
What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub - okket
https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buying-github
======
roadbeats
Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and
open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me.

Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new
Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in
your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We
had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back.

Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom, this is why they used to fight open
source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks.
It's sad to see they now own Github.

~~~
raesene9
You know that Microsoft are the largest corporate contributor to _open source_
projects on Github right?

~~~
Grue3
Imagine there are two cities in a country, city A and city B. The president
lives in city A and is very popular there, but not so much in city B.

Person from city B: I hate the president. He never did anything good for our
people.

Person from city A: On the contrary, this is the best president we had in
forever. In fact he built 5 hospitals and 10 schools in our city alone! How
can you possibly hate him?

Like, maybe Microsoft has contributed to some open source projects, but are
these open source projects something everyone benefits from? I'm not even sure
what their open source projects are.

Also, isn't it a big conflict of interest then? When the largest user of a
platform also owns this platform, it kind of puts other projects at a huge
disadvantage.

~~~
btschaegg
I don't think the issue is where MS has contributed in terms of open source.
For me, it doesn't matter: It's great that they do it, but their history of
aquiring companies and driving their products into walls (like Skype and so
many others) _hasn 't changed_. So, when I see "MS acquires open source
hosting platform", I'm thinking about that, not how many lines of code they've
opensourced.

Of course, if MS wanted to dampen that reaction, they could distribute the
whole code for GitHub as a platform under an open source license - I just
can't imagine them doing that.

------
raesene9
The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the
past seems odd to me.

Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest
that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you
can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you
once trusted)

There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company
they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and
I'd imagine neither are the staff.

Is that to say that the Github acquisition will be an unalloyed good, no.

but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a
disaster...

~~~
RyanZAG
Windows 10 is really recent though.

That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github
than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it.

And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control
distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code
at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus
has done for the world is incredible.

~~~
mpartel
Another recent example: lockdown of ARM-based Windows machines, preventing the
installation of other operating systems.

~~~
guardian5x
You mean like Android or iOS?

~~~
mpartel
Like iOS yes, and some, but not all, Android manufacturers/phones.

"Others do it too" is not a very good justification in my mind.

~~~
guardian5x
"Others do it too" is not a good justification of course. But his comment also
fails to to explain how Microsoft is somehow more evil than the industry
standard.

~~~
mpartel
Bootloader lockdown was practically unheard of for the PC/laptop form factor
before Microsoft started doing it for ARM laptops. And and it's not even
really standard for phones. Plenty of Android phones have unlockable
bootloaders (see LineageOS).

I don't think whether one is more evil than Apple/iOS in this regard is a good
benchmark.

------
pi-victor
It's not like GitHub was the perfect open source place anyway. The platform
itself is not open source in any way and it has been plagued by a few
scandals.

'i've deleted my account' seems very pedantic and most of the arguments
brought up are rather old. However, i do agree on the skype thing - man it got
bad after MS bought it.

Don't think any company that can afford to buy another company for well above
1.5 billion (i understand the worth of GitHub in 2016 was around 2 billion)
has a pristine past.

------
gressquel
I myself am optimistic but some few questrions popped up:

Microsoft is very proactive removing things from azure and shutting down sites
as soon as they receive DMCA complaint or abuse complaint.

Are they going to remove important github repos like these if they get DMCA or
other complaints?

[https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-
Project](https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-Project) (cheat for Counter
strike)

[https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl)
(download from video streamers)

[https://github.com/kurtcoke/DemonHunter_Exploitkit](https://github.com/kurtcoke/DemonHunter_Exploitkit)
(exploit kit)

[https://github.com/lontivero/vinchuca](https://github.com/lontivero/vinchuca)
(p2p botnet)

the second I hear any repos being removed by Microsoft, I i will dump my
private repos and leave.

~~~
vortico
What's wrong with this? I don't want unauthorized infringing projects
jeopardizing the service the rest of us use legally and ethically. Invalid
DMCAs are another story, but what's the harm of respecting an IP owner's valid
DMCA request?

~~~
gressquel
it will become a sterile, homogenous environment.

Its the diversity (like the repos mentioned above) that made github the goto
code-sharing site.

I, for one, would rather jeaopardize the service to defend the rights of such
fringe developers. Together we stand.

~~~
vortico
You might think that the reason GitHub exists is to be an altruistic public
service to all developers, but that's not the case. This is:
[https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing) As a paying user of
GitHub and a member of organizations that use its commercial services, it
would be completely absurd for them to put a dozen employees out of work
because they have to support a pointless lawsuit of not removing an infringing
repository that isn't making them any money in the first place.

------
pg_bot
The biggest surprise to me was that Github was running at a loss for a
considerable amount of time. Given their roots as a bootstrapped company, I
would've assumed that they would be more disciplined in their spending. I'm
disappointed that they've decided to sell rather than go public, I would've
happily been a shareholder of Github if given the choice.

~~~
the_duke
Going public would probaly have been near impossible with large losses and a
competitive marketplace where there are alternatives available you can switch
to if price is too high.

~~~
pg_bot
This would be true for any industry other than tech. It feels like every
single tech IPO follows the same formula of going public while posting large
losses. See dropbox, box, twilio, spotify, snap, or any other high profile S1
of the last 10 years and you will find that almost none of them make a profit
at the time they went public.

------
gregknicholson
GitHub has always been proprietary and centralised. If you choose to host your
open source project on a proprietary service, you can't exactly be surprised
when a different company buys that service.

------
Artemis2
Not commenting on the acquisitions rumors;

> The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was
> routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the
> conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done
> to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases,
> for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip
> latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the
> traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was
> detected.

IIRC the main reasons this was done are (i) due to the complexity of porting
P2P code across many platforms and (ii) for resource consumption on mobile
devices. These are hardly edge cases.

~~~
culturestate
I know lots of people think Microsoft did this to kowtow to the NSA, but I'm
willing to bet it was _really_ done for the same reason that Apple
fundamentally re-architected FaceTime: patent threats.

------
trixie_
How about the alternate reality where GitHub is desperate to monetize and/or
is acquired by a company that is... don't think it could happen? Let me tell
you a little story about SourceForge...

~~~
erk__
SourceForge have recently been acquired, by a new company that is a lot more
friendly to everyone. But even then it still has a very bad reputation.

------
discreteevent
I don't disagree with any of what he says. But he only includes the negative
things they did. It's also worth remembering that ms also helped democratise
computing. In the late eighties, early nineties Unix was an ivory tower. Only
large organisations could afford it. Apple was expensive and closed. Windows
was cheap and open. It worked with every kind of hardware and peripheral. And
with dev tools like VB a lot of software was written and systems built for
people that otherwise would just have had to stick with paper.

~~~
oldcynic
> ms also helped democratise computing

I find that laughable. Their client and processor licensing model is of the
Oracle school.

Large OEM's are _still_ paying the MS tax on machines supplied are they not?
(MS get fee on every OEM machine sold regardless of whether it includes
Windows. Buy a Dell Linux laptop and MS still get their $x)

> Unix was an ivory tower

Hmm. What of BSD+FreeBSD? Hell even MS Xenix ran on 10x the range of machines
that Windows did.

Late 80s, early 90s folks like Sequent were charging a bomb because they
included 4 or 8 processors and gobs of memory (for the time). Sun and SGI
charged a fortune because 50% of the machine cost was the graphics and IO,
_and a net stack that worked._ A Sun lunchbox wasn't that much more than an
equivalent spec PC of the time but gave SCSI and networking. None of that plug
and pray or fucking around with INT settings in BIOS, driver settings or it
suddenly developing amnesia.

SunOS (usually) just worked, Windows usually didn't until Win2k finally
arrived and you could actually have uptime over a daily reboot.

The expensive stuff in the Unix world was where there was no comparison in teh
PC world or you scaled up. Multi processors, Sun pizza boxes where 50% of the
cost was the top end graphics (always buy the flight sim CD when speccing that
one), 100+ serial ports, racks full of USR Couriers etc. NT didn't scale (see
Hotmail and the infamous scaling demo scam).

> Windows was cheap and open

It was neither.

I'm not going to reopen VB memories. :)

------
mwj
Some of the shenanigans I've seen recently from MS employees in the .NET Core
and JS space doesn't inspire me with confidence... For all of Nadella's
"turning over a new leaf", it will still take a generation to change the
culture of 120 000 employees

~~~
sydd
> the shenanigans I've seen recently from MS employees in the .NET Core and JS
> space

Do you have links? I Havent heard MS doing anything malicious recently in
these spaces.

~~~
hiccuphippo
I guess the non compliance to GDPR by using opt-out instead of opt-in for
their telemetry in .netcore and vscode.

~~~
macca321
As I understand it the information isn't PI and so isn't covered by GDPR.

------
onyva
Microsoft’s brute force approache has never worked and will never work. It
really doesn’t matter who heads it. As indicate by RMS, and proven time and
again, these ethical questions at the heart of the free software movement are
important and there for a reason. You can slap “open source” on anything these
days, and it has been the case for a while, but it’s missing the point. And
dangerous for the free software movement.

------
onion2k
Assuming GitHub was actually losing money and couldn't fix that problem
quickly enough it's fair to assume they _had_ to sell, and it's reasonable to
believe there aren't _that_ many companies who could have bought them if you
think an understanding of the domain is important, then you're really limited
to Facebook (user surveillance, adverts), Apple (bad at software, not
developer friendly), Google (user surveillance, adverts), Microsoft (history
of extinguishing things) and maybe Oracle (very hostile).

 _Regardless_ of who GH sold to they'd be facing a ton of negative reactions.
Microsoft's actions recently make me thing maybe they're actually the least
bad as far as their dealings with developers go.

~~~
ssijak
How is Apple not developer friendly?

~~~
onion2k
XCode is a clunky horrible mess of an IDE, iTunes Connect is worse, and they
charge $100/year for a developer account. Also, they try to lock you in to
buying Apple hardware to develop for Apple devices (though you can get around
that using, among others, Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center).

~~~
ssijak
You can use AppCode. XCode being a mess is not making Apple developer
unfriendly, it just means that they don`t know how to make a good IDE. I don`t
mind 100$ per year if it means better support then nonexistant Google support.
Also if I am making money off the platform I don`t mind paying. And it also
stops random people submitting crap apps to the store.

~~~
onion2k
_And it also stops random people submitting crap apps to the store._

It clearly doesn't work.

~~~
rbanffy
It's much better than the Windows app store though.

~~~
bausshf
That isn't really a good argument

------
jasonvorhe
> I’ve deleted my GitHub account, I’ll find a way to replace it and if you’re
> halfway clever so should you.

So clever.

~~~
katnegermis
I can't think of a worse way to get your point across.

~~~
sametmax
Agreed, as much as I dislike the acquisition, even I just wait and see. I'm
setting up a migration plan right now of course, but I'm not going to activate
it unless I have a good reason to.

------
bevax
How much Microsoft loves open source is also proofed by the case of MeeGo.
Their agent, a certain Mr. Elop, hugged it to death.

> The first MeeGo device came out in 2011 and won all kinds of awards and is
> to this date the only flagship consistently ranked better than its
> contemporary iPhone, while MeeGo is the only OS ever launched in smartphones
> to be ranked as good as - or in some reviews even better than - Apple's
> iPhone iOS operating system. THAT was Nokia's strategy in January 2011. Only
> a delusional idiot would change this.

[http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/the-
nok...](http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/the-nokia-saga-
predictions-on-this-blog-full-listing-with-links.html)

------
SmellyGeekBoy
Has there even been any kind of official confirmation that the sale is going
ahead? Or the terms of the sale?

Sabotaging a pivotal part of your own development workflow entirely based on
internet speculation doesn't seem "clever" at all to me.

------
kjeetgill
If not Microsoft, who would you have liked to see GitHub bought by? Presumably
they'd have to find an exit eventually.

My vote would be Mozilla. I can't think of any other company I'd want running
a service for "the greater good".

------
heygema
First step, Github Theme will go Fabric. [https://developer.microsoft.com/en-
us/fabric](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric)

Second, More ms tools in github.

Third, atom is dead.

Bright enough I guess.

------
shishirsharma
Microsoft acquiring Github has completely busted my chops. I am totally
depressed now. Is deleting your account from Github is a viable solution?
Where to go from here. Bitbucket?

------
Lordarminius
GitHub is for all intents and purposes dead. They just don't know it yet. Open
Source is the closet thing to a religion in programming and selling to
Microsoft, while it makes commercial sense, is heresy in all but name.

I moved all my workflow to Linux back-in-the-day (actually just over 2 years
ago, but hey) and never looked back. I'll be damned if I let Microsoft in by
this particular backdoor.

Like the author, I'm deleting my account as well.

------
stunt
Microsoft is on the good direction today (comparing to what it was).

But problem is when management changes. after all their values are different.
All classic big corporate stuff, their business model and expectations from
investors. things can change in the future when making money is the main
goal..

But the good thing is that GIT is easy to migrate. So we can migrate anytime
that things goes wrong..

Github is still a great product/service. Hope they don't ruin it.

------
lifeisstillgood
I would look at using client- side encryption of my pushes upto github as a
possible third way between fully trusting MS and deleting my account

[https://gist.github.com/shadowhand/873637](https://gist.github.com/shadowhand/873637)

NB the irony of the top ranked article on git encryption being hosted on
Github is not lost on me ...

------
doubleunplussed
I agree with this article on the basis that if Microsoft's incentives haven't
changed, then there's no reason Microsoft should be expected to behave any
differently to the nineties.

Arguing that they're a different company I think should require arguments that
their incentives are different, and I don't see that they are.

~~~
hiccuphippo
I think for them today selling Azure is a bigger incentive than selling
Windows and Office.

~~~
kthejoker2
Let me clarify: Selling Azure is _absolutely_ a bigger incentive than selling
Windows and Office. And more generally, selling solutions instead of
technology.

Their #1 competitor is AWS. They don't even mention Oracle, Apple, or really
even Google.

------
DomreiRoam
What I find sad is that github didn't find a way to be profitable on its own.

I would really like to have some Consumers' co-operatives that would provide
hosting/online services around open source. I wouldn't mind to pay something
to have private hosting for me and subsidizing the hosting open source
projects.

------
mmoez
> Foxes may change their coats, they don’t change their nature.

It seems clear today that the "Developers, developers, developers!" thing of
Steve Ballmer is still in the plans of Microsoft.

I wonder how do people who believed in the modern Microsoft with Nadella feel
now?

------
bobdaal
Awesome! Now we can end the mass delusion and realize Git sucks and has been a
monumental drag on developer productivity. Thak you Microsoft!

------
Lordarminius
I'm waiting for a reaction from Linus and Stallman

------
miguelrochefort
> I’ve deleted my GitHub account, I’ll find a way to replace it and if you’re
> halfway clever so should you.

Is this satire?

------
iampoul
Nothing

------
seren
On a slightly tangential note, my company has a massive Yammer install (200k+
account) and I always wonder if people can discuss in yammer group about
replacing Office by G Suite, without triggering anything. This is kinda
paranoid, but I am still astonished that a company can essentially put all its
communications, roadmap, and so on on another company platform. Even if you do
not compete frontally, at some point, there are some diverging interests.

I understand that the risk would be too big to eavesdrop on your customer, you
would ruin your reputation and your product, but still, it seems the
temptation even by a rogue employee could be strong.

This is not a jab at Microsoft, it would not be better if it was another mega
corp platform.

~~~
2sk21
Related - Slack is also widely used as a communication mechanism in many large
companies. This seems fine but I wonder how attitudes would change if Slack
got acquired.

------
Miraries
Well..
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257)

Unrelated, is this standard practice when sharing a link to the HN Discussion?

    
    
      javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent("What%20is%20wrong%20with%20Microsoft%20buying%20GitHub")

------
tekproxy
Microsoft used to be bad (M$) but if you haven't noticed you can now run Linux
on Windows and sql server runs on Linux.

We're in the twilight zone bro; all bets are off.

~~~
Mononokay
Running Linux on Windows solely benefits Microsoft and Canonical, not the
Linux community.

We're not in the twilight zone, we're in the zone where Microsoft realizes
it's more profitable to leech off of others' efforts.

~~~
cube2222
Well, it benefits developers who use Windows machines and develop applications
for Linux.

~~~
rbanffy
I'm genuinely curious as to what drives a developer to run Linux on Windows
rather than just booting into a Linux environment.

Is that software support? Is that hardware support that's not available on
Linux?

~~~
cube2222
Desktop linux has been much less reliable for me. I'm also using a surface
device and like to use it for sketching.

~~~
rbanffy
Special input devices is a thing. I doubt the Cintiq would work with any of my
Linux boxes in the same way it does on the Mac. This is how we end up with
multiple computers...

In general, desktop Linux has been rock solid for me. I even keep my music
collection on BtrFS and, yes, I know it's tempting fate.

------
mlazos
TLDR; the 90’s happened. Delete your github account because Microsoft is evil.
I’m surprised this article got this far because it really doesn’t add anything
unique to discussions that are already happening.

~~~
macns
Putting personal sentiment aside (delete github account part) an article like
this is needed to sum up and justify developer worries that are scattered
through discussions here and other online communities.

~~~
mlazos
That’s my whole point. Without the part about deleting your account and the
unnecessarily long introduction to what github is this article is a bullet
point list of what Microsoft did in the 90’s. (With the exception of the
telemetry and skype acquisition) Anyone can look up this history.

