I'm no MS lover; I've been off their products both at home and work for over 15+ years, at home since basically forever except for some apps that only ran on Windows.
The MS of now is a far difference MS a decade ago, even five years ago. Things change--sometimes people don't.
IMO calling a wide swath of people "ignorant" with zero content is just noise that does nothing to elevate the conversation. Most of us moved past name-calling in grade school.
Personally I'm not vehemently against this takeover, like others are. That said, I'm not super enthusiastic about it either. I've seen MS acquisitions go both good and bad before, so I'll simply wait and see how it turns out before passing judgement.
Consider me neutral[1] at this point.
> Ah, a voice of reason
I'm not going to argue "reason" or not, but the Linux foundation is not impartial in these matters: Microsoft is a platinum Linux Foundation partner.
Someone might want to inform MS Legal dept that they work for a "far far far different" company than a decade ago, the MS legal team seems to have missed that memo
That is a very interesting point actually. That Microsoft is a sponsor of the Linux foundation is not just a plus point in this discussion, but also a motivator for the Foundation to report positively.
I've worked for a non-profit in a controversial space (interaction of faith and science). While my colleagues always strived to tell what they saw as truth, there was always an acknowledgement—unstated—that donors' reactions informed our approaches to addressing issues. Not that we compromised our values, but we couldn't operate in a vacuum.
The Linux Foundation is a joke. Hell, even Oracle is a 'platinum member', and there's no company on earth as aggressively hostile towards FLOSS than Oracle.
I'm really surprised this thread is so heavily upvoted here and on reddit.
The Linux Foundation is literally a lobbying agency for major coporations, why does it matter what's their opinion?
I mean The Linux Foundation president doesn't even use linux on his machine lol [1].
This should say everything you need to know about the foundation really.
LWN publishes regulator "kernel development statistics" which counts commits on a per-company basis and Oracle shows up consistently. Membership in the Linux Foundation seems entirely justified.
I agree, I made a similar comment here. I think it lacks integrity for the foundation to make such a statement knowing Microsoft is one of their board members as well as being a Platinum member.
Can't really write something on the Linux foundation that'd annoy a platinum partner though, can you? :)
Though I'm in the middle on this, I'll see what microsoft does with github. The company has shown a different approach to the 'old microsoft' but it's still a company with the aim of making a profit. Github was losing money IIRC and MSFT has a lot of data on people as it is. Github might be a good way to target devs for advertisements :)
Yeah Github wasn't a non-profit. It was a company that wanted to make money. They weren't giving everything they offered away for free. In fact the main reason I used Gitlab was for free private repositories. But no use arguing I guess since people will never change their mind no matter what Microsoft does.
> To use MT3620 Dev Board for Azure Sphere, you’ll need a Windows 10 PC with the latest Windows Updates, along with the Visual Studio Tools for Azure Sphere (which will be available for download from Microsoft). These tools will include application templates, development tools and the Azure Sphere software development kit (SDK).
Can someone clarify if Windows 10 will be a hard requirement to use the Microsoft Azure Sphere Linux SDK for IoT/embedded boards?
It’s a real question. It makes no sense that Microsoft would impose a hard requirement, they only need to make Visual Studio more convenient for open-source Linux developers, which should be trivially easy in comparison to any Linux embedded CLI toolchain.
If you’re Microsoft courting the open-source community to the the tune of $7.5B purchase of Github, and you are releasing the first Microsoft Linux kernel, why would you unnecessarily mandate the tying of Linux to a Windows toolchain, when you’re already going to win/earn a voluntary tie by competing on usability? What you want is developers voluntarily porting their Github embedded Linux open-source projects to Visual Studio.
New Microsoft should have a chat with vestiges of Old Microsoft.
Yeah, Microsoft can find $500,000 in the couch cushions. It's not even a rounding error for them. It doesn't mean it's not a good thing they're doing it, but it's not like that's a huge contribution.
It's not huge to Microsoft, sure, but it's signficant enough to the Linux Foundation that it effects the independence of any LF reaction to Microsoft (especially since their stance toward Platinum members affects the attractiveness of the membership in general, not just for the member they respond to.)
I believe it is quite clear to many of us familiar with the space that Microsoft is not some small-time backer of the Linux Foundation and other, related organizations. I certainly did not feel the least bit of an attempt to downplay MS' financial contribution in light of the subject of the conversation.
My understanding is that the GP was commenting about the author's biases not those of Microsoft. Those are two entirely different perspectives. It doesn't apply here that Microsoft gets a deduction.
Ahh yes, Jim Zemlin the man that famously Attends Linux conference using a apple mac Computer and not Linux.... (am sure that will soon be replaced with the Surface running Windows 10 with the "Linux Subsystem" ...)
The Linux Foundation... the Business Organization that rejected the individuals of the community and focus solely on its corporate sponsors one of the largest being Microsoft
It is not shocking that the Linux Foundation supports their Corporate Master Microsoft in their acquisition of Github.. To do otherwise would cost them many many thousands of dollars
That does depend on the situation. We know that google wanted to buy Github, so a (very unlikely) motivation could be that microsoft bought github to "protect it" from google, or in case of no deal happening, financial instability.
That being said, we have no way of knowing what the true motive of the move is - being sceptical/critical is indeed the correct reaction.
Usually you buy something in order to make a profit from it. In the case of GitHub, Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern, that will never implode for lack of funds, as a place where open source projects can be freely hosted and open source developers can find a sense of community. This is more magnanimous than anything Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter have done -- COMBINED!
The fact that Microsoft tried as many times as they did to push Windows Phone -- even buying Nokia to have a captive device maker -- shows how committed they can be to losing money.
I agree with you here. I doubt Microsoft is committed to losing money on a product.
There could be a direct (selling subscriptions / additional addon products) or indirect (marketing dollars, community goodwill, 'mindshare) profit motivations.
I think Microsoft sees this as a way to get into businesses that would have never entertained a relationship with them. When those github enterprise contracts come up for renewal, I expect large discounts for trying Azure and other Microsoft products to come with them.
Microsoft's been orienting themselves as a developer services company over the past few years. Azure, vscode, open source dotnet, they want free onramps onto their services.
They were missing CI/CD tools, and source control. They had VSTS and Team Foundation Server but there's no way theyd beat the ubiquity of git.
I'm betting they're going to now start offering CI via GitHub like Gitlab (or offering a unified marketplace to allow other companies to fill this role and they take a cut) and then folding GitHub Enterprise into their suite of developer tools. Just like Visual Studio is vscode++, GitHub Enterprise will be invested in to where it does a whole lot more fancy things, and free GitHub is the onramp. And then Microsoft will have a portfolio that spans the entire code development pipeline.
Microsoft has incredible CI/CD tooling -- check out Visual Studio App Center, Azure App Insights, HockeyApp -- and many enterprise customers use this along with VSTS. However, many companies will never use VSTS, especially non-Microsoft-stack companies so making a big deal about how Microsoft's CI/CD tools work for non-Microsoft projects hosted at places like GitHub or any other hosting provider that supports the issuing of webhooks on checkin/merge events (eg: BitBucket, GitLab, Kiln, etc).
Did you realize that your Java/Android Studio project in GitHub could be connected to App Center such that for every source check-in the project is built, unit tested (code-level), UI-tested on physical hardware (Xamarin Test Cloud), and if all tests pass the build is pushed to beta testers via HockeyApp which also captures reams of telemetry and debugging information? App Center can even be set up to automatically push the app all the way to Google Play automatically when you merge down to your release branch.
Ditto iOS apps written with Swift in Xcode.
If you think Microsoft doesn't have massive amounts of CI/CD tooling that is agnostic to language and platform you should check it out.
Yeah. They do have great tools. And I appreciate that link, I never heard of it.
But I think that sort of makes my point. If a company makes world class tools that people don't know about or don't want to use, are the tools that valuable/good? Microsoft just spent $7.5 billion to say "we don't think Team Foundation Server can cut it for the developer population at large". By doing that, they threw themselves into the center of millions of developer workflows around the world. I think it was a great buy for them, and is definitely a strategic move.
Github itself extends Git in a closed and proprietary way...
Github is the extend part or EEE, Git is the Standard, Github is the extension...
--
Edit since I being prevented from responding I will edit this to address the idea that "Github is not an extension of git"
Yes, it is. While you can still use git with out Github, you could also use "the web" with out IE6, GitHub however had workflow and process improvements over standard git, just like Active X added workflow and process improvements over HTML Standard.
GitHub adds things like Issues, Pull Requests, "Social Coding, unified Login, Access Controls, Project Discovery and about 100+ other things on top of git that using git alone does not get you. This is text book example of EXTEND
it is insane to me how people do not see it.
Further to address "I have to be insane to believe GitHub was started by MS" well I never said that, Simply because Github was not created by MS, does not change the fact that their buying Github is part of the EEE model
GitHub is a set of UI tools built on top of a command line interface. It is not an extension to git. You can still use git normally. You can use other UI tools built on top of git. That, by definition, is not an extension.
And the logical leap required to think that somehow GitHub was built, years ago, as part of a strategy for Microsoft is bordering on insanity.
That was Steve Ballmer, and he was talking about how using libraries licensed under the GPL affects the software built on it. His words were very poorly chosen[1] but his sentiment is actually one that a lot of people in open source seemingly agree with - we have the LGPL and many other licenses because people don't agree that the way one dependency is licensed should affect the whole application.
What you see there is the different between open source and Free Software
Free Software is a ethical movement and position around software and information
Open Source is a business model for collaborative development where most often the end product is not open but the tools used to create the end product are. Thus you can not use Copy-left Licenses if you intend to close source your final product.
Free Software is about Developer and User freedom
Open Source is about developer freedom exclusively
Ballmer's Microsoft disliked both Open Source and Free Software. Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software
> Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software
Microsoft donates more dev time to open source then they will EVER get out of their own use of it. But sure, let's pretend the multi-billion dollar company is spending billions upon billions on open source in order to save money. That makes SO much sense!
One primary example of them "donating" dev time is their Advancment of the Linux Kernal of which they have "become a top contributor" like the article says.
Why did they do this? To make Linux a First Class citizen on Azure so they can take on AWS... they did not "donate" this work out of some ethical kindness or wanting to "give back to the community" they did it to make money on Azure.
Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason, and largely traced to get Linux to work with some MS Commercial product of some kind, be is Azure or some other product.
> Why did they do this? To make Linux a First Class citizen on Azure so they can take on AWS... they did not "donate" this work out of some ethical kindness or wanting to "give back to the community" they did it to make money on Azure.
Are you as virulent towards people that donate their time for recognition or their resume? Nobody doesn't anything altruistically. Microsoft doesn't have to either.
> Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason
VS Code and open sourcing their closed source .NET modules? Those are about building trust in the dev community. They have no direct correlation with profit. And even if they did that's ok.
>Nobody doesn't anything altruistically. Microsoft doesn't have to either.
I nave claimed they did. That is the claim that was made, MS is "donating more time then they will ever get out" that was the claim
That is factually incorrect. They are getting more value from the Dev time they are putting into open source projects thus it is incorrect to say they are "donating" it, nor are they "giving more than they are getting" which was the comment I was replying to,
You can attempt to strawman and move the goal posts if you desire but it does not change reality
This is a reaction that is both funny and frustrating. While there is enlightened self-interest for Microsoft to buy GitHub (they rely on GitHub for a lot of their open source work as well as their documentation websites) buying GitHub and saying "We're going to let it operate independently as before while we fund the project knowing it will never turn a profit -- that's how important Open Source is to us, we're willing to lose money every quarter to ensure GitHub will never implode for want of money" STILL brings distrust.
And yet, the hue and cry is "Unless you open source every byte of GitHub's code and infrastructure you're just evil monopolists trying to smother us!" Given all that Microsoft has done to embrace and support open source I think the onus is now on the Open Source community to justify their distrust of Microsoft because "Duh, it's Microsoft" simply doesn't fly as a legitimate argument anymore.
Microsoft is the heart of corporate America, it's a facepalm to imagine that any dollar they spend isn't in their own long term interest to make money. It would be illegal for them not to. You can apply that to any large corporation but the problem is by definition how Microsoft makes money.
How does Microsoft make money? They make money by renting from a platform which is monopolistic and enforced. What do they do to maintain this? They deliberately force people onto their platform by abusing their market position, and try to crush any opposition by any possible tactic, including dubious legal cases designed just to bankrupt their opposition. What else do they do? EEE, and also just blatant unnecessary reinvention /ripping off and lock-in when they get the chance.
They didn't abandon some of the visible tactics and start paying open source because they had a moral revelation, it's a company with the same business model it's not possible. Those tactics were just inneffective and co-opting, more subtle EEE has to be the game plan.
Why does that make me angrier than equally evil Facebook/Apple? Well if I was a farmer driving around one of those trucks with source code preventing me from fixing it I'd be pretty personally furious. But I'm not, I'm a developer and those guys are the ones trying to make everyone drive the coding equivalent. But it's worse, because coding isn't just my livelihood, it's a lot of how I think and express my thoughts. They're not messing with my job they're trying to restrict the way I think, so their shareholders can make a buck.
"Microsoft is running Github for charity" have a word with yourself.
> Microsoft is the heart of corporate America, it's a facepalm to imagine that any dollar they spend isn't in their own long term interest to make money. It would be illegal for them not to. You can apply that to any large corporation but the problem is by definition how Microsoft makes money.
Feel free to show me which part of the criminal code "not making money" falls under. You want to rant about EEE (irrelevant for decades now) or some other silly plan to undermine open source development, feel free. But expect to be called out for your pointless drivel at the same time.
I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.
The person you replied to is probably referring to the concept of fiduciary duty which is often mentioned alongside discussions of public companies. I don't know anything about it though.
Right but profit can be both long-term and short-term and often one requires sacrificing the other, which is why calling it "illegal" was completely incorrect.
Not to dogpile, but it's essentially a naive take on the Ford vs. Dodge case. It's usually trotted out as "proof" of the evils of capitalism. As such it ignores nearly 100 years of evidence to the contrary.
(My view of capitalism meshes with Churchill's view of democracy: It's the worst except for all the others)
I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.
It's never time to stop being cautious about megacorps.
To think that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for altruistic reasons, without a plan to actually turn a profit on the purchase, is dangerously naive.
I think your response misses the point of my post. The point wasn't that they're trying to undermine Open Source, the point was that they fundamentally and unavoidably make their huge profits by extracting rent from a platform that they try to force everybody onto. They don't sell support, expertise or individual products. They get you in, lock you in and then charge rent. In infra teams in the UK at least the guys used to call it "Microsoft rent" with a straight face. The motivations of a company where that has and always will be the game plan are antithetical to someone who identifies freedom of coding with freedom of thought and expression.
"We are pro open source except our entire business model which is build around a closed source platform on which we sell closed source products"
Yeah they're worse than they could be but that's not really the central point.
The legal thing you asked for a source on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Some people dissent from this reading of the case but it's also not that important, in practice they act like this.
> it's a facepalm to imagine that any dollar they spend isn't in their own long term interest to make money
This is true, but "long term interest" for Microsoft means 30, 50, or 100 years from now. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits, and therefore doing good things is quite easy to align with the notion that companies only do things that make them a profit.
I find myself saying this a lot - companies are by definition amoral (lacking a moral sense or understanding), not immoral. Just because they are driven by profits doesn't mean they don't do things that are moral or good, as many good things are in the interest of a company's profits. Especially their long term profits.
> w. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits
This hasn't been the case with Microsoft. They had their most successful era, and created (at the time) the richest man in the world, all while we hated them.
Yes, but the world of software development is radically different now. Microsoft knows that the cloud is where most of their potential for growth is and they think (correctly, in my opinion) that developer goodwill is going to be important in getting more of the cloud market share.
They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.
After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.
I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.
Who's "we"? The open-source advocate reviled Microsoft in their own clique but the vast majority of the software industry just quietly went on with their lives.
Spare a thought for those of us who distrusted GitHub before Microsoft bought it, precisely because they're closed-source attempted-monopolists whose interests don't necessarily align with their users'.
What about them should be trusted? The latest version of their OS is literally spy and adware, they've been using UWP and their store to try and lock developers into their walled systems, they have an exceedingly poor history of managing things they purchase, they haven't stopped trying to dominate computing with their products. And let's not forget the secureboot bullshit.
Just because they hire developers that have worked on open source projects, are seemingly more friendly towards open source by opening some of their code and saying everything will be fine really kind of means nothing. They haven't stopped Microsofting the fuck out of everything. I don't understand how it's gotten better at all. Windows 10 is more invasive and controlling than any shit that ever happened on any older version of windows.
My point was that your comment was absolutely silly. Embracing open source doesn't mean never producing closed source. Contributing in commits and/or money is also embracing open source.
Embracing open source means contributing to open source and using open source. Buying a company to take advantage of open source has nothing to do with embracing open source.
Microsoft is one of the largest open-source contributors in the world AND they bought an unprofitable, but widely liked company that supports a significant number of open-source products.
Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.
Is Windows open source? No.
Is the C# compiler open source? No.
Microsoft may have taken some positive steps to support Linux on Azure & other things -- things possibility necessitated by market demands -- as well some contributions to open source.
But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.
Their Edge browser engine is proprietary but is built to work with open standards - no more pushing their own proprietary standards like ActiveX.
> Is Word, Excel, or Powerpoint open source? No
> Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.
The default file format for recent Office versions is based on Office Open XML which is a published standard that anyone can interoperate with. Also, Office apps can save to the OpenDocument format too. Yes, there is a lot of proprietary stuff inside of Office, but they also have 20+ years of backwards compatibility to deal with.
> Is Windows open source? No.
Are there any examples of a company taking something as large as Windows OS and converting the whole thing from closed to open source? It's not like they can just flip a switch and let the whole world see the source code?
> Is the C# compiler open source? No.
Look at what they are doing in the .Net Core space for an indication of where this is going...
> But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.
I disagree with this and most who have followed Microsoft's actions over the last few years would also disagree with you. They have embraced open source way more than could be expected of any other company with a huge portfolio of closed source software.
> Are there any examples of a company taking something as large as Windows OS and converting the whole thing from closed to open source? It's not like they can just flip a switch and let the whole world see the source code?
Maybe when Sun Open Sourced Solaris?
It took them quite some time to get it done, but with significant effort they got it over the line.
This purchase makes you decide whether to opt out of your existing Github use. Or at least worry whether its usability (on whatever dimensions matter to you) will decline.
I like his good vibe about all of it, and I agree I love to see that MS is doing more moves into the right direction. However I feel we should not trust him too quickly. Every big company tries to claim they have changed, will change and are currently in a process of change. But in reality most companies stay stuck at exactly that point in time where they were most successful. that means Microsoft is likely stuck ~10 years go, where Windows XP was at its peak.
It's not just a CEO who can change that. It needs all kinds of changes on all kinds of levels. For instance if department leader's KPIs and bonus structure hasn't changed, they will continue to actively fight open source. Even if there is now a new, fancy department with even big names from open source communities, that doesn't mean all the other departments changed.
Also what happens to the devs who are there for 20+ years now, probably quite a few of them in senior dev and architect roles. Will they drop all that they've grown up with? Can Microsoft afford to let them go for big money and hire new, unknown people instead?
If they manage to get this github integration right, I may start to think about them in a positive fashion but until now there's too much doubt and too many things that might go wrong. Compared to the size of a huge corp we've only seen fluff up till now.
> Microsoft is likely stuck ~10 years go, where Windows XP was at its peak
I feel that they were like this during the Windows 8 era.
But I like to believe they had their wake-up call (the failure of Windows RT, of Windows Phone, the rise of macOS and iOS) to a point where they were ready to try something radical, and what we're seeing now is the result of those efforts.
Every big company tries to claim they have changed, will change and are currently in a process of change.
This is insightful, and in addition to this, culture change can and does happen at companies.
Just because they're evil today, doesn't mean they'll be evil tomorrow.
Similarly, just because they're good today, doesn't mean they'll be good tomorrow.
We should always look with suspicion at megacorps acting with what appears to be outrageous altruism. Companies don't throw around $7.5 billion without expecting to profit from it.
> For instance if department leader's KPIs and bonus structure hasn't changed, they will continue to actively fight open source.
They did change, and quite radically when Kevin Turner (then COO) was ousted (or voluntary left, it's unclear).
> Also what happens to the devs who are there for 20+ years now
Today, the biggest focus for Microsoft is Azure. And incidentally Azure grew enormously under Satya, so they had to hire a lot of new people there. A lot of them wouldn't even have considered joining MS under Ballmer, and a lot of them were hired specifically for there knowledge of non-MS technologies.
Things might be different in older divisions, such as Windows, but at least in the division that now matter the most, the culture is dead-set on open source and the values that Satya promotes.
> But in reality most companies stay stuck at exactly that point in time where they were most successful
This doesn't really make sense. How did they get to be that successful? They must have changed something from an earlier point, when their most successful point was less successful.
Your claim is like saying "A companies stock is always worth less than its historical maximum". It's only true until there's a new maximum.
I wonder how many companies have considered selecting GitHub as the place for their source code, wikis, process, issue tracking, etc but hesitated or went with another vendor simply because the financial future of GitHub was an open question. Now, with Microsoft making that question a moot point, I think a lot of companies will now make the move to GitHub knowing it will not go away.
Ironically... having Microsoft behind GitHub and being willing to lose money on the company forever could actually be the reasons it has a hope to turn a profit some day.
Pretty sure this will be the first change after the acquisition. Microsoft has to ease the path from checking in code to Github to building and deploying it on Azure.
You don't have to go through 3 redirections to login, handling of 3rd party apps authorization is well thought out, and GitHub is already used an auth provider for many dev servcies, Microsoft accounts are not.
No he didn't. He said "We love GitHub login. Your GitHub account is your developer identity, and many users are accustomed to signing into developer tools and services (e.g. Travis, Circle) with their GitHub accounts."
That leaves open the door for migrating all github accounts into Live accounts within a github namespace. The could have already done it but aren't letting it leak into the github UI yet.
>Use your GitHub account to sign into MS other services.
This isn't an argument they won't do it. It suggests that they will even more.
Implementing GitHub login for Microsoft's other products can be split into three categories of possibility:
1) Other MS services add support for GitHub's authentication systems.
2) GitHub accounts will be mirrored into Microsoft's existing account system.
3) GitHub's backend migrates to Microsoft's exiting account system.
The question isn't "if" but "when and with what UI" #3 will happen.
this has a huge spin/politics feel to it, when you get to "it used to be easy to make fun of Microsoft, but.. I have grown up"
I call BS -- it was very grown-up of Microsoft to abuse repeatedly their clients and partners, and it is just and right to call them out on it.. that one statement is obsequious whiteash, plain and simple.
People relax. If M$ really does go Weyland-Yutani on us with GitHub we'll just move to another git hosting service and they'll be out 7.5B. Unfortunately for them as a company they need costumers to exist, and we are those costumers, so, we just have to keep an eye out for shady stuff and act on them. Like always.
" I will own responsibility for some of that as I spent a good part of my career at the Linux Foundation poking fun at Microsoft (which, at times, prior management made way too easy). But times have changed and it’s time to recognize that we have all grown up – the industry, the open source community, even me."
What is this guy talking about? Maybe he's changed but Microsoft hasn't: they're still a company doing evil things on a large scale that simply sees more value (for them) increased FOSS support. I'll especially highlight the patent suits with them pulling billions of dollars from Android vendors despite them not contributing anything to Android. They were working on displacing it with Windows Phone. Yet, they use legal threats to pull hundreds of millions a year for their "inventions" on paper from those actually building things we want to buy.
EDIT: In case anyone wonders, I was hoping a company like Red Hat acquired them. One that is a bit less evil with more incentive to keep high investments in FOSS. Given the numbers involved, one can't hope for much more.
From the OP: "Whether it’s an established company or startup that’s gained mass appeal like GitHub, GitLab or Stack Overflow"
Thanks for the recognition for GitLab! We hope that for many people that switched https://twitter.com/develosysadmine/status/10050613234058731... was the case: "For me, I already knew GitLab was better than GitHub in a variety of ways. Microsoft just gave me the slightest nudge to actually make the switch."
> Most of the important projects on GitHub are licensed under an open source license, which addresses intellectual property ownership.
This can be tricky in a legally messed up environment. In US, courts sided with Oracle about copyrightability of APIs. And guess who supported Oracle in that dispute? Microsoft. So how should open source projects feel about it, especially when they let's say implement MS own APIs?
It's not for sure but highly likely that Microsoft will do some things that are not desirable. From now on, should you believe trending repos are not filtered by Microsoft? Don't you think they might put some advertisement for their own projects / products? What will they do with the massive amount of data they have now access to, including private repositories?
Those saying there is no reason to worry are just hoping for big amount of luck. Yeah I hope so too, but let's face it, it's very unlikely they're not gonna do anything undesirable and only improve the platform.
Something is missing from this reaction: AI.
MS is buying a privileged access to billions lines of code with their history and corrections. In 5-10Y times most code will be produced by AI and the simplest way to train a AI system is to to have access to data. That's what they bought, data. Unfortunately this is another step towards more concentration in IT...
I think what I don't appreciate is how many people are trying to calm peoples fears about the acquisition.
Feels like a parent chiding a kid
I guess Github was in worse shape than they looked like on the outside. Happens; the fact that the 3 founders made a fortune off of this is unfortunate.
One of those founders stepped down and yet he still won.
It's just a game; wether you play blackjack or poker or big stakes with companies.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadI'm no MS lover; I've been off their products both at home and work for over 15+ years, at home since basically forever except for some apps that only ran on Windows.
The MS of now is a far difference MS a decade ago, even five years ago. Things change--sometimes people don't.
Personally I'm not vehemently against this takeover, like others are. That said, I'm not super enthusiastic about it either. I've seen MS acquisitions go both good and bad before, so I'll simply wait and see how it turns out before passing judgement.
Consider me neutral[1] at this point.
> Ah, a voice of reason
I'm not going to argue "reason" or not, but the Linux foundation is not impartial in these matters: Microsoft is a platinum Linux Foundation partner.
They're obviously going to be biased.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk1dd1D2Kts
You're assuming bias. There may or may not be bias in this statement.
It would be really weird to see anything but a positive reaction from a consortium which receives a substantial amount of money from Microsoft.
Such as vmware and allwinner who refuse to release kernel sourcecode for their products.
The Linux Foundation is literally a lobbying agency for major coporations, why does it matter what's their opinion?
I mean The Linux Foundation president doesn't even use linux on his machine lol [1]. This should say everything you need to know about the foundation really.
[1] - https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/09/17/2017204/linux-foun...
Though I'm in the middle on this, I'll see what microsoft does with github. The company has shown a different approach to the 'old microsoft' but it's still a company with the aim of making a profit. Github was losing money IIRC and MSFT has a lot of data on people as it is. Github might be a good way to target devs for advertisements :)
If you want to develop software for Microsoft’s Linux distro/kernel (Azure Sphere for IoT), it appears you must use Windows 10 + Visual Studio, https://seeedstudio.com/productDetail/3052 & https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/developing-an-azure-s...
> To use MT3620 Dev Board for Azure Sphere, you’ll need a Windows 10 PC with the latest Windows Updates, along with the Visual Studio Tools for Azure Sphere (which will be available for download from Microsoft). These tools will include application templates, development tools and the Azure Sphere software development kit (SDK).
Can someone clarify if Windows 10 will be a hard requirement to use the Microsoft Azure Sphere Linux SDK for IoT/embedded boards?
If you’re Microsoft courting the open-source community to the the tune of $7.5B purchase of Github, and you are releasing the first Microsoft Linux kernel, why would you unnecessarily mandate the tying of Linux to a Windows toolchain, when you’re already going to win/earn a voluntary tie by competing on usability? What you want is developers voluntarily porting their Github embedded Linux open-source projects to Visual Studio.
New Microsoft should have a chat with vestiges of Old Microsoft.
*About Microsoft buying Github.
Yes, most definitely.
Looks like disclosure to me
They get a write off and your support as well as the marketing bits.
The Linux Foundation... the Business Organization that rejected the individuals of the community and focus solely on its corporate sponsors one of the largest being Microsoft
It is not shocking that the Linux Foundation supports their Corporate Master Microsoft in their acquisition of Github.. To do otherwise would cost them many many thousands of dollars
Microsoft: embraces open source
Open-source developers: "They're trying to control us! They're trying to control us!".
That being said, we have no way of knowing what the true motive of the move is - being sceptical/critical is indeed the correct reaction.
Is that your belief, or do you know that to be true?
Microsoft buys GitHub and says we're going to let them operate independently as they see fit.
Where do you see the profit motive?
I never wrote anything abut profit motives. You just made the same leap of logic again.
Do you know factually that , "Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern."
There could be a direct (selling subscriptions / additional addon products) or indirect (marketing dollars, community goodwill, 'mindshare) profit motivations.
I think Microsoft sees this as a way to get into businesses that would have never entertained a relationship with them. When those github enterprise contracts come up for renewal, I expect large discounts for trying Azure and other Microsoft products to come with them.
They were missing CI/CD tools, and source control. They had VSTS and Team Foundation Server but there's no way theyd beat the ubiquity of git.
I'm betting they're going to now start offering CI via GitHub like Gitlab (or offering a unified marketplace to allow other companies to fill this role and they take a cut) and then folding GitHub Enterprise into their suite of developer tools. Just like Visual Studio is vscode++, GitHub Enterprise will be invested in to where it does a whole lot more fancy things, and free GitHub is the onramp. And then Microsoft will have a portfolio that spans the entire code development pipeline.
Did you realize that your Java/Android Studio project in GitHub could be connected to App Center such that for every source check-in the project is built, unit tested (code-level), UI-tested on physical hardware (Xamarin Test Cloud), and if all tests pass the build is pushed to beta testers via HockeyApp which also captures reams of telemetry and debugging information? App Center can even be set up to automatically push the app all the way to Google Play automatically when you merge down to your release branch.
Ditto iOS apps written with Swift in Xcode.
If you think Microsoft doesn't have massive amounts of CI/CD tooling that is agnostic to language and platform you should check it out.
https://www.visualstudio.com/app-center/
But I think that sort of makes my point. If a company makes world class tools that people don't know about or don't want to use, are the tools that valuable/good? Microsoft just spent $7.5 billion to say "we don't think Team Foundation Server can cut it for the developer population at large". By doing that, they threw themselves into the center of millions of developer workflows around the world. I think it was a great buy for them, and is definitely a strategic move.
Those of us that have seen this play before know what comes after Extend in the 3 Phases of EEE
Github is the extend part or EEE, Git is the Standard, Github is the extension...
--
Edit since I being prevented from responding I will edit this to address the idea that "Github is not an extension of git"
Yes, it is. While you can still use git with out Github, you could also use "the web" with out IE6, GitHub however had workflow and process improvements over standard git, just like Active X added workflow and process improvements over HTML Standard.
GitHub adds things like Issues, Pull Requests, "Social Coding, unified Login, Access Controls, Project Discovery and about 100+ other things on top of git that using git alone does not get you. This is text book example of EXTEND
it is insane to me how people do not see it.
Further to address "I have to be insane to believe GitHub was started by MS" well I never said that, Simply because Github was not created by MS, does not change the fact that their buying Github is part of the EEE model
And the logical leap required to think that somehow GitHub was built, years ago, as part of a strategy for Microsoft is bordering on insanity.
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"
Times have changed, however it's reasonable to question if the Microsoft DNA radically changed or "not really".
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
Free Software is a ethical movement and position around software and information
Open Source is a business model for collaborative development where most often the end product is not open but the tools used to create the end product are. Thus you can not use Copy-left Licenses if you intend to close source your final product.
Free Software is about Developer and User freedom
Open Source is about developer freedom exclusively
Ballmer's Microsoft disliked both Open Source and Free Software. Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software
> Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software
Microsoft donates more dev time to open source then they will EVER get out of their own use of it. But sure, let's pretend the multi-billion dollar company is spending billions upon billions on open source in order to save money. That makes SO much sense!
This can't be true, or they wouldn't be doing it. They put dollar signs on positive attention. Obviously.
One primary example of them "donating" dev time is their Advancment of the Linux Kernal of which they have "become a top contributor" like the article says.
Why did they do this? To make Linux a First Class citizen on Azure so they can take on AWS... they did not "donate" this work out of some ethical kindness or wanting to "give back to the community" they did it to make money on Azure.
Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason, and largely traced to get Linux to work with some MS Commercial product of some kind, be is Azure or some other product.
Are you as virulent towards people that donate their time for recognition or their resume? Nobody doesn't anything altruistically. Microsoft doesn't have to either.
> Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason
VS Code and open sourcing their closed source .NET modules? Those are about building trust in the dev community. They have no direct correlation with profit. And even if they did that's ok.
> Azure or some other product.
So?
I nave claimed they did. That is the claim that was made, MS is "donating more time then they will ever get out" that was the claim
That is factually incorrect. They are getting more value from the Dev time they are putting into open source projects thus it is incorrect to say they are "donating" it, nor are they "giving more than they are getting" which was the comment I was replying to,
You can attempt to strawman and move the goal posts if you desire but it does not change reality
And yet, the hue and cry is "Unless you open source every byte of GitHub's code and infrastructure you're just evil monopolists trying to smother us!" Given all that Microsoft has done to embrace and support open source I think the onus is now on the Open Source community to justify their distrust of Microsoft because "Duh, it's Microsoft" simply doesn't fly as a legitimate argument anymore.
How does Microsoft make money? They make money by renting from a platform which is monopolistic and enforced. What do they do to maintain this? They deliberately force people onto their platform by abusing their market position, and try to crush any opposition by any possible tactic, including dubious legal cases designed just to bankrupt their opposition. What else do they do? EEE, and also just blatant unnecessary reinvention /ripping off and lock-in when they get the chance.
They didn't abandon some of the visible tactics and start paying open source because they had a moral revelation, it's a company with the same business model it's not possible. Those tactics were just inneffective and co-opting, more subtle EEE has to be the game plan.
Why does that make me angrier than equally evil Facebook/Apple? Well if I was a farmer driving around one of those trucks with source code preventing me from fixing it I'd be pretty personally furious. But I'm not, I'm a developer and those guys are the ones trying to make everyone drive the coding equivalent. But it's worse, because coding isn't just my livelihood, it's a lot of how I think and express my thoughts. They're not messing with my job they're trying to restrict the way I think, so their shareholders can make a buck.
"Microsoft is running Github for charity" have a word with yourself.
Feel free to show me which part of the criminal code "not making money" falls under. You want to rant about EEE (irrelevant for decades now) or some other silly plan to undermine open source development, feel free. But expect to be called out for your pointless drivel at the same time.
I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.
I don't really know anything about US laws, but I think they do have to act in the interest of their shareholders, i.e. make them more money.
(My view of capitalism meshes with Churchill's view of democracy: It's the worst except for all the others)
It's never time to stop being cautious about megacorps.
To think that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for altruistic reasons, without a plan to actually turn a profit on the purchase, is dangerously naive.
You thinking tech companies don't have loss-leaders is naive.
"We are pro open source except our entire business model which is build around a closed source platform on which we sell closed source products"
Yeah they're worse than they could be but that's not really the central point.
The legal thing you asked for a source on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Some people dissent from this reading of the case but it's also not that important, in practice they act like this.
This is true, but "long term interest" for Microsoft means 30, 50, or 100 years from now. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits, and therefore doing good things is quite easy to align with the notion that companies only do things that make them a profit.
I find myself saying this a lot - companies are by definition amoral (lacking a moral sense or understanding), not immoral. Just because they are driven by profits doesn't mean they don't do things that are moral or good, as many good things are in the interest of a company's profits. Especially their long term profits.
This hasn't been the case with Microsoft. They had their most successful era, and created (at the time) the richest man in the world, all while we hated them.
They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.
After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.
I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.
Who's "we"? The open-source advocate reviled Microsoft in their own clique but the vast majority of the software industry just quietly went on with their lives.
That assumes that this situation is a zero-sum game. It's not. Microsoft clearly benefits from this, but so does everyone else.
Can't you do it without GitHub?
As I asked a few days ago: "Do proponents of Free Software, on the whole, assert that the concept of intellectual property should not exist?"
If so then I can see why a closed-source supporter of open source is an abhorrent concept.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232778
I have viewed GitHub as a net negative for Free Software for a number of years, this Microsoft deal amplifies that...
Just because they hire developers that have worked on open source projects, are seemingly more friendly towards open source by opening some of their code and saying everything will be fine really kind of means nothing. They haven't stopped Microsofting the fuck out of everything. I don't understand how it's gotten better at all. Windows 10 is more invasive and controlling than any shit that ever happened on any older version of windows.
You confuse embrace with replace.
Btw, you can make your point without bringing in Red Hat. It sounds absolutely silly to me :)
I'm trying to think of some, and drawing a blank so far...
I'd be interested in seeing the source for microsoft's Telemetry, if you have a link? :)
Oh please.
Microsoft has not embraced open source.
Is their web browser open source? No.
Is Word, Excel, or Powerpoint open source? No.
Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.
Is Windows open source? No.
Is the C# compiler open source? No.
Microsoft may have taken some positive steps to support Linux on Azure & other things -- things possibility necessitated by market demands -- as well some contributions to open source.
But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.
Their Edge browser engine is proprietary but is built to work with open standards - no more pushing their own proprietary standards like ActiveX.
> Is Word, Excel, or Powerpoint open source? No > Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.
The default file format for recent Office versions is based on Office Open XML which is a published standard that anyone can interoperate with. Also, Office apps can save to the OpenDocument format too. Yes, there is a lot of proprietary stuff inside of Office, but they also have 20+ years of backwards compatibility to deal with.
> Is Windows open source? No.
Are there any examples of a company taking something as large as Windows OS and converting the whole thing from closed to open source? It's not like they can just flip a switch and let the whole world see the source code?
> Is the C# compiler open source? No.
Look at what they are doing in the .Net Core space for an indication of where this is going...
> But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.
I disagree with this and most who have followed Microsoft's actions over the last few years would also disagree with you. They have embraced open source way more than could be expected of any other company with a huge portfolio of closed source software.
Maybe when Sun Open Sourced Solaris?
It took them quite some time to get it done, but with significant effort they got it over the line.
You can opt in to using .NET.
This purchase makes you decide whether to opt out of your existing Github use. Or at least worry whether its usability (on whatever dimensions matter to you) will decline.
It's not just a CEO who can change that. It needs all kinds of changes on all kinds of levels. For instance if department leader's KPIs and bonus structure hasn't changed, they will continue to actively fight open source. Even if there is now a new, fancy department with even big names from open source communities, that doesn't mean all the other departments changed.
Also what happens to the devs who are there for 20+ years now, probably quite a few of them in senior dev and architect roles. Will they drop all that they've grown up with? Can Microsoft afford to let them go for big money and hire new, unknown people instead?
If they manage to get this github integration right, I may start to think about them in a positive fashion but until now there's too much doubt and too many things that might go wrong. Compared to the size of a huge corp we've only seen fluff up till now.
I feel that they were like this during the Windows 8 era.
But I like to believe they had their wake-up call (the failure of Windows RT, of Windows Phone, the rise of macOS and iOS) to a point where they were ready to try something radical, and what we're seeing now is the result of those efforts.
This is insightful, and in addition to this, culture change can and does happen at companies.
Just because they're evil today, doesn't mean they'll be evil tomorrow.
Similarly, just because they're good today, doesn't mean they'll be good tomorrow.
We should always look with suspicion at megacorps acting with what appears to be outrageous altruism. Companies don't throw around $7.5 billion without expecting to profit from it.
They did change, and quite radically when Kevin Turner (then COO) was ousted (or voluntary left, it's unclear).
> Also what happens to the devs who are there for 20+ years now
Today, the biggest focus for Microsoft is Azure. And incidentally Azure grew enormously under Satya, so they had to hire a lot of new people there. A lot of them wouldn't even have considered joining MS under Ballmer, and a lot of them were hired specifically for there knowledge of non-MS technologies. Things might be different in older divisions, such as Windows, but at least in the division that now matter the most, the culture is dead-set on open source and the values that Satya promotes.
This doesn't really make sense. How did they get to be that successful? They must have changed something from an earlier point, when their most successful point was less successful.
Your claim is like saying "A companies stock is always worth less than its historical maximum". It's only true until there's a new maximum.
Ironically... having Microsoft behind GitHub and being willing to lose money on the company forever could actually be the reasons it has a hope to turn a profit some day.
However the opposite might very well happen: Use your GitHub account to sign into MS other services.
You don't have to go through 3 redirections to login, handling of 3rd party apps authorization is well thought out, and GitHub is already used an auth provider for many dev servcies, Microsoft accounts are not.
No he didn't. He said "We love GitHub login. Your GitHub account is your developer identity, and many users are accustomed to signing into developer tools and services (e.g. Travis, Circle) with their GitHub accounts."
That leaves open the door for migrating all github accounts into Live accounts within a github namespace. The could have already done it but aren't letting it leak into the github UI yet.
>Use your GitHub account to sign into MS other services.
This isn't an argument they won't do it. It suggests that they will even more.
Implementing GitHub login for Microsoft's other products can be split into three categories of possibility:
1) Other MS services add support for GitHub's authentication systems.
2) GitHub accounts will be mirrored into Microsoft's existing account system.
3) GitHub's backend migrates to Microsoft's exiting account system.
The question isn't "if" but "when and with what UI" #3 will happen.
I call BS -- it was very grown-up of Microsoft to abuse repeatedly their clients and partners, and it is just and right to call them out on it.. that one statement is obsequious whiteash, plain and simple.
The author implies that if you have a healthy skepticism when megacorps throw around billions of dollars, you're not "grown up."
Acquired might be replaced with other euphemisms like "joined" or "became a member of".
What is this guy talking about? Maybe he's changed but Microsoft hasn't: they're still a company doing evil things on a large scale that simply sees more value (for them) increased FOSS support. I'll especially highlight the patent suits with them pulling billions of dollars from Android vendors despite them not contributing anything to Android. They were working on displacing it with Windows Phone. Yet, they use legal threats to pull hundreds of millions a year for their "inventions" on paper from those actually building things we want to buy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/11/01/microsoft...
Both stevelord and I had a few more examples at the link below where we last discussed it:
https://lobste.rs/s/zknzmj/microsoft_acquire_github_for_7_5_...
EDIT: In case anyone wonders, I was hoping a company like Red Hat acquired them. One that is a bit less evil with more incentive to keep high investments in FOSS. Given the numbers involved, one can't hope for much more.
Thanks for the recognition for GitLab! We hope that for many people that switched https://twitter.com/develosysadmine/status/10050613234058731... was the case: "For me, I already knew GitLab was better than GitHub in a variety of ways. Microsoft just gave me the slightest nudge to actually make the switch."
This can be tricky in a legally messed up environment. In US, courts sided with Oracle about copyrightability of APIs. And guess who supported Oracle in that dispute? Microsoft. So how should open source projects feel about it, especially when they let's say implement MS own APIs?
Those saying there is no reason to worry are just hoping for big amount of luck. Yeah I hope so too, but let's face it, it's very unlikely they're not gonna do anything undesirable and only improve the platform.
I find this article distasteful and lacking integrity.
Feels like a parent chiding a kid
I guess Github was in worse shape than they looked like on the outside. Happens; the fact that the 3 founders made a fortune off of this is unfortunate.
One of those founders stepped down and yet he still won.
It's just a game; wether you play blackjack or poker or big stakes with companies.