-source, non-free SaaS. Free software repos can (mostly) relocate to any other hoster as they wish.
Microsoft has a history of taking the open source philosophy out of their products. Github is one of the few large, commercially successful platforms that have not only embraced, but built their entire platform around those fundamental values.
It's not a surprise we feel unease, and to hope that Microsoft is actually going in a direction that aligns with those values, instead of simply twisting them for it's own continued success - that's being a bit naive.
We'll all see what happens, but honestly, I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
There are plenty of examples that stick to the core philosophy of open source software and open ideas, but there are rarely examples that manage to become extremely successful and maintain that success without drowning in the confusion created through their own influence.
> I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
An example that comes to mind is Wikipedia. Maybe the lesson here is that if you fear this happening, don't come to rely on services that are not setup as non-profits.
I think it's a balance. Non-profits have their own problems, individuals aren't fiscally organized and instead, have their incentives tied directly to the service. These incentives are philosophical ideals, therefore, not invariant (continuously being used and tested against the system they exist in), therefore, not equivalent (unified) across all participating minds. So there can be confusion there as well. Competition due to ego can cloud clarity, and this impedes the finding and actualizing simple solutions.
Same problems still in a for profit enterprise, just shifted across whatever the base values are. Life will never be perfect.
The Skype buy was seven years ago, and it was a pretty user hostile piece of software before that.
Post Balmer we've seen a more open (in the transparent, consultative, community sensitive sense) attitude, with genuine contributions to free software.
People also seem to be citing LinkedIn as an example, but that doesn't feel like it got any more unpleasant since the buyout.
Microsoft built its business by selling software products. If they had meddled with Fortune 500 companies running their business-critical information on top of Windows, Microsoft wouldn't be here now. There are situations to be wary of MS, but I don't think this is one.
In Europe there are real worries about state-driven industrial espionage.
We shouldn't be worried that our developers coding habits will get connected with linked-in and fed into the surveillance state (which MS is big part of)?
Microsoft is not gonna give a fuck about your shitty little repos or anyones for that matter. What makes you think they are gonna put time and effort into mining people's code?
A shitty free browser developers still have to deal with today because enterprises refuse to fix their garbage in-house software..I'm not bitter at all.
There will probably be a decent amount of skepticism around this acquisition (with fair reason), but I'd like to think of this as an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate their respect and commitment to the developer community. I say this as someone who has been pleasantly surprised at how helpful BizSpark has been. Staying cautiously optimistic.
I stopped trusting them when they stole the intellectual property of numerous small companies years before the _NSAKEY debacle. I know, I know, Bill Gates is supposed to be some kind of good guy now (malaria, etc.) but I can't think of any good reason to trust any robber baron, based on the past histories of robber barons. Even Andrew Carnegie was an asshole in the final analysis.
Microsoft is basically the corporate version of the ship of Theseus at this point. The have a lot of questionable stuff in their history, but the leadership and the culture at large has shifted drastically since those days. At a certain point it is worth reevaluating one's opinions and question whether it is still worth hanging on to those old grudges.
I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
Yeah, I am not saying I would trust any other big competitor more than Microsoft.
However, I am still not convinced that Microsoft really changed as much as many people like to believe. I think it is obvious that they lost the fight against open-standards in many domains. Linux on Smartphones would be one example. Now they have two options, either to embrace these technologies or lose market. The question is: How genuine is their enthusiasm and are they really acting in the interest of open-standards? Do they still have strategies to hurt open alternatives to their own products in the long run?
I think the shift from a traditional sales focus to one on subscriptions and "The Cloud" is a pretty monumental change. Losing traditional sales markets like selling phones really hastened that change. I don't think you're looking for proof that they're genuinely enthusiastic, because imo desperation is the rawest form of genuine enthusiasm. It's whether or not they're altruistic in this particular field, and that has yet to be seen.
I don't think you have to be altruistic to have genuine enthusiasm -- some companies have fantastic plans to support open-source as well as their business plans. But I agree with the first point you are making.
I think it is naive to believe than any company that is beholden to investors would choose altruism over profit. Most corporate altruism is just marketing.
I don't think Microsoft is any more altruistic now, they just have adjusted their corporate strategy to recognize that supporting openness is good for business. That is enough for me.
> google gets praised for blatantly awful abuses of power
Do you have some examples of that? The first things that come to mind are AMP and related announcements, which were not received particularly positively here on HN.
Except all the key players of this strategy are gone and Microsoft has embraced (full stop) open source as much as any major corporation in recent years.
But don't let actual evidence stop your pitchforks.
I see that Microsoft is not a corporation that is evil by design and that they are doing exciting stuff as well -- I don't hate them.
However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?
So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).
This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.
That gives the acquisition a very different perspective.
What if MS is really buying Electron? It’s something they’ve been using a lot in all their recent products, and it’s a key technology in the contemporary development landscape. Making it more Windows-friendly would definitely help them.
At least historically Windows used different parts of UNIX. i.e. they used BSD's TCP/IP stack for quite some time. Also used "UNIX services for Windows" and recently added the Windows subsystem for Linux.
That doesn't make Electron _a part_ of Atom. If I build my application on top of Linux, my application is not _a part_ of Linux.
Electron is its own application framework, that Atom builds itself on top of. Electron is not a text editor framework, no more than QT or Cocoa is.
It is _very_ fair to say VSCode is using Electron - heavily, in fact! But saying VSCode is using part of Atom is just not true, and implies VSCode is building atop the Atom editor, which it does not.
In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.
RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing.
I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.
(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)
That's true, and I want to add that usually it's the company's fault for not guiding the project into the hands of the community (be it intentionally or because of incompetence).
Rust is a great example of a "company's project" that reached (or is reaching) a nice spot in autonomy.
Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.
I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.
Atom is really just a testbed for electron, where the real technology lies. If you can make an editor that programmers love using electron you can make pretty much anything else (excluding games).
HTML5 and Canvas do work on Electron after all. :) I feel there was some post on HN about a game released under Electron to which the reaction was "I didn't know it was made with Electron!" not a month ago.
Edit:
Also Atom wasn't a testbed for Electron. Electron WAS MADE for Atom afaik. They only opened up Electron after Atom was out for a while, it'd be the other way around if what you're saying is the case. I think Microsoft is already heavily invested in Electron. If anything they will provide even more resources towards Electron itself.
They could probably also merge the two somehow. The one thing I like more about Atom (even though I don't use it anymore) is editing the editor settings gives you a UI instead of just a JSON file which I don't mind, but it's kind of uneeded to me to have to work harder just to check all my editor settings.
True, but Windows users would find it odd if an app didn't suck. It has to match the overall Windows experience.
Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.
I find the file exporers on linux a huge joke, and Finder on OSX is too simple for me.
On Windows I have found XYplorer [1] to be extremly powerful. Its not OSS and its not free, but I happily paid for it once I discovered it. The project is like 20 years old. I have looked for a free replacement for years and always ignored it, which was a mistake.
XYplorer is very well maintained, 0% CPU cost, 1% RAM cost, highly-configurable, has very nice features. Someone really put some thoughts into the UI and UX. I really like the Ghost filter. Ctrl+P is great. Oh and it remembers all opened tree views after restart, so your workspace is exactly the same after a reboot.
Now, on a more serious note, I think the way IE3's News and Mail Explorer extension dealt with custom views for filesystems was nothing short of brilliant. I wish we had something like that for Gnome now.
Were it a consumer product I'd agree. But this is a developer tool and MS have been doing fairly well in that regard the last few years with azure and vscode.
Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.
I dunno, as an Azure user, they've launched good products like Azure Insights, that were really good, which they deprecated or merged with PowerBI etc... that totally tanked them.
Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).
"because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities"...what are you talking about? They are a company with a purpose to make money. And when I think about some of the other possible buyers, I am fine with Microsoft.
The GP means they were neutral with respect to the tech giants' ecosystems. They didn't favor Amazon or Microsoft or Google's tech. Consider that Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had GitHub organizations and hosted code there. That's what they're talking about
yeah, I'm curious if those other big companies will now move their repos off of GitHub because of this. I guess these two will be the ones to watch: https://github.com/googlehttps://github.com/apple
It sucks. We had as you said a neutral site everyone used. Now the big guys will move their code. Hopefully we will get a new common GitHub that is neutral and they will use. Sounds like it might be gitlab.
Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.
Do you think Gitlab will stay independent? They’re burning money. They’ll in all likelihood be acquired in the coming decade as well.
Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.
Hopefully. The problem is the site has to be neutral. Might end up we just have the big tech companies like Google host their own which sucks but you can't blame them.
Right now looks like GitLab will just become the new GitHub.
We were just so lucky we had basically a single site with GitHub and now that will not be true any longer. We really did not have a single site for very long.
Really just wish this news was not true. But I am sure MS just could not resist.
What bothers me is I really like how the newer tech companies are all about moving the entire industry forward while helping themselves.
So Google shared Map/Reduce, K8s, TF and open source just about everything. They spend tons of money finding all the vulnerabilities and then tell their competitors when they have a problem and even help mitigate. They do it all for free and expect nothing from the companies. What Google did for Cloudflare for example with Cloudbleed is how I love it being.
I am old and remember the old days. But as MS has become less relevant those old ways have been dying.
But then it is like MS sticking in their head in the fun of the new way and mess it up. They should just do their own thing and leave the new culture alone.
I'm sure they'll try to 'Microsoft' it. They could never keep their hands off any UI in any product, no matter if it works or not, and especially lately, leaving a rather spectacular trail of destruction in their wake.
I remember reading that they employ some muppet to check that nobody uses "hate language" and their naive "check all words in text files against this list" spotted the word "retard" as in "fire retardant" and locked the project. Appealing for common sense, or even escalating the problem to someone with a functional grasp of English didn't succeed.
You don't remember when the co-founder had to step down over harassment issues? This was all over HN a few years ago. A female developer claimed she sexually harassed and discriminated against and the company then conspired to push her with the founders' wife (not an employee) leading the charge. That guy is a billionaire now.
My guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.
Does it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit.
Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
Oh god, I hope not. Anytime a big company acquires almost anything, the quality level drops off a cliff. Microsoft with Skype is the obvious example, but so is anything bought by Google (like YouTube).
Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.
I was going to quote YouTube as the one counterexample to your otherwise valid rule. What's wrong with YouTube? (other than being part of the Google Surveillance State GoStaPo)
You didn't use Youtube before it was acquired? I vividly remember finding a lot of cool videos and music that I couldn't otherwise have found. Now once you watch a few garbage videos it's all Youtube autosuggests to you. Also if you start exploring videos they'll probably be mostly around the same what you've already seen and not diverge too much from what's popular. Anything novel and out-of-ordinary is pushed to the bottom in most cases.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is different but the freshness of it is gone. I don't expect anymore to find anything super-interesting and the same old stuff that I've already watched is being suggested to me again and again.
Videos get demonetised for questionable or non reasons
Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time).
Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything.
Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today).
Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site.
Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant.
Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them.
YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections.
And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.
Most of these features (and problems) appeared after YT was acquired, but demonetization and account problems (including wholesale blocking) seem specific to Google, so I agree.
I worry about github too. BUT, at least with github most of the data is open. And they have a worthy competitor in Gitlab. Might be a bit of disruption if MS mess things up, but not a disaster.
I'm not sure what exactly you're reacting to, but a lot of us absolutely do not want to self-host our github repos. Because it's work, because we don't need it, because we like using github/gitlab/other as a "marketplace"
1. Electricity cost
2. Need for constant electricity
3. Internet cost
4. Need for constant Internet access
5. Cost of hardware
6. Heat generated by the running hardware
7. Noise generated by the running hardware
8. Space occupied by the hardware
9. Need to update and maintain hardware/software
10. Worse discoverability for your repos
11. ISP asking questions
12. Government asking questions
13. Police asking questions
Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
Not everyone will need to self-host, it is still possible to host your projects at someone else's instance. If you live in a place where $1 is a lot of money (where is this by the way?) you could either share a server with others who each chip in their $0.10 or just find an open instance somewhere. There are plenty of organisations which host services like these, Github is the best-known but by no means the only alternative.
Gitlab, no. Gogs [1] or Gitea [2], no problem. I run Gitea on an Intel SS4200 (2.4 GHz Pentium E2200, 2 GB, 8 TB JBOD), it hardly causes a blip on this rather anaemic system. The process generally takes up around 35 MB (RSS), it talks to a PostgreSQL database server on the same box. You would not want to run a service the size of Github on this but for a personal repository it is more than enough. If your projects get so popular that they outgrow the hardware or VPS just move to a higher tier.
A lot of these would be problems anywhere. Reliability/uptime of electricity/internet is problematic everywhere, although noise/heat I don't see why it would really be much of a problem anywhere.
If you self-host you will probably never get outside contributions. For most people it isn't worth taking the time to figure out whatever system you use. I'd like to see a federated system like GNUsocial/Mastodon for git. I've thought about trying to make such a system but I don't know much about federation.
I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github.
the history of Microsoft is the reason why we all reacting this way. But encouraged by the move they made lately coming into Linux, even though other players have forced their hand
I'd recommend running your own FossilSCM server. It supports full code repo, wiki, bugtracking, and more. And it's free software to boot.
I'm looking to see if it's feasible to write a github->fossil layer to make it easy for programmers to dump to local. Right now, Git is easy to dump... but those issues and wiki support isnt dumpable yet..
Unfortunately, that misses the bulk of user communications. Those bug reports and issues are also tremendously important. And since they link back to commits, its essential to obtain that history as well and maintain the appropriate link between the 2.
Else, changes were made for "reasons", and those justifications are effectively lost.
This was the main reason I started developing https://sit.fyi. It allows you to carry issues, discussions, patches as files (for example, in a git repo) in a decentralized way and has a tool that allows to import from GitHub
It wouldn't be seamless. But it wouldn't be difficult for a competitor to create a "competitor import" feature that moved over most of it in a few clicks.
It doesn't solve the number one issue: External references to your project will all still point to github.com since that's where the project homepage (aka README.md) is.
If GitHub does get sold to MS and I end up moving to GitLab, I'll probably push one last commit to the GitHub repo adding a header saying the project has moved, with a link to the GitLab repo. It's not perfect, but it wouldn't be too bad.
Until MSFT/GitHub does what Sourceforge.net did - taking over project sites from projects which moved away and adding malware (adware/spyware) into those ;)
(I believe with all critique on Microsoft they aren't as bad, but want to exemplarize the risk)
It might just be cleaner to close the github repo and when other projects find a 404 where it used to be, they'll have to use super detective skills (i.e. Google it) to find the project's new home. And if they can't find it that way, then nothing of value was lost. (Yes, yes, I know it's more nuanced than that, but if you wanted permanence, you'd be hosting on your own domain, right?)
I expect Google could be convinced to accept certain files or metadata in a README as equivalent to a 301 permanent redirect, meaning searches will remain effective. That would account for a lot, especially if Chrome begins to honour it.
Personal data is extremely broad and is any data that can be identified to an individual. If my photos are Facebook are personal data, then so is my code on GitHub (even if some people are professional photographers or programmers).
Still one step too much making it harder to migrate. Should've been a directory in a repo, default to `wiki` or whatever and configurable to something else.
Agreed on both points. The shift will bring a lot of opportunity to build a more decentralized repo base. I think something like (Keybase)[http://keybase.io] might be interesting.
How profitable would they be if they didn’t pursue “growth at all costs” and built GitHub with a small and focused team like Stack Overflow or WhatsApp?
As a startup, worrying about competition from Microsoft hasn't been a big deal for almost a decade. I would be more worried about Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
Probably because its fairly low-risk. I have ~270 Github repos. About a year ago I made a ~5 line Python script that added Gitlab as another origin to each repo. I still use (used) Gitlab as my main host, I'm a paying customer - but for me to flick over to Gitlab is a one-liner.
I'm all for FOSS (Git webgui) solutions, but they were absolutely not competitive until recently. Even now, with less trust, the social effect and the lack of need of maintenance and setup is attractive.
Well, Google recently also purchased Kaggle, another major open-source repository for code. It hasn't really changed anything for now, but Microsoft's purchase will be in the same vein. I think that Microsoft's contribution to the open-source community in the last few years kind of makes sense for why they are purchasing it, just like Google purchased Kaggle because of their contribution to ML.
Your dream of “neutral” VCS is misfounded. Websites like GitHub are massive bandwidth and storage hogs and needs huge cash burn just for dev ops. Unfortunately they can’t be reasonably profitable as well because revenue sources are rather tiny. This means every vcs company out there offering free for all plan is bound to be sold or go bankrupt.
For GitHub I would have wished Google bought them because there is huge synergy both ways. With Microsoft, eventually some CVP there will realize that there is no profitability and they will leave it to rot.
"The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work."
Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?
Can the old CEO be sued for 'breach of trust'?
At least they must have to give prior notice before any of our sensitive data (trusted to github) falls into the hands of MS (untrustworthy)?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 421 ms ] threadLately they released amazing open-source projects with VSCode being the most prominent one.
Company which actively pushes lock-in and patent aggression is not a good steward for FOSS projects.
Microsoft of today is more Microsoft than ever.
Meanwhile, all their non-developer-focused products are still Windows-only and closed-source.
Now MSFT just needs something along the lines of Jira to replace the dog’s breakfast that is VSTS Agile project management tooling. I don’t suppose the folks in Redmond are looking to acquire Atlassian next...?
Most of the discussio here is just centered around Microsofts goodwill and trustworthiness, mostly ignoring that MS wouldn't make this investment without a solid plan and path to profitability.
That doesn't have to be bad per se, I guess there are a lot of options like integrating Github well with Azure and providing alternatives to AWS CodeCommit / pipelines, ...
Microsoft's new future is to be a cross-platform vendor for developers. I see absolutely zero incompatibility between Github and Microsoft and a need to shut it down. I think the Satya's Microsoft is smart enough not to ruin it.
Atom is extensible to a fault. A plugin can do just about everything and anything. FFS tabs are actually a plugin! While that means that performance will suffer, many (myself included) use Atom because of that insane freedom that plugins have to do what they need to do.
VSCode on the other hand is much more "if you want to do X, use this API". It's much more controlled, much more opinionated about how things "should" be done using VSCode as a platform.
From 30,000 ft, they are the same. But their goals and details differ, and I always prefer more choice rather than less.
Lately, based on comments made while promoting .NET Core, it sounds like Microsoft don't want to consolidate tooling, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Atom and VS Code co-exist as entirely separate entities/teams.
Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.
I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:
- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.
- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.
- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.
- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.
The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.
https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/pricing/
It's very simple, reasonable, and sane compared to GitHub's.
Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
Well, it's Microsoft, so more complex tiering and tie in to MSDN should be on the road map.
> Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers.
How so?
> I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper.
Perhaps, so what? That's an unrelated service.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Their competitors do that to build a user base and mind share in the face of GitHub’s huge advantage in network effects.
I think most people who use github would NOT want that.
They already embraced it by adding 1k repos. They're now going to extend it.
We'll soon have an msgit, which is git with extensions that only github will support.
let 'em know.
If they had developed a good powerful code search (custom semantic engine for most used languages, complex queries, exact/fuzzy matches for syntax, use of history, etc) they could have become the primary way you interact with code you don't know yet.
As it stands now it's simply more efficient to clone and use plain old grep, it's really sad.
... but since it's allowed if the fork has more stars, I guess they're just trying to save compute cost. Seems like a bad place to scrimp to me.
I used to go:
press start btn --> type "utor" --> press enter --> uTorrent.exe executes.
Why would they remove such a useful feature?
It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.
It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.
I'm super curious to what all these companies are using for search because they are so atrocious that tend to not even work in a basic substring search solution.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/project/search/code-se...
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.
I think that's his point. He's saying that LinkedIn has the opportunity to do lots of interesting things, and appears to be squandering it.
It went from seemed like a ~reasonable security architecture, to outright enabling the monitoring and forwarding of all user conversations. Ugh.
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh.
Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve.
"with the vast resources it has available to it now"
This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
A hash collision in git lets you show somebody one change, then substitute it for a different change (with the same hash) in a version others see that appears (to the first person) to be the same code.
This is a very narrow opportunity. It is _probably_ viable for a very powerful adversary (such as the NSA) to successfully trick someone working with binary blobs, like firmware for a black box. You can imagine a developer who (unusually) assiduously checks the firmware they're provided to see that it works as intended, then uploads a new version to github, and the NSA trap is sprung, they substitute a modification with the same hash but different firmware that, perhaps, causes your billion dollar spy satellite to point its cameras at the sun, destroying it.
But if the developer is less assiduous this was all pointless, just send the "burn spy sat" firmware to the original developer and lie.
Or if the spy camera owners decide not to take this mysterious last-minute update, or they try it on their ground-based prototype first to check it works... bzzt, your hugely expensive SHA-1 trick was a waste of time.
Yes, SHA-1 is broken. Nobody should use it for anything new, and things that already use it should have been migrating already _before_ the official announcement from Google et al. But, Merkle-Damgard hashes have done this before, and will do it again, and so we know how this goes. You get a collision but don't get anything else, critically you don't get second-pre-image.
This means, the NSA doesn't gain a way to substitute other stuff in a repo. They can only _collide_ their own things, by carefully choosing the inputs. So a plan where you just replace the _real_ firmware can't work.
Also, the nature of this MD attacks smashes up the input state, which for git will usually be source code. A mysterious anonymous contributor is surprising enough, but when their proposed patch adds dozens of bytes of what seems to be binary noise, you know something is up. That's why my example attack above involved firmware, where this might be less suspicious.
So yes, Git should have transitioned off SHA-1, and a window of opportunity for bad guys does exist, but it's not the sort of gaping window you imagine.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
Someone explain the extreme feeling of uneasiness penetrating our brains.
It's not a surprise we feel unease, and to hope that Microsoft is actually going in a direction that aligns with those values, instead of simply twisting them for it's own continued success - that's being a bit naive.
We'll all see what happens, but honestly, I wish their was one web platform that existed out there, that could stay stable in it's philosophy, and not succumb to embracing the chaos invoked through economic success.
There are plenty of examples that stick to the core philosophy of open source software and open ideas, but there are rarely examples that manage to become extremely successful and maintain that success without drowning in the confusion created through their own influence.
An example that comes to mind is Wikipedia. Maybe the lesson here is that if you fear this happening, don't come to rely on services that are not setup as non-profits.
Same problems still in a for profit enterprise, just shifted across whatever the base values are. Life will never be perfect.
Wonder how hiring/firing is going to be now at Git. They are pro-remote, while most MSFT positions are going no longer remote.
But it feels a bit like the Atlassian / Trello arrangement, which has had little impact on users.
From recent behaviour I'd expect Microsoft to have a very light touch here.
Post Balmer we've seen a more open (in the transparent, consultative, community sensitive sense) attitude, with genuine contributions to free software.
People also seem to be citing LinkedIn as an example, but that doesn't feel like it got any more unpleasant since the buyout.
Minecraft has also gone untouched - it's still hosted on AWS in fact.
The last thing I want is my code to fall into the hands of MS.
The idea was that it's more likely our servers get hacked than a breach at github. Guess I was wrong.
We shouldn't be worried that our developers coding habits will get connected with linked-in and fed into the surveillance state (which MS is big part of)?
Some things you can just never forgive.
"postmaster@nsa.gov"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
However, I am still not convinced that Microsoft really changed as much as many people like to believe. I think it is obvious that they lost the fight against open-standards in many domains. Linux on Smartphones would be one example. Now they have two options, either to embrace these technologies or lose market. The question is: How genuine is their enthusiasm and are they really acting in the interest of open-standards? Do they still have strategies to hurt open alternatives to their own products in the long run?
I don't think Microsoft is any more altruistic now, they just have adjusted their corporate strategy to recognize that supporting openness is good for business. That is enough for me.
My days of google fan-boy-ism are long over :-/
Do you have some examples of that? The first things that come to mind are AMP and related announcements, which were not received particularly positively here on HN.
Cue followup 'Actually these are all extremely good + business-savvy decisions for big G since' posts.
> google gets praised
None of the things you list are things Google is praised for.
But don't let actual evidence stop your pitchforks.
However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?
So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).
Somebody used this address in a joke, and then a Wikipedia editor took it seriously and put it in the article. sigh
Don't you even dare think about it much less tell MS about this idea
Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...
What if MS is really buying Electron? It’s something they’ve been using a lot in all their recent products, and it’s a key technology in the contemporary development landscape. Making it more Windows-friendly would definitely help them.
The only thing GitHub has that Microsoft can't easily get on their own is the user base. That's what this acquisition will be about.
Electron is its own application framework, that Atom builds itself on top of. Electron is not a text editor framework, no more than QT or Cocoa is.
It is _very_ fair to say VSCode is using Electron - heavily, in fact! But saying VSCode is using part of Atom is just not true, and implies VSCode is building atop the Atom editor, which it does not.
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...
https://github.com/atom/atom
RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing. I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.
(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)
A light IDE is not rocket science and this project is known (and loved) by many open source developers.
https://electronjs.org/apps?category=games
HTML5 and Canvas do work on Electron after all. :) I feel there was some post on HN about a game released under Electron to which the reaction was "I didn't know it was made with Electron!" not a month ago.
Edit:
Also Atom wasn't a testbed for Electron. Electron WAS MADE for Atom afaik. They only opened up Electron after Atom was out for a while, it'd be the other way around if what you're saying is the case. I think Microsoft is already heavily invested in Electron. If anything they will provide even more resources towards Electron itself.
Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.
Total Commander for example.
On Windows I have found XYplorer [1] to be extremly powerful. Its not OSS and its not free, but I happily paid for it once I discovered it. The project is like 20 years old. I have looked for a free replacement for years and always ignored it, which was a mistake.
XYplorer is very well maintained, 0% CPU cost, 1% RAM cost, highly-configurable, has very nice features. Someone really put some thoughts into the UI and UX. I really like the Ghost filter. Ctrl+P is great. Oh and it remembers all opened tree views after restart, so your workspace is exactly the same after a reboot.
[1] https://www.xyplorer.com/
Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.
So I'm not super hopeful.
Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).
Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.
Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.
Right now looks like GitLab will just become the new GitHub.
We were just so lucky we had basically a single site with GitHub and now that will not be true any longer. We really did not have a single site for very long.
Really just wish this news was not true. But I am sure MS just could not resist.
What bothers me is I really like how the newer tech companies are all about moving the entire industry forward while helping themselves.
So Google shared Map/Reduce, K8s, TF and open source just about everything. They spend tons of money finding all the vulnerabilities and then tell their competitors when they have a problem and even help mitigate. They do it all for free and expect nothing from the companies. What Google did for Cloudflare for example with Cloudbleed is how I love it being.
I am old and remember the old days. But as MS has become less relevant those old ways have been dying.
But then it is like MS sticking in their head in the fun of the new way and mess it up. They should just do their own thing and leave the new culture alone.
redacted: i mistook the acquisition date
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/an-executive-depar...
The cash flow is probably good but even with a million customers at $5 a month, that's not enough to sustain a large company.
[1]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... [2]: https://a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-developme...
Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.
Add to this the bad experience we had with Sourceforge, and I definitely worry it could be all over for GitHub if this is true.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is different but the freshness of it is gone. I don't expect anymore to find anything super-interesting and the same old stuff that I've already watched is being suggested to me again and again.
Subscribers don't see videos from those they're subscribed to in their home page(a depressingly large percentage of the time).
Things like the YouTube inbox are so 'well' pushed to the background that most people don't remember they exist, let alone know how to use them for anything.
Recommendations are borked, and often consist of videos you've already seen ten times (maybe even ten times today).
Rules in general seem to applied based on how popular a YouTuber is/how much money they bring in instead of what they actually do on the site.
Fair use is basically non existent, or very poorly applied overall. Sometimes people are able to get paid off content they don't own and it's almost impossible to get it taken down/demonetised, sometimes content is claimed through complete lies by the claimant.
Google account integration means that any setup related issue can break large parts of the site. For example, I couldn't previously get Adsense on my account; not because I wasn't qualified, but because the account I used Adsense with and the one I used YouTube for were different, and the merge basically broke any chance of connecting them.
YouTube comment/channel moderation is really bad, with few tools leading to horrendously toxic comment sections.
And then there are various bits of the interface that make me wonder exactly who designed them. For example, you've got a username, display name and channel name, and all can be completely different from one another. Or conflict. This makes it easy to confuse or mislead people, since youtube.com/user/[whatever] and youtube.com/c/[whatever] can be completely different people/channels.
Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.
"Self-hosting" doesn't have to mean having a giant server farm at home. You could put it on an AWS/GCP/Azure free-tier VPS instance.
[1] https://gogs.io/
[2] https://gitea.io/
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#memory
Hosting our downloads though... hmmm... that could be more tricky.
Our releases generally have ~180k downloads a month, with each being (very) roughly 15MB in size.
That's only 2.5TB/mo, but the downloads aren't evenly spaced throughout the day.
We'd probably need a small cluster of servers with unmetered bandwidth or something. Scaleway might suit.
Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.
A recent changelog episode addresses this exact issue:https://changelog.com/podcast/298#transcript-78
Github should remain a neutral ground in my opinion.
They failed to make it attractive to other developers.
I don't remember the name, but MS tried for a year or two to create another competing hosting platform if I recall correctly, and they also failed.
Good. Need more people like you.
I'm looking to see if it's feasible to write a github->fossil layer to make it easy for programmers to dump to local. Right now, Git is easy to dump... but those issues and wiki support isnt dumpable yet..
Else, changes were made for "reasons", and those justifications are effectively lost.
I see a potentially big market opportunity for anyone who wants to compete in the space now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI
this adresses some of the issues.
(I believe with all critique on Microsoft they aren't as bad, but want to exemplarize the risk)
GitHub pages is super easy to move except for getting users to know the new domain.
Anyway, there are APIs which one can use to export issues.
Extend
Extinguish
Conglomeration, unless you hated github before which I wouldn't object too.
I agree with you anyway.
I'm all for FOSS (Git webgui) solutions, but they were absolutely not competitive until recently. Even now, with less trust, the social effect and the lack of need of maintenance and setup is attractive.
For GitHub I would have wished Google bought them because there is huge synergy both ways. With Microsoft, eventually some CVP there will realize that there is no profitability and they will leave it to rot.
Github was profitable day 1 from what I remember, before they took the $100 million from Andreseen, right?