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https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/

I don't think I ever expected to see the day where Microsoft would even have an interest in something like GitHub, let alone enough interest to actually buy it. At least for right now, Microsoft pinkie-swears that not much will change:

But more than that, their vision for the future closely matches our own. We both believe GitHub needs to remain an open platform for all developers. No matter your language, stack, platform, cloud, or license, GitHub will continue to be your home—the best place for software creation, collaboration, and discovery.

I guess we'll see.

If Microsoft manages to screw this up (and I don't put anything past them these days) they're going to burn every ounce of goodwill they ever had from the development community at large.

gitlab is apparently seeing a surge in repository imports

A former co-worker of mine just took a job at GitHub a couple of months ago. His reaction to the acquisition: "at least it isn't Oracle". (Which is probably similar to the reaction he had when his previous employer was acquired by IBM...)

just brew it! wrote:

A former co-worker of mine just took a job at GitHub a couple of months ago. His reaction to the acquisition: "at least it isn't Oracle". (Which is probably similar to the reaction he had when his previous employer was acquired by IBM...)

My company was acquired by IBM as well. I hated my life when I was employed by IBM. Terrible company to work for.

If they manage GitHub like they manage Skype then GitHub is fu*ked.

I want to be optimistic, and Microsoft *has* made some valuable open source contributions to date.

I just feel that they can't be impartial to projects/developers at the same time as being true to their shareholders. There's a legal conflict of interest and something ugly is bound to crop up sooner or later if the acquisition doesn't include some AAA lawyering to word the contract properly.

I'll admit to having an immediate sense of dread when reading about this which I guess many people have shared. It probably won't affect me greatly even if MS does manage to screw it up. Most of the repos that I use professionally I host locally anyway, but yeah... I really hope they don't screw it up.

Microsoft will screw it up, like they do all acquisitions. I guess you are right, it could be worse. Google could buy it and segment it into 1000 different products and eventually kill or sell it off.

To quote the email I sent to the software group this morning, this could be good or it could be very, very bad. In theory, the deal could provide a good level of stability and keep Github focused on catering to professionals who want to get work done, not following the path of so many other web service companies in screwing over paying customers because blah blah blah let's move fast and break things because productivity is soooo 20th century bruh. But MS has a long history of killing off stuff that isn't Windows or Office due to corporate turf wars and/or attempting to shove a captive customer base into various executives' questionable new product ideas. See: Codeplex*, Winforms, Silverlight, Nokia, FASA, really anything to do with PC gaming for that matter. We will see, I suppose.

The good news, of course, is that nobody can commandeer git itself so if MS pulls a stupid then developers can just retarget their repos to some other remote. GH is just a convenience.

Chrispy_ wrote:

I want to be optimistic, and Microsoft *has* made some valuable open source contributions to date.

I just feel that they can't be impartial to projects/developers at the same time as being true to their shareholders. There's a legal conflict of interest and something ugly is bound to crop up sooner or later if the acquisition doesn't include some AAA lawyering to word the contract properly.

It's not necessarily a conflict of interest, though. GH charges money to host private repos and many companies have taken them up on that, including both my employer and Microsoft itself*. So as long as the business unit can make money everything's fine. Where it might get complicated is if some meddle manager decides to twist GH into a weapon in the service of some BS corporate initiative, which has happened far too often. Then it could indeed become a big problem.

* - That Microsoft cited the immense success of Github and its widespread adoption in their own organization as a major reason why they shut down Codeplex is an interesting data point

Well, guess that's that then. Hopefully another site will be set up for people to use after this burns to ash.

NovusBogus wrote:

But MS has a long history of killing off stuff that isn't Windows or Office due to corporate turf wars and/or attempting to shove a captive customer base into various executives' questionable new product ideas. See: Codeplex*, Winforms, Silverlight, Nokia, FASA, really anything to do with PC gaming for that matter. We will see, I suppose.

Your ray of hope is Sanjay Nadella. The guy seems pretty determined to shepherd a platform-agnostic expansion of the the entire Win+Office ecosystem to the World+Dog and this appears to be another part of that vision. As recently as 5 years ago, i.e. just before Steve "The Chair" Ballmer got de-chaired himself, I never imagined that Microsoft in my lifetime would have free, basic-function versions of its major Office apps available on both Android and iOS. And Windows stuff, too: I can now run a remote desktop session on my Windows 10 PC from my Pixel smartphone, or connect same phone to a PC running Office 2013 (and up) and use it as a PowerPoint remote with notes and next-slide preview.

I'm just not sure how long Nadella will last if he keeps trying to give everything away for free.

NovusBogus wrote:

I'm just not sure how long Nadella will last if he keeps trying to give everything away for free.

It's only for the fickle consumer segment where datamining user habits to death and shoving ads to their face is more profitable than selling them OS/software which they can pirate for free anyway.

Though I'm curious just how long more people at large can tolerate ever increasingly amounts of both before a massive blowback happens.

ludi wrote:

Your ray of hope is Sanjay Nadella. The guy seems pretty determined to shepherd a platform-agnostic expansion of the the entire Win+Office ecosystem to the World+Dog and this appears to be another part of that vision. As recently as 5 years ago, i.e. just before Steve "The Chair" Ballmer got de-chaired himself, I never imagined that Microsoft in my lifetime would have free, basic-function versions of its major Office apps available on both Android and iOS. And Windows stuff, too: I can now run a remote desktop session on my Windows 10 PC from my Pixel smartphone, or connect same phone to a PC running Office 2013 (and up) and use it as a PowerPoint remote with notes and next-slide preview.

I'm just not sure how long Nadella will last if he keeps trying to give everything away for free.

I wouldn't be surprised if the OSS strategy within MS aims to:

1./ Flex its developer muscle and show the younger generation how good their tools are (and hence making it attractive to apply to work on OSS @ MS as a twenty-something)

and

2./ Function as an on-ramp (or a gentle funnel as Ars Technica puts it) to premium versions, be they Azure-hosted services or traditional applications.

I'm not really worried about the developer side of MS screwing things up, as my impression is that MS employs top talent who "gets" it.

In this case, MS saw the writing on the wall a few years back and admitted that git is the future and bet big on it internally. Since they'll never control git (only influence it via sponsorship and code contributions), their second best bet was to acquire the best git value-add mousetrap on the market. Sure, there are alternatives; but for software houses that already rely on MS platforms, this is simply a way to improve developer workflow. As for the large share of non-idealistic GH business users not building software on or for MS dev platforms, the easiest thing is to wait and see how MS handles the transition, which implies a steady revenue stream in the mean time.

What worries me is what the business and legal part of the operation will do down the line: What is good for internal company politics (meddling product planners, bean counters and ambitious managers with no stake in anything but their own career) isn't necessarily what's in the best interests of MS' customers. And MS is no longer the only game in town.

If this ends up going down in flames (and what a glorious fire it would be) MS will have no one to blame for their immense loss of developer goodwill other than themselves. Here's hoping the MS honchos know what they're doing for once.

ludi wrote:

NovusBogus wrote:

I'm just not sure how long Nadella will last if he keeps trying to give everything away for free.

They went from number 6? to number 3 largest company in the time that Nadella took over.
Not only did he arrest the falling market share he grew it pretty fast as well.

I would also point out that there are multiple companies that give things away for "Free", "Freemium", and Free (as in beer) and are doing quite well.

Microsoft gives away a lot for free, but they've also learned the same thing that lots of other companies have: suscritchins is where it's at!

derFunkenstein wrote:

https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/

I don't think I ever expected to see the day where Microsoft would even have an interest in something like GitHub, let alone enough interest to actually buy it. At least for right now, Microsoft pinkie-swears that not much will change:

But more than that, their vision for the future closely matches our own. We both believe GitHub needs to remain an open platform for all developers. No matter your language, stack, platform, cloud, or license, GitHub will continue to be your home—the best place for software creation, collaboration, and discovery.

I guess we'll see.

I kinda saw this is an eventuality - they've been integrated from VS with Git for some time now - they'd be dumb to screw with it though and I don't think they will. They'll better monetize Git Enterprise and it'll flourish. They wanted the name and recognition.

We use TFS where I'm at (and with fully automated builds, continuous integration [deployments], etc so Git doesn't make sense for us right now) but I've continue to push for a more decentralized source control environment.

Yeah my employer is also all about the TFS, so it has basically zero impact on me.

I sorta figured this was coming. Visual Studio on the Mac picked up Git source control support very early on. Meanwhile TFS is *still* not available.

steelcity_ballin wrote:

We use TFS where I'm at (and with fully automated builds, continuous integration [deployments], etc so Git doesn't make sense for us right now) but I've continue to push for a more decentralized source control environment.

What are you using for Continuous Integrations? I am in the process of setting up Continuum for our Dynamics 365 environment/s. Of course that means we use TFS and Version One too. After that I need to get Selenium up and running for our automated testing. Then we will be truly Agile and DevOps running. Im still on the fence about Agile, some days it feels like a sweat shop, other days its nice to have the ability to focus on one or two items and to be able to fully flesh them out.

steelcity_ballin wrote:

They'll better monetize Git Enterprise and it'll flourish. They wanted the name and recognition.

I must admit, I'd be pretty fired up if they built a good issue tracker into GH Enterprise. We use paid Github and paid Jira, and while Github has been pretty stable from a usability perspective Jira has been pushing out increasingly **** UI overhauls that make my job harder by hogging bandwidth and adding clicks to my workflow. Of course, the fact that GH just got bought by the company that thought the Windows 8 UI was a good idea is not lost on me either...

NovusBogus wrote:

steelcity_ballin wrote:

They'll better monetize Git Enterprise and it'll flourish. They wanted the name and recognition.

I must admit, I'd be pretty fired up if they built a good issue tracker into GH Enterprise. We use paid Github and paid Jira, and while Github has been pretty stable from a usability perspective Jira has been pushing out increasingly **** UI overhauls that make my job harder by hogging bandwidth and adding clicks to my workflow. Of course, the fact that GH just got bought by the company that thought the Windows 8 UI was a good idea is not lost on me either...

JIRA has always sucked like that, but it just has so many options and features that people continue to use it. I got "certified" as a JIRA admin at my last job and hooooooooooooooooooooooo boy is it a deep, dark rabbit hole to dive into.

Anyway, I'm not quite as worried about Github as some in this thread. Plenty of places to host code if you really need to, and if you're a larger enterprise that needs some place, your own Gitlab hosted servers isn't a bad idea.