Microsoft buys GitHub (CONFIRMED)

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Oh please!

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

On the plus side, I'm glad for these guys are going to pocket a good bunch of millions $. Good for them! I'm green with envy.

[Nominal Animal]

one golden rule is that name calling is not allowed and is a offence that gets you banned. You have been warned.

Noted.

Developers are very very stuck up and don't like helping newcomers and you often find that it's not so free if you need to make serious use of software.

I take exception to being called very very stuck up (I am a Linux developer), but other than that, you're absolutely right.

The reason is that in the FOSS land, all maintenance and development costs are on the end user.  Time and effort is the exchange medium, the "currency", if you will.  There is no beneficial exchange in helping newcomers; only those who like helping, help newcomers.

"Free" does not mean no-cost support or maintenance; it means you are free to decide for yourself what to do about it.

Edited to add: This is also the reason why most Linux users could not care less whether Linux is popular or not. In fact, for many people who develop tools they use and need themselves, not a lot newcomers is a good thing, because they don't want to listen to their woes. It's similar to not wanting to see beggars on the street, really.

This fundamental difference in how the single-vendor world and Linux world sees software tools and how their development and maintenance costs are covered, is at the very heart of the MS GitHub acquisition, too.

One might think that large corporations would easily see how FOSS ecosystem (and many of their developers certainly do), but I posit that their officers do not.  All large proprietary software vendors have confidentiality built in to their operating procedures.  Just look at AMD: it took them years of open-sourcing their graphics driver, even when they really wanted to.  Confidentiality is simply built in to all their contracts and procedures.  The officers have been trained to work in that kind of operating environment; how would they have any inkling of how open-source licenses or projects work?  From magazines?  Plus, as officers of a publicly traded company, they are on the hook for making decisions that bring in cash. If they spend it frivolously, they can be sued by the shareholders.

I was not kidding when I suggested that perhaps there is a software licensing loophole lurking at the minds of MS officers, explaining the high purchase price.

[Nominal Animal]

I think hardware vendors and software developers may be reluctant to commit until there is less diversity in OSes.

There was a point in time when everyone could have standardized on OpenGL, or developed a better one to replace it (Khronos group etc.), but Microsoft developed their own solution, and even Apple is rejecting OpenGL and OpenCL for their own solution, Metal.  This means fundamental differences at the core approach.

For cross-platform development, the application must be designed to cater for those core differences, and that is really, really hard for most developers.

I have never had decent graphics performance on linux although it is a few years since i bothered because I need a system that just works so that i can get on with my life.

I can recommend the HP EliteBook 830 G3 and HP EliteBook 840 G4 laptops. Full support in Ubuntu and Mint.  Installation (for a first-time OS installer on an EFI-based machine) can be tricky, but if you get that part right, the machine Just Works.  My university lends these (using their own Ubuntu distro variant) for new math/physics students, a couple of hundred machines now I believe. I've helped in the maintenance and troubleshooting typical issues, and have been using these myself for about a year each.  Other than hardware failures, I've only seen typical user goofs (that everyone makes, myself included), and some OS update glitches (as dependencies were changed in the custom distro). Very beefy and nice machines, in my humble opinion.

[Simon]

Folder structure is the same on either, boxes in boxes, my point was that it's often the programs that people use, the OS is transparent.

[Simon]

I suspect MS will do their best to encourage people to develop on things like dotNET, paint.net is made on that and was as slow as hell at first but the platform has improved, obviously being developed on MS's own platform it will never exist on anything but windows. I suspect that they will add the ability to "publish" a program to the "windows store" further consolidating the hold of windows. MS have failed badly in the past in that they missed boats like their XPS format to replace PDF and the world just ignored them, now office has save to PDF as standard. They developed silverlight to replace flash and get people building websites BUT silverlight had to be installed on windows (did they do a linux, macos, android version) and i guess would be web developers soon realised that they would be wise not to box themselves into a corner...... the list probably goes on and it is all about and in aid of world domination of windows.

[Zero999]

There are plenty of non-free Linux distributions for non-technical users, which contain additional proprietary features, such as better support for Windows programs and codecs.

I'm hardly a techy person, as far as computers are concerned and have found migrating to Linux, fairly straightforward. Indeed, as far as user interface is concerned, I find KDE easier to use than the Windows 10 desktop and I found it easier to migrate from Windows XP to Linux, than Windows 10.

The major stumbling blocks for most people is driver support for things such as printers and Windows-only software, but fortunately neither of them affect me personally.

Which ones? and again it's plural not a single platform so developers will look at it and just continue to support windows based programs. If they are adding their own proprietary stuff onto linux you have an even further divergence of systems to cope with.

How is that a problem for the developer?

It's fairly easy to make software which will work across the most popular Linux distributions. It's true that there are some problems with binary compatibility between different Linux variants, but it's not that bad.

[Simon]

Developers are hired by dum managers that want an easy life. Support staff are not always the sharpest and often work off a script, the more platform combinations you serve the harder the inevitable support is. Solid edge will only support the latest version on windows 10 and even then you are lucky if they acknowledge you have found yet another bug. I had a problem with lack of consistency in how their software did display background colours with the main software and the viewer doing 2 different things. Unsurprisingly they have ditched the viewer......

[Simon]

We had instances of solid edge not working with an iphone plugged into the computer, how many times over do sofware companies want to solve issues on slightly different platforms.

[ivaylo]

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/_/

[Bassman59]

Linux is a pipe dream, ...

So, that's why there are Linux versions of Cadence, Zuken, ADS (Keysight), Eagle, Microchip, Altera, Xilinx, etc. etc. ... because Linux is a pipedream.

For those applications the vendors generally specify the supported Linux distro (usually RHEL/CentOS). Hacks exist to get things to run on other Linuxes (Ubuntu seem to be favored) but I think Simon's point is that why should these applications be distro-specific? (I run CentOS in a VMWare VM.)

[Rick Law]

I wonder if the Microsoft legal team have developed some legal theory, that allows them to include any code from any GitHub project in their own proprietary products, regardless of the project's license?

Something cleverly worded in the GitHub user agreement, perhaps? Or perhaps that will be achieved via a small, innocuous-looking rewording of the user agreement? Perhaps in conjunction with a little-known law in the US?  (All pure speculation, of course.)

I do know that MS would happily pay a billion dollars for the ability to reuse for example Linux kernel code without abiding by the GPL license. I really don't see how MS officers could otherwise explain the extremely high purchase price to their shareholders. The officers of a publicly-traded company just do not get to spend a billion dollars on something just because it is a good cause; they must have a viable plan, or they'll be on the hook for a shareholder lawsuit.

Took me a while to finish all existing replies.  I think I agree with this reply the most.

I suspect MS will issue new user agreement that everything you put on the new MS-GitHub, MS will have some sort of right-to-use, or right-to-sell, or right-of-first-refusal.

Just like photos uploaded to social media, the original owner lost most if not all control.  I would not be surprised if someday, some work published on GitHub worked it's way into a Microsoft Patent (or Microsoft copyright-ed product) without the original author even knowing about it.  They will point out that their ability to do that would be clearly enumerated in the user agreement - a War and Peace size user agreement.

[Simon]

I think this will be just another miscalculation and flop, people can just go elsewhere and if a preferred platform emerges they be able to improve and replicate what was lost. At best Microsoft are simply shutting the platform down until they tire or chasing it.

[FrankBuss]

I've never used it, but looks like their old version control system, TFS Version Control, sucks:

http://www.derekhammer.com/2011/09/11/tfs-is-destroying-your-development-capacity.html

I like github, and I hope they don't make it worse, but always possible to migrate to gitlab if this happens.

[TerraHertz]

[...]

Also I notice people using the word 'git' as a generic. So 'github' isn't just a made up name? What does 'git' stand for?
 

GIT is the tool, like Subversion or CVS were (are).

GitHub is one site providing several storage and functionality for the tool, but not the only one, as you can use others, install in your server or use locally, as SourceForge is.

Ah ha. Shows you how long it's been since I touched anything significant in software.
In case I'm not actually the only person on the planet who didn't know what GIT is, this may save you a few seconds of search time:

https://hackernoon.com/understanding-git-fcffd87c15a3
  Understanding Git (part 1)—Explain it Like I’m Five

https://hackernoon.com/understanding-git-2-81feb12b8b26
  Understanding Git (part 2)—Contributing to a Team

The GIT site
   https://git-scm.com/downloads   GIT's command line interface
   https://desktop.github.com/     GIT's GUI (Win & MAC)
   https://git-scm.com/docs/gitglossary     Glossary
   https://git-scm.com/docs                 Reference Guide
   https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching-and-Merging    Book


Incidentally, here's an AMA from the guy who will be future MS CEO of Github:
   https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/

More significant for the questions he didn't answer.

Hmm. So Github also has (lots of) private repositories, typically used by commercial businesses for their product development. I bet they are just thrilled about MS buying all their trade secrets, and someone else getting the cash.
If one had a list of all those projects, there might be some things in there to explain the price MS agreed to pay. Especially since even if repository creators delete their account, you can bet Github will still have copies.

[FrankBuss]

Anyone remember Clippy? 

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Especially since even if repository creators delete their account *NOW, BEFORE M$ OWNS IT*, you can bet Github will still have copies.

Exactly... :-(

[Naguissa]

Anyone remember Clippy? 

It will be bad even for the Git itself, because Microsoft always EEE.

Only if people actually keep using GitHub, or Microsoft's forthcoming fork of the git protocols and utilities.

I wonder what kind of "helpful" mascot they'll push with their mutant version of git? Gitty?

[Nominal Animal]

I think this will be just another miscalculation and flop

How likely is such a blunder, however?

In 2000, the Finnish telephone company Sonera formed a group, "Group 3G", along with Spanish Telefonica, basically wasted billions of euros in the auction of German UMTS frequency ranges.  There was a lot of hype and a lot of competition, but I do not think any of the officers in charge got any backlash (quite the opposite, golden parachutes, eventually), probably because the majority of their stocks were government-owned.

Is it possible that this is a billion-dollar blunder by MS officers?  Could it be they simply do not understand open source licensing and software development at all, and have mistakenly applied the traditional "one who has it and keeps it secret, owns it" approach to GitHub? Nah, I don't buy it.

Having thought about this off and on for a couple of days after deleting my GitHub account, I think the most likely explanation is that MS sees this as buying goodwill among the free/open source ecosystem.  Could it be they have problems in hiring the best developers, especially those already working on open source projects?  For example, mono is still treated as at least slightly suspicious by many developers and even some users, so much so that mono-based packages in e.g. Ubuntu often do not mention it in their short descriptions at all. (Mono-related packages use the "-cil" suffix; whether this is intentional in obfuscating the relationship to Mono or not, I do not know.)

The risks to GitHub users still remains, even in that (innocuous-seeming) case.  If we extrapolate from history, this effort will not provide the results MS hopes for, and at some point, that means a fundamental change the users do not like.

Like what happened to Netmeeting. It is interesting to note that MS removed it from Windows XP before there were any alternatives; even Skype was launched several years after that. Most likely reason for the removal was that they couldn't get any revenue off it, but maintenance costs were pretty high (video codecs, webcam support). They did, IIRC, try to bundle it with Office at some point, probably in an effort to try and extract at least some revenue off it, by getting users who don't really need Office but wanted Netmeeting, to buy the Office package. This was around 2000, so very much during the Office wars.

[Simon]

as i said before i suspect they will "help" developers to use windows only IDE's with windows only depedancies and then they will "help" them to "publish" or even "sell" through the windows store. This may even be thought of as a way to push along the windows phone.

They bought hotmail, things were ok, then they moved hotmail to their own servers, not so good but no one that was not a techie noticed the difference. Now they have ditched hotmail and created their own outlook email provision. then they tried to migrate from hotmail servers to outlook servers. Now one of my friends who knows nothing about computers and could not care who she is with has moved to gmail as even though she was getting emails the sender always got a bounce back error because MS fuck up everything they touch.

[HoracioDos]

Hi:
Perhaps I got a little too late into discussion. I dont' like Microsoft very much but until they don't show any attempt to ruin GitHub I guess it is still a perfect valid option. It would be very interesting to see how Microsoft will make money from this acquisition. Their business model is beyond my understanding. I hope they don't apply their old EEE strategy. Other companies do the same. Oracle is one of them but they didn't kill MySql. I remember when many people augured a bad future.

I'm not a developer, I only write simple python scripts and many times I fork repos to make my own fixes but never publish them. It's still a pending desire to upload repos and create a personal page. So I will evaluate GitHub service or others based on how they can help me to accomplish my objectives. For example Gitlab seems to have better features for free plans.
Regards

[Simon]

I think it is more a case of eliminating the competition and looking good.

I don't know about oracle but Mysql has reached the end of it's life replaced by MariaDB

[HoracioDos]

I don't know about oracle but Mysql has reached the end of it's life replaced by MariaDB

I'm not completely sure about about that. MariaDb was MySql replacement until version 8. Now MySQL follows it's own path.

[Simon]

oh, well the last options i looked at on my server looked like Mysql was no longer being developed.

[donotdespisethesnake]

I suspect MS will screw up Github, whether they mean to or not. They can't help it. They lost the "cool developers" cachet many decades ago, when it became clear they are ruthless corporates dressed as cool developers. Regarding change of strategy, sure Nutella is moving away from desktop to cloud, IoT etc, but are they really moving away from the goal of making money from everything they can get their fingers in? MS make billions from Android, just on patents and licensing.

Github is nice, but of course the barrier to entry is pretty low, developing web sites is a commodity. Being the cool place to share projects is completely different, and github could lose that as easily as Sourceforge did.

Prediction: MS recommend everyone move to gitlab because they are shutting down Github. MS buys Gitlab for $15 billion. Rinse, repeat.