Microsoft buys GitHub (CONFIRMED)

[Simon]

Sadly we are not allowed any more.

[bd139]

Aldi seem to manage it with their cheap imported tools.

[Simon]

well yea, but we want quality lethal

[Nominal Animal]

It's not fun if stuff is randomly lethal; that just makes for timid, scared people.

It needs to be stuff like not wearing a helmet when driving a bike.  Like increased sentences when one commits a crime when under the influence, not lesser sentences (because you chose to drink/partake and do, regardless of the consequences).  Consequences for stupidity or lack of thought.

One might think that'd be unfair, but the real world isn't fair or moral anyway, and if we ensure the worst kind of humans have the most kids, we most definitely doom the entire race; that's just biology.  I don't trust any human to make the decision on who gets to procreate; I'd rather it be "natural" in the sense that before people have the opportunity to procreate, they'd have ample opportunity to nix themselves due to their stupidity (but not for random causes, or because of others' decision).

As to the topic at hand, regardless of who bought GitHub, I do not like the idea of more and more services being provided by very few supercorps.  I trust competition, not people; and to compete on a level playing field, competitors cannot be allowed to become larger than laws.  (Otherwise, it's like letting some people win because they belong to a group that is supposed to win, not because they play better.)

[bd139]

We could replace all helmets with melons. That would pick off a few percent of people.

Agree with very few supercorps. It wasn’t like there weren’t any warnings of this in science fiction in the last few decades: OCP, Weyland Yutani, Tyrell, Cyberdyne, Soylent, ICS, Umbrella, Zorin, US Robotics...

[Nominal Animal]

The other annoying set (which I hope GitHub will not become part of) is small companies who partner with Microsoft and Microsoft only.  I just got aggravated in a discussion where people do not understand that if you work for a company whose only product is dependent on Microsoft's goodwill (like, say, a NTFS driver), you are at least as much swayed by external-facing Microsoft policies as Microsoft employees are.  Essentially, either your tongue is very brown, or the future of your company is uncertain. Moreso when you have actual legal agreements with MS.

That too is more about huge companies bigger than small countries, and not that much about Microsoft per se.  Google might have a slightly better history with its partners (Android), but not by much.  None of the huge IT companies are much better.  The threat of a lawsuit from them is enough to kill any small to mid-sized company, no matter how good proof you have. They have the money and the political pull to make even outrageously funny legal theories fly enough to cost you too much to survive. (Just look at the SCO-IBM saga; it's still not over.)

[Simon]

Oh you mean like dotNET which guarantees paint.NET will always be windows only

[Tandy]

Well it seems that the Microsoft haters will drop github, and if they are not paying customers the Microsoft execs won't care because looking at their spreadsheet all they will see is a drop in costs for hosting free repositories.

Most of them will probably go to GitLab, as people are like lemmings and will follow the crowd. GitLab will then have a problem, they will have a sudden increase in users and have to scale up quickly to keep up with demand. But they have already had 5 rounds of funding 2 seed investors and 3 lots of venture capital. What happens when they burn through what is left of their October 2017 investment to add all this extra capacity? VC investors will not keep throwing money into a company that is loosing money.

One of two things will happen the investors will be convinced that the surge in users will create a critical mass of users that can be monitized and will make a further investment. Or the investors will force a sale, using the increased numbers as a selling point for someone else to monitize. Who will make such an investment? Probably somebody like IBM or Oracle who would be expecting to sell support contracts to corporate users. I wonder how many Microsoft haters also hate IBM and Oracle, as much as Microsoft or possibly more?

The real issue though is what will happen to GitHub? My prediction is that 'influencers' who are not necessarily paying customers will move to gitlab, Microsoft will start making 'improvments' to Github that push more people away. Eventually much like sourceforge it will loose market share and will be left with those who just can't be bothered to change or have locked themselves in through some sort of Microsoft corporate agreement.

As for an opinion about Microsoft, the problem is past business decisions have left the Microsoft name with a less than ideal reputation and that is really going to be a problem for something like Github. I tend to think that they have changed a lot in recent years, but a huge corporation is difficult to steer quickly. The developers of VS Code have shown that parts of Microsoft can do quite well at working within an open source environment and produce something really quite good. So the future of github really depends on who gets put in charge of it. If it is someone with the old Microsoft software business model then it will fail quite quickly, if it somehow gets rolled into the same team as VS Code it could well do quite well.

[bd139]

Oh you mean like dotNET which guarantees paint.NET will always be windows only

Err no. We're even deploying .Net on Linux. https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/release-notes/2.1/2.1-supported-os.md

Actually not a lot of people know this but .Net was developed at Microsoft Research. The original target was FreeBSD, the build system for it was written in Perl. This goes back a loooong way: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx

Tandy: that's about it. But you don't need a central place to hang out when you know how to use git properly.

[Simon]

So did microsoft ever intend .net for anything but windows? I don't know anything about programming on windows/linux but i got the impression .net was going to provide developers with easy tools only to find that it could not work an anything else. I have to have several versions of .net installed to make programs work, that really does not platform independent.

[bd139]

Well MSR intended it to be for all platforms from day one. However the commercial team saw it as an escape from DCOM etc and killed all funding for any platforms other than Windows. Thank Ballmer for that fuck up. There was a major mutiny a few years back when they started shipping the new metro interface. "devdiv" at microsoft (developer tools/azure etc) started branching out on their own and looking at other platforms and worked out that the key to success was pushing in that direction. So they did. And it worked pretty well.

Now in 2018 VScode + .Net run on ALL major platforms. Unfortunately perhaps, if they had done this a decade ago they might be #1 software platform but everyone else got in before that. That means there's mindshare elsewhere now. From a developer experience point of view, C# is absolutely the best general purpose language I've used and the CLR is crazy fast and scalable. However it's run by a schizophrenic monopolist so I can't invest in it. Been burned by churn too many times.

There have been several major "steppings" of .Net which means you usually have to have a specific major version but other than that it's mostly backwards compatible. Apathy from the developers of what you are installing is usually the cause of having to install lots of different versions.

[Nominal Animal]

the Microsoft haters will drop github

hate ≠ mistrust.

I wonder how many Microsoft haters also hate IBM and Oracle, as much as Microsoft or possibly more?

I wonder when the Microsoft proponents will finally stop eating children?

[bd139]

Just a point: I despise Oracle and IBM even more than MSFT. They are just totally irrelevant in my daily life.

And Larry Ellison probably does eat children on his super villain island.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

They couldn't stand having say... 'Javascript' unleashed on the 'World', so they HAD to try
to 'force' their OWN version, 'VBScript', and tried to make 'Browsers' adhere to THEM !!

And IE... we've had to suffer it for a decade. What a pile of crap.

http://google.com/search?q=ie+must+die

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

And Larry Ellison probably does eat children on his super villain island.

And he was best friends with S. Jobs...

[Tandy]

hate ≠ mistrust.

Well maybe hate was too strong a word, but the point stands, anyone who has a reason dislike Microsoft will jump and there is really nothing that can be done about that. On the whole I don't tend to use Microsoft products, I have recently started using VS Code however, as a replacement for Eclipse. Interestingly I almost overlooked VS Code due to past experiences with Microsoft software but pleasantly surprised when I tried it out. So for those like me who are not particularly tied to Microsoft products but are open minded enough to try things on their individual merits then Github could survive an exodus if Microsoft don't mess it up. They will have to tread carefully and work hard at avoiding messing things up or it will go south very quickly as frustrated users will quickly follow in the footsteps of those who have already left 'because Microsoft'.

[Beamin]

Aldi seem to manage it with their cheap imported tools.

We have those in America but it only sells food. Really good prices for generic brand granola and nutrigrain bars and some vegetables and fruit. It generic brand everything actually. I wouldn't eat the meat from there though, and certainly not the fish at those prices there has to be some compromise to make it that cheap.

 $200 fills an entire grocery cart which is unheard of in this area. One place called Giant (Giant prices) had a full grocery cart out front with the bill stuck to it for <200$. Huge sign read: "WHOLE CART OF FOOD FOR UNDER (198.37) TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS!" When I lifted some of the things I noticed most of the cart was filled with a big black felt covered box that filled 3/4 of the cart. So I took out the box and repacked just the bottom of the cart barely 1/5 full. That's so slimy and deceptive unless they include the felt box with food in it. Next week it had plexi glass over it, so I bought one thing and left.


I have picture on a HDD somewhere. Oh but I saved $0.03 cents a gallon on gas (14X0.03= $0.42 but cost of eggs was $3.49 vs $0.79 at the store that doesn't have the "rewards card" So net loss on one item = $2.28 cents to save less then $0.50 on gas. DOLLAR COST AVERAGING AND MATH BITCHES! Imagine the whole cart at $800? To make a Mexican dinner I spent 80.00$ at this place for one days meal for four people. People fall for this all the time because they are too lazy to do out the math, they could do it but their brain says : gas is expensive I save on gas when I shop here. And the money saved on gas could be realized just by going to a generic brand gas station that isn't out of the way.

[Bassman59]

Tandy: that's about it. But you don't need a central place to hang out when you know how to use git properly.

Exactly! I see "value" in something like Github (and Sourceforge and Launchpad and OpenCores and ...) if the goal is for the project to be a true far-flung open-source project. But for someone's personal project? Why bother. How many projects are on those services that have one or two commits and were then abandoned by their creators? Nobody cares about your "open-source" project!

It's pretty easy to set up a git or Subversion repository on your home network. Only if your open-source project takes off and gets serious interest from other developers, then migrating to a service such as Github then makes sense, as you offload the hosting, the backups, the bandwidth.

Small companies like mine who need a VCS but don't need the issue trackers and the ability for far-flung developers to access the system can set one up on a box in the server room without much trouble. For more complex requirements, outsourcing to a provider makes a lot of sense, and in those cases even if hosted on Github those repositories aren't public.

[Nominal Animal]

So for those like me who are not particularly tied to Microsoft products

and don't have much at stake, you mean? 

Several of my former colleagues were forced to move from using local mail programs (whatever they wanted) to Office365. As IT support types with distributed internal clients and many concurrently ongoing projects, they relied heavily on filtering, to essentially triage their mail torrent based on sender, recipient, and subject keywords; essentially, filters did the hard work of prioritizing which mails to read and handle.  Now that they must use Office365, they say they simply cannot filter their mails that way. They just miss some of their mails, because the tool doesn't work well enough.

Because the decision to move to Office365 was made at the executive level, they have very few options left. They either accept the added cognitive load, or switch jobs.

It isn't that much of a stretch to compare Office365 interfaces to other mail clients, and extrapolate that to what the likely/possible direction MS will take the Azure-Github-for-Enterprise.  When they capture the larger organizations, then you either use those half-crippled MS tools, or go work somewhere else.

[HoracioDos]

Today on Slate.com

As for GitHub, it’s just the latest in a string of major Microsoft acquisitions (Skype, Minecraft, LinkedIn) that seek to move the company away from Windows and toward a much broader set of services for people using any kind of device. This time, really, the profits don’t matter: Microsoft is paying by issuing about 73 million new shares of stock, which cost it nothing. (It’s a tiny dilution, given the company’s 7.7 billion shares outstanding; what’s more, the share price rose on the news, which means that existing shareholders are happy to be diluted.)

GitHub is not being bought for its revenues, but rather for the promise (a promise not everyone is convinced can be realized) that it will be able to turn Microsoft into an even more developer-friendly place than it already is. No more will GitHub’s managers need to worry about how their new CEO is going to lead them to profitability. Instead, they can concentrate on simply providing the very best service to their customers, who will end up spending dozens of hours a month inside the Microsoft ecosystem. For the Redmond, Washington, giant, that’s priceless—and all at a price much less than it would cost to, say, buy Red Hat, another open-source darling that currently has a market capitalization north of $30 billion.

[Beamin]

So for those like me who are not particularly tied to Microsoft products

and don't have much at stake, you mean? 

Several of my former colleagues were forced to move from using local mail programs (whatever they wanted) to Office365. As IT support types with distributed internal clients and many concurrently ongoing projects, they relied heavily on filtering, to essentially triage their mail torrent based on sender, recipient, and subject keywords; essentially, filters did the hard work of prioritizing which mails to read and handle.  Now that they must use Office365, they say they simply cannot filter their mails that way. They just miss some of their mails, because the tool doesn't work well enough.

Because the decision to move to Office365 was made at the executive level, they have very few options left. They either accept the added cognitive load, or switch jobs.

It isn't that much of a stretch to compare Office365 interfaces to other mail clients, and extrapolate that to what the likely/possible direction MS will take the Azure-Github-for-Enterprise.  When they capture the larger organizations, then you either use those half-crippled MS tools, or go work somewhere else.

When I had a business that had email, I had to use outlook; but the spam mail would cripple it. Literally wasting precious time to go through it and find real customers. So many minutes wasted just deleting everyday because it didn't have functions like gmail. Don't know if they fixed it but it sucked balls and I'm glad it was only a small part of the business.


I do have outlook now I used for a month and it had so many options for IT people that it sucked to manage only three mailboxes. From one extreme to the other.

[bd139]

I use FastMail for my business email. Works nicely and not much admin overhead.

[Simon]

Outlook is not great. I use it as I have office 365 as i have no choice but i actually use my phone to do the spam filtering as outlook sucks. You can only block an address not the whole domain unless you go around setting up elaborate filters by hand. I use Blue mail on my phone and it is great as in a few taps you can block 1 address, or the whole domain or in some cases (and i suggested this to them and they implemented it) a TLD. while blocking a TLD should be done with caution it is really handy for all of those stupid new ones like *.date, *.business, *.live and soooooo many more that get used for nothing but spam. It is actually great, all of the spammers use the TLD's that no serious business uses and in 2 taps the whole TLD can be blocked. Outlook for android is a disaster and barely a mail reader, it has no functionality at all.

Microsoft seem to wreck everything they touch, since they took over linkedin nothing works for me, an invite that I think the other person cancelled i still get reminders about even though it is not there, links from emails fail to work. So good luck Github.....

[Naguissa]

So for those like me who are not particularly tied to Microsoft products

and don't have much at stake, you mean? 

Several of my former colleagues were forced to move from using local mail programs (whatever they wanted) to Office365. As IT support types with distributed internal clients and many concurrently ongoing projects, they relied heavily on filtering, to essentially triage their mail torrent based on sender, recipient, and subject keywords; essentially, filters did the hard work of prioritizing which mails to read and handle.  Now that they must use Office365, they say they simply cannot filter their mails that way. They just miss some of their mails, because the tool doesn't work well enough.

Because the decision to move to Office365 was made at the executive level, they have very few options left. They either accept the added cognitive load, or switch jobs.

It isn't that much of a stretch to compare Office365 interfaces to other mail clients, and extrapolate that to what the likely/possible direction MS will take the Azure-Github-for-Enterprise.  When they capture the larger organizations, then you either use those half-crippled MS tools, or go work somewhere else.

When I had a business that had email, I had to use outlook; but the spam mail would cripple it. Literally wasting precious time to go through it and find real customers. So many minutes wasted just deleting everyday because it didn't have functions like gmail. Don't know if they fixed it but it sucked balls and I'm glad it was only a small part of the business.


I do have outlook now I used for a month and it had so many options for IT people that it sucked to manage only three mailboxes. From one extreme to the other.

I use gmail for users (i have no time to waste) and postfix + spf + dkim + dmark for server, in a subdomain. Best option for 100 000 daily emails, with around 1M peaks some days....

But... was this thread about GitHub?

[bd139]

postfix FTW.  I designed and maintain our outbound postfix relay architecture to replace SES. Lovely bit of software. DMARC/DKIM is still a pain in the ass though.

Apparently it was github but MSFT like to fuck up stuff so we’re doing history lessons, analogies and future predictions too.