Things are really bad when bloomberg makes mistakes like this- Github has nothing to do with Microsoft. Bloomberg of all should know what that means, even if a layman doesn't.
If even bloomber makes mistakes like this then who will not?
Github has absolutely nothing to do with this and while a layman might not get it- its something every single one of bloombergs intended clients should and would.
There is mostly functional git remote - https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/git-remote-ipld - It's still missing "full" remote tracking with IPNS, that will get implemented soon after next go-ipfs release, so it's a bit weird to use now
Also, if you mostly use GitHub as a way to backup your code or to synchronise it between machines, and you're okay with spending a little bit, simply spin up a 5$/month VPS on digital ocean (or similar), set up your SSH keys, create bare git repos for your projects, and you're good to go. Private and simple.
What GitHub has that GitLab didn't offer in my experience last year is a snappy website. Apart from that I'm a huge fan of GitLab, it is superior.
I believe that GitHub is more popular mainly because it was first, gained traction and became synonymous for some people with git itself, and open source.
The market segment of web hosted Git repositories was a relatively new and small market segment when GitHub got started back in 2008.
GitLab didn't appear until 2011, and at the time it didn't feel to me like a direct competitor. So GitHub had quite a bit of extra time to establish its presence and capture a large share of a growing market.
For a large chunk of GitHub's users, GitHub fulfills their needs well enough that they don't feel much motivation to make a change. Even if GitLab is better than GitHub for a person or company, it has to be better enough to be worth the pain of switching.
And I think for most users, that just isn't the case. Speaking anecdotally, there are some things about GitLab I like more than GitHub. And if I were starting out, I'd likely pick GitLab. But all of my code is on GitHub, and although I pay a monthly fee for private repos, it's small enough that it doesn't bother me.
> and given that it's open-source, there's no fear of any shutdowns.
Well, not entirely. The community aspect of GitHub would largely be lost if it vanished overnight and was replaced by scattered competing clones, even if they were running the exact same code.
Yeah... if anyone remembers Google Wave, which was open sourced and pushed out to Apache when Google decided to close it down. Eventually that didn't even have enough momentum to live on under Apache.
Which might not meet some definitions of fear, but it's not the best outcome for anyone who likes a product.
Not a bad comparison, but I think Google Wave was doomed from the start. As they say, it 'filled a much needed gap'. It wasn't quite a forum, it wasn't quite an IM chat system, it wasn't quite a wiki, and it had no clear advantages.
Google Reader
iGoogle
Google Talk
Google Health
Knol
Picnik
Buzz
AARDVARK
Sidewiki
Notebook
Wave
Dictionary
Labs
SearchWiki
Video
Dodgeball
Jaiku
Lively
Answers
Page Creator
I won't even mention how bad android sucks with devices never seeing security patches, updates or new releases.
I'm just not a fan of choosing sides. Already saw google code die, why would i want them to own or have heavy influence over gitlab?
Me too; I've moved my active projects to Gitlab quite a while ago and haven't looked back. I just prefer everything about the Gitlab user experience over GitHub.
Thanks for commenting! By the way we intent to grow as an independent company. We want to support all public clouds. This financing was lead by Iconiq, not GV. And we plan to go public on November 18, 2020.
Some programmers were concerned about how Microsoft -- historically critical of open-source tools like GitHub and GitLab -- would change the platform as its new owner.
I wasn't aware MS was critical of GitHub and GitLab. Does anyone has more info on this?
It's a misleading sentence, I would say - Steve Ballmer was very critical of open source (he once called Linux "a cancer"), but this was certainly "historically", ie. quite some years before GitHub and GitLab even existed.
Actually I trust Microsoft more with Github than I would trust Google. Never imagined I would say this until few months ago. Also I just left free google consumer services few days ago.
The bigger and more authority something wields the more people should be should be inclined to be skeptical of it.
More than a decade ago the behemoth was Microsoft. Now it's Google. I guess if those positions reversed again I'd go back to being more skeptical of Microsoft.
Microsoft still the largest software house. Of course Google is bigger on the web, but this doesn't make MS automatically a better choice even if it's fancy to call MS a trustworthy company as they invested few millions (out of billions) into FOSS ecosystem, basically because their cloud platform, meanwhile do everything to destroy competition everywhere else.
>meanwhile do everything to destroy competition everywhere else.
That's not even remotely true. Powershell core, SQL on Linux, WSL, vs code, etc etc. They're doing their best to give customers choice in just about every new product they release.
Developers. Those are choices for developers, not their customers.
Their customers are still primarily enterprise/gov.
And the reason for giving choice and candy to the developers is to keep them onboard and happy to develop for the ecosystem, so that customers will continue to buy in as the ecosystem has what they need.
I'm not saying WSL or VS Code are evil. They make developing on Windows a joy. But they make it a joy with that goal in mind.
Really? SQL isn't free. Github isn't free. Linux on Azure isn't free.
The only other apps they're selling on-prem to enterprises are Exchange and AD.
In both cases, their focus is on moving customers to a hosted/cloud based version, so it's not something I would ever expect them to spend a ton of time and effort porting to another on-premises OS. For SMB they've become far, far more open both licensing it to third parties as well as helping out the samba crew with the open source version.
Do you have a single example of them being openly hostile? Or you're just whining about them not open sourcing and giving away the farm?
Is it really an industry thing? There do seem to be several large bad actors at present (MS being one of them), and but not sure it really extends to most of the IT industry.
Maybe you're meaning some non-IT industry? eg Marketing?
I just have mail left to migrate, which in itself is proving quite difficult. Mail services are plentiful, paid or free, but mail for 5+ custom domains, where i'm not paying $5/mo per user, those are hard to come by.
I'm planning on, once again, spinning up my own mailserver on a $5/mo VPS. Have lots of domains, but not that many users/traffic.
I'm also always actively looking, and they look interesting, but their recent blog posts don't fill me with too much confidence (although they have to be commended on being so open about it). Any personal experience there?
Yeah, I'd agree about the recent blog posts. But I've been a customer of theirs for about a year and have only good things to say about the quality of the product. I think I originally came across them from another hacker news comment too.
I used to run my own mail server for years but spam was becomming a problem as it always does when running your own system and I thought the pricing of most of the services was poor if you had lots of addresses but didn't send/receive many emails. Spam hasn't been an issue for me with mxroute so far and their infrastructure seems to be pretty solid.
I'm slightly bothered by the fact that their servers are located in the worlds surveillance hotspots no. 2 and 3. but i guess email always has at least 2 involved parties, so it's not exactly "top secret".
That's true. But unecrypted email really isn't secure anyway. I'd prefer this solution to using Google Mail and having my emails read for targeted advertising.
I've tried mailcow, and it is also being considered. I'm trying to dig up "dirt" on it to see just how secure it is.
I'm always very nervous when it comes to running docker in production. Also, it looks like it (by default) stores emails in a docker container, which in my book is just overcomplicating things. While i don't mind software being containerized, i much prefer having my data stored in the plain old filesystem.
I have chosen Fastmail. Cheap, works really well (but I am a new customer so more time needs to pass), you can register I think 100 custom domains on 1 account, aliases, catch all addresses, etc.. They host caldav and carddav stuff too. Their webui is really fast, much faster than gmail, and IMAP works great.
AND they can import your gmail account. They imported mine in a few hours, 4.5gb of mails.
Their pricing says $5 per user per month with custom domains. That's exactly what the parent comment said they didn't want. Am I missing some cheaper plan?
You are right about the open-core. However, in that blog-post, Sid mentioned that we are an open-source company and remarked that open-core is the more accurate term.
Microsoft, since Satya took over, is a developer-first company. Everything they're doing is designed to give developers better tools on whatever platform they choose.
As we're all aware by now, Google is an advertising company (with a heap of technology, but it's still a company which primarily sells advertising).
To be fair to Google (and I say that as a massive skeptic), they are diversifying their business model, most notably by offering cloud services and developer tools. At one point 98% of their revenue was from advertising, and probably they saw the writing on the wall that it was time to diversify. Google Cloud seems to be doing well. I’m not sure what the revenue breakdown is now, but also not sure we can entirely call them an advertising company anymore.
And I'd say that a significant portion of the remaining 16% is a byproduct of platforms for selling ads (e.g. Android) or just monetizing infrastructure Google had anyhow to serve ad related services (GCS, Google Drive).
The one thing coming to mind which is not designed to boost advertising is their Pixel line (after they killed the rest of their hardware, of course) but even that is not as much of a standalone activity as it is a way to effectively steer the future of the Android ecosystem.
Ask yourself this: Which Google products or services would have justification as standalone P&L units, without collecting user data and sending it to the mothership? Not too many.
Play (the non-admob parts: app hosting/monetization, licensed content providing (music, movies/tv).
ChromeOS / Classroom
The entire Hardware division (which now includes Nest)
An awful lot of the Geo/Maps org is oriented away from direct advertising.
FWIW, you didn't ask, and my answer didn't include, other significant pieces of Google investment that are not remotely ad driven, like Deepmind & the entire RMI (Research & Machine Intelligence) organizations.
Once upon a time, Google was known for those low-distraction text-only banners...
What I am trying to say: The whole online advertising business would not be that creepy if Google and Facebook wouldn't compete on who can track more out of the web users. The reason why we call them an advertising company, is that their core actions are driven by their advertising business. Otherwise, you would consider calling them a search company ;-)
Obviously, but what are the means to that end? All public companies are in the quest of increasing shareholder value - some of them do this by selling tobacco, others by monetizing user data (in other words, ad services) and others by providing developer tools and platforms.
Actually no. Vanguard has a different arrangement from pretty much any company in that it is owned by the funds it manages. As such any return vanguard earns for shareholders is money they charged the shareholders in the first place. At best it is a zero sum game, and more likely it is inefficient.
But that is an obvious observation. Almost a tautology. The question is how they choose to go about doing it. One company plans to keep selling me off to advertisers. Another plans to provide me with software.
> One company plans to keep selling me off to advertisers. Another plans to provide me with software.
That's not exactly true. Both companies have shown that they _will_ switch to selling something different when they believe they can make more money that way.
Also, both these companies spy on you while using their products, and both sell that data to their advertisers. It's not just Google.
You should use both their products as you want, when they help you. My point is mainly not to trust that the company behind the developer products is some kind of a good actor. They will sell you out when it fits them.
I think it is too early to say if Microsoft has reformed. Fact is that a) they bought GitHub, b) infiltrated Python, c) infiltrated the Linux foundation.
Given certain recent and not so recent events, it is still very possible that they are purposefully creating divisiveness among open source developers for the long term goal of establishing Windows dominance again.
I would put it simply: Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company, and Google is an ad company. Because that's what these companies sell to keep themselves alive.
I'm convinced that Microsoft will soon offer a "free" version of Windows 10, supported by explicit tracking, advertising, and promotions (q.v., Candy Crush). I think it will be quite successful.
i skipped the part during installation where it says to enter a key. after install, it says windows is activated, no watermark, no countdown. i don't use it, though. i just don't trust free shit anymore.
Apple build advanced products with vertical integration (taking risks, but with a high profit margin). Microsoft sells "cheap" software (historically using nasty commercial tactics). Google is an AI company. By luck, trying to give meaning to web pages and search requests brings a lot of money from ads. Google tries to get knowledge about every aspects of our lives (mail, contact, documents, travel, interests) in order to build smarter IA (like Alphago). The main risk of Google is to be broken in pieces for monopoly. Google is implied in politic to protect itself and gain military contracts. IMHO, the future of Google is about building skynet (and terminator). Earning money is a side effect.
That doesn't even make sense. Google is the ad company. If they "sold your data" as claimed, they'd be giving away their biggest advantage to their competitors.
Sadly it became a user hostile company at the same it became developer friendly. So while the tools (.net Core, VS Code, Xamarin) are a pleasure to use, I hardly boot Windows 10 anymore except for VS. The UI inconstancies, the productivity-nerfed start menu, the pervasive ads, etc. all contribute to gave that negative sentiment.
Also while MS is good to integrate third party open source projects, it also fails at the same time to address some core concerns of developpers from its own platform. For years people have wanted a portable UI framework for .net but the idea is always dismissed by the higher management. So, I think Microsoft is actually a developer-second, hype-first company.
Microsoft only left US Federal oversight seven years ago. Satya has only been in charge for four years. Do you think the mindset of an international 130,000 employee company can change that fast?
Yes. Because you don’t have to change all of it. A lot of those people are in support, logistics, or working in extremely stable projects (e.g. office).
Besides, the risk here is toxic managerial choices, and you can and do swap out VPs and similar over half a decade.
> Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of "commoditizing your complement"
> This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields ...
> ...they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
After having read this article, it's been interesting how a lot of these investments have started making more sense. They often aren't primarily about the product itself, rather they serve the function of minimizing any leverage other companies could have over them.
As Github offers an access to a valuable resource for tech companies, developers, Microsoft could use it to promote its products/services and to attract talent. This isn't good for Google, so they are hoping to reduce Microsoft's leverage.
In some sense this is obvious, but I hadn't consciously identified this as a pattern before.
Apologies if what I say is naive -- I don't follow Google announcements at all -- but they don't seem to try and progress any field per se, except maybe deep learning and only where it serves them (like one of their first successes was to reduce their power usage on a ship full of servers I think?).
They are merging YouTube Gaming to YT itself (cited branding problems), discontinuing Inbox next March... Add that to a long list of canceled services. I am not saying they have to run a charity but they do seem very heavy-handed in these situations.
And so far we have not seen them innovate anywhere for a while -- correct me if I am wrong.
To me, it seems they entrench themselves even further in the business of using personal data for profit -- one example could be the upcoming laptop OS Fuchsia. Imagine how much more they will know about people if that takes off on a massive scale.
They do have lots of ancillary revenue streams, but when you're talking about 100s of billions from ads then they just get overshadowed completely. Very hard to build an equivalently sized business in any other sector.
The major now seems to be on Google Cloud, but they have struggled there with bad marketing, lack of sales and support talent, and strange priorities. Seems to be growing now with the AI functionalities but there's a long road ahead.
Google Compute Engine, and their infrastructure offerings more generally, are in a nice spot relative to Amazon and Microsoft. AWS and Azure get all the attention, but I wouldn't be surprised if GCE is decently profitable as well.
Like sibling commentors have pointed out, it's easy for even relatively successful ventures to be completely overshadowed by the golden goose that is ads and search.
The very example you cite at the end is an example of them genuinely innovating and advancing the field. Have you read the Fuchsia docs (https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/HEAD/README.md)? It's spearheading several innovative OS concepts and I'm excited to see it develop (to name three: microkernel architecture, top to bottom least-privilege access sandboxing, and Flutter for the UI which advances UI development in other ways).
As much as a Google replacement would be great for competition, it would be extremely difficult. Google was able to scale with the web gradually through anti spam and proprietary software, but a new competitor would struggle to reach such a needed scale so quickly
Agreed but I don’t think this is quite the same case. Back then Alta Vista pretty much only offered search as a value to its users. Google certainly started there but offers a lot more than just search to its users. Only one service had to be overthrown to overcome AV. Lots of services would need to be overcome to overthrow google.
Gitlab, from my outside perspective, seems to be a company run with commonly accepted (here) best practicies through and through.
Very transparent to users, open core, very modern tech stack, entirely remote workforce, what more could you ask of a company? They aim to do things basically the way we as a community would ask.
I guess we will see how it turns out. I think the lesson here is that you can't just attempt to follow best practices and accepted wisdom without really thinking for yourself. (Nor would I argue they were clearly following best DB practices!)
Hey, thank you for the feedback. We are heavily focusing on performance improvements - both in the product (so that features run better)[1] and in our GitLab.com infrastructure team (so that GitLab.com runs more reliably)[2]. We stayed transparent about the database incident and people really appreciated that.
There's been a few stories about the fact that Google was also interested in buying GitHub. I think the GitHub CEO felt Microsoft would be a better fit for them.
ducks in advance - I acknowledge that Microsoft and Google are not without sin, especially Google, but at least the coding and engineering teams of Google that I've been watching, namely the prolific #webperfmatters crowd behind free beer contributions such as SPDY, QUIC, WebM/WebP, mod/ngx_pagespeed, Brotli, HSTS pinning and leveraging other teams' Google assets like SERPs and Chrome padlock design to pressure the adoption of HTTPS use, at least that behavior, talent and energy seems to be in line with the gist of Github. These teams collaborate with organizations you (plural) find much less threatening, for example with Brotli (gzip alternative), there was collaboration between veteran Google and Mozilla developers, and now about 85% of us use browsers that have implemented Brotli support which, in addition to claims and my own testing, is across-the-board superior to gzip in this context. As for adoption on the server side, NGINX at least was open minded.
All the time independent developers cook up superior things to prevailing standards but, lacking the might of Google and Microsoft and Mozilla, their work seldom gains traction. Git* under control of Microsoft and Google could give the little guys with the superior code a better spotlight, a symbiotic win-win for everybody.
I am convinced guys like Ilya Grigorik and Colt Mcanlis show up to work, and to public lectures, with making the web faster as their objective. Were they pressured to insidiously exploit Gitlab to our detriment, they'd blow whistles to stop Google, like with AI collaborations with the military, or at least resign, I'd hope. They'd have better and nobler things to do than be party to that.
Judging from the pronounced skepticism and negative consensus among this crowd to such actions, I think you will do an effective job hedging the risks and "keeping them [Google, Microsoft] honest" with respect to treasures like Github and Gitlab, both in your scrutiny and the influence you wield.
I also think that, if they behave themselves, their control over Github/Gitlab may give them more return on their respective investments than were they to Do Evil. Further, if they can't resist their undesirable habits, or even if they do behave, a market has already been created for some sort of Lavabit-like set of competitors to emerge, and that should be regarded as a good thing as another consensus hereabouts has been, before Microsoft's involvement, that Github's growth was a threat and at odds with our interests.
That said, note the lack of citations in my comment indicating that this is nothing but unfounded devil's-advocate corporate-apologist Google-fanboy speculation on my part and that you all are probably right... Cheers everybody!
edit: Ouch, i thought that was more substantive than contrarian. Before this gets voted to death, could someone please offer a rebuttal? I'm often wrong and it could help me wake up.
In the past we have had few "code repos" from Savannah to Sf and few sites like freshmeat to spread the news, the code, the idea. Of course we also have had and have used usenet.
IMVHO today it's time to evalutare ZeroNet for project sites/blog and something like IPFS (not much convinced by this project but...) for code and repos to AVOID depend on someone else server's switching to relay only on us all.
For me there is no difference in GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket etc, nor between Google and Microsoft. In an era of diversity companies are not a problem, in an oligopolistic era like today, in an era of proprietary platforms instead of open standard companies are a problem and should be avoided, especially if they are big, especially if they push mix of proprietary and FOSS solution.
Ironically, I think Gitlab's popularity comes from the fact that it allowed free private repos, gaining more popularity in "closed source" teams. (At least, that's why I first used Gitlab)
We have community edition deployed to AWS which is pretty neat. Not only do we have private repos, but the entire deployment is private and behind a firewall. Github would require you to sign up for an enterprise hosted account and pay +$$$s. For the project we have at work that would be a hard, hard sell - without Gitlab we'd be a bit screwed for modern Git workflow with easy code reviews and all the other great stuff Github pioneered.
However, that's an old blog-post, today GitLab is the only single product for the complete DevOps lifecycle. Here you can find out more references about GitLab DevOps https://about.gitlab.com/devops/.
>ZeroNet is a decentralized web-like network of peer-to-peer users.
so how do you "spread the word" by using a peer to peer network that no one has signed up for? might as well share a link to the project on your google drive on a subreddit you maintain but don't publicize
I use github a lot but I'm not too worried about the vendor lock-in. Since git is by nature distributed it's trivial to migrate the code elsewhere. The real problem is migrating the issues (but there are solutions for that as well, even if it's a bit more clunky) and the "social network" aspect but I don't care much for that myself.
But you're right, maybe IPFS plus something like Fossil (including issues in the VCS directly) could be a good solution to have a truly decentralized "platform".
For me and my team, git is not the tie-in for github. PRs are. Those are the proprietary parts of GitHubs value proposition. We use them all the time and fine the review process pretty convenient. I haven’t tried gitlabs equivalent. I’m sure we could use them but we’d need to adjust our workflow. So we’ll stay at github until the cost of migrating is less than any pain points we find at GitHub
I do not know if it's a joke for you but it's a discussion point: my point is that devs are not "mass users" so they MUST know the tools of the trade.
So if I agree for instance that LaTeX for the classic stereotypical secretary it's a lock-out software despite it's excellent characteristics, I can't accept the same argument for an IT professional and even for a casual hobbyist programmer.
"Alphabet’s role in funding the 350-person firm comes soon after it lost out to Microsoft in the bidding for GitHub. "
Can someone describe to me how bidding for companies like GitHub works? Is it a blind bid where the highest bidder is selected? Or are participants given the opportunity to up their bid against one another?
218 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadGithub has absolutely nothing to do with this and while a layman might not get it- its something every single one of bloombergs intended clients should and would.
Single Sideband Radio?
There is mostly functional git remote - https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/git-remote-ipld - It's still missing "full" remote tracking with IPNS, that will get implemented soon after next go-ipfs release, so it's a bit weird to use now
Git portal is also taking shape: https://igis.io/ (also accessible via any gateway - https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/igis.io/). Git repo is at https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/IGiS (Dynamic features like pull-requests are hard).
Edit: formatting
It's good, by the way.
I believe that GitHub is more popular mainly because it was first, gained traction and became synonymous for some people with git itself, and open source.
The market segment of web hosted Git repositories was a relatively new and small market segment when GitHub got started back in 2008.
GitLab didn't appear until 2011, and at the time it didn't feel to me like a direct competitor. So GitHub had quite a bit of extra time to establish its presence and capture a large share of a growing market.
For a large chunk of GitHub's users, GitHub fulfills their needs well enough that they don't feel much motivation to make a change. Even if GitLab is better than GitHub for a person or company, it has to be better enough to be worth the pain of switching.
And I think for most users, that just isn't the case. Speaking anecdotally, there are some things about GitLab I like more than GitHub. And if I were starting out, I'd likely pick GitLab. But all of my code is on GitHub, and although I pay a monthly fee for private repos, it's small enough that it doesn't bother me.
I haven't gone through that document yet, but I'll take a look.
They've fully stepped out of the shadow of Github (for a long while, in my mind), and it's nice to see people taking attention.
why not? If it means gitlab can have the resources to keep improving...
and given that it's open-source, there's no fear of any shutdowns.
Well, not entirely. The community aspect of GitHub would largely be lost if it vanished overnight and was replaced by scattered competing clones, even if they were running the exact same code.
Which might not meet some definitions of fear, but it's not the best outcome for anyone who likes a product.
Apparently this, uh, 'innovation', is worth around $3bn.
[0] https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed
Google Reader iGoogle Google Talk Google Health Knol Picnik Buzz AARDVARK Sidewiki Notebook Wave Dictionary Labs SearchWiki Video Dodgeball Jaiku Lively Answers Page Creator
I won't even mention how bad android sucks with devices never seeing security patches, updates or new releases.
I'm just not a fan of choosing sides. Already saw google code die, why would i want them to own or have heavy influence over gitlab?
I wasn't aware MS was critical of GitHub and GitLab. Does anyone has more info on this?
For the benefit of the reader, they explain that GitHub and GitLab are (more or less) open-source tools.
> historically critical of open-source tools that have its file hosted on GitHub and GitLab
Maybe it was overzealous editor and simplified it too much.
More than a decade ago the behemoth was Microsoft. Now it's Google. I guess if those positions reversed again I'd go back to being more skeptical of Microsoft.
That's not even remotely true. Powershell core, SQL on Linux, WSL, vs code, etc etc. They're doing their best to give customers choice in just about every new product they release.
Their customers are still primarily enterprise/gov.
And the reason for giving choice and candy to the developers is to keep them onboard and happy to develop for the ecosystem, so that customers will continue to buy in as the ecosystem has what they need.
I'm not saying WSL or VS Code are evil. They make developing on Windows a joy. But they make it a joy with that goal in mind.
The only other apps they're selling on-prem to enterprises are Exchange and AD.
In both cases, their focus is on moving customers to a hosted/cloud based version, so it's not something I would ever expect them to spend a ton of time and effort porting to another on-premises OS. For SMB they've become far, far more open both licensing it to third parties as well as helping out the samba crew with the open source version.
Do you have a single example of them being openly hostile? Or you're just whining about them not open sourcing and giving away the farm?
The spyware literally built into Win 10 - and backported to previous windows - which can't be disabled without third party products?
To me, that's openly hostile to everyone. Note - "everyone" includes developers. I'm not sure why many people seem to give MS a free pass on this. :/
I'm not sure why everyone pretends this is an MS thing and not an industry thing :/
Maybe you're meaning some non-IT industry? eg Marketing?
Nowhere did I claim them to be hostile. I never expressed my thoughts on how they acquire business as good or bad.
All I did was state that "They're doing their best" isn't out of the goodness of their hearts, there's a biz decision behind it.
> Or you're just whining about them not open sourcing and giving away the farm?
Way to try and attack my character. Never said a word of what you're accusing.
With Google I’m not so sure any more. Hopefully I’ll soon be able to say goodbye as well.
Microsoft didn't take over the Evil Empire title until the late '90s, IMO.
I'm planning on, once again, spinning up my own mailserver on a $5/mo VPS. Have lots of domains, but not that many users/traffic.
I used to run my own mail server for years but spam was becomming a problem as it always does when running your own system and I thought the pricing of most of the services was poor if you had lots of addresses but didn't send/receive many emails. Spam hasn't been an issue for me with mxroute so far and their infrastructure seems to be pretty solid.
I'm slightly bothered by the fact that their servers are located in the worlds surveillance hotspots no. 2 and 3. but i guess email always has at least 2 involved parties, so it's not exactly "top secret".
If you are the only actual user of those emails accounts, then it's a great option (I have 5+ domains under a single account with them)
https://mailcow.email/
I'm always very nervous when it comes to running docker in production. Also, it looks like it (by default) stores emails in a docker container, which in my book is just overcomplicating things. While i don't mind software being containerized, i much prefer having my data stored in the plain old filesystem.
AND they can import your gmail account. They imported mine in a few hours, 4.5gb of mails.
If Google wants to throw some of their money on something that end user can fully control, then why not be happy about it?
GitLab is open core, not open source. They say so themselves:
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core-gith...
As we're all aware by now, Google is an advertising company (with a heap of technology, but it's still a company which primarily sells advertising).
https://martechtoday.com/google-posts-31-1b-in-total-revenue...
The one thing coming to mind which is not designed to boost advertising is their Pixel line (after they killed the rest of their hardware, of course) but even that is not as much of a standalone activity as it is a way to effectively steer the future of the Android ecosystem.
Ask yourself this: Which Google products or services would have justification as standalone P&L units, without collecting user data and sending it to the mothership? Not too many.
Cloud
X
Waymo
Play (the non-admob parts: app hosting/monetization, licensed content providing (music, movies/tv).
ChromeOS / Classroom
The entire Hardware division (which now includes Nest)
An awful lot of the Geo/Maps org is oriented away from direct advertising.
FWIW, you didn't ask, and my answer didn't include, other significant pieces of Google investment that are not remotely ad driven, like Deepmind & the entire RMI (Research & Machine Intelligence) organizations.
What I am trying to say: The whole online advertising business would not be that creepy if Google and Facebook wouldn't compete on who can track more out of the web users. The reason why we call them an advertising company, is that their core actions are driven by their advertising business. Otherwise, you would consider calling them a search company ;-)
This is what people said about Google too a few years back.
The reality is: Everything they're doing is designed to increase the company value for their shareholders.
That's not exactly true. Both companies have shown that they _will_ switch to selling something different when they believe they can make more money that way.
Also, both these companies spy on you while using their products, and both sell that data to their advertisers. It's not just Google.
You should use both their products as you want, when they help you. My point is mainly not to trust that the company behind the developer products is some kind of a good actor. They will sell you out when it fits them.
Given certain recent and not so recent events, it is still very possible that they are purposefully creating divisiveness among open source developers for the long term goal of establishing Windows dominance again.
It's a bit late.
i skipped the part during installation where it says to enter a key. after install, it says windows is activated, no watermark, no countdown. i don't use it, though. i just don't trust free shit anymore.
Also while MS is good to integrate third party open source projects, it also fails at the same time to address some core concerns of developpers from its own platform. For years people have wanted a portable UI framework for .net but the idea is always dismissed by the higher management. So, I think Microsoft is actually a developer-second, hype-first company.
Besides, the risk here is toxic managerial choices, and you can and do swap out VPs and similar over half a decade.
Anecdotally speaking, the culture enforced by Ballmer was not that popular among Microsoft's employees.
What I'm saying is, employees don't get to decide how a company is run.
They haven't bought GitLab
> Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of "commoditizing your complement"
> This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields ...
> ...they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
After having read this article, it's been interesting how a lot of these investments have started making more sense. They often aren't primarily about the product itself, rather they serve the function of minimizing any leverage other companies could have over them.
As Github offers an access to a valuable resource for tech companies, developers, Microsoft could use it to promote its products/services and to attract talent. This isn't good for Google, so they are hoping to reduce Microsoft's leverage.
In some sense this is obvious, but I hadn't consciously identified this as a pattern before.
They are merging YouTube Gaming to YT itself (cited branding problems), discontinuing Inbox next March... Add that to a long list of canceled services. I am not saying they have to run a charity but they do seem very heavy-handed in these situations.
And so far we have not seen them innovate anywhere for a while -- correct me if I am wrong.
To me, it seems they entrench themselves even further in the business of using personal data for profit -- one example could be the upcoming laptop OS Fuchsia. Imagine how much more they will know about people if that takes off on a massive scale.
As for alternative revenues, they are heavily pushing Google Cloud platforms to businesses.
The major now seems to be on Google Cloud, but they have struggled there with bad marketing, lack of sales and support talent, and strange priorities. Seems to be growing now with the AI functionalities but there's a long road ahead.
Like sibling commentors have pointed out, it's easy for even relatively successful ventures to be completely overshadowed by the golden goose that is ads and search.
Tl;dr: High cost of entry for newcomers
(Note I said “users” not “customers”)
GitLab: 4.1m to 4.6m visits
GitHub: 542m to 561m visits
Very transparent to users, open core, very modern tech stack, entirely remote workforce, what more could you ask of a company? They aim to do things basically the way we as a community would ask.
How will it turn out? Anyone's guess :)
Don't they have massive scaling problems? And didn't they delete their production database by mistake recently?
GitHub doesn't seem to have faced the same problems - so it seems difficult to argue GitLab has better practices.
> what more could you ask of a company?
Reasonable page response times?
Support for plugins?
That was in February 2017 [0]. Not exactly recently IMO.
I recall that Github also had data loss and scaling issues back when they were starting up. Those days are now gone for them though.
[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...
The real question is did they learn from their mistakes and implement better guardrails to prevent this from happening in the future?
[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?label....
[2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues
ducks in advance - I acknowledge that Microsoft and Google are not without sin, especially Google, but at least the coding and engineering teams of Google that I've been watching, namely the prolific #webperfmatters crowd behind free beer contributions such as SPDY, QUIC, WebM/WebP, mod/ngx_pagespeed, Brotli, HSTS pinning and leveraging other teams' Google assets like SERPs and Chrome padlock design to pressure the adoption of HTTPS use, at least that behavior, talent and energy seems to be in line with the gist of Github. These teams collaborate with organizations you (plural) find much less threatening, for example with Brotli (gzip alternative), there was collaboration between veteran Google and Mozilla developers, and now about 85% of us use browsers that have implemented Brotli support which, in addition to claims and my own testing, is across-the-board superior to gzip in this context. As for adoption on the server side, NGINX at least was open minded.
All the time independent developers cook up superior things to prevailing standards but, lacking the might of Google and Microsoft and Mozilla, their work seldom gains traction. Git* under control of Microsoft and Google could give the little guys with the superior code a better spotlight, a symbiotic win-win for everybody.
I am convinced guys like Ilya Grigorik and Colt Mcanlis show up to work, and to public lectures, with making the web faster as their objective. Were they pressured to insidiously exploit Gitlab to our detriment, they'd blow whistles to stop Google, like with AI collaborations with the military, or at least resign, I'd hope. They'd have better and nobler things to do than be party to that.
Judging from the pronounced skepticism and negative consensus among this crowd to such actions, I think you will do an effective job hedging the risks and "keeping them [Google, Microsoft] honest" with respect to treasures like Github and Gitlab, both in your scrutiny and the influence you wield.
I also think that, if they behave themselves, their control over Github/Gitlab may give them more return on their respective investments than were they to Do Evil. Further, if they can't resist their undesirable habits, or even if they do behave, a market has already been created for some sort of Lavabit-like set of competitors to emerge, and that should be regarded as a good thing as another consensus hereabouts has been, before Microsoft's involvement, that Github's growth was a threat and at odds with our interests.
That said, note the lack of citations in my comment indicating that this is nothing but unfounded devil's-advocate corporate-apologist Google-fanboy speculation on my part and that you all are probably right... Cheers everybody!
edit: Ouch, i thought that was more substantive than contrarian. Before this gets voted to death, could someone please offer a rebuttal? I'm often wrong and it could help me wake up.
IMVHO today it's time to evalutare ZeroNet for project sites/blog and something like IPFS (not much convinced by this project but...) for code and repos to AVOID depend on someone else server's switching to relay only on us all.
For me there is no difference in GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket etc, nor between Google and Microsoft. In an era of diversity companies are not a problem, in an oligopolistic era like today, in an era of proprietary platforms instead of open standard companies are a problem and should be avoided, especially if they are big, especially if they push mix of proprietary and FOSS solution.
However, that's an old blog-post, today GitLab is the only single product for the complete DevOps lifecycle. Here you can find out more references about GitLab DevOps https://about.gitlab.com/devops/.
so how do you "spread the word" by using a peer to peer network that no one has signed up for? might as well share a link to the project on your google drive on a subreddit you maintain but don't publicize
But you're right, maybe IPFS plus something like Fossil (including issues in the VCS directly) could be a good solution to have a truly decentralized "platform".
So if I agree for instance that LaTeX for the classic stereotypical secretary it's a lock-out software despite it's excellent characteristics, I can't accept the same argument for an IT professional and even for a casual hobbyist programmer.
I don't miss it at all.
Can someone describe to me how bidding for companies like GitHub works? Is it a blind bid where the highest bidder is selected? Or are participants given the opportunity to up their bid against one another?
There was certainly more to it than comparing two numbers.