The title in this case is not very clear because it's out of context. Should be something like "the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub is complete" to be more factual and instantly understandable.
> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you.
Who asked you to make GitHub better though? It's pretty darn good already. I fear that the new CEO will try to make things better when they are already good. I'm really scared that GitHub will end up like Azure DevOps, perhaps get merged or shut down entirely when they feel they have feature parity. Currently there is no great GitHub alternative IMHO and for selfish reasons I wish Microsoft could just leave it. The most I am scared is to wake up one day and see the most ugly "Metro" UX applied to GitHub.
I have slowly moved most of my projects to GitLab. The UX is a little different, but you also get unlimited private repositories for individuals and organizations.
Thanks for sharing this! I'd love to hear if you have more feedback on how is GitLab's UX different. Particularly, what do you think GitLab could do better here?
Gitlab is a smaller company with a smaller userbase. You could argue they are a much more obvious takeover target for the Oracle / IBM / Google's wanting to compete more with Microsoft to own the developer experience.
GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business. This means that GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.
GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.
> Never in the history of acquisitions of that profile has the buyer ever given a different message than "we won't touch anything".
Well, _technically_ I worked for one where it functioned in a hands-off way. The big difference was, the parent company was a holding company specialising in a certain industry, and us functioning differently from their other properties was the whole point.
In this case, I expect things to go the What's App way: it's going to be long and slow, but MS will eat it eventually.
GitLab is decent, with an open source core that can be installed on premise — I introduced it for a former employer and they are still very happy with it.
It's not about an alternative -- heck, `apt install git` is the way everyone is already self-hosting git (you can push and pull from anything like Dropbox/Drive/OneDrive to an NFS mount). It's about the community that is GitHub.
Since the news broke I've been hosting a Gitea instance and while that works fine, I cannot go a day without using Github for things like pulling other people's code, creating issues, etc.
Probably 2/3 of my day job is implementing Azure Devops for our internal and client applications - personally I really like it although it certainly has a learning curve and some things are non-intuitive. But everyone I've talked to who has used it in a professional context more than once (e.g. not tried it once and given up) is more-or-less very happy with the quality and reliability.
If you're good with Powershell it's also extremely easy to write your own build and/or release steps which is a huge plus.
For us, a few weeks ago Azure DevOps randomly stopped processing GitHub webhooks, so merge commits didn't trigger builds anymore (and we're not the only ones, see https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/...). A fix for this issue still isn't deployed.
Just a few days ago the service connection to Azure suddenly stopped working with "401 CouldNotFetchAccessTokenForAzureStatusCode" which appeared when deploying to Azure AppService. We had to recreate the service connection to get it working again.
Recently we also wanted to move our Android builds to Azure DevOps but in the end the documentation was so confusing that we just used Bitrise instead.
It does not work unless Github is open to the internet. For example, Github Enterprise behind a VPN will not be able to use Azure Devops. Crazy but true.
Your statements sounds a little confused. Everything stagnates, suffer from miss-direction, or just become irrelevant. Someone in an earlier post mentioned sourceforge for example. we just have to hope that this acquisition doesn't make it happen anytime soon.
I blame poor product management and engineering. It's not even cached between page loads if nothing has changed (which is 99% of the time I load the page).
And every person that has ever used GitHub ever, that wants things to improve instead of remaining static. Just in the past few months Github has released a lot of cool stuff, before this was even completed. Github has changed a lot over the years, and that's a good thing. No one wants something that never improves.
TFA mentions the community "paper cuts" issue tracker[1]. I'd love to know what's so hard about the standout top-voted issue[2] that it hasn't been implemented since being logged in 2014.
Probably nothing, just that it wasn't interesting to the devs (e.g. they don't feel that is a paper cut) and/or was not pushed/promoted by management, leading to nobody working on it.
Plus I'm guessing many/most GH employees aren't looking at this, this kind of listings is generally a bummer/PITA, and fixing them is a thankless job: once you've done so, all you get is "finally, took you long enough".
More like "Finally, thank God" (the implementer becomes a God for the day).
This is the paradox of GitHub. The product itself is closed-source, so the outsiders cannot do the work to implement that feature themselves, no matter how much they want it.
Nat Friedman has cofounded Xamarin, he understands Open Source and I'm sure he'll do well as CEO of GitHub. I'm cautiously optimistic about it.
Microsoft could pull a Skype of course, but on the upside this might turn out to be a good thing, as in this climate many businesses, operating at scale and giving away so many freebies, are struggling and GitHub could have been the next SourceForge.
Who knows, maybe they'll even open source it. Fingers crossed.
Lets get one thing clear ... this company never gained anything from developing and pushing .NET and they haven't acquired a company for it either. So no, that's not a good example.
In my industry, Microsoft stacks are extremely common. The talent pool for C# in this area is tremendous, which has absolutely gained the company much synergy in the form of OS and MSSQL licensing. So the development of .Net in my opinion has made the company much more sticky.
I can't help but believe they're making a mistake (even though I want it!) in pushing .Net to open source.
"this company never gained anything from developing and pushing .NET"
I would have to disagree. .NET has become the backbone of the MSFT developer experience and has gone far beyond being just an alternative to java. It's heavily used in Azure, SQL Server, Web Applications, Desktop, Mobile etc.
Nat Friedman running this is one of the reasons I don't worry much. Plus, Microsoft buying GitHub meant...Oracle, IBM, etc. couldn't buy it, which removes a lot of risk.
Was cautiously pessimistic until I understood that Skype won't happen again because we have alternative: gitlab (and others). So it will either get better (good) or everyone will move to gitlab (good, more likely, ms hater here). So here goes.
Well as for Skype, there are a dozen alternatives out there (such as Wire). Much as I'd like to see an influx of users from Skype, very few people have it. The only group that's on there is colleagues and friends of colleagues, after the company did a pentest on Wire (see Wire's website for the reports).
I agree that Nat Friedman seems to be the right CEO for GitHub. I've observed him on Twitter in the past few months and his behaviour has been top notch. Words are worthless and what only matters is action. In the last weeks, he actually took the time to reach out to actual project maintainers and contributors to listen to what they want.
Microsoft won't ruin GitHub. Windows's ecosystem need developers more than ever. Developers are on GitHub. They simply can't screw it up.
Yes, but at least at the moment Microsoft leadership doesn't have the highest opinions on Ballmers merits regarding developers https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SNOHJf97uQU
What does “pulling a Skype” mean in this context? I remember when they bought Skype it was “bad.” But do people really use Skype any less now than before?
Heh, one of the awful things they did when they acquired Skype was rebrand a bunch of pre-existing products in the same general space with the Skype name, causing a huge amount of confusion. Hopefully they don't slap the GitHub name on everything under the sun; I'm optimistic, right now it seems like Azure and Office365 are the two catchall branding efforts.
Skype is a shell of its former self, everybody has moved over to facebook or discord. The few friends I have who did still use Skype as of a few months ago have migrated to Wire. I only know one person that uses it now and they only use it because they still have a real phone number attached to it.
I've hardly ever known a single person that has ever used Skype. I actually used to really like Lync when I worked for a company that used Office 365...but hated when they Skypified it. Microsoft Teams seems pretty awesome, but I haven't had the chance to use it. Skype does have a lot of business uses that it doesn't face any competition with...but they are features most people don't use.
On Linux they have had a client "forever". I don't use it frequently, but I have no reason to believe that it work significantly worse than on Windows. (Some usecases were not supported IIRC, something with groupcalls maybe? Screensharing was dropped at some phase, but can be achieved by some v4l2 trickery to have the screen contents appear as a camera. No idea whther it is back, I have little reason to use skype these days.)
This is only a good thing for GitHub's competitors. MS will ruin Github, so I would recommend just not getting attached to it and change over to somewhere else now, while it's easy.
> as in this climate many businesses, operating at scale and giving away so many freebies, are struggling and GitHub could have been the next SourceForge.
What kind of world do we live in when a service which is so ubiquitous and depended upon in our community is at risk of struggling?
(Side note: I haven't been following this acquisition in detail; was GH struggling? Or was the acquisition just their exit?)
The kind where VC subsidizes everything and people start to expect it for free, but when it comes time to pay, they have difficult decisions to make, and VCs require growth of their investments, so management also has difficult decisions to make.
Github would be unknown today if it wasn’t free for personal use.
Yep, but the other way around. Open source was Microsoft's fiercest enemy, and now it's managed to root deep inside the company, eating it from the inside out, turning Microsoft into something very very different than what it was 15 years ago. We won!
I remember someone replied with that to a comment of mine. I find it hard to find words for it as a non-native speaker, as I don't have to express this often, but it's rather derogatory/denigrating/belittling, as if someone is speaking complete nonsense. At the same time, it's not an obvious personal / ad hominem statement, so it's unlikely to be moderated.
Or maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the attitude here.
Game of Thrones reference. It’s usually not intended to be quite as snarky as it sounds, as it’s often used just because fans of the show are tempted to apply it. Otherwise, your perception is accurate.
Remember, no matter who they are you will never own your data unless self-hosting. GitLab is slow, bloated and the free version lacks core features provided by Gitea for free so get a $5 vultr vps and speed up your workflow while owning your data.
Word, I agree it's Excellent. Myself, I'm a bit of a Solitaire, but the whole Office is full of happiness about it. I just hope GitHub isn't in Danger...
Maybe. But today's Microsoft is not that of your parents. 10 years ago, could you imagine them being the owners of the hub of the open source community?
With .NET Core [0], and ChakraCore[1] (Edge's JS engine) both being open sourced. And them having thrown the entirety of MS-DOS [2] up under the MIT license, and making a bunch of new tools and stuff under open licenses (VSCode, TypeScript, msbuild, etc...). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they started making a push to open up many parts of Windows.
Already some devs on the Edge team have said publicly that they are working on open sourcing the whole rendering engine from Edge, and seeing that they are moving toward having Windows be more of a "platform" and less of "software you buy", it makes sense that it could eventually become an open source (or at least "open core") product.
I don't think it will happen this year, but I do think that if MS keeps going in this direction, it's more likely than not to happen eventually.
Just a friendly reminder: Corporations are not humans. Corporation's acts are driven by profits. Last decade Microsoft CEO was describing Linux as "communism".
Some say, till this day Microsoft would go after hardware manufacturers who use Linux for patent fees, having covert patent war vs Linux. [1]
I really like how Microsoft is now, all open, free, unicorns and rainbows. Hell, they're producing some terrific open source themselves and support community.
But lets not forget - corporations are not people. Next CEO may use Github to put obstacles on OSS movement's way. Just because it is good now, doesn't mean it will be good tomorrow, or in 10 years.
P.S. Personally, I really happy where Microsoft is heading right now, and I think they're doing terrific job with their open source projects. You go Microsoft. I hope OSS way would be successful enough so MS would embrace it even more... But you never know.
EDIT:
[1] I'm aware that Microsoft recently joined Open Invention Network patent pool. But there're criticism that contributed patents are not important ones.
I tried to find ExFAT patents, but couldn't in OIN list. Also, it is really hard to find full OIN contributed patent list. Here's US patent numbers MS going around asking money for, couldn't find any confirmation of all of them being contributed 5579517 5758352 5745902 6286013
While this obviously also applies equally to Apple, Google, etc., I'm curious: do you think it also is the case with companies like RedHat? The recent MongoDB announcement made me a bit more sensitive and aware of the orthogonality of interests, even in a company that produces OSS as it's core product (and monetizes services).
Apple and Google didn't take over major OSS hub (some say, the OSS hub of today). This companies contribute a lot themselves, and have a long history of doing so.
And yes, MongoDB ticked me too.
I like way Microsoft is going, I just don't want to get hurt if suddenly their board/CEO decide to pursue opposite direction: won't even be first time for the company.
> do you think it also is the case with companies like RedHat?
Not the op, but yes, both "Corporations are not humans" and "Corporation's acts are driven by profits" also applies to RedHat and other publicly traded companies.
The benefits or Microsoft owning GitHub seem to keep rolling in. The visual studio integration has gotten much better already and I'm excited to see how they begin to integrate github into Azure.
"but they also must know Azure is not stable enough"
In what universe is this true? Azure is the backbone of large things in corporate America, especially in banking and healthcare that you never even think about. Things a lot more important than someone's repo being inconvenienced.
Any migration will be painful, but to say Azure as a service isn't up to the task is just nonsense.
Honestly I'll be happy no matter how this turns out. If this deters developers as a result, it should open up more potential for new platforms. If it does great, then open source as a community will continue to grow and be backed up by the credibility of Microsoft.
> GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.
> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you.
Whenever I see a product claim it's "for you", I cringe. You just can't put something on the web or on TV and say "for you" and have it mean anything useful.
What I always loved about GitHub was that it was the underdog, so they naturally built tools so that a couple of developers in a garage (well, cafe) could have access to the same type of tools that a Fortune-100 company has (and has to pay companies like IBM big bucks to install and maintain). It's using technology to help those with fewer resources, which is to me the entire purpose of technology.
Almost everything I've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been to help enterprise developers at big established companies. Creating giant workflows and integrating with legacy systems and such. The little things that individuals use are slipping through the cracks. When I reported that the milestone date-picker went away for Safari users, for example, they just told me "Sorry".
"Developers" has become a dirty word. It's a weasel word that companies use to try to convince me they're talking about me, while actually talking about someone and something completely different. If you can't be more specific than that, you're almost certainly wasting my time.
I miss the GitHub whose homepage had logos of little startups I'd barely heard of, and direct links to new and interesting repos. Now they've got IBM and SAP and Walmart logos. It's clear that the "developers" they're targeting no longer includes me.
Have to go where the money is, and if we're at the end of the business cycle where VCs are making it rain, startups aren't where the money is at. Businesses run on cash, not hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Think about that the next time you're on the free tier of a service you love and can't live without.
> Almost everything I've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been to help enterprise developers at big established companies.
Companies eventually go after companies willing to spend money, otherwise they don’t survive because consumers and startups are cheap and don’t want to spend money on such productivity tools and services.
That or they could’ve shoved ads down your throat, or bundle spyware in the archives people download.
As they say, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Next time when you like a service that brings you value, pay for it (using the royal you here).
My reservations about Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub are not that they might ruin it or whatever, but that I've no interest in adding to the value of any Microsoft product by being their user.
For the same reason I use a Gnu/Linux operating system. Truthfully there are things that I imagine MS or apple might do better, but that's beside the point for me. It's a political stance.
118 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadWho asked you to make GitHub better though? It's pretty darn good already. I fear that the new CEO will try to make things better when they are already good. I'm really scared that GitHub will end up like Azure DevOps, perhaps get merged or shut down entirely when they feel they have feature parity. Currently there is no great GitHub alternative IMHO and for selfish reasons I wish Microsoft could just leave it. The most I am scared is to wake up one day and see the most ugly "Metro" UX applied to GitHub.
Alongside this, is there also a way to change the order of Wiki Pages?
I think you can override the default index of pages with a custom one.
This was my draw to it as well.
GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.
Of course they will make big changes two years later down the line. You don't buy something if you have no plans for it.
Well, _technically_ I worked for one where it functioned in a hands-off way. The big difference was, the parent company was a holding company specialising in a certain industry, and us functioning differently from their other properties was the whole point.
In this case, I expect things to go the What's App way: it's going to be long and slow, but MS will eat it eventually.
GitLab is decent, with an open source core that can be installed on premise — I introduced it for a former employer and they are still very happy with it.
https://gitlab.com/
All isn't perfect and I'm still on GitHub due to the network effects, but you do have alternatives.
If you have more feedback on the things that could be better, we would love to hear more!
Since the news broke I've been hosting a Gitea instance and while that works fine, I cannot go a day without using Github for things like pulling other people's code, creating issues, etc.
Seriously it only takes a bunch of high profile projects and people to drive a migration.
In other words Microsoft has to play nice.
If you're good with Powershell it's also extremely easy to write your own build and/or release steps which is a huge plus.
Just a few days ago the service connection to Azure suddenly stopped working with "401 CouldNotFetchAccessTokenForAzureStatusCode" which appeared when deploying to Azure AppService. We had to recreate the service connection to get it working again.
Recently we also wanted to move our Android builds to Azure DevOps but in the end the documentation was so confusing that we just used Bitrise instead.
It is? Because it takes my home feed ~5 seconds to load. Totally unacceptable.
Microsoft, his employer and the owner of GitHub.
[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop...
[2] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/283
Plus I'm guessing many/most GH employees aren't looking at this, this kind of listings is generally a bummer/PITA, and fixing them is a thankless job: once you've done so, all you get is "finally, took you long enough".
This is the paradox of GitHub. The product itself is closed-source, so the outsiders cannot do the work to implement that feature themselves, no matter how much they want it.
https://octobox.io/
Microsoft could pull a Skype of course, but on the upside this might turn out to be a good thing, as in this climate many businesses, operating at scale and giving away so many freebies, are struggling and GitHub could have been the next SourceForge.
Who knows, maybe they'll even open source it. Fingers crossed.
A better example would be Nokia.
In my industry, Microsoft stacks are extremely common. The talent pool for C# in this area is tremendous, which has absolutely gained the company much synergy in the form of OS and MSSQL licensing. So the development of .Net in my opinion has made the company much more sticky.
I can't help but believe they're making a mistake (even though I want it!) in pushing .Net to open source.
I would have to disagree. .NET has become the backbone of the MSFT developer experience and has gone far beyond being just an alternative to java. It's heavily used in Azure, SQL Server, Web Applications, Desktop, Mobile etc.
Yup. Very glad that can never happen now.
Microsoft won't ruin GitHub. Windows's ecosystem need developers more than ever. Developers are on GitHub. They simply can't screw it up.
What kind of world do we live in when a service which is so ubiquitous and depended upon in our community is at risk of struggling?
(Side note: I haven't been following this acquisition in detail; was GH struggling? Or was the acquisition just their exit?)
Github would be unknown today if it wasn’t free for personal use.
One could even say that GitHub was "embracing & extending" Git (pull requests, issue trackers, wikis) well before the acquisition.
This could just be the embrace phase.
I remember someone replied with that to a comment of mine. I find it hard to find words for it as a non-native speaker, as I don't have to express this often, but it's rather derogatory/denigrating/belittling, as if someone is speaking complete nonsense. At the same time, it's not an obvious personal / ad hominem statement, so it's unlikely to be moderated.
Or maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the attitude here.
Maybe there's a hint of that, but it's so over the top and a famous quote to boot (from Game of Thrones) that I wouldn't ascribe malice to the poster.
PS: not a native speaker either.
One way to look at is that code is no longer that interesting, data is more important.
Does any of those share their data under an open license?
With .NET Core [0], and ChakraCore[1] (Edge's JS engine) both being open sourced. And them having thrown the entirety of MS-DOS [2] up under the MIT license, and making a bunch of new tools and stuff under open licenses (VSCode, TypeScript, msbuild, etc...). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they started making a push to open up many parts of Windows.
Already some devs on the Edge team have said publicly that they are working on open sourcing the whole rendering engine from Edge, and seeing that they are moving toward having Windows be more of a "platform" and less of "software you buy", it makes sense that it could eventually become an open source (or at least "open core") product.
I don't think it will happen this year, but I do think that if MS keeps going in this direction, it's more likely than not to happen eventually.
[0] https://github.com/dotnet/core [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS
I really like how Microsoft is now, all open, free, unicorns and rainbows. Hell, they're producing some terrific open source themselves and support community.
But lets not forget - corporations are not people. Next CEO may use Github to put obstacles on OSS movement's way. Just because it is good now, doesn't mean it will be good tomorrow, or in 10 years.
P.S. Personally, I really happy where Microsoft is heading right now, and I think they're doing terrific job with their open source projects. You go Microsoft. I hope OSS way would be successful enough so MS would embrace it even more... But you never know.
EDIT: [1] I'm aware that Microsoft recently joined Open Invention Network patent pool. But there're criticism that contributed patents are not important ones. I tried to find ExFAT patents, but couldn't in OIN list. Also, it is really hard to find full OIN contributed patent list. Here's US patent numbers MS going around asking money for, couldn't find any confirmation of all of them being contributed 5579517 5758352 5745902 6286013
Not the op, but yes, both "Corporations are not humans" and "Corporation's acts are driven by profits" also applies to RedHat and other publicly traded companies.
You can either fear the future and hence never enjoy what's good today. Or you can forget the future and actually enjoy the present.
GitHub didn't exist 15 years ago. Something better will probably be there in 15 years from now.
If GitHub changes direction and becomes a bad citizen, we'll go elsewhere.
Unless they buy and shut down any alternative that gathers more than a thousand users.
Having it in RackSpace and AWS is bad optics, but they also must know Azure is not stable enough for something as large and visible as GitHub.
I expect this to be the first integration they try. Stockpiling the popcorn.
In what universe is this true? Azure is the backbone of large things in corporate America, especially in banking and healthcare that you never even think about. Things a lot more important than someone's repo being inconvenienced.
Any migration will be painful, but to say Azure as a service isn't up to the task is just nonsense.
Did MS confirm that them joining OIN includes non aggression with exFAT and ActiveSync patents?
> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you.
Whenever I see a product claim it's "for you", I cringe. You just can't put something on the web or on TV and say "for you" and have it mean anything useful.
What I always loved about GitHub was that it was the underdog, so they naturally built tools so that a couple of developers in a garage (well, cafe) could have access to the same type of tools that a Fortune-100 company has (and has to pay companies like IBM big bucks to install and maintain). It's using technology to help those with fewer resources, which is to me the entire purpose of technology.
Almost everything I've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been to help enterprise developers at big established companies. Creating giant workflows and integrating with legacy systems and such. The little things that individuals use are slipping through the cracks. When I reported that the milestone date-picker went away for Safari users, for example, they just told me "Sorry".
"Developers" has become a dirty word. It's a weasel word that companies use to try to convince me they're talking about me, while actually talking about someone and something completely different. If you can't be more specific than that, you're almost certainly wasting my time.
I miss the GitHub whose homepage had logos of little startups I'd barely heard of, and direct links to new and interesting repos. Now they've got IBM and SAP and Walmart logos. It's clear that the "developers" they're targeting no longer includes me.
Companies eventually go after companies willing to spend money, otherwise they don’t survive because consumers and startups are cheap and don’t want to spend money on such productivity tools and services.
That or they could’ve shoved ads down your throat, or bundle spyware in the archives people download.
As they say, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Next time when you like a service that brings you value, pay for it (using the royal you here).
For the same reason I use a Gnu/Linux operating system. Truthfully there are things that I imagine MS or apple might do better, but that's beside the point for me. It's a political stance.