Microsoft has been setting a very (almost unthinkably) different course since Ballmer departed. Bash on Windows, Visual Studio Code, as well as other seemingly genuine commitments to open source. It's wonderful that competitors like GitLab exist, and today is probably a great day for them, but I'm willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on this one - we won't be moving.
I wonder what people would have thought if Github had just disappeared instead of selling to Microsoft? I mean I understand some concern, but this can really only be a good thing for Github in the long run. It isn't like Microsoft was producing a competitor and just bought them to kill them. Honestly, I like this better than Amazon or Google buying them.
>I wonder what people would have thought if Github had just disappeared
I would have preferred it.
Very likely their final act would have been to open source github and then we could finally get a good OOS platform that used their own issue tracker.
Atm the players are gitlab, a mess that barely works and reserves some pretty fucking basic features for enterprise, some random initials i can never remember (somebody get them a branding guy, even tom haverford would work) and closed source github.
The reason this happened is to get a payday for the investors. I'm happy they invested, but when you look at GitHub it is a utility, not a commercial enterprise and should be treated like public transport rather than like an oil company.
I’m so tired of this trope. It’s like nothing Microsoft does is ever enough for people to realize that there is enough new leadership that isn’t doing this nonsense.
Is there any evidence in the Nadella years of MS doing this in the way they used to do this in the 90s?
There isa definite change of tone in the modern Microsoft, but remember that they're still doing a lot of sketchy things. The ongoing patent trolling, or mandatory telemetry in Windows are examples.
So a new CEO and the established culture just automatically changes?
It’s not just that MSFT did what they did, but they established a culture that was cool with it and even came up with the ideas. How do we know they are no longer doing that? It’s not like they openly admitted to what they did in the 1990s...
What crown jewels are these? Windows? Office? Edge?
They're trying, they see the writing on the wall, it's foolish to not see that they're trying. I think it would be equally foolish to just whitewash away the sins of the past.
Nadella has worked at MS long enough to have been there when the company was all-in on SCO vs Linux.
He's been there since 1992. That means that if he was so ethically challenged that he could sit through that without piping up that I have very little hope that there is a real and sincere change happening. Most of what I see is just very clever PR whilst under the hood not much has changed.
They just got a lot smarter about keeping their nastiness out of the public light. The reason why the 'trope' gets trotted out is because this could very well be the part where Microsoft finally gets to 'embrace' the open source world where they can hurt it for real. Keep in mind that nothing comes close to threatening Microsoft at its core business as open source software does.
This comes down to your definition of “core business”
Open source (LibreOffice) has never seriously threatened office for professionals so much as maybe google docs, and even then not so much. And they’ve made great moves towards subscriptions so that’s going strong.
Windows isn’t threatened so much by open source unless you talk about either Apple or chromebooks. Again, less about open source and more about the web.
They’ve already lost developer mindshare to open source culture. So they responded apppropriately by open sourcing their entire .NET platform, and actually using a useful license like Apache, not some murky custom commercial nonsense.
How do you suppose they’re going to start hurting the open source world? I’m all ears, especially given they’d have to sue companies like FB and Google.
Just because Nadella was there, it doesn’t mean he ran that operation that sued SCO. Otherwise that would’ve come out.
Plus with personalities like Bill Gates, they would clearly override any dissent.
Isn't that the usual course of a corporate acquisition? One business buys another, they make an announcement, nothing will change, and a year later the old thing is completely gone. Happens in all sorts of industries, it's not just Microsoft.
> Once the acquisition closes later this year, GitHub will be led by CEO Nat Friedman, an open source veteran and founder of Xamarin, who will continue to report to Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie; GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath will be a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting to Scott.
This was one of the main outcomes I was hoping for in the last HN thread on this acquisition. GitHub get the strong CEO they were hoping for, and one with solid credentials with interacting with the development community.
But I talked about MS PR team before, and I can already see it at work everywhere. Here, the first HN links were not warmly welcomed, so we had another one published, then another one published, until one with a positive top comment for them is here.
Also plenty of comments to defend them by using vague positive things like "they did good things recently" or "they like open source".
If you go on reddit you'll see the same is happening.
The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.
It doesn't have to be astroturfing. Repeatedly exposing HN readers to the same news would be a good way to gradually increase positive opinion until a desirable threshold is reached ("the first positive top comment").
Suppose it isn't more likely, that it is just random. All Microsoft has to do is pick the one article that has a positive opinion at the top and promote that one.
I had this debate for the last 10 years, and everytime there are persons to say "maybe this time they changed", and everytime use something like "Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake".
The problem with a PR machine is that it never get tired of repeating the same story, while we do. And people eventually listen to the PR machine anyway. That's why it works. Not because it's clever, but because of human nature.
I've been watching MS for the last 23 years. So I'm not oblivious to history. ;)
And granted that's how PR works, but the problem with carrying distrust to defend against it is that is eventually makes one paranoid.
Personally, I aspire to objective reevaluation at the current point in time.
In 2018?
Microsoft historically did terrible things to open source, Balmer was an asshole about casting it as us vs them, and they still have substantial legacy OS and Office revenue streams to protect.
At the same time, their cloud business is rapidly growing, they've realized the only way to compete there is to embrace open source, and that's beginning to permeate the rest of the company. Largely via promoting someone from the dev / server / cloud business as CEO.
A couple years ago, when they had that bug in Win10 that broke webcams, folks here were all "Oh the downfall of software quality at MS! They used to be great!"
Those of us who had to admin their products pre-Win7 era were all "What?"
To the average user at home, perhaps the experience seemed smooth most of the time. But they've been peddling half-assed efforts and relying on a "walled garden" approach to computing since before the iPhone.
They failed to notice the "lifestyle" changes taking place in IT until recently, is all.
They're still Evil Corp, and want you to dedicate yourself to building out their empire for them.
I won't ever really forgive MicroSoft until they give us back "Clippy".
In a marketing atmosphere dominated by Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Watson.... how can MicroSoft continue to ignore the original and much beloved assistant A.I?
> The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.
I had a serious dislike of MS under Ballmer, and every single one of your examples in that post was under his reign. But the argument that "they used to be bad, so they still have to be bad" is just silly. Ballmer may have screamed "developers" on stage, but he was the one who lost them - which cost them dearly (mobile, cloud). Shareholders and the board pushed him out for that reason, so the new management had no choice but to sail a completely different course - which they did. It's no accident that their new CEO is the guy that was heading the Azure division, which is effectively selling Linux.
But yes - it's still a company that will act in it's own self-interest, as any company will, and right now, that aligns pretty well with playing nice with the opensource community. That could change - in the future, so some caution is always a good idea (but that's the same for Google, Apple, Amazon, ...), but today, I have little issues with MS's attitude today towards opensource. Tomorrow, we'll see.
That said - I don't mind them buying github and I like that people are actively looking into alternatives, github is simply too big imho, and too many things just expect git = github, which sucks too.
Did windows 10 stopped shipping ads and spywares ? Or orce update (and sometime locking my PC for 30 minutes then erase my grub for even more fun) ? Did skype turned back great, and P2P again ? Did they revoked their abusive patents ? Did they start to adopt open standard for new products ? Did they quit the Business Software Alliance ?Did they stopped shipping root TLS certificates from dictatures so that they can basically intercept any of my communications ?
Bitlocker sends you private key to microsoft (and questions about it, said they were to be trusted, but you could request deletion individually if you wanted):
So investors were going to keep sinking money into Github forever?
As far as competing with the entire industry, everyone competes with everyone and does business with everyone....
Netflix and Amazon Video compete but Netflix hosts its entire infrastructure on AWS.
Apple and Samsung compete, they are involved with lawsuits but Apple is still one of Samsung's largest customers.
Apple and Google compete but Google pays Apple $2 billion a year to be the default search provider on iOS. Apple also reportedly uses Google Cloud Platform for some of its iCloud hosting.
Amazon and Apple compete selling media and streaming boxes but Amazon Prime is on IOS devices.
Microsoft Azure and AWS compete but it is just as easy to deploy to AWS using VSTS as it is to Azure.
Microsoft and Google work together on Angular/Typescript.
Amazon hosts Windows VMs,SqlServer RDS instances and supports VS Code.
Atlassian is “only” worth $15B. GitHub was sold for $7.5B. Not sure Atlassian would want to effectively merge with GitHub since they certainly don’t have the cash to buy it.
If they could afford it they would kill it off in favor of Bitbucket (probably name it BitHub), stagnate development of services, lock it into Bamboo build envs.. Hating MS with a passion, i still prefer MS to have bought Github.
It would be great if companies like GitHub would figure out how to earn money. I love more diversity in companies and not just a handful of them dominating and being insanely profitable. The only good thing I see about acquisitions like this is that there will be a few employees with enough money to care less about their future and build something new and interesting. At MS, Google, FB, etc this will not happen.
Interesting, where are the financials for GitHub available? What sort of deficit were they running?
I think the answer would be 'a company without a history of ruining things one loved' -- my recent experience of Microsoft is very negative too (though I've seen some awesome tech demos of their's).
GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.
> GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.
GitHub no longer needs to directly turn a profit now that it is owned by Microsoft. They just need to use GitHub to increase their profits from Azure (or any of Microsoft's other money makers). I don't think they need to make drastic changes to GitHub for that to happen.
How do you envision them forcing^W encouraging use of Azure, or other MS paid offerings, through GitHub?
I can see that working if they don't meddle with GitHub for the next decade, and keep it running well; then people might be convinced to try MS's other offerings.
Maybe Heroku style "run this project on your own Azure instance now" (perhaps GitHub does this already?)? Is Azure's rep good enough to pull that off?
I haven't heard anyone say anything bad about Azure that can't be said about AWS, GCP, or whatever IBM calls their cloud hosting service.
That is exactly the kind of feature I think they will implement. They will probably add more support in Visual Studio and VSCode for GitHub as well, although their support is already pretty good as far as I know.
They can also throw paid GitHub features in with their Office 365 package, like they currently do with Skype. That would further consolidate companies on the Microsoft platform by ensuring that they don't have to leave it for code hosting.
Tell that to Youtube. Youtube has never made a dollar in profits. Did Google destroy it as soon as they acquired it in 2008?
No: Google is propping it up as a loss-leader and incentive to sweeten the deal by bundling their other more profitable services.
We can expect Microsoft to do the same thing: Github will still lose money, but it will integrate with VScode and Azure and OWA and they'll offer on-prem installations for enterprise customers who are already paying for those other profitable services.
Only on HN / in San Francisco would the federal government (if I understand you correctly) be preferable to a technology company which has been a key player in the PC and internet marketplace for decades. I’m not trying to lionize M$, but come on - a Public Utility? As if the government doesn’t already burn enough cash....
Having been to the GitHub offices and having dined at their in-office restaurant, and having gotten drunk at their free bar - the answer is an asbsolute no regarding me funding then via donation. I’ll continue to fund the Linux foundation, and continue to run my own git server, and continue to enjoy the fruits of VC funding, but donations for GitHub? Insanity. I would for sure be happier if they reached profitability on their own, but that was pretty clearly not in the cards.
As for Wikipedia, I feel similarly, except Wikimedia runs a fairly tight ship, and lacking a corporate product offering (or market) means I’m much more happy to donate. They don’t run in the deep red intentionally, which is the key difference. Also, GitHub is extremely easily replaceable (and we -need- diversity in code hosting for FOSS), whereas Wikipedia is not quite so replaceable, and diversity in open encyclopedia platforms doesn’t help anyone...
That's a nice idea and all, but was there ever any path to accomplish it without asking everyone invested in GitHub to take an unforced L?
GitHub was a startup, and that comes with certain expectations and constraints on their future. But, for some crazy reason, avoiding GitHub wasn't a particularly popular position to take a week ago. People who understood the business realities of Facebook dunked on normal people for getting duped, then went around and complained that everyone should just submit to network effects and get on github.
For me, it's not about whose the bigger scarier influence, or who does more evil. It's just based on how practically I see either turning out.
=Microsoft Acquisition=
For a few months to a year, everything is mostly the same, until new features start happening. It starts with something like annotations on particular regions of code, with say all the annotations for the codebase stored in an extra file "git_annotations.tla", which is some zip file collecting together a bunch of random undocumented xml that changes constantly. These annotations are tracked semi-competently by VS Code and MS team enterprise tools, being updated to deal with source changes with each commit, but ultimately just showing up automagically in either the web view, VS Code, or associated enterprise tools. These annotations will start out as minor unimportant things, not even really worth porting to other editors, but will increasingly be abused for code review in enterprisey contexts. People who try to just edit things from the command line or their editor of choice will be constantly breaking other people's annotations at random times since they don't update that file, so file renamings, moving, etc won't be tracked properly. MS provides some xcode/sublime/atom plugins to provide partial support for some other editors, which prompts web developers to adopt them in droves so they can add gif tooltips to comments. At no point is there a great enough reason for anyone still using github to switch, so slowly the remaining open source projects there start making use of these features, and so contributers need to start using the appropriate MS tooling to ensure their commit doesn't break the annotations (or just use one of the supported editors).
=Google Acquisition=
Github user profiles are now linked to a google account. The webclient works better in chrome than other browsers. The webclient is renamed, rebranded and redesigned every 2-4 years by someone looking for a promotion, but ultimately in a way that doesn't affect people just using git from the command line. Github possibly gets a few additional features to support internal usage with Google weird mono-repo lifestyle. Google tries unsuccessfully multiple times to integrate Github into yet another failed team messaging platform or whatever, but again in ways that only affect the webclient. Google more successfully does some data analytics stuff based on searching and indexing all of that code now sitting on servers they own, and this is almost but not quite profitable, but close enough for them to leave it alone and get distracted by something else that's shiny.
To me, neither seems ideal, but all of the annoyance of the google stuff seems avoidable by just using separate accounts for separate things, as usual.
This is how I see things playing out as well. GitHub starting to behave like the MS Office suite is something straight out of a nightmare. I hope so much that we are wrong.
Is that last one sarcastic? Because with Skype they finally tossed the 15-20 year old client with a slick (and lacking in features) electron-like app. Better to start fresh than try and maintain the old shit.
Anyway Skype is a non-issue, it's lost market thanks to pretty much everyone making a chat app / competitor, notably Slack.
I'm actually happy about this acquisition. For everything that all the 13 y/o "hackers" say on Reddit, this will hopefully be a great thing for the wider community.
> And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.
It’s a fair point but I still cannot read this without thinking of someone saying “yeah I did some things in the past but I’ve totally changed I promise. Look, for the whole past week I’ve been really nice to people haven’t I?”
(1) Make it easy for alternative OS to run on Surface/Windows-certified devices: Both x86 and ARM.
(2) Support OpenDocumentFormat in their office apps. Still remember how they corrupted the ISO certification process by creating OOXML (which is just a wrapper over binary blobs produced by MS-Office)
> OpenXML on the other hand, is a high-level specification which describes the high level envelopes used to embed binary objects which are included in the content. The content itself contains the binary code which can call any function in any Microsoft library and has all permissions of the person opening the document.
They'll do it the day they think it's profitable for them to do so, as their public company status obliges them to do, unless their shareholders vote otherwise.
This is just ridiculous. The other points may/may not make sense but drop direct-x for vulkan? What? It'd have made more sense to make Direct-X open source than just dump it like it's useless. It's not like windows drivers for GPUs don't support vulkan.
Direct-X has had a history of being the superior graphics API to OGL. Now, VULKAN evens things out a bit but just dumping so much of RnD for nothing doesn't make sense
But to summarize: OpenGL was the standard before D3D was created. D3D has been a step behind OpenGL in features and performance up to about D3Dv7. Then the OpenGL ARB screwed up, with Microsoft among the members (some hypothesize that Microsoft were attempting to sabotage OpenGL).
Several key pieces of Edge are open source, such as Chakra Core, which is the JS engine (like Chromium's V8), and more are expected.
The argument IE6 was that the web grew too stagnant with a single dominant web renderer. If we all agree that the Web is a better place with multiple competing web renderers, why wish the death of the Edge renderer when it and Firefox are all that are standing in the way (and barely by latest metrics) of forks from the KHTML/WebKit/Blink family dominating?
He consistent and have a good track record for years.
It feels just like yesterday that Microsoft was spying on windows boxes. In my mind, everyone has a "Days since last accident" counter in their head, and Microsoft's number is quite low.
Think this is the only other alternative for cross plat guis if you don't want to pull in non-.net stuff like qt or electron.
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
It is, but a lot of people want that instead of a desktop and the work necessary to maintain that. I don't think my toaster is crappy just because it can only make toast even though I could use an oven which has more capabilities
but particularly msft it would seem. Many of the larger oss projects are maintained by companies who either make money off the products or are funded by the other things they work on
Its worse now. Grub-efi cant boot Windows 8.1+ directly. It instead boots Window's Bootloader which then handles all of the bootable windows partitions.
It looks okay if you only have one Windows in your boot options but once you have two you realize you have two bootloaders.
Sell the majority of their shares to other people and behave very nicely, doing things against their short and medium term interest, for 15 years.
That's about the minimum, given their track record.
In the meanwhile we can give them increasing credit, if they do behave nicely, but it's absurd to believe that they've suddenly become a good company and that they'll stay like this for the next decades. I have a hard time believing that anyone not payed by them could think so.
And by the way, they have yet to reverse the decidedly un-nice things they have done with Windows 10 in the last years. Allow everyone to disable the telemetry and to better control the updates, and then we can start the 15 years count. Oh yeah, and maybe also stop astroturfing, that's another extremely un-nice thing that they clearly started doing only recently.
There would be nothing wrong in discussing with the people, if they paid people to do so while stating in every message that they're being paid by Microsoft it would be perfectly ok, but that's very different from what they're doing now.
These things make it clear that they're still motherfuckers, just less then they used to be.
It may sound like a harsh statement, but exactly because corporations are not like people, they seem to be harder to change, in my opinion. I'm not saying Microsoft can't change, but it's easy to forget that the main goal of any corporation is profit, specially when it's so big.
I think the profit motive is exactly why change happens.
As soon as a company realizes it can make more $$$ with new strategy B than their original strategy A, then boom -- changed. (Sometimes you have to get rid of the old believers, but that already happened at Microsoft.)
If you look at MSFT's stock price, it's ~tripled since Satya became CEO, after being stagnant for years. He seems incredibly committed to open-source -- because in the long run it will ultimately be more profitable for Microsoft, no?
> I think the profit motive is exactly why change happens.
I agree. They don't actually care about open source it's purely because it's profitable to their business. They'll close it without caring if it's not making them enough money or good will.
But I still hope this works. As long as maintaining open source projects is profitable to Microsoft then it gives incentives for other FLOSS projects to show that if such an anti open source company as Microsoft is willing to embrace it then there's good reasons to join in.
> He seems incredibly committed to open-source -- because in the long run it will ultimately be more profitable for Microsoft, no?
I think it's just because in the short run Microsoft ran a very high risk of getting pushed in a corner.
They are embracing what's hip most of all to improve their image, especially so as to be more attractive for talented technical people.
The "Windows everywhere" vision is not pursuable at this time, so it makes sense to let some things go and focus on what can get you the most money right now (cloud, IA, individual profitable products and services).
And maybe, just maybe, surreptitiously spread your patents everywhere... =0
But incentives are still very much in the hand of shareholders who have been rewarding and continue to reward Microsoft's predatory stance on the market (including its continuous abuse of patents against open-source projects like Android and Linux).
I'd argue that the incentives of a company who made their fortune and moat on deliberately incompatible lock-in OS/software are permanently broken, so I agree with you but come to the opposite conclusion.
> If you change the leadership and change employee incentives, it might as well be a different company.
Exactly. Which is why the idea of "trusting" a corporation, or treating them like you would a human being on any level, is ludicrous. They're a plane crash and a stock dip from becoming a totally different entity.
A person is a midlife crisis[1] or a railway accident[2] away from being a totally different entity. There is no absolute trust, just risk assessment and reevaluation.
[1] I thought it was just a cliche until I saw it happen to someone. She went through some things and upended her whole life.
The thought that Satya Nadella, who joined Microsoft in 1992 and then steadily climbed his way (in extremely fierce competition) to the top would be a better, more moral person than the "old guard" is kind of funny.
He's just younger and less out of touch than Gates (and particularly Balmer). Many people seem to mistake ascribe this aspect of him (more in touch with modern tech) with some higher moral standards etc than e.g. Gates/Ballmer. I don't see why he should be any less fierce/brutal.
True, but you can say that for any company. At least in this case, you can consider their past 5 years, see what moves they make and what statements they have released, and judge whether their words and matching their actions.
I'd believe them if they open sourced Windows. They could still keep their web platforms (Office365, Azure, etc.) closed but it would be a huge statement to open up Windows 10.
(Never going to happen, not just for philosophical reasons, but I'm sure legal reasons too)
I think the biggest issue would be the audit. Recall that NT started out as part of OS/2 which is owned by IBM. I suspect that Edge/IE has similar issues, because it was evolved from NCSA Mosaic it probably has legal issues preventing it from being open sourced.
I know for a fact that the ZIP component of the windows shell would be an issue as that is definitely licensed to Microsoft instead of being owned by.
The MS of today has massive skin in this OSS game. They've been contributing to the Linux kernel for years now [0]. They've got over 4000 repos on GitHub. Many projects are actively developed on GH. As an example, the VS code team solicits contributions on GH [1]. It's hard to say what kind of resources have been invested in .NET core and the open source compilers (Roslyn) and the CLR. Substantial resources.
If you told me 5/10 years ago about these developments I would have never believed you.
I don't think it's fair to reason about a (40+ year old, 100k+ employees, public) company's behaviour as if it has a mind. It doesn't.
The new Microsoft only exist in markets where the old Microsoft have been pushed to the fringes. In the markets where Microsoft still have the ability to set the rules their behavior is even worse then the bad old days when they still believed the windows market could grow(as anyone trying to get a telemetry free copy of windows10 can tell you).
What we are seeing now is Microsoft reacting to being kicked out of several markets by going back to the embrace phase in an attempt to regain some of the ground lost from Balmers failed attempt to secure a foothold for MS in the mobile and web framework markets.
If they had really been about embracing open source and open standards we would have seen them do something useful for Linux like releasing a version of excel for Linux or opening up the protocols outlook and exchange use to talk to each other, but that kind of openness was never on the table.
What i would expect to see with github is that if/when ms decide they want to utilize their investment for profit is a heavy integration with the azure environment in the form of CI hooks designed around azure api's to the point where other CI platforms become 2nd degree citizens in the ecosystem and i would not be surprised if a github account becomes a add on to an office365 subscription rather then a stand alone product.
The real question everyone should be asking is whether Microsoft is trustworthy, cognizant, and honorable enough to be the steward of such a major player that facilitates a large portion of open source software.
This has me very concerned for the open source community.
Why were you not concerned previously about an unprofitable SV startup holding that central position?
GitHub wasn’t a non-profit. This was always the endgame for them. They were losing money to acquire a userbase that would be sold when the time is right — just like WhatsApp and numerous other big social SV plays.
Who says I wasn't? And I know Github wasn't a non-profit. You make quite a number of assumptions with your statement.
The difference for me is that I was supporting Github (by paying) to be an independent company, warts and all. If their goal was to always sell specifically to Microsoft, I would have voiced many concerns very early on. I would much rather they had sold to Mozilla or another in the open source community.
How would Mozilla afford this? Anyone in the open source community? The selling price of $7.5B is huge. Red Hat’s market cap is only 4x what GitHub sold for.
I am not feeling extremely concerned, since every developer has almost or exactly an identical copy of the repository in at least one location, and can push that entire repository to another location with two commands. This would probably be the most difficult genie to put back into a bottle.
The issue is with the issues, which are not cloned together with the repository (and pull requests, while there's the trick of using --mirror to also clone the pull requests, the comments aren't cloned).
There probably is, and if not, someone will have created one. But even then, "every developer has almost or exactly an identical copy of the repository in at least one location" is false for issues and pull requests; while nearly every developer can be assumed to have one or more "git clone" copies of the repository, few will have any copy of the issues and pull request comments.
I don't think GDPR comes into this. You could probably make the case that the issues you've posted yourself are personal/identifying information but github have no obligation as far as I can see to allow you to export issues and comments created by others as well.
I think the bigger question is that even if Microsoft is headed in a more trustworthy direction now, there's no knowing if they'll stay that course in a decade when there's a new CEO. Things shift.
I can definitely see why this would be a desirable acquisition on GitHub's side. They were bleeding money. I can't blame them.
I am a GitLab user and have been for about 2 years now. With that being said, I think this acquisition makes a ton of sense strategically. Microsoft has really been trying to change their identity from being a stuffy close-source corporation to an open company that developers can rely on. And they have done pretty well at this. They open sourced .net, run MS SQL on Linux, and have released the WSL (which would have been unfathomable a decade ago). They also moved their VCS over to Git for Windows development.
GitHub, however, has a business issue of not making money. I think with the resources that Microsoft can provide GitHub can continue to build a great product and tap further into Microsoft's enterprise user base to make sales and release more features that customers want/need.
Congrats to everyone at GitHub for this momentous acquisition!
Why did GitHub become unprofitable? Did they spend too much money hosting open-source projects, compared to what they made on private repos? Maybe the lesson is that free hosting never works.
I have been looking for a source to that claim (not the first I have seen) and haven't found one (either for or against profitability). Does anybody have one?
It's a great move for both, and as a developer I like the opportunities this creates for tooling and productivity. Good to see those two dev focused organizations team up!
To your very good post you forgot to add that majority of large corps with lrge projects scramble at the moment to move and delete off of their source codebase from GitHub so that Microsoft programmers dont get access to their repos and secret souce.
I just don't understand this take. How many of those companies run Windows on any of their devices? Either you trust Microsoft or you don't. If you don't trust Microsoft, you have bigger problems than them owning GitHub.
More tech consolidation under Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple flat out sucks. It doesn't empower developers in the slightest to have a small number of giant companies own everything.
Yet they have numerous defenders on this site, all the more peculiar considering those companies' collusion to avoid paying market rates to developers. The preference to be a sharecropper on their plantations is evidently strong, for no very clear reason.
And let us not forget the EU's efforts to support incumbents and deter new entrants, with their complex, vague and punitive regulations. These also receive much approval here; perhaps a fruitful field for study by some enterprising psychologists!
They do seem to be trying to reassure people that they're not gonna mess this up:
> And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.
> [...]
> Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.
> [...]
> Most importantly, we recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform.
Yes, they got way better at PR. They could get away with bad PR before when they were leader, but now that they have serious competition from everywhere, they are trying to win people away again.
If they meant "open source" I have to imagine they would have said so. "Remain" is the key word there. Github is already an open platform with an API and plugin system. Github is not already open source, so it can't remain so.
Of course they are, have you read all the HN posts on the subject? People literally called them "fundamentally reprehensible."
It's not too much to say that they more or less only have upside here - if they can more or less keep their hands off GitHub's community and mindshare while expanding its capabilities and services, it'll be one more notch in their belt of "See? We're not Gates or Ballmer."
The phrase is still valid, but it is unclear that it applies to the current company. Companies do not have minds and are not people. They do have inertia, but if you change enough of the people then it's fundamentally a different company. MS is certainly different than it was 20 or 10 years ago.
MS was fined by EU for monopoly practices in 2008 and 2013. It is currently in a case against Spain when it made it harder to dual boot with Windows 8's UEFI systems.
The year is 2018 and Windows still ships with a single navigator, only supports NTFS and does not know that dual-boot is even a possibility.
More generally, cloud is the key. MS is using O365 as a lead-in to Azure and Google is using G Suite the same way. GitLab currently has built-in support to pump your CI pipeline to Google Cloud and comes with some hosting credits. That would be the obvious next step for MS. Introduce one-click deployment to Azure Container Service. I can also see VS Code in the browser for your GitHub projects, but that would be brand halo, not a money maker.
People keep mentioning how "Microsoft changed" due to VS Code, the Linux subsystem, .NET Core.
I say that they are the same company, only with different cash cows.
Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
"But Mom, some of the other companies are doing it too", well yeah, but some of us don't have double standards, in spite of what you'd think and that doesn't absolve them of anything ;-)
Brilliant marketing campaign though. They needed it I guess, but it's getting obnoxious.
---
That said I'm glad that after the acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility.
As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do, and even gave him a bonus for achieving it.
I only know that because I have one of their awesome scales (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales). I was shocked they were Nokia when I found out about them. They're absolutely awesome, highly recommend them.
>As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do
Did that include having secret negotiations with Steve Ballmer that the board was unaware of? For a true accounting of what really happened you can find it all in Operation Elop.
> the same company, only with different cash cows.
I think having different cash cows does change a company. If it's in their interest to be a good steward of VSCode, Typescript, Github etc then they're more likely to do it.
I think consolidation is actually as much of an issue as which company it is, the more consolidated, arguably the less direct incentive for intercompatibility and open standards. That's more of an issue here because GitHub is not open-source, so unlike the other examples the developer base has nothing to fall back on.
On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.
> On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.
That's not the same though. I host my (company private) code on Github. I can use React or Kubernetes without giving any access to Google or Facebook to my code.
> Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Have they not killed Nokia or ruined Skype?
I don't think one can say they killed Nokia. Nokia's phone business was basically doomed after Android gained traction, and Microsoft just helped the company to pivot by overpaying for that part of the business, while leaving Nokia with everything that actually was making money.
I think this was a better outcome for Nokia. They didn't make their own components like Samsung does, so they'd probably now be in a position similar to HTC and Sony. They would have faced years of painful, expensive downsizing instead of a (retrospectively) good payout that assumed the liabilities too.
I don’t believe the engineers spent thousands man-years developing in-house Symbian, then significant time working on (mostly) in-house Maemo, then some day they said “screw that, let’s throw away everything we’ve developed and move to Android”.
Nokia had and released their own version of Android [0] which probably sped up the negotiations with Microsoft. Likely done by a completely different team vs. the Symbian people, though somone else probably knows more of those details.
Android was really hated by middlemanagers at nokia. Android was eating Nokia's lunch in mid-end phones, and managers lost their sales bonuses. When Nokia went to talk to Google and Microsoft, Google gave the "here's the deal everyone gets" and Microsoft "we'll do anything for you".
Finally Nokia managers were full of hubris, and believed Nokias was still the center of mobile, and so important it to change the course of industry by Adopting Windows Phone.
>When Nokia went to talk to Google and Microsoft, Google gave the "here's the deal everyone gets" and Microsoft "we'll do anything for you".
This is a well regurgitated lie that I see posted often. If you would like the truth about what really happened I suggest you read Operation Elop.
According to a source present, Google seemed to really want Nokia to join the Android world. The company assured that Android can be customized more than Nokia understood, especially compared with Windows Phone. Even if Google was criticized continuously for having Samsung, HTC and Sony Android phones differ from each other too much, Nokia would be given leeway to create its own user experience. Google saw that Nokia differentiated from these competitors in that it had a global area of operation. Nokia would be able to create better local services and user experiences for network providers and customers, one person present remembers being discussed. The Nokians also noticed that they had been living partially with misinformation. Nokia could continue with Android with its own maps side-by-side with Google’s maps. The same applied with the app store. Nokia’s music service as well as ovi.com could continue, as long as the phone had Google Play.
The discussions continued at a fast pace after the first visit. Google seemed to really want Nokia.
Some constraints were set by the Open Handset Alliance behind Android, OHA. Unlike Windows Phone, Android is not controlled by one company, rather by an alliance of 84 companies which is led by Google, where the members are able to use Android in an equal manner. Google was in a difficult position. By giving Nokia special privileges, it risked its relationship with other manufacturers. The reactions would be difficult to predict. Creativity was needed.
As the negotiations proceeded, a solution was found. Google offered Nokia, among other things, plenty of say in choosing the direction of Android development. By directing Android development to align with its own competitive goals, Nokia would gain some advantage, even if the changes would be available for everyone at the same time. Now Nokia was interested. Android and Nokia had an area where their interests converged in a brilliant way: Developing countries. If Android could be made to work on cheap hardware, Nokia would be best at getting in through in developing markets. The arrangement was enticing. Google would secure the position it was dreaming of in smartphones, and Nokia would become part of virgin Android markets. The precise details remained hidden, but Nokia was able to learn that Google worked Android into clearly cheaper models than Windows Phone.
Another flexible point of Android was in its predictability. Nokia wanted to publicize the new software features earlier than when the phones go into sales. The reason was brutal: Nokia was more solid than its Korean competitor and needed more time to build a phone. If the information about the new Android features was available earlier, Nokia would have enough time to get them in the first wave, like the others. Google was willing. It promised to make the publicizing of its plans earlier and to release the source code to its partners. The solution would have been useless for other Android manufacturers in relation to Nokia, but would not have broken the OHA rules.
Google made a substantial offer regarding distribution of income. Nokia would have gotten a portion of the income from Google’s search engine, app store, and other services which originate from Nokia phones, and the terms would be in relation to Nokia’s influence in the ecosystem. We don’t have information about precise percentages, but at any rate, Google’s promise was quite exceptional, considering that Nokia would still have been able to keep its own services in its phones.
Contrary to what Nokia has claimed, Google was ready for concessions. It was ready to flex as far as it could in the framework of OHA, and even then some...
Skype is pretty awful for calling phones. The user interface has become a mess and is difficult to use. They are constantly making it more difficult to call phone.
You absolutely can't be serious. The new Skype is an unrelenting abomination... just look on ANY community site and you will see the utter livid rage for "new skype". It's truly horrible in every way, it removed every setting and feature that was good, the UI/UX is one of the worst things ever. https://www.reddit.com/r/skype/search?q=new+skype&restrict_s...
Nokia basically held onto Symbian for a bit too long. They had a massive chance with Meego; they weakened it slightly pre-Microsoft due to mismanagement, but killing it in favour of Windows Phone was the actual Nokia's death sentence.
They killed Nokia twice! First by forcing them to use Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone, or whatever it was called) when it was clear to all they needed to go with Android, and then by actually buying it and killing it when even Microsoft couldn't refuse Windows Mobile was going nowhere.
> First by forcing them to use Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone, or whatever it was called) when it was clear to all they needed to go with Android
There's no way that Microsoft bought Nokia to concentrate on making that tiny hardware subdivision profitable (MSFT's market cap is $700B+ and they bought Nokia for $7.6B). They wanted a hardware platform to promote Windows Phone. For Microsoft, the dying entity in need of a Hail Mary was Windows Phone, not Nokia.
Nokia had Maemo/Meego which wasn't on par with Android at that time wrt the software ecosystem, but with some investment in development could have killed it pretty easily: thanks to native code a device could offer the same performance using slower CPUs and less RAM, or be a lot snappier with the same hardware. Given due time, manufacturers and users would have noticed. As probably did Microsoft. You can have a full desktop Linux running in 1GB of RAM, full HD screen etc. but most Android users throw away old cellphones because 1 or even 2 GB RAM aren't enough anymore thanks to Android Java dependency. Maemo/Meego would have eliminated that problem completely.
I really liked the Maemo and Meego phones that got released, but your scenario would not have happened. Nokia's DNA was not in software development, and they couldn't really compete with Google on that.
Furthermore, Nokia wouldn't have shared a successful OS with others like Google did if they had one. That meant all other manufacturers were going to stay with Android, and I greatly doubt that they would've succeeded in building the whole ecosystem alone like Apple did.
> Nokia wouldn't have shared a successful OS with others like Google did if they had one
But that was exactly the plan. When they cooperated with Intel to build Meego, the resulting OS was available to all other handset manufacturers and there were test suites in the work for vendors to be able to claim Meego compat, just as with Android.
The Meego OS was actually quite solid and very nice to develop for. Its major problem was the unwillingness of most app developers to support additional platforms besides Android and the Iphones. Just as with Windows Phone.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Nokia's plan to make Meego open-source but keep their own UI layer closed? I may be misremembering things as it was a while ago, but there was some catch to keep Nokia the main player.
As for the adoption among developers, it never had a wide enough release to even start with that. N9 was available in limited countries only, and after Nokia's WP announcement.
> with some investment in development could have killed it pretty easily: thanks to native code a device could offer the same performance using slower CPUs and less RAM, or be a lot snappier with the same hardware. Given due time, manufacturers and users would have noticed.
Windows Phone was native and extremely performant on even low end hardware. Microsoft dumped millions into development and couldn’t get traction. No way Maemo was going to displace Android.
Manufacturers literally do not care about anything except selling devices and are uninterested in performance except as it relates to bigger numbers that they can advertise with. Users consistently chose Android over Windows Phone demonstrating that their priorities did not align with picking the phone that would still be snappy in two years.
Nokia’s phone business was doomed. Even if they’d pivoted to Android devices they’d probably have still failed because that’s such a tough market with so much competition willing to sell phones with no margin.
I've worked in several offices around 2013 where people happily used Skype like IRC: everyone was in a list of ~10 channels and occasionally sent private messages to coworkers. Instead of building on this, Microsoft kept pushing its unpopular business chat app (Lync) and made sure that Skype was only useful for consumers (obnoxious birthday notifications, the "snapchat redesign" etc.)
Skype could have beat Slack to the punch. Instead Microsoft lost both the business and the consumer market.
What exactly is Microsoft alleged to have done wrong here? It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code.
Furthermore, I'd see Microsoft's reply:
> I'm not aware of any deliberate copying of the Lerna code, but let me dig into it now and call all the devs on the team to be sure. If there is, we should definitely give correct attribution, so I want to investigate. [...] I checked with the devs, and nobody's aware of any code coming from Lerna. If we inadvertently used something without credit, I really would like to know so that I can fix it.
> It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code
Unrelated to the rest of the discussion, I just want to clarify that MIT License != 'Do Whatever You Want' License. MIT requires attribution and maintaining the copyright license on existing code. Yes, if you don't adhere to the license's terms when copying code, it is stealing.
I know, which is why I wanted to clarify precisely what Microsoft is being accused of (I may have worded it poorly). The tone I was getting from OP (the Twitter discussion) was that the code taken was something Microsoft did not have any right to use in the way they did, not something that could be solved by attribution. "stole my code" may be strictly accurate (as if you don't follow the licence, you don't have a licence to use), but I feel like it doesn't clearly communicate the problem, especially with comments such as "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited.
To be clear, I'm not saying using MIT-licensed code without attribution is acceptable, but I feel that there is a qualitative difference between this and using code you couldn't use under any circumstances, or silently incorporating MIT code in a commercial product.
> The tone I was getting from OP (the Twitter discussion) was that the code taken was something Microsoft did not have any right to use in the way they did, not something that could be solved by attribution.
> "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited.
Attribution alone doesn't bring it into compliance. The copyright notices have to be preserved too.
Also, the rewriting of commit history, if true, sounds more shady than mere "Oops, I dropped the license and copyright texts".
Yep, I really dont understand why there are Microsoft fans.
Like I understand if you bought an Xbox, but I dont understand if you are a programmer.
Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.
That doesn't make them an ethical company. Oracle makes a pretty good database. Google makes a good search engine. All of those companies have serious ethical issues and I would not want any of them as the steward of the largest body of open source code on the planet.
A federated or independent solution is the only way to go for infrastructure like this.
Their developer tools are pretty good for their own platform (but JetBrains actually makes great cross platform tools, some of them are proper free and open source, VSCode is playing catch up). Their C++ stdlib implementation was sucking balls for decades. Their (the dev tools') scriptability was horrible. PowerShell is nice, but it came too late, and it was too server focused.
C# is okay, MS has great teams and people, but they are still very much run by the bean counters.
MSVC's stdlib is still a headache, just see the /std flag[1] which only appeared in msvc2017: you can either have C++14 with some C++17 features, or C++ "latest" which means 17 and missing features.
EDIT: just noticed the article says it was also added to 2013, but my 2015 doesn't support it so idk.
I can conceive PowerShell being good as a scripting language, but as a day to day terminal? That would my hell. And the fact that they are forcing so much on it in win10 doesn't help.
They do produce some great things sometimes, I agree, it just doesn't average out as positive IMO.
I dislike Microsoft a lot. But Apple, just as much. People will take a dump on Microsoft while in the same breath fawn over Apple for identical behaviour.
They're all as bad as each other. Yep. Google included.
> Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
Just want to point out that Github was also a "for-profit" company.
Exactly. It seems people around here are brainwashed. They are incapable of thinking objectively. You are so naive if you think Apple or Google or Facebook are not for profit!
Look at how much data Google has on every single one of us.
MSFT is going through a cultural change right now. It was the case for Google, to make money the had to be an advocate of open source. They didn't do that because they are good-hearted or anything else. It is just like geopolitics. Hit your opponent from the weakest point. And Microsoft weak point was open source at that time.
But the point is neither MSFT, Apple, Google or Facebook does not care about developers or customers. They want to make money. This is nature of corporations. Instead of nagging and being short-sighted we should embrace open source collaboration by MSFT and should hit them when they don't respect customers.
The expression "for profit" is indeed inappropriate.
However, with the understanding of what the poster meant, it does make sense. We're talking about the company whose racket produces 10$ avg for each Android phone sold.
I'm talking especially about those FAT patents, which are against the spirit of patenting (independently of being in favour or against patents).
I understand that big companies are big and internally conflicting, however, I see a radical conflict of interest between their newfounded open source responsibility and their ruthless business attitude.
>Look at how much data Google has on every single one of us.
What about the data Microsoft has on you? Their Windows 10 OS is basically a data funnel right to their servers. They operate a tracking based search engine that also builds profiles on people. And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.
There are two ways you create value for your employer:
1) creating value for their customers
2) maintaining the moat that prevents other people from creating value for their customers
The former is constructive, the latter is destructive. They both contribute revenue.
I haven’t done a full scale analysis of Microsoft, but the argument I would entertain is that Microsoft primarily sells tools for companies and individuals to built moats around themselves.
#2 doesn't work unless you can also provide that value, so it is still constructive. You cant keep customers from using something if you have no such offering yourself to compete with.
That doesn't make sense. If they buy the competitor, why would they tank the business which is now their own instead of gaining the combined revenue and market share?
"Buy and trash competitor" isn't a real strategy. When an acquisition fails, it's usually poor management or vision, or just a lack of synergy in the first place, not a purposeful tanking.
The original poster claimed it was "destructive" which doesn't logically sound like a way to build a lot of value, especially to be one of the top 10 companies on the planet, at the very least without clarity on what they are supposedly destroying. From the votes and other comments, I'm clearly not alone in wondering. You had your chance to enlighten us but went with juvenile retorts instead, ultimately only really proving that you don't know either. Thanks for playing I guess.
I was never terribly fond of GitHub either. I disliked how they somehow became synonymous with open source, and I dislike how people have focused on GitHub rather than software freedom. I also wasn't a fan when they decided to step into politics.
I think self-hosting is a better choice for almost any organisation. Remember, 'the cloud' just means 'someone else's computer.'
The problem with self-hosting is a lack of visibility. Like Sourceforge before them, you basically need to host your project there for anyone else to notice it.
Of course you don't need to host it all there. Just mirror enough that it gets you the "visibility", while keeping everything else on your own servers.
Then again, there's inertia. And inertia always wins.
The interesting bit is that is about to get tested out with GitHub. Yes, of course, Skype target audience was network locked and not that savvy, but, the open source community does seem a tad bit different breed.
As with every other big corporation, including Apple, Google etc. the problem isn't making money, which is perfectly legit and fine, the problem is the "western" economy system which requires, or even encourages, any rogue behavior aimed at maximizing profits at any cost.
A company expecting returns for its investment is a thing, but one who buys startups only to destroy them to stop the development of competing products, or engage in legal battles to eliminate competition, is a totally different thing.
Most of us criticize the latter, not the former. Unfortunately there's no legal way to prevent a corporation to become a creature turning anything including its integrity into profits, because being an ass in this context brings money and money buys favorable laws.
What does "Western" have to do with anything of this? Should we be "Eastern" like Chinese sweatshops that choke the air with smog? "Middle Eastern" like Qatari slaveowners?
RHAT is about making money too. They do a good job of it.
Unlike Microsoft, however, they can't seem to make GUIs where the font metrics are right (eg. can you read the text properly or does the text overlap or end up being too big or too small for the space?) or scrollbars.
Linux is a winner for server apps but on the desktop it seems to get worse over time, not better.
>Linux is a winner for server apps but on the desktop it seems to get worse over time, not better.
No, not really. The problem is too many people (like you maybe) associate "Linux desktop" with "Gnome (3)". That's false; there's a bunch of different DEs for Linux. Just look at Xfce; it isn't getting worse. KDE seems to be getting no worse too.
I do not associate it with Gnome3 but I have to ask (as I am not longer a desktop Linux user), do they still rewrite every system utility every couple of releases? Back when Fedora Core was a thing, they rewrote the GUI utilities every couple of releases, without actually improving them from what I could tell. And despite installing a binary distribution, they insisted on writing these in Python with bindings to the in-fashion GUI library (typically GTK). This meant the utilities were dog slow and generally very poor. Why not write a compiled binary? Didn't make sense to me.
I don't know, because I never used Gnome much, and have avoided Gnome3 like the plague. Fedora is very much a Gnome-centric distro, so of course it's going to be like what you say.
At home, I use KDE, so of course they're not going to have system utilities binding to GTK. KDE is Qt-centric, so most stuff there is most likely in Qt-flavored C++. Xfce is GTK, but it's known to be fast (I use it at work and it's quick), so I seriously doubt it has system utilities in Python.
Honestly, I think all your complaints are really about Gnome3.
No, they were aimed at the system utilities eg. system-* that present UIs. They weren't tied to a DE (but did use a specific windowing toolkit like GTK+); I am not talking about the control center or Kontrol system - I am talking about the system-* UI packages which were all Python written, with bindings to GTK+ and ran horribly.
As a developer Microsoft has treated my far better than any other corporation pushing an agenda. Amazon seems kind of apathetic towards any one developer or group, Google and Apple can be down-right hostile in their policies or support. Microsoft has by far hosted the most events that I have access to, ranging from global developer conferences to user-group meetings.Their tooling and developer support has always been forefront in their strategy as well.
So it's a little disingenuous to say only technology consumers should have positive feelings for Microsoft. Plus, making money & helping programmers are not mutually exclusive; Coupled with their business strategies (good and bad) this has always been MS's strategy to grow and profit from their markets.
I was one of them, and Microsoft treated me very well.
Windows Phone was an amazing platform. I’ve also developed for iOS a lot. Visual studio + expression blend was way ahead of apple’s xCode. Every single piece was much better: language, libraries, compiler, debugger, emulator, UI designer.
The platform is now discontinued so I no longer develop for WP. Meanwhile, most of the skills I’ve obtained working on WP7-8 apps apply to other XAML-based platforms, i.e. WPF, WinRT, and UWP. Fortunately for me, Windows is not going from desktops any time soon.
I appreciate that Aws is apathetic a bit. The other way to put it would be unintereste or removed or unbiased. They aren’t that helpful, fine. That’s what we get paid the big bucks for. I’ve worjed in the Msft ecosystem...never again, no thanks.
As a former windows phone user and .NET developer who is currently a mobile developer, Microsoft definitely treated mobile developers worse than any other company.
They killed what small progress they’d made on their ecosystem 2 times, simply because they got bored and decided they didn’t like the technology stack they’d previously mandated and supported. They deserved to get buried in that space.
Meanwhile Apple have kept what is essentially the same technology stack for the past decade. Sure there’s been some pain, but almost all of it had some purpose that moved the development of apps forward.
As someone who also developed on windows phone I really disagree with this portrayal. Microsoft did not change the stack on account of "getting bored" with the tech.
Looking back on it, they took on an extremely difficult problem having a completely new marketplace and platform against competitors with tremendous amount of pre-existing traction.
There were clearly some pivots towards universal windows compatibility, and possibility of android compatibility as well. Nobody argues there's a ton of tactical failures and the net result was a loss, but I wouldnt conflate the mobile endeavor with something half-baked nor disregard to developers
None of what you said actually justifies this to a developer. Microsoft may claim "developers, developers, developers" but when it came to mobile, they screwed the platform not once but twice.
Trust has two main dimensions in my view, compassion and competence. Microsoft was not competent enough to have a surviving platform in the face of iOS or Android... even though they had roughly a 8 year lead.
> but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.
What a strange criticism. Of course Microsoft is a for-profit company and they're doing this to make more profit - no one is of the delusion of otherwise. They didn't spend $8b out of the goodness of their heart.
However, one way you make money is to do and make things people like. Here's hoping Microsoft will recognise the value Github can provide and they do right by it. I'm cautiously optimistic.
I think many people forget that the word free in free software means free as in free speech, and not free as in free beer. There's no issue with a for profit company selling free software so long as they adhere to the license. It's not quite the case here, but I think too many developers forget that making money is why people start business and why people work.
> Yep, I really dont understand why there are Microsoft fans.
I definitely agree. Anything Microsoft-related, or even Google-related, is a no from me. Just from a product standpoint, most of there products inherently aren’t that great. And you get that feeling when using their products, a feeling of “oh, this must be a Microsoft product because it feels very corporate.” Plus, there approach to design is subpar — it’s like there’s people out there that actually like Google’s Material Design?
> Like I understand if you bought an Xbox
I have an Xbox, and I just noticed advertisements on the dashboard that are non-gaming related. I also think I saw this when using a friend’s Windows-computer, they have advertisements within their operating system. It’s just bad.
TypeScript and Visual Studio Code are both really nicely done open source projects. There is a fairly significant group of .NET developers out there, and that's largely open source today.
Sure, Microsoft is ultimately out to make money, but they're doing a fair bit to "help programmers" and only making money from those efforts indirectly.
Not "always." I started working with Microsoft dev tools in the late 80's and early 90's after Borland's sun began to set (in no small part because MS poached a lot of their best people). There was a time when MS was the developer's best friend, and tools like the early versions of MSDN gave unprecedented access to information that previously had been very hard to get (raise your hand if you ever paid over $100USD for a manual from IBM). Of course back then the FOSS community did not exist, and the alternatives were old line players like IBM, Digital and Sun. Things are different now. My major concern is not that the company is somehow still evil in a Ballmer-esque way, but rather that their focus on enterprise customers will inevitably lead to changes in the core Github offering. We'll see.
Nokia was struggling long before Microsoft came along though. They saved it for a little bit, but there isn't much you can do with a company that got so far behind it's competitors. Samsung, HTC, Apple, Motorola, etc were all light years ahead of Nokia even before Microsoft got involved.
Funny that the things you mention all happened under Steve Ballmer too...
Ahead in what sense? Apart from Apple and Google, everyone was behind. The fact that HTC and Motorola adopted Android didn't do much good for them in the end, and in hardware and market share Nokia still had the lead at that time.
There was no real chance Symbian had in the post iPhone world.
Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well.
> Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well.
You misremember things quite badly. Nokia was the clear leader in all phone segments, smartphones included. At the peak they sold just over 50% of all smartphones in the world. Of course they would try to hold on to that. They were better in software than their hardware competitors (Ericsson/RIM/etc), but of course that didn't amount to much when the field was upended by Google and Apple.
My understanding is that the debugger is an adapted version of the closed source Visual Studio debugger. Visual Studio isn't open source, and is a paid for product.
It takes time to break things out from inside a larger closed source project...
Nobody here is claiming proprietary code is inherently bad (some people definitely do, but not in this thread), they're just saying it makes a poor example of Microsoft embracing open source.
You're asking why releasing an open source debugger has anything to do with embracing open source because there are closed source companies that are also making a debugger?
> You're asking why releasing an open source debugger has anything to do with embracing open source
I don't even understand what that means. It was never Open Source, it was part of the IDE(s). Microsoft released an update package for their IDE(s) on NuGet which JetBrains used before their native debugger was ready.
If Microsoft are to be shamed for keeping their IDE's debugger closed source then JetBrains should be equally shamed, both have closed source proprietary IDEs.
> how is embracing a closed source for-profit company anything to do with embracing Open Source?
Truly embracing open-source with .NET core would mean that, yes, even a proprietary product could make use of it. A debugger is extremely core to having a language being open-source and artificially limiting it to your own products is the exact opposite of 'embrace'
Also, JetBrains does have an open-source debugger in their community versions, but this is not what the debate is about.
By that token Richard Stalman doesn't embrace open source. The Linux kernel isn't open source. Anything that is GPL is not open source, because you can't make proprietary code from GPL code.
GPL spells this out and gives you the source, if requested. It does not make any restrictions as to on what platform you can use it or anything like that. Microsoft released .NET Core under a permissive license which does allow integration with proprietary code and then specifically limited use of the debugger to their own products. Even other open-source projects, beside VS Code, cannot use the debugger. That is everything that the GPL is not.
This is like if Stallman released Emacs under the GPL, but kept the Elisp interpreter proprietary.
My problem is; if you're going to pretend to embrace open-source and then limit a core component this arbitrarily, you're not embracing open-source, you're still the old org afraid of competition.
And they're still pulling the same old tricks of vendor lock-in with DirectX. Microsoft's PR team likes to pretend they've changed since they gave a few concessions, but the reality is that they made those decisions solely because they were losing competitiveness. .Net core was because everybody was jumping ship to Linux due to the Kubernetes bandwagon. VS code was because the "Electron text editor" market was already filled with cross platform competitors.
> acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility
Credibility of what? He's a Microsoft employee, being paid by Microsoft, and has made a ton of money by selling his company to Microsoft. Follow the money and you'll find nothing but allegiance to Microsoft and it's corporate goals.
For the record - I don't think MS is as nefarious as people here are insinuating, I'm just pointing out facts that people seem to overlook.
Funny story about him. He wanted to get a Job at Microsoft and wasn’t hired because he didn’t have the qualifications. Then he built Xamarin and made it a great C# open source tool to build apps. M$ really loved it and bought the company. Now he’s leading GitHub. That’s awesome.
Microsoft does have a dark history, it’s also a huge company and Terry Meyerson (windows lead) was an aweful leader.
Things definitely changed. Satya knows that they need the developer mindshare, and that means to go where the developers are.
I hate windows as much as anyone, but a lot of their products are top notch. God I love vscode and Typescript. Just only use their OS products and you’ll be happy.
Not sure about the job part being about Miguel, but it's certainly not true about Nat. Nat interned at Microsoft in 97 and I was his manager. He did a great job and was well liked. I don't think he ever applied for a full time position after graduating as I would have heard about it.
I think it's just that he wanted to do something Open Source based, rather than what Microsoft was doing at the time.
Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos? Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have. It starts to go downhill? Just push your repo to another Git host. Yes, you'll need to figure out how to port some of your workflows, but it won't be an insurmountable pain.
GP gave you a very good reason why this is different than historical Microsoft EEE[0]:
> Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have
There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced; it uses git at its core. Comments, issues, and wikis are convenient, but relatively simple to implement.
The main value in Github is the de facto community status it has, which it earned by being an open community and good steward of open source projects. The worst MS could do here is shoot themselves in the foot and ruin that value (which they just purchased for 7.5B) by driving developers to other platforms (who will make it all too easy to switch).
I think the M&A teams at MS must have seen this possiblity and have a different plan in mind for Github. Think dead simple (one-click) Azure deployments and integrations. And if you want (or need) that functionality for a different cloud provider, you'll just have to build it yourself on a different site.
They can't really "kill" it as in destroy it, but the biggest contributors to that project were all GitHub staff. MS will most definitely redirect any staff efforts to VSCode instead.
> There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced.
Integration and workflow. Thanks to the various gubbins available in the marketplace[0], CI/CD goodies, hooks into communication and project management tools and so on, for a lot of people migrating away from Github would mean losing access to enough little convenience things that actually it's not feasible for a large organisation with not great process change management techniques.
Yea, but if you maintain that mentality, that affects your thoughts, affects behavior, affects 'crowd' behavior generally (all those agree), is perceived as such from those you predict about, get it? Affects all those who disagree too.
2 sides, same coin. You assume chaos, they see you assume that. They shape their narrative to fit their perspective with this data in mind. That rationalizes the behavioral pattern from their end, which continues the cycle.
Not saying I know any better solution, just that it's annoying as fuck to actually change when everyone keeps assuming you won't, and treats you as such. Chaos is probably going to happen even if there's a general mutual trust that springs forth. Can't control chaos.
That's why the "extend" phase is there in the embrace/extend/extinguish strategy - to make it an insurmountable pain to migrate elsewhere, after first having lured the users in with the "embrace" phase. Letting it play out is just what they need to move from phase 1 to phase 2.
But "extend" hasn't happened yet. There's no need to cry foul until it does, because until it does there's no evidence of anything nefarious going on. "Embrace" on its own is perfectly normal and acceptable behavior.
Vendor lock-in is an important concern regardless of who owns the platform you're being locked into.
So you're saying anytime a new technology gets embraced by anyone it's time to jump ship? That's ridiculous. Should we be abandoning email because Outlook exists?
Edit: Actually, I don't think the idea of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" even applies to buying out companies. The idea behind that phrase applies to technologies, not companies. You can't "extend" GitHub with proprietary tech, it was never an open source technology in the first place.
If Microsoft starts extending git with new proprietary features that only work with GitHub, _then_ it may be time to start being concerned. As of now though, I don't see how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" applies to this situation in the slightest.
GitHub is to git as Outlook is to e-mail and as Internet Explorer is to the web.
As for how EEE applies to this situation: The situation is consistent with an EEE strategy currently being in the "embrace" phase. It's also consistent with a "embrace, be nice, create win-win outcomes" strategy, but that is not usually Microsoft's modus operandi.
The idea is that stuff like issues and PR comments (the added value a social coding site like GitHub provides) are the extend around pure git source management.
So what do you call TypeScript !? They now bought the site where 99% of all free NodeJS packages are hosted. A few years ago NodeJS didn't even work properly on Windows, and was growing at exponential rate, taking market share from the Microsoft ecosystem. So what happened in the last few years ? Many developers now code JavaScript/NodeJS using TypeScript on VsCode. And their code is hosted on Github.
Unless they disable the APIs migrating to another platform would take a couple of days to hack something together. Disabling those APIs would also break a load of tools people already use for management so they would be shooting themselves in the foot.
When you see a fox entering a chicken coop would you also say the same? Microsoft will most likely gut GitHub, not as badly as Oracle would have done it but they will.
This said, Free Software Devs should never have trusted GitHub in the first place.
It isn't a good marketing campaign. This is just going to scare a ton of projects off of GitHub. I also imagine a ton of private companies (e.g. Google, Apple) are going to be moving their repos elsewhere if they are already hosted on GitHub for fear of Microsoft looking at their private code, which they WILL do.
companies that get acquired are probably required to move their private repos off of github. open source projects in the process of open sourcing or using a private repo as a staging area for the open source code are ok
I am much more unhappy about the quality of their operating system. They had decades to turn it into a user friendly simple system like macos is, and failed every single time. It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable and the first thing when you run windows update is to put back the games and other crapware that I do not need on my devices. Is there any hope that Windows UX gets once something good or should I just give up hoping?
> It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable
Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle.
Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.
Windows 10 has plenty of flaws that are worth pointing out, but using ridiculous hyperbole doesn't add to the conversation in a productive way.
> Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box.
There's a large gap between 'usable' and 'good'.
They destroyed the consistency of their interface (combined desktop/mobile anyone), and added a lot of cruft that literally nobody who's used Win 7 needs.
Yes there is. I have no problem with people saying Windows 10 isn't good, even if I personally think it's good. The "goodness" of an operating system is pretty subjective.
I do have a problem with people calling it barely usable, which is a much more objective (and incorrect) statement.
Arguing with developers about the gaping maw between “tolerable” and “good” is an uphill battle. I’m starting a support group. We meet at a bar. Want in?
Yeah just like Ubuntu, FreeBSD + XFCE and a bunch of other systems. I need something solid, featureful and simple as macos is, that has _great_ UX and I don't feel like fighting against the OS. Good example is when to update feature in macos vs windows is. One is pleasant, co-operative and feels right, the other is disruptive and I need to disable basic stuff not to lose some unsaved work. Just a great example how UX matters.
I don't really care if you choose MacOS over Windows. Plenty of people do. There are good reasons to. I even agree with you on some of your points.
My contention is that you implied that Windows 10 does not even meet the low bar of "barely usable" when you said that you have to delete half of the OS to make it barely usable.
That is a lie. Windows 10 is usable out of the box without any modifications. Saying otherwise is spreading misinformation, which I don't support.
For me it definitely does not meet the bar. It might be because I work as a systems/software engineer for too long and I have extremely low tolerance to have a subpar solution running in "production". It is ok if you just open a Outlook client and mostly use Excel + Word + PowerPoint, this covers huge amount of the user base.
> Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle.
Ditto for dozens of Linux distro's.
> Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.
What other things have they installed that is difficult to find out about? How about all the spying? Some game you don't use is the tip of the iceberg.
I'm not sure how Linux's viability as a desktop OS is relevant to Windows being usable or unusable.
I have no idea what else they've installed, just like I have no idea what MacOS or Linux install. They're all black boxes to me. I see no reason to think Windows is any worse than it's competitors.
I assume by spying, you are referring to Windows 10's telemetry. Personally, I think concerns about it are overblown and calling it spying is misleading at best. It's for diagnostic information. You can set it to only send basic diagnostic data if you so choose. I am in favor of companies collecting diagnostic information about their products to improve them.
MS claimed APIs are copyrightable. MS strongly pushes lock-in in markets where they have strong presence. It shows they haven't changed enough to trust them with anything.
No, Microsoft did an incredible service to all Nokia shareholders by buying the sorry handset business which had already failed in the market at that point.
You can blame Microsoft for not resurrecting a dead carcass but that's another thing entirely.
Nokia is doing quite fine manufacturing telecoms infrastructure.
You haven’t been using GitHub for open source then.
The best part of GitHub is the social part and that’s not currently replaceable. Also good luck migrating issues and their history of comments and PRs.
Issues and comments can already be migrated, github has a simple API and all the other services have import tools. It's not hard.
The social part is not that big of a deal, its just because everybody happens to already have a login. Other than that, what's the big social hook? You can have the same exact discussions on the other source code sites, all of which have more features too.
Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
This is small compared potatoes to the sort of thing Microsoft used to pull before. Microsoft spent years in the courts and narrowly avoided some very drastic government intervention and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. That doesn't happen because someone might not like the new Skype UI or really misses flip phones.
Why should I care that they "killed" Nokia. (It still sells products, by the way.)
Nokia, isn't a person. It's another corporation. Patents racketeering...this is literally only going to be fixed with legislation. I'm all for it. There is no such thing as a corporation that won't chase every dollar that it can. That's what they do. Want to stop patent BS? Remove the incentives through legislation.
Some people get offended when for-profit companies turn out to be not neighborly or friendly or human beings.
I like to look at it from the perspective that they are a for-profit public company and are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and they have every right to do so.
Therefore, any plans I make regarding GitHub will not rely on them being friendly and kind-spirited in any way. If they turn out to be great, I'll just be pleasantly surprised.
If that works out good for you, great. I know that GitHub has every right to do what they think is necessary to maximize shareholder value.
But I don't have to agree with their decisions.
I don't trust Microsoft for pretty much exactly the reasons the parent listed.
That’s fine, at first blush at least, as long as they stay out of my way.
But their MO is to buy up companies people like or love and run them into the ground, then replace them with a Me Too product that is just enough different that getting out is challenging. To the rest of us that’s indistinguishable from destroying the competition and reducing options.
And here they are buying a company people like, having recently killed off others.
This tiger has the same stripes. When it eats your remaining arm, try to remember people told you so.
How is it spying when they present you with a full screen detailing data collection with the option to turn it off, and have several blog posts providing details.
> Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
It's not much of an excuse, but all tech companies do this.
> Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
Didn't they give Windows Mobile one hell of a run? Like they tried for a decade and finally admitted defeat? And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.
I'm really not sure here but I was under the impression that they had started doing the full screen detailing data collection thing after they had gotten caught doing it without it?
They made it clearer and easier to review and change, but data collection was always toggle-able in Windows 10. A lot of people just hit "Express Setup" and then were surprised when the defaults were full collection.
The Privacy Panel in the new Settings applet for example has always existed.
It was not toggle-able. You could only opt out of an ill-defined subset of an ill defined set of collected data, including, but not limited to all user inputs performed on that system. You would know as much if you had read the material published by MS on this. Only with the recent update do they offer a tool with which to inspect at least part of the actual data sent to MS. There is however no proof that the data shown in that tool is complete (even though I believe that they truely intend to show everything - despite their traditionally pushy methods, they are not Facebook).
You actually can’t turn it off, and they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected. You need an enterprise version to disable as much as they will let you, and even then, they still force quite a bit of collection.
>> they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected
Seems like refusing to disclose what is collected would run afoul of GDPR. The law requires that "categories of personal data" be disclosed, and also that Microsoft's European customers have a right to a copy of their personal data. Are you claiming that Microsoft is not or does not intend to comply with GDPR? Or perhaps there is some other qualification implied; such as this only applies to non-European customers? If so what is your basis?
"This article describes all types of diagnostic data collected by Windows at the Full level (inclusive of data collected at Basic), with comprehensive examples of data we collect per each type" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/windo...
Below “Basic” is the “Security” level, which only enterprise can set. It’s a subset of Basic, but excluded from the disclosure. They refuse to say what that sends.
>> And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.
Likewise. I know they neglected the Linux client (which I used to use) for years and then replaced it with some new browser based thing. This 'ruined Skype' claim has been made several times with each Microsoft buys GitHub story. What exactly do people have in mind when they claim Skype was ruined?
The new UI is absolutely counterintuitive and badly designed. The Linux version is now based on Electron and requires a ridiculous 400MB of RAM just for the login screen. It subjects the CPU to ridiculously high loads, ca. 10 times higher than before when idling (easily saturating one core periodically). It starts to jerk and studder when the chatlog reaches any realistic length, making it unusable with more than 200 to 500 messages in the visible history. The Windows 10 client, which seems mostly identical, cannot get audio from any of my microphones.
> The Windows 10 client, which seems mostly identical, cannot get audio from any of my microphones.
I see. By all accounts the Electron based client is garbage. I use the 'classic' Skype client; a.k.a. Skype 7. It isn't based on Electron and works great for me with two different mics. So I guess I've missed out on all the fun with the new client.
Telemetry and analytics is a spyware. Let me give you an example. Let's say that Windows collects information on which applications were run and how much time they were used. Now let's say there is a competitor to Microsoft that uses Windows with telemetry option.
Even if the data is anonymous, Microsoft can filter it by range of competitor's IP addresses. Then by stuyding the list of used applications they can learn: how many employees the company has, how many of them use IDE (i.e. are developers), how many use Excel (marketing people), how many use social networks and chats (managers), how many man-hours they spend on development, how many DBAs are there, whether anyone works overnight or on weekends, when they have vacations etc. Now tell me it is not a spyware.
And by the way Google has similar powers because they have advertisement and analytics scripts installed on most websites, so they can spy on their competitors too.
UPD: looked through an article [1] and understood that I underestimated Microsoft. They even collect user account identifiers and hardware details. Microsoft knows about your computers more than your sysadmin.
You do realize that by posting that link, you contradicted yourself? How many Microsoft be spying on you if they write articles detailing what data is collected?
If you don't like data collection, then don't use Windows 10. Plenty of Microsoft tools work on macOS and Linux. But don't accuse them of spying on the user when they have made efforts to be transparent about it.
What you said makes no sense. Talking about doing something is the same as not doing something?!
There's a reason the GDPR requires explicit opt-in: companies are expert at making their spyware look harmless and know that most people won't bother to change the defaults or won't understand what's happening.
No, what I was disputing was the claim that what Windows 10 collects is spyware when Microsoft makes it a point to ask you what data you want to share (if any) and then has several posts written describing in detail what they collect and how to turn it off. Spying implies the company is doing it in secret, and yet here we are talking about and referencing public documents that describe it. That is not "spying".
"Data collection" is implemeted not only in Windows 10, but also is backported up to Windows 7. So basically it is now in every supported and regularly updated Windows installation.
Also I remember that detailed articles about "data collection" appeared only after it was shipped and caused some negative reaction. While publishing an article is a good idea, it is unlikely that everyone will read it. A better idea would be to display a popup for Windows users saying something like "Hi there! We are going to look what programs you are running and what else do you do at your computer to improve your experience. Hope you are fine with that.".
Technically it might be not a spyware, but if the user doesn't realize that their actions are being tracked, it still would look like a spyware to them. Or should we better call it a "trojan" software? A definition from Wikipedia says "In computing, a Trojan horse, or Trojan, is any malicious computer program which misleads users of its true intent." and Windows telemetry program matches that definition.
For example, in an article about "basic" telemetry [1] they mention that full command line of an application can be recorded, potentially including any private data and passwords.
Literally every for-profit desktop OS vendor has "spied on users" by the definition you're trying to use. Including OSX and Ubuntu.
>Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
So Google boxes Microsoft out of the phone market by refusing to support any of their services on Windows Phone. And Microsoft is the bad guy for leveraging their patents against vendors selling Android phones? Satya Nadella would be looking for a new job if he weren't leveraging their patent portfolio. End of story.
>Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
See comment above. Nokia is dead because they couldn't get a handful of table-stakes apps. Primarily because of google.
Skype... well that was just fumbling the ball, but it wasn't for no-reason. The way Skype was originally architected wasn't going to scale. That was by no means nefarious in nature though. Github has no fundamental flaws that I've seen that they would require them making significant changes.
You must be referring to the time Microsoft reversed engineered YouTube API's and blocked ads in their unauthorized YouTube app. They had no right to reverse engineer proprietary API's, they had no right to block ads from being played and they had no right to create an app for an IP they didn't own.
>And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering?
You should look into the Microsoft vs Barnes and Noble case[1] as well as review their detailed patent racketeering practices at Groklaw. Additionally, the Chinese government made Microsoft expose all of their patents that they wouldn't allow companies they were shaking down to see and, well, they were full of old, obsolete and prior art ridden patents - be sure to look those up too.
There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.
> ruined Skype?
Its still pretty popular. It was crap 5 years ago, but now its on par with the other big messaging apps.
>There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall.
Who knows what would have happened to Nokia's Device division without Microsoft's involvement, but one thing is certain - Windows Phone exclusivity solidified their demise. At least Nokia got 7 billion for their troubles, though.
>They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.
There's a difference between trying everything and being incompetent and constantly rebooting your platform and expecting a different outcome. As for Google sabotaging their platform - Microsoft was already doing a good job of it so they didn't need help from Google. Also, Google did have a couple of apps on their platform I believe, but let's not try and blame another company for the demise of their OS when they were ultimately responsible.
To be really frank Nokia killed itself in the after math of the iPhone. But that was long time coming. When a company which wasn't even your prime competitor an year or two back, out innovates you to the graveyard, you really were setting yourself up for something like this for a while.
Proprietary software used to be Microsoft's cash cow. That it is turning to different cash cows is actually a good thing for open source.
Companies have to make money, and originally, Microsoft made money just by selling proprietary software licenses. In these conditions, open source is their enemy, and they have to fight it. Now they do a bit of spying, a bit of cloud, a bit of hardware, etc... which mean they can cut open source some slack and focus on other evils.
Skype was terrible before they got it. Had to make the config XML file on Windows readonly and remove the obnoxious advert placeholders. Skype 7 still works alright with these removed (although uses mind-bogglingly high amounts of RAM).
The Metro version no longer supports copy/paste formatting properly (no timestamps), destroys {code} annotations, does not show alerts properly, does not actually send messages you type into the Windows 10 popup alerts, does not auto scroll to the bottom of a message list, does not let you set your status to AWAY.
The web.skype.com also has broken copy/paste but is better than the absymal Metro version.
The iPad version is probably the most usable (but not tried copy/paste on it) and the Android one is mostly alright when it lets you log in, although still a bit clunky and non-responsive (blatantly a web app in a native wrapper).
I run OOSU10.exe on all my Windows 10 instances to turn off the spyware and run PiHole at home to try and limit the insane amounts of data leakage from all my devices (TV, iPads, Android phones sending buckets of telemetry home, Windows PC and Macs) - it's insane.
Interesting to see this purchase though, but I wanted to say that Skype is getting worse and worse - bring back MSN Messenger which had more features than modern Skype!
> Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
Does this mean we'll see some sort of VSCode-esque IDE built into GitHub's UI? Or perhaps exposure of VSTS to people who previously weren't aware of it?
#2 in Hackernews "GitLab sees huge spike in project imports" I see no reason to trust Microsoft, all they are really doing is trying to buy out any opposition as is what they have always done. Microsoft rips off developers and pays bloggers to say nice stuff about them. No thanks, not now not ever
I think the edge just means CDN edge locations. There’s been a trend towards making edge locations smarter (via Lambda etc), so you can sometimes send dynamic responses straight back from the edge, ie quicker than always deferring to the big data centre for dynamic stuff. Previously computing on the edge was restricted to fairly simple caching of static responses.
In some fields, 'edge' has long been used to refer to devices running in the real world - such as IP cameras and IoT devices that gather sensor data.
I used to work for a company that worked with security cameras, and they always used terms like 'edge analytics' to refer to software that's running on each individual camera as opposed to running somewhere central, like on the DVR the cameras are connected to or a server.
From what I've seen in Nadella's presentations at various events and conferences recently, he's using 'edge' in the same way. Lots of MS presentations about the intelligent edge have included things like training a neural network on Azure, and then pushing it out to IoT devices and phones so the NN is running on 'edge' devices and just transmitting results back to a central server.
Another way to think of it: if we were looking at a tree, servers/the cloud would be the trunk, the internet would be the branches, and edge devices like cameras, various IoT devices, and phones would be the leaves. They're out at the edge of the tree, interacting with the world.
It's the current hot buzzword. It's CDN++, where not just static content gets distributed but web applications get sharded/distributed around the globe to the nearest node to the end user.
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[ 7.9 ms ] story [ 434 ms ] threadI understand the concern of a few companies dominating everything that we use, but time will tell.
I doubt we'll be able to predict how they'll respond. Their own code hosting services are... anemic, in Amazon's case, and dead, in Google's case.
In hindsight, it's amazing the other hyperscale cloud providers didn't buy it.
I would have preferred it.
Very likely their final act would have been to open source github and then we could finally get a good OOS platform that used their own issue tracker.
Atm the players are gitlab, a mess that barely works and reserves some pretty fucking basic features for enterprise, some random initials i can never remember (somebody get them a branding guy, even tom haverford would work) and closed source github.
So ya, i would have preferred if github failed.
The reason this happened is to get a payday for the investors. I'm happy they invested, but when you look at GitHub it is a utility, not a commercial enterprise and should be treated like public transport rather than like an oil company.
https://twitter.com/github/status/1003623284829638659
Is there any evidence in the Nadella years of MS doing this in the way they used to do this in the 90s?
There isa definite change of tone in the modern Microsoft, but remember that they're still doing a lot of sketchy things. The ongoing patent trolling, or mandatory telemetry in Windows are examples.
It’s not just that MSFT did what they did, but they established a culture that was cool with it and even came up with the ideas. How do we know they are no longer doing that? It’s not like they openly admitted to what they did in the 1990s...
The burden of proof is in the accusers that claim they haven’t changed a bit. Where’s the proof that they’re the same Microsoft?
I don't think that concept is relevant to this format of discussion.
They're trying, they see the writing on the wall, it's foolish to not see that they're trying. I think it would be equally foolish to just whitewash away the sins of the past.
He's been there since 1992. That means that if he was so ethically challenged that he could sit through that without piping up that I have very little hope that there is a real and sincere change happening. Most of what I see is just very clever PR whilst under the hood not much has changed.
They just got a lot smarter about keeping their nastiness out of the public light. The reason why the 'trope' gets trotted out is because this could very well be the part where Microsoft finally gets to 'embrace' the open source world where they can hurt it for real. Keep in mind that nothing comes close to threatening Microsoft at its core business as open source software does.
Open source (LibreOffice) has never seriously threatened office for professionals so much as maybe google docs, and even then not so much. And they’ve made great moves towards subscriptions so that’s going strong.
Windows isn’t threatened so much by open source unless you talk about either Apple or chromebooks. Again, less about open source and more about the web.
They’ve already lost developer mindshare to open source culture. So they responded apppropriately by open sourcing their entire .NET platform, and actually using a useful license like Apache, not some murky custom commercial nonsense.
How do you suppose they’re going to start hurting the open source world? I’m all ears, especially given they’d have to sue companies like FB and Google.
Just because Nadella was there, it doesn’t mean he ran that operation that sued SCO. Otherwise that would’ve come out.
Plus with personalities like Bill Gates, they would clearly override any dissent.
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225290
History does not help with trusting them.
So let's wait and see.
But I talked about MS PR team before, and I can already see it at work everywhere. Here, the first HN links were not warmly welcomed, so we had another one published, then another one published, until one with a positive top comment for them is here.
Also plenty of comments to defend them by using vague positive things like "they did good things recently" or "they like open source".
If you go on reddit you'll see the same is happening.
The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.
Another possibility is that HN members are responding favorably to MS's recent moves.
Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake. Like you said, we'll see!
How is repeated exposure more likely to increase positive opinion?
(PDF) http://erewhon.superkuh.com/library/Neuroscience/Psychology/...
Parent comment specified the same news, which makes less sense.
If I hear 100x that MS is buying GitHub, that doesn't make me more likely to respond favorably.
The problem with a PR machine is that it never get tired of repeating the same story, while we do. And people eventually listen to the PR machine anyway. That's why it works. Not because it's clever, but because of human nature.
It works with politician, CEO, singers...
But yeah, we'll see.
And granted that's how PR works, but the problem with carrying distrust to defend against it is that is eventually makes one paranoid.
Personally, I aspire to objective reevaluation at the current point in time.
In 2018?
Microsoft historically did terrible things to open source, Balmer was an asshole about casting it as us vs them, and they still have substantial legacy OS and Office revenue streams to protect.
At the same time, their cloud business is rapidly growing, they've realized the only way to compete there is to embrace open source, and that's beginning to permeate the rest of the company. Largely via promoting someone from the dev / server / cloud business as CEO.
Those of us who had to admin their products pre-Win7 era were all "What?"
To the average user at home, perhaps the experience seemed smooth most of the time. But they've been peddling half-assed efforts and relying on a "walled garden" approach to computing since before the iPhone.
They failed to notice the "lifestyle" changes taking place in IT until recently, is all.
They're still Evil Corp, and want you to dedicate yourself to building out their empire for them.
In a marketing atmosphere dominated by Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Watson.... how can MicroSoft continue to ignore the original and much beloved assistant A.I?
We stopped trusting TV and starting trusting each other more. So they started disguising as us. It's the natural evolution.
What’s the difference, really?
If it would legitimize my claim that Microsoft is different under Nadella, I can write a blog post about it with supporting data.
But yes - it's still a company that will act in it's own self-interest, as any company will, and right now, that aligns pretty well with playing nice with the opensource community. That could change - in the future, so some caution is always a good idea (but that's the same for Google, Apple, Amazon, ...), but today, I have little issues with MS's attitude today towards opensource. Tomorrow, we'll see.
That said - I don't mind them buying github and I like that people are actively looking into alternatives, github is simply too big imho, and too many things just expect git = github, which sucks too.
Their updated terms of services are a treat:
https://professional-troublemaker.com/2018/03/25/microsoft-b...
If you disable telemetry in Windows, the OS __still__ calls home:
https://social.nah.re/@alex/99699321529592263
MS prompting his users to not think too much about what it's doing :
https://shelter.moe/@fenarinarsa/99472223904930838
Bitlocker sends you private key to microsoft (and questions about it, said they were to be trusted, but you could request deletion individually if you wanted):
https://www.undernews.fr/libertes-neutralite/windows-10-vs-v...
I have sane doubts about this new microsoft.
We got another new microsoft every year. I have this argument every year.
And since I do see they are getting way better at PR, I think that now I just miss worse scandals because they deal with them much better.
I still remember when this was made.
How is that patent extortion going then? Still earning you money? Any plans to stop in "the near future"? Didn't think so.
I'm sure Microsoft will improve github. Just like it improved skype.
GitHub wasn't profitable. Would you rather it just disappear?
By combining GitHub's product with Microsoft's sales infrastructure, they can sell in ways that neither could do on their own.
Also Microsoft is basically competing with the entire industry on some level, so I do not see how them buying Github could be a good thing.
As far as competing with the entire industry, everyone competes with everyone and does business with everyone....
Netflix and Amazon Video compete but Netflix hosts its entire infrastructure on AWS.
Apple and Samsung compete, they are involved with lawsuits but Apple is still one of Samsung's largest customers.
Apple and Google compete but Google pays Apple $2 billion a year to be the default search provider on iOS. Apple also reportedly uses Google Cloud Platform for some of its iCloud hosting.
Amazon and Apple compete selling media and streaming boxes but Amazon Prime is on IOS devices.
Microsoft Azure and AWS compete but it is just as easy to deploy to AWS using VSTS as it is to Azure.
Microsoft and Google work together on Angular/Typescript.
Amazon hosts Windows VMs,SqlServer RDS instances and supports VS Code.
I think the answer would be 'a company without a history of ruining things one loved' -- my recent experience of Microsoft is very negative too (though I've seen some awesome tech demos of their's).
GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.
GitHub no longer needs to directly turn a profit now that it is owned by Microsoft. They just need to use GitHub to increase their profits from Azure (or any of Microsoft's other money makers). I don't think they need to make drastic changes to GitHub for that to happen.
I can see that working if they don't meddle with GitHub for the next decade, and keep it running well; then people might be convinced to try MS's other offerings.
Maybe Heroku style "run this project on your own Azure instance now" (perhaps GitHub does this already?)? Is Azure's rep good enough to pull that off?
That is exactly the kind of feature I think they will implement. They will probably add more support in Visual Studio and VSCode for GitHub as well, although their support is already pretty good as far as I know.
They can also throw paid GitHub features in with their Office 365 package, like they currently do with Skype. That would further consolidate companies on the Microsoft platform by ensuring that they don't have to leave it for code hosting.
No: Google is propping it up as a loss-leader and incentive to sweeten the deal by bundling their other more profitable services.
We can expect Microsoft to do the same thing: Github will still lose money, but it will integrate with VScode and Azure and OWA and they'll offer on-prem installations for enterprise customers who are already paying for those other profitable services.
None.
It could be run as a public utility or it could be turned into something federated to absorb the bulk of the hosting costs.
hardly worth it for the investors who want to see a 10x or even 100x ROI for their initial private funding rounds.
Public utility should be started using public funds, for the public good. Private companies can never become this.
You don't.
We are the public. If GitHub did an annual funding drive a-la wikipedia it would definitely keep them afloat.
A-propos, would you be OK with Microsoft buying Wikipedia?
Archive.org?
As for Wikipedia, I feel similarly, except Wikimedia runs a fairly tight ship, and lacking a corporate product offering (or market) means I’m much more happy to donate. They don’t run in the deep red intentionally, which is the key difference. Also, GitHub is extremely easily replaceable (and we -need- diversity in code hosting for FOSS), whereas Wikipedia is not quite so replaceable, and diversity in open encyclopedia platforms doesn’t help anyone...
GitHub was a startup, and that comes with certain expectations and constraints on their future. But, for some crazy reason, avoiding GitHub wasn't a particularly popular position to take a week ago. People who understood the business realities of Facebook dunked on normal people for getting duped, then went around and complained that everyone should just submit to network effects and get on github.
For me, it's not about whose the bigger scarier influence, or who does more evil. It's just based on how practically I see either turning out.
=Microsoft Acquisition=
For a few months to a year, everything is mostly the same, until new features start happening. It starts with something like annotations on particular regions of code, with say all the annotations for the codebase stored in an extra file "git_annotations.tla", which is some zip file collecting together a bunch of random undocumented xml that changes constantly. These annotations are tracked semi-competently by VS Code and MS team enterprise tools, being updated to deal with source changes with each commit, but ultimately just showing up automagically in either the web view, VS Code, or associated enterprise tools. These annotations will start out as minor unimportant things, not even really worth porting to other editors, but will increasingly be abused for code review in enterprisey contexts. People who try to just edit things from the command line or their editor of choice will be constantly breaking other people's annotations at random times since they don't update that file, so file renamings, moving, etc won't be tracked properly. MS provides some xcode/sublime/atom plugins to provide partial support for some other editors, which prompts web developers to adopt them in droves so they can add gif tooltips to comments. At no point is there a great enough reason for anyone still using github to switch, so slowly the remaining open source projects there start making use of these features, and so contributers need to start using the appropriate MS tooling to ensure their commit doesn't break the annotations (or just use one of the supported editors).
=Google Acquisition=
Github user profiles are now linked to a google account. The webclient works better in chrome than other browsers. The webclient is renamed, rebranded and redesigned every 2-4 years by someone looking for a promotion, but ultimately in a way that doesn't affect people just using git from the command line. Github possibly gets a few additional features to support internal usage with Google weird mono-repo lifestyle. Google tries unsuccessfully multiple times to integrate Github into yet another failed team messaging platform or whatever, but again in ways that only affect the webclient. Google more successfully does some data analytics stuff based on searching and indexing all of that code now sitting on servers they own, and this is almost but not quite profitable, but close enough for them to leave it alone and get distracted by something else that's shiny.
To me, neither seems ideal, but all of the annoyance of the google stuff seems avoidable by just using separate accounts for separate things, as usual.
Anyway Skype is a non-issue, it's lost market thanks to pretty much everyone making a chat app / competitor, notably Slack.
I think that's a pretty false statement in the world of big business.
It’s a fair point but I still cannot read this without thinking of someone saying “yeah I did some things in the past but I’ve totally changed I promise. Look, for the whole past week I’ve been really nice to people haven’t I?”
(2) Support OpenDocumentFormat in their office apps. Still remember how they corrupted the ISO certification process by creating OOXML (which is just a wrapper over binary blobs produced by MS-Office)
(3) Stop suing Android OEM's for patent licenses
I know the old .doc format was basically a memory dump of the document; but how does OXML relate to that?
http://slated.org/ooxml_dissecting_the_binary_blob_problem http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/2007/08/microso...
* Drop MSVC for Clang or GCC
* Drop Edge for Firefox or Chromium
because they love open-source, right?
Did you mean to say Direct3D? That's still leave you with input, sound, maths, and 2D missing.
That view is fairly one-sided, to say the least. The history is presented in this StackExchange thread: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6054....
But to summarize: OpenGL was the standard before D3D was created. D3D has been a step behind OpenGL in features and performance up to about D3Dv7. Then the OpenGL ARB screwed up, with Microsoft among the members (some hypothesize that Microsoft were attempting to sabotage OpenGL).
The argument IE6 was that the web grew too stagnant with a single dominant web renderer. If we all agree that the Web is a better place with multiple competing web renderers, why wish the death of the Edge renderer when it and Firefox are all that are standing in the way (and barely by latest metrics) of forks from the KHTML/WebKit/Blink family dominating?
* Direct3D being open-sourced would have removed the need for Vulkan.
* Many compilers are good for the ecosystem.
* Many browsers are good for the ecosystem.
It's only a choice if we have open standards so you can actually choose between different implementations.
It feels just like yesterday that Microsoft was spying on windows boxes. In my mind, everyone has a "Days since last accident" counter in their head, and Microsoft's number is quite low.
Windows 10 exists. Microsoft is "spying" on Windows boxes right now
* Drop OOXML and make ODF the default format
* Drop the patents
* Drop the telemetry
* Drop Xbox
* Drop DirectX
* Drop the cloud garbage
* Drop or open MSVC
* Drop or open Edge
* Actually open .NET
We don't need to open the .NET Framework... We have .NET Core. It's better, faster, and cross-platform...
So yeah.
It looks okay if you only have one Windows in your boot options but once you have two you realize you have two bootloaders.
That's about the minimum, given their track record.
In the meanwhile we can give them increasing credit, if they do behave nicely, but it's absurd to believe that they've suddenly become a good company and that they'll stay like this for the next decades. I have a hard time believing that anyone not payed by them could think so.
And by the way, they have yet to reverse the decidedly un-nice things they have done with Windows 10 in the last years. Allow everyone to disable the telemetry and to better control the updates, and then we can start the 15 years count. Oh yeah, and maybe also stop astroturfing, that's another extremely un-nice thing that they clearly started doing only recently.
There would be nothing wrong in discussing with the people, if they paid people to do so while stating in every message that they're being paid by Microsoft it would be perfectly ok, but that's very different from what they're doing now.
These things make it clear that they're still motherfuckers, just less then they used to be.
If you change the leadership and change employee incentives, it might as well be a different company.
Sure there's cultural inertia... but incentives trump culture every time.
As soon as a company realizes it can make more $$$ with new strategy B than their original strategy A, then boom -- changed. (Sometimes you have to get rid of the old believers, but that already happened at Microsoft.)
If you look at MSFT's stock price, it's ~tripled since Satya became CEO, after being stagnant for years. He seems incredibly committed to open-source -- because in the long run it will ultimately be more profitable for Microsoft, no?
I agree. They don't actually care about open source it's purely because it's profitable to their business. They'll close it without caring if it's not making them enough money or good will.
But I still hope this works. As long as maintaining open source projects is profitable to Microsoft then it gives incentives for other FLOSS projects to show that if such an anti open source company as Microsoft is willing to embrace it then there's good reasons to join in.
I think it's just because in the short run Microsoft ran a very high risk of getting pushed in a corner.
They are embracing what's hip most of all to improve their image, especially so as to be more attractive for talented technical people.
The "Windows everywhere" vision is not pursuable at this time, so it makes sense to let some things go and focus on what can get you the most money right now (cloud, IA, individual profitable products and services).
And maybe, just maybe, surreptitiously spread your patents everywhere... =0
So yeah, they are "all in on Open source", right.
Exactly. Which is why the idea of "trusting" a corporation, or treating them like you would a human being on any level, is ludicrous. They're a plane crash and a stock dip from becoming a totally different entity.
[1] I thought it was just a cliche until I saw it happen to someone. She went through some things and upended her whole life.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
He's just younger and less out of touch than Gates (and particularly Balmer). Many people seem to mistake ascribe this aspect of him (more in touch with modern tech) with some higher moral standards etc than e.g. Gates/Ballmer. I don't see why he should be any less fierce/brutal.
I agree with your assessment. For me MS motives are pretty transparent and in my opinion will have a positive net result for GitHub.
(Never going to happen, not just for philosophical reasons, but I'm sure legal reasons too)
I know for a fact that the ZIP component of the windows shell would be an issue as that is definitely licensed to Microsoft instead of being owned by.
If you told me 5/10 years ago about these developments I would have never believed you.
I don't think it's fair to reason about a (40+ year old, 100k+ employees, public) company's behaviour as if it has a mind. It doesn't.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-five-linux-contributor-mic...
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING...
What we are seeing now is Microsoft reacting to being kicked out of several markets by going back to the embrace phase in an attempt to regain some of the ground lost from Balmers failed attempt to secure a foothold for MS in the mobile and web framework markets.
If they had really been about embracing open source and open standards we would have seen them do something useful for Linux like releasing a version of excel for Linux or opening up the protocols outlook and exchange use to talk to each other, but that kind of openness was never on the table.
What i would expect to see with github is that if/when ms decide they want to utilize their investment for profit is a heavy integration with the azure environment in the form of CI hooks designed around azure api's to the point where other CI platforms become 2nd degree citizens in the ecosystem and i would not be surprised if a github account becomes a add on to an office365 subscription rather then a stand alone product.
Everything said after that is just some cheap PR trick for chumps.
Quickly after they get back into an advantage position again they will abuse it same as before and you will live in an age of digital slavery.
This has me very concerned for the open source community.
GitHub wasn’t a non-profit. This was always the endgame for them. They were losing money to acquire a userbase that would be sold when the time is right — just like WhatsApp and numerous other big social SV plays.
The difference for me is that I was supporting Github (by paying) to be an independent company, warts and all. If their goal was to always sell specifically to Microsoft, I would have voiced many concerns very early on. I would much rather they had sold to Mozilla or another in the open source community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV
I can definitely see why this would be a desirable acquisition on GitHub's side. They were bleeding money. I can't blame them.
GitHub, however, has a business issue of not making money. I think with the resources that Microsoft can provide GitHub can continue to build a great product and tap further into Microsoft's enterprise user base to make sales and release more features that customers want/need.
Congrats to everyone at GitHub for this momentous acquisition!
[1] https://blog.github.com/2016-05-26-diversity-and-inclusion-a... [2] http://i.imgur.com/7YaVYUx.jpg
Rumor has it that Satya is furious he still gets so many LinkedIn emails, but is keeping hands off.
Well, he's exhibiting far more self control than I would be able to. Linked-in has the worst email practices of any legitimate company I can think of.
Maybe it's ageism?!?! ;-)
So long github.
And let us not forget the EU's efforts to support incumbents and deter new entrants, with their complex, vague and punitive regulations. These also receive much approval here; perhaps a fruitful field for study by some enterprising psychologists!
> And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.
> [...]
> Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.
> [...]
> Most importantly, we recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform.
Does an “open platform” mean “open source” or “a plugin system”? I think making it open source would alleviate a lot of dev concerns.
It's not too much to say that they more or less only have upside here - if they can more or less keep their hands off GitHub's community and mindshare while expanding its capabilities and services, it'll be one more notch in their belt of "See? We're not Gates or Ballmer."
There is one actor I don't trust with that, it is them. I'll move my repos next weekend. Maybe that's the call I needed to self host...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
For example, the phrase "doublespeak" is much older and also especially relevant today.
The year is 2018 and Windows still ships with a single navigator, only supports NTFS and does not know that dual-boot is even a possibility.
Perhaps Microsoft will open source parts of GitHub?
What better way to demonstrate a commitment to the OSS community?
-> Bundle Github Business Plans and Office 365 which includes Microsoft Teams I guess.
-> Better azure integrations and push developers for more Azure usage
-> Push VSCode out to more developers
-> Connect LinkedIn accounts of developers to their GitHub accounts and help companies hire better
I say that they are the same company, only with different cash cows.
Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
"But Mom, some of the other companies are doing it too", well yeah, but some of us don't have double standards, in spite of what you'd think and that doesn't absolve them of anything ;-)
Brilliant marketing campaign though. They needed it I guess, but it's getting obnoxious.
---
That said I'm glad that after the acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility.
At least the news isn't all bad.
As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do, and even gave him a bonus for achieving it.
I only know that because I have one of their awesome scales (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales). I was shocked they were Nokia when I found out about them. They're absolutely awesome, highly recommend them.
They got back many of the former mobile division employees via the partnership with HMD, currently having one of the best deals in Android devices.
Ah and Bell Labs now belongs to Nokia.
Did that include having secret negotiations with Steve Ballmer that the board was unaware of? For a true accounting of what really happened you can find it all in Operation Elop.
https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
If the board hadn't had such bonus (24. The bonus brouhaha boils over) as Helsingin Sanomat discovered, the outcome would be much different.
https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
As someone that used to know the Espoo HQ from inside, Microsoft is not the one I blame.
I think having different cash cows does change a company. If it's in their interest to be a good steward of VSCode, Typescript, Github etc then they're more likely to do it.
I think consolidation is actually as much of an issue as which company it is, the more consolidated, arguably the less direct incentive for intercompatibility and open standards. That's more of an issue here because GitHub is not open-source, so unlike the other examples the developer base has nothing to fall back on.
On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.
That's not the same though. I host my (company private) code on Github. I can use React or Kubernetes without giving any access to Google or Facebook to my code.
Nokia is still alive. But it's not like it was doing well before Microsoft bought them.
I don't think one can say they killed Nokia. Nokia's phone business was basically doomed after Android gained traction, and Microsoft just helped the company to pivot by overpaying for that part of the business, while leaving Nokia with everything that actually was making money.
diktat just for those wondering
I don’t believe the engineers spent thousands man-years developing in-house Symbian, then significant time working on (mostly) in-house Maemo, then some day they said “screw that, let’s throw away everything we’ve developed and move to Android”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X_platform
Finally Nokia managers were full of hubris, and believed Nokias was still the center of mobile, and so important it to change the course of industry by Adopting Windows Phone.
This is a well regurgitated lie that I see posted often. If you would like the truth about what really happened I suggest you read Operation Elop.
According to a source present, Google seemed to really want Nokia to join the Android world. The company assured that Android can be customized more than Nokia understood, especially compared with Windows Phone. Even if Google was criticized continuously for having Samsung, HTC and Sony Android phones differ from each other too much, Nokia would be given leeway to create its own user experience. Google saw that Nokia differentiated from these competitors in that it had a global area of operation. Nokia would be able to create better local services and user experiences for network providers and customers, one person present remembers being discussed. The Nokians also noticed that they had been living partially with misinformation. Nokia could continue with Android with its own maps side-by-side with Google’s maps. The same applied with the app store. Nokia’s music service as well as ovi.com could continue, as long as the phone had Google Play.
The discussions continued at a fast pace after the first visit. Google seemed to really want Nokia.
Some constraints were set by the Open Handset Alliance behind Android, OHA. Unlike Windows Phone, Android is not controlled by one company, rather by an alliance of 84 companies which is led by Google, where the members are able to use Android in an equal manner. Google was in a difficult position. By giving Nokia special privileges, it risked its relationship with other manufacturers. The reactions would be difficult to predict. Creativity was needed.
As the negotiations proceeded, a solution was found. Google offered Nokia, among other things, plenty of say in choosing the direction of Android development. By directing Android development to align with its own competitive goals, Nokia would gain some advantage, even if the changes would be available for everyone at the same time. Now Nokia was interested. Android and Nokia had an area where their interests converged in a brilliant way: Developing countries. If Android could be made to work on cheap hardware, Nokia would be best at getting in through in developing markets. The arrangement was enticing. Google would secure the position it was dreaming of in smartphones, and Nokia would become part of virgin Android markets. The precise details remained hidden, but Nokia was able to learn that Google worked Android into clearly cheaper models than Windows Phone.
Another flexible point of Android was in its predictability. Nokia wanted to publicize the new software features earlier than when the phones go into sales. The reason was brutal: Nokia was more solid than its Korean competitor and needed more time to build a phone. If the information about the new Android features was available earlier, Nokia would have enough time to get them in the first wave, like the others. Google was willing. It promised to make the publicizing of its plans earlier and to release the source code to its partners. The solution would have been useless for other Android manufacturers in relation to Nokia, but would not have broken the OHA rules.
Google made a substantial offer regarding distribution of income. Nokia would have gotten a portion of the income from Google’s search engine, app store, and other services which originate from Nokia phones, and the terms would be in relation to Nokia’s influence in the ecosystem. We don’t have information about precise percentages, but at any rate, Google’s promise was quite exceptional, considering that Nokia would still have been able to keep its own services in its phones.
Contrary to what Nokia has claimed, Google was ready for concessions. It was ready to flex as far as it could in the framework of OHA, and even then some...
Yes there were a few dark years, but I think most IM was struggling years ago.
Now skype is pretty good.
There's no way that Microsoft bought Nokia to concentrate on making that tiny hardware subdivision profitable (MSFT's market cap is $700B+ and they bought Nokia for $7.6B). They wanted a hardware platform to promote Windows Phone. For Microsoft, the dying entity in need of a Hail Mary was Windows Phone, not Nokia.
Furthermore, Nokia wouldn't have shared a successful OS with others like Google did if they had one. That meant all other manufacturers were going to stay with Android, and I greatly doubt that they would've succeeded in building the whole ecosystem alone like Apple did.
But that was exactly the plan. When they cooperated with Intel to build Meego, the resulting OS was available to all other handset manufacturers and there were test suites in the work for vendors to be able to claim Meego compat, just as with Android.
The Meego OS was actually quite solid and very nice to develop for. Its major problem was the unwillingness of most app developers to support additional platforms besides Android and the Iphones. Just as with Windows Phone.
As for the adoption among developers, it never had a wide enough release to even start with that. N9 was available in limited countries only, and after Nokia's WP announcement.
Windows Phone was native and extremely performant on even low end hardware. Microsoft dumped millions into development and couldn’t get traction. No way Maemo was going to displace Android.
Manufacturers literally do not care about anything except selling devices and are uninterested in performance except as it relates to bigger numbers that they can advertise with. Users consistently chose Android over Windows Phone demonstrating that their priorities did not align with picking the phone that would still be snappy in two years.
Nokia’s phone business was doomed. Even if they’d pivoted to Android devices they’d probably have still failed because that’s such a tough market with so much competition willing to sell phones with no margin.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee
They killed msn, skype was always a turd. Nokia was dead well before Microsoft got involved.
Skype could have beat Slack to the punch. Instead Microsoft lost both the business and the consumer market.
Furthermore, I'd see Microsoft's reply:
> I'm not aware of any deliberate copying of the Lerna code, but let me dig into it now and call all the devs on the team to be sure. If there is, we should definitely give correct attribution, so I want to investigate. [...] I checked with the devs, and nobody's aware of any code coming from Lerna. If we inadvertently used something without credit, I really would like to know so that I can fix it.
https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673
Unrelated to the rest of the discussion, I just want to clarify that MIT License != 'Do Whatever You Want' License. MIT requires attribution and maintaining the copyright license on existing code. Yes, if you don't adhere to the license's terms when copying code, it is stealing.
To be clear, I'm not saying using MIT-licensed code without attribution is acceptable, but I feel that there is a qualitative difference between this and using code you couldn't use under any circumstances, or silently incorporating MIT code in a commercial product.
> "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited.
Attribution alone doesn't bring it into compliance. The copyright notices have to be preserved too.
Also, the rewriting of commit history, if true, sounds more shady than mere "Oops, I dropped the license and copyright texts".
Is it? Or is it copyright infringement?
Like I understand if you bought an Xbox, but I dont understand if you are a programmer.
Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.
A federated or independent solution is the only way to go for infrastructure like this.
Their developer tools are pretty good for their own platform (but JetBrains actually makes great cross platform tools, some of them are proper free and open source, VSCode is playing catch up). Their C++ stdlib implementation was sucking balls for decades. Their (the dev tools') scriptability was horrible. PowerShell is nice, but it came too late, and it was too server focused.
C# is okay, MS has great teams and people, but they are still very much run by the bean counters.
EDIT: just noticed the article says it was also added to 2013, but my 2015 doesn't support it so idk.
I can conceive PowerShell being good as a scripting language, but as a day to day terminal? That would my hell. And the fact that they are forcing so much on it in win10 doesn't help.
They do produce some great things sometimes, I agree, it just doesn't average out as positive IMO.
[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt490614.aspx
I wouldn't consider myself a fan, but their developer tools were (are?) some of the best out there.
I dislike Microsoft a lot. But Apple, just as much. People will take a dump on Microsoft while in the same breath fawn over Apple for identical behaviour.
They're all as bad as each other. Yep. Google included.
Not a Fan, but judging from their recent work, I am giving them the benefits of doubt.
Just want to point out that Github was also a "for-profit" company.
Look at how much data Google has on every single one of us.
MSFT is going through a cultural change right now. It was the case for Google, to make money the had to be an advocate of open source. They didn't do that because they are good-hearted or anything else. It is just like geopolitics. Hit your opponent from the weakest point. And Microsoft weak point was open source at that time.
But the point is neither MSFT, Apple, Google or Facebook does not care about developers or customers. They want to make money. This is nature of corporations. Instead of nagging and being short-sighted we should embrace open source collaboration by MSFT and should hit them when they don't respect customers.
However, with the understanding of what the poster meant, it does make sense. We're talking about the company whose racket produces 10$ avg for each Android phone sold.
I'm talking especially about those FAT patents, which are against the spirit of patenting (independently of being in favour or against patents).
I understand that big companies are big and internally conflicting, however, I see a radical conflict of interest between their newfounded open source responsibility and their ruthless business attitude.
What about the data Microsoft has on you? Their Windows 10 OS is basically a data funnel right to their servers. They operate a tracking based search engine that also builds profiles on people. And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.
>And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.
BTW, tbh I don't trust data centers in USA any more than data centers in China.
1) creating value for their customers
2) maintaining the moat that prevents other people from creating value for their customers
The former is constructive, the latter is destructive. They both contribute revenue.
I haven’t done a full scale analysis of Microsoft, but the argument I would entertain is that Microsoft primarily sells tools for companies and individuals to built moats around themselves.
Meanwhile, they basically invented the "buy your competitor and tank their business" strategy. That's probably what this person is referring to.
How does tanking Github allow Microsoft to sell more copies of Office?
"Buy and trash competitor" isn't a real strategy. When an acquisition fails, it's usually poor management or vision, or just a lack of synergy in the first place, not a purposeful tanking.
I think self-hosting is a better choice for almost any organisation. Remember, 'the cloud' just means 'someone else's computer.'
Of course you don't need to host it all there. Just mirror enough that it gets you the "visibility", while keeping everything else on your own servers.
Then again, there's inertia. And inertia always wins.
This is not mutually exclusive. You need money to keep lights and servers ON
Unlike Microsoft, however, they can't seem to make GUIs where the font metrics are right (eg. can you read the text properly or does the text overlap or end up being too big or too small for the space?) or scrollbars.
Linux is a winner for server apps but on the desktop it seems to get worse over time, not better.
No, not really. The problem is too many people (like you maybe) associate "Linux desktop" with "Gnome (3)". That's false; there's a bunch of different DEs for Linux. Just look at Xfce; it isn't getting worse. KDE seems to be getting no worse too.
Do they still do that?
At home, I use KDE, so of course they're not going to have system utilities binding to GTK. KDE is Qt-centric, so most stuff there is most likely in Qt-flavored C++. Xfce is GTK, but it's known to be fast (I use it at work and it's quick), so I seriously doubt it has system utilities in Python.
Honestly, I think all your complaints are really about Gnome3.
You comment makes no sens, "I don't understand if you are a programmer', no offense but what rock do you live under?
So it's a little disingenuous to say only technology consumers should have positive feelings for Microsoft. Plus, making money & helping programmers are not mutually exclusive; Coupled with their business strategies (good and bad) this has always been MS's strategy to grow and profit from their markets.
How did they treat Nokia employees?
Mhmmm.
I was one of them, and Microsoft treated me very well.
Windows Phone was an amazing platform. I’ve also developed for iOS a lot. Visual studio + expression blend was way ahead of apple’s xCode. Every single piece was much better: language, libraries, compiler, debugger, emulator, UI designer.
The platform is now discontinued so I no longer develop for WP. Meanwhile, most of the skills I’ve obtained working on WP7-8 apps apply to other XAML-based platforms, i.e. WPF, WinRT, and UWP. Fortunately for me, Windows is not going from desktops any time soon.
They killed what small progress they’d made on their ecosystem 2 times, simply because they got bored and decided they didn’t like the technology stack they’d previously mandated and supported. They deserved to get buried in that space.
Meanwhile Apple have kept what is essentially the same technology stack for the past decade. Sure there’s been some pain, but almost all of it had some purpose that moved the development of apps forward.
Looking back on it, they took on an extremely difficult problem having a completely new marketplace and platform against competitors with tremendous amount of pre-existing traction.
There were clearly some pivots towards universal windows compatibility, and possibility of android compatibility as well. Nobody argues there's a ton of tactical failures and the net result was a loss, but I wouldnt conflate the mobile endeavor with something half-baked nor disregard to developers
Trust has two main dimensions in my view, compassion and competence. Microsoft was not competent enough to have a surviving platform in the face of iOS or Android... even though they had roughly a 8 year lead.
That doesn't earn my trust.
What a strange criticism. Of course Microsoft is a for-profit company and they're doing this to make more profit - no one is of the delusion of otherwise. They didn't spend $8b out of the goodness of their heart.
However, one way you make money is to do and make things people like. Here's hoping Microsoft will recognise the value Github can provide and they do right by it. I'm cautiously optimistic.
I definitely agree. Anything Microsoft-related, or even Google-related, is a no from me. Just from a product standpoint, most of there products inherently aren’t that great. And you get that feeling when using their products, a feeling of “oh, this must be a Microsoft product because it feels very corporate.” Plus, there approach to design is subpar — it’s like there’s people out there that actually like Google’s Material Design?
> Like I understand if you bought an Xbox
I have an Xbox, and I just noticed advertisements on the dashboard that are non-gaming related. I also think I saw this when using a friend’s Windows-computer, they have advertisements within their operating system. It’s just bad.
I like Material Design...
Sure, Microsoft is ultimately out to make money, but they're doing a fair bit to "help programmers" and only making money from those efforts indirectly.
Funny that the things you mention all happened under Steve Ballmer too...
Refusing to move on to Android?
There was no real chance Symbian had in the post iPhone world.
Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well.
Motorola is doing quite good with Android.
You misremember things quite badly. Nokia was the clear leader in all phone segments, smartphones included. At the peak they sold just over 50% of all smartphones in the world. Of course they would try to hold on to that. They were better in software than their hardware competitors (Ericsson/RIM/etc), but of course that didn't amount to much when the field was upended by Google and Apple.
> Motorola is doing quite good with Android.
Motorola is now a Lenovo brand.
1 - https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nu...
It takes time to break things out from inside a larger closed source project...
There's VSCode (is that OSS?) but that's not an edition of VS but rather a whole different product.
It's not like JetBrains can't build their own debugger based on the ICorDebug interface (which is what Microsoft's implementation is also based on).
I don't even understand what that means. It was never Open Source, it was part of the IDE(s). Microsoft released an update package for their IDE(s) on NuGet which JetBrains used before their native debugger was ready.
If Microsoft are to be shamed for keeping their IDE's debugger closed source then JetBrains should be equally shamed, both have closed source proprietary IDEs.
Truly embracing open-source with .NET core would mean that, yes, even a proprietary product could make use of it. A debugger is extremely core to having a language being open-source and artificially limiting it to your own products is the exact opposite of 'embrace'
Also, JetBrains does have an open-source debugger in their community versions, but this is not what the debate is about.
This is like if Stallman released Emacs under the GPL, but kept the Elisp interpreter proprietary.
My problem is; if you're going to pretend to embrace open-source and then limit a core component this arbitrarily, you're not embracing open-source, you're still the old org afraid of competition.
Credibility of what? He's a Microsoft employee, being paid by Microsoft, and has made a ton of money by selling his company to Microsoft. Follow the money and you'll find nothing but allegiance to Microsoft and it's corporate goals.
For the record - I don't think MS is as nefarious as people here are insinuating, I'm just pointing out facts that people seem to overlook.
Microsoft does have a dark history, it’s also a huge company and Terry Meyerson (windows lead) was an aweful leader.
Things definitely changed. Satya knows that they need the developer mindshare, and that means to go where the developers are.
I hate windows as much as anyone, but a lot of their products are top notch. God I love vscode and Typescript. Just only use their OS products and you’ll be happy.
I think it's just that he wanted to do something Open Source based, rather than what Microsoft was doing at the time.
History.
> Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have
There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced; it uses git at its core. Comments, issues, and wikis are convenient, but relatively simple to implement.
The main value in Github is the de facto community status it has, which it earned by being an open community and good steward of open source projects. The worst MS could do here is shoot themselves in the foot and ruin that value (which they just purchased for 7.5B) by driving developers to other platforms (who will make it all too easy to switch).
I think the M&A teams at MS must have seen this possiblity and have a different plan in mind for Github. Think dead simple (one-click) Azure deployments and integrations. And if you want (or need) that functionality for a different cloud provider, you'll just have to build it yourself on a different site.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Integration and workflow. Thanks to the various gubbins available in the marketplace[0], CI/CD goodies, hooks into communication and project management tools and so on, for a lot of people migrating away from Github would mean losing access to enough little convenience things that actually it's not feasible for a large organisation with not great process change management techniques.
https://github.com/marketplace
2 sides, same coin. You assume chaos, they see you assume that. They shape their narrative to fit their perspective with this data in mind. That rationalizes the behavioral pattern from their end, which continues the cycle.
Not saying I know any better solution, just that it's annoying as fuck to actually change when everyone keeps assuming you won't, and treats you as such. Chaos is probably going to happen even if there's a general mutual trust that springs forth. Can't control chaos.
They haven't fooled me since the 1990's and they won't fool me this time.
Dear reader, you should too.
Vendor lock-in is an important concern regardless of who owns the platform you're being locked into.
If we wait for it to happen by then it will be too late
Edit: Actually, I don't think the idea of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" even applies to buying out companies. The idea behind that phrase applies to technologies, not companies. You can't "extend" GitHub with proprietary tech, it was never an open source technology in the first place.
If Microsoft starts extending git with new proprietary features that only work with GitHub, _then_ it may be time to start being concerned. As of now though, I don't see how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" applies to this situation in the slightest.
As for how EEE applies to this situation: The situation is consistent with an EEE strategy currently being in the "embrace" phase. It's also consistent with a "embrace, be nice, create win-win outcomes" strategy, but that is not usually Microsoft's modus operandi.
Git doesn't support issue tracking and pull requests.
This said, Free Software Devs should never have trusted GitHub in the first place.
There is a wiki, a bug tracker, a platform for pull requests and distribution, etc...
Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle.
Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.
Windows 10 has plenty of flaws that are worth pointing out, but using ridiculous hyperbole doesn't add to the conversation in a productive way.
There's a large gap between 'usable' and 'good'.
They destroyed the consistency of their interface (combined desktop/mobile anyone), and added a lot of cruft that literally nobody who's used Win 7 needs.
I do have a problem with people calling it barely usable, which is a much more objective (and incorrect) statement.
My contention is that you implied that Windows 10 does not even meet the low bar of "barely usable" when you said that you have to delete half of the OS to make it barely usable.
That is a lie. Windows 10 is usable out of the box without any modifications. Saying otherwise is spreading misinformation, which I don't support.
Ditto for dozens of Linux distro's.
> Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.
What other things have they installed that is difficult to find out about? How about all the spying? Some game you don't use is the tip of the iceberg.
I have no idea what else they've installed, just like I have no idea what MacOS or Linux install. They're all black boxes to me. I see no reason to think Windows is any worse than it's competitors.
I assume by spying, you are referring to Windows 10's telemetry. Personally, I think concerns about it are overblown and calling it spying is misleading at best. It's for diagnostic information. You can set it to only send basic diagnostic data if you so choose. I am in favor of companies collecting diagnostic information about their products to improve them.
When was that? Oracle famously has, but I haven't read Microsoft's version of the same.
So MS contributed to the abysmal court decision.
No, Microsoft did an incredible service to all Nokia shareholders by buying the sorry handset business which had already failed in the market at that point.
You can blame Microsoft for not resurrecting a dead carcass but that's another thing entirely.
Nokia is doing quite fine manufacturing telecoms infrastructure.
The developer side of Microsoft has definitely changed for the better over the last several years.
And even if github fails, so what? It’s the most easily replaceable part of the stack.
The best part of GitHub is the social part and that’s not currently replaceable. Also good luck migrating issues and their history of comments and PRs.
The social part is not that big of a deal, its just because everybody happens to already have a login. Other than that, what's the big social hook? You can have the same exact discussions on the other source code sites, all of which have more features too.
To be fair, Nokia was already dead when Microsoft bought them. MS just pulled the plug.
This is small compared potatoes to the sort of thing Microsoft used to pull before. Microsoft spent years in the courts and narrowly avoided some very drastic government intervention and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. That doesn't happen because someone might not like the new Skype UI or really misses flip phones.
Nokia, isn't a person. It's another corporation. Patents racketeering...this is literally only going to be fixed with legislation. I'm all for it. There is no such thing as a corporation that won't chase every dollar that it can. That's what they do. Want to stop patent BS? Remove the incentives through legislation.
I like to look at it from the perspective that they are a for-profit public company and are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and they have every right to do so.
Therefore, any plans I make regarding GitHub will not rely on them being friendly and kind-spirited in any way. If they turn out to be great, I'll just be pleasantly surprised.
But their MO is to buy up companies people like or love and run them into the ground, then replace them with a Me Too product that is just enough different that getting out is challenging. To the rest of us that’s indistinguishable from destroying the competition and reducing options.
And here they are buying a company people like, having recently killed off others.
This tiger has the same stripes. When it eats your remaining arm, try to remember people told you so.
How is it spying when they present you with a full screen detailing data collection with the option to turn it off, and have several blog posts providing details.
> Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
It's not much of an excuse, but all tech companies do this.
> Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
Didn't they give Windows Mobile one hell of a run? Like they tried for a decade and finally admitted defeat? And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.
The Privacy Panel in the new Settings applet for example has always existed.
Seems like refusing to disclose what is collected would run afoul of GDPR. The law requires that "categories of personal data" be disclosed, and also that Microsoft's European customers have a right to a copy of their personal data. Are you claiming that Microsoft is not or does not intend to comply with GDPR? Or perhaps there is some other qualification implied; such as this only applies to non-European customers? If so what is your basis?
They give you the option to fully inspect all the telemetry data your computer is sending, categorized by use.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/diagn...
Likewise. I know they neglected the Linux client (which I used to use) for years and then replaced it with some new browser based thing. This 'ruined Skype' claim has been made several times with each Microsoft buys GitHub story. What exactly do people have in mind when they claim Skype was ruined?
The new UI is absolutely counterintuitive and badly designed. The Linux version is now based on Electron and requires a ridiculous 400MB of RAM just for the login screen. It subjects the CPU to ridiculously high loads, ca. 10 times higher than before when idling (easily saturating one core periodically). It starts to jerk and studder when the chatlog reaches any realistic length, making it unusable with more than 200 to 500 messages in the visible history. The Windows 10 client, which seems mostly identical, cannot get audio from any of my microphones.
I see. By all accounts the Electron based client is garbage. I use the 'classic' Skype client; a.k.a. Skype 7. It isn't based on Electron and works great for me with two different mics. So I guess I've missed out on all the fun with the new client.
Even if the data is anonymous, Microsoft can filter it by range of competitor's IP addresses. Then by stuyding the list of used applications they can learn: how many employees the company has, how many of them use IDE (i.e. are developers), how many use Excel (marketing people), how many use social networks and chats (managers), how many man-hours they spend on development, how many DBAs are there, whether anyone works overnight or on weekends, when they have vacations etc. Now tell me it is not a spyware.
And by the way Google has similar powers because they have advertisement and analytics scripts installed on most websites, so they can spy on their competitors too.
UPD: looked through an article [1] and understood that I underestimated Microsoft. They even collect user account identifiers and hardware details. Microsoft knows about your computers more than your sysadmin.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/windo...
If you don't like data collection, then don't use Windows 10. Plenty of Microsoft tools work on macOS and Linux. But don't accuse them of spying on the user when they have made efforts to be transparent about it.
There's a reason the GDPR requires explicit opt-in: companies are expert at making their spyware look harmless and know that most people won't bother to change the defaults or won't understand what's happening.
Also I remember that detailed articles about "data collection" appeared only after it was shipped and caused some negative reaction. While publishing an article is a good idea, it is unlikely that everyone will read it. A better idea would be to display a popup for Windows users saying something like "Hi there! We are going to look what programs you are running and what else do you do at your computer to improve your experience. Hope you are fine with that.".
Technically it might be not a spyware, but if the user doesn't realize that their actions are being tracked, it still would look like a spyware to them. Or should we better call it a "trojan" software? A definition from Wikipedia says "In computing, a Trojan horse, or Trojan, is any malicious computer program which misleads users of its true intent." and Windows telemetry program matches that definition.
For example, in an article about "basic" telemetry [1] they mention that full command line of an application can be recorded, potentially including any private data and passwords.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/ru-ru/windows/privacy/basic-level...
Literally every for-profit desktop OS vendor has "spied on users" by the definition you're trying to use. Including OSX and Ubuntu.
>Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
So Google boxes Microsoft out of the phone market by refusing to support any of their services on Windows Phone. And Microsoft is the bad guy for leveraging their patents against vendors selling Android phones? Satya Nadella would be looking for a new job if he weren't leveraging their patent portfolio. End of story.
>Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?
See comment above. Nokia is dead because they couldn't get a handful of table-stakes apps. Primarily because of google.
Skype... well that was just fumbling the ball, but it wasn't for no-reason. The way Skype was originally architected wasn't going to scale. That was by no means nefarious in nature though. Github has no fundamental flaws that I've seen that they would require them making significant changes.
And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering? Talk about Torchlighting....
>And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering?
You should look into the Microsoft vs Barnes and Noble case[1] as well as review their detailed patent racketeering practices at Groklaw. Additionally, the Chinese government made Microsoft expose all of their patents that they wouldn't allow companies they were shaking down to see and, well, they were full of old, obsolete and prior art ridden patents - be sure to look those up too.
[1]http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111111222912...
There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.
> ruined Skype?
Its still pretty popular. It was crap 5 years ago, but now its on par with the other big messaging apps.
Who knows what would have happened to Nokia's Device division without Microsoft's involvement, but one thing is certain - Windows Phone exclusivity solidified their demise. At least Nokia got 7 billion for their troubles, though.
>They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.
There's a difference between trying everything and being incompetent and constantly rebooting your platform and expecting a different outcome. As for Google sabotaging their platform - Microsoft was already doing a good job of it so they didn't need help from Google. Also, Google did have a couple of apps on their platform I believe, but let's not try and blame another company for the demise of their OS when they were ultimately responsible.
To be really frank Nokia killed itself in the after math of the iPhone. But that was long time coming. When a company which wasn't even your prime competitor an year or two back, out innovates you to the graveyard, you really were setting yourself up for something like this for a while.
And yes, WhatsApp did the same to Skype.
Companies have to make money, and originally, Microsoft made money just by selling proprietary software licenses. In these conditions, open source is their enemy, and they have to fight it. Now they do a bit of spying, a bit of cloud, a bit of hardware, etc... which mean they can cut open source some slack and focus on other evils.
The Metro version no longer supports copy/paste formatting properly (no timestamps), destroys {code} annotations, does not show alerts properly, does not actually send messages you type into the Windows 10 popup alerts, does not auto scroll to the bottom of a message list, does not let you set your status to AWAY.
The web.skype.com also has broken copy/paste but is better than the absymal Metro version.
The iPad version is probably the most usable (but not tried copy/paste on it) and the Android one is mostly alright when it lets you log in, although still a bit clunky and non-responsive (blatantly a web app in a native wrapper).
I run OOSU10.exe on all my Windows 10 instances to turn off the spyware and run PiHole at home to try and limit the insane amounts of data leakage from all my devices (TV, iPads, Android phones sending buckets of telemetry home, Windows PC and Macs) - it's insane.
Interesting to see this purchase though, but I wanted to say that Skype is getting worse and worse - bring back MSN Messenger which had more features than modern Skype!
> Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
Does this mean we'll see some sort of VSCode-esque IDE built into GitHub's UI? Or perhaps exposure of VSTS to people who previously weren't aware of it?
Clearly written by HMM: Human Markov Model.
I still have no idea what "intelligent edge" is supposed to mean.
Let's move our open soresx elsewhere to bleed.
I used to work for a company that worked with security cameras, and they always used terms like 'edge analytics' to refer to software that's running on each individual camera as opposed to running somewhere central, like on the DVR the cameras are connected to or a server.
From what I've seen in Nadella's presentations at various events and conferences recently, he's using 'edge' in the same way. Lots of MS presentations about the intelligent edge have included things like training a neural network on Azure, and then pushing it out to IoT devices and phones so the NN is running on 'edge' devices and just transmitting results back to a central server.
Another way to think of it: if we were looking at a tree, servers/the cloud would be the trunk, the internet would be the branches, and edge devices like cameras, various IoT devices, and phones would be the leaves. They're out at the edge of the tree, interacting with the world.