
Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition - moritzplassnig
https://blog.github.com/2018-10-26-github-and-microsoft/
======
bad_user
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.

~~~
rajacombinator
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?

~~~
behringer
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.

~~~
partiallypro
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.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
After leaving Google Talk behind, Skype was my primary chat app for a few
years, but a lot of people I used to talk to on it have primarily moved to
Discord at this point.

I still like Skype more than Discord, but chat apps are wherever your friends
are.

------
ken
> 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.

~~~
bad_user
> _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).

~~~
marmaduke
I don’t think this is true. I paid for a personal GitHub plan for years to
have the private repos and to support them, back when it was a simpler place.
If 100k devs around the world did the same, they’d have enough plenty of money
to do what they were doing then.

Instead they insisted on endless growth, hosting All The Projects without
bound or limit and I’d say that’s what puts them in hot water, needing crazy
amounts of money that individuals can’t provide.

~~~
Kalium
OK! Let's work some numbers on this. 100k devs times $7mo personal account
times twelve months. 100 000 * 7 * 12 = 8 400 000

$8.4 million in gross revenue a year. Out of this has to come all operational
costs, all salaries, all benefits for staff, all other overhead, and so on. At
west coast tech rates, that's low-30s number of people. Assume lower, since
AWS and similar isn't exactly free. Do you think GitHub could have done every
single thing they did at the time you have in mind with a double handful of
engineers and sysadmins and managers? I must admit, I'm a little skeptical.
Staffing a solid ops organization capable of 24/7 coverage takes at _least_ a
dozen people.

I haven't even touched on taxes.

Business plans can easily be a thousand a month or more. GitHub has an
offering of $21 per user per month, also for business. In either case this
almost certainly offers significantly greater overhead that the individual
plans do. You can get the same revenue numbers with significantly lower load
with a third the number of users! Not to mention that you have fewer customers
for the same amount of revenue, which makes support higher-touch but much
easier in important ways.

With this in mind, it's easy to see why a group like GitHub might want to
consider investing in supporting businesses. There's so much more margin
there. Especially when you consider that their predecessors did not, and
GitHub out-competed them in part due to the extra revenue that comes from
strong enterprise support.

Services like GitHub don't get to sit still. Or else we'd all still be using
SourceForge.

~~~
marmaduke
The margin per user argument is fine but I’m lamenting that it leads to a sort
of digital gentrification.

Personally, from GitHub, I didn’t want 9 9s or infinite bandwidth or feature
creep or even to use it at my day job (Jira/Jenkins/prayer).

SourceForge is a scarecrow argument btw, it’s the MySpace of its sort.

~~~
Kalium
I don't understand. In what way is GitHub's increasing focus on the customers
that pay the bills forcing you out? I understand that you don't care about
maximum uptime or SSO or the vulnerability detection system, but are they in
some manner making it impossible for you to continue using GitHub? Or are you
displeased because you feel GitHub could be paying attention to the needs of
users like you, instead of big corporate users? Perhaps you feel it's grown
Jira-grade complicated, and is no longer suitable for personal projects?

Sourceforge is exactly like MySpace! Sourceforge once ruled the roost. It was,
for many people, the only game in town. It got complacent, and thought it
could stay top dog while only really caring about the not-particularly-
profitable users or if there was a good way to make more money from the
services it offered.

Competitors innovated, found other business models, and did much better. Now
we have GitHub! Which has learned from the missteps of Sourceforge. One of
which was failing to invest in features that high-margin customers value and
will happily pay extra for.

~~~
marmaduke
No one is forcing me out, and I still pay a subscription (kudos to GitHub for
not raising the price over the years even if the exchange from my currency to
USD has made it slightly more expensive)

My original comment was an argument that the reorientation towards business
clients was not an inevitability as the parent comment said it was. this
mindset says products for rational, aware individuals (here, developers) are
not worth building anymore since the margins aren’t high enough. If these
individuals aren’t worthwhile clients anymore than they are only data to be
traded.

~~~
Kalium
Thank you for for clarifying! It's nice to know that you're not being forced
out of anywhere by digital gentrification.

There is a very reasonable point that this should be enough for any company
not addicted to endless, pointless growth. This is, after all, the ideology of
a cancer! Customers should be respected, rather than treated as data-
generators fit only to be traded upon. You have made this point wisely and
well.

I think it's worth considering why a business might consider limiting its
investments in competing for a pool of low-margin customers of limited size.
Historical examples suggest that confining your investments to just this
customer pool will often end with your customers being attracted away to other
providers who have the resources to produce a superior offering. As a result,
what should be a healthy and sustainable mindset of building for rational,
aware individual consumers can easily lead to being out-innovated and out-
competed.

An intelligent reader will note at this point that there is a lot of
uncertainty in the previous paragraph. This person is right! There is a great
deal of uncertainty at hand, as with all things in markets. With that said,
the above scenari is more likely than not, and the expected gains from chasing
high-margin customers are generally larger than the expected gains of opting
to focus exclusively on low-margin ones in the face of competition.

To such services as GitHub, the consumer offering is not a way to collect data
to be monetized. Indeed, the experience for single consumers is critical - it
shows the key features and accustoms users to the product. A high-quality
offering for rational, aware individual consumers is of paramount importance
because it is where the real customer funnel starts.

------
frou_dh
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.

[1]
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop...](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc)

[2]
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/283](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/283)

~~~
masklinn
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".

~~~
frou_dh
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.

------
tenderlove
This is some great FrontPage news

~~~
ksec
what's the Outlook for GitHub ?

~~~
tenderlove
After the merge, we'll probably branch out and become an even better
SharePoint for developers

~~~
mattkevan
The pace has been surprisingly Clippy for an acquisition of this size.

------
nanna
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.

~~~
marcosdumay
If you start a project somewhere, choose a competitor.

FOSS development is way too much concentrated on GitHub already, it's
unhealthy. But there is no problem in most people not thinking like you
either.

Overall, I think the acquisition was good, if no other reason, just because
there are enough people that dislike MS for pushing some diversity on the FOSS
hosting game.

------
Walkman
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.

~~~
moritzplassnig
Yes, good point. Updated the title.

------
sevensor
So when I write a project in C, will Github show me a popup recommending I
switch to C# for a faster, safer development experience?

Microsoft feels like an untrustworthy friend to me -- I'll go to a party at
Microsoft's house, but I wouldn't let Microsoft hold my wallet.

~~~
mmirate
To be fair, a (hypothetical) non-morally-bankrupt hosting provider would do
just that but for Rust instead of C#.

------
jyriand
I remember that GitHub was paraded as boss-less company. But now they ended up
in big pile of hierarchy.

------
Svoka
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

~~~
robinhood
Well. It's almost a philosophical dilemma at this point.

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.

~~~
pessimizer
> 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.

------
sys_64738
Wonder if they'll decide to open source Windows via GitHub.

~~~
vezycash
Dream on

~~~
Klathmon
It's not without precedent!

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](https://github.com/dotnet/core) [1]
[https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore](https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore)
[2] [https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS](https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS)

~~~
tracker1
Was hoping to see MS-DOS 6.22 :-(

I think MS in the past few years has made huge strides...

~~~
sys_64738
They recently release the source for MS-DOS 2.x or was it 3.x...

------
shmerl
Interesting joining OIN was driven by GitHub acquisition.

Did MS confirm that them joining OIN includes non aggression with exFAT and
ActiveSync patents?

------
adamnemecek
Please fix search. A simple deduction would go a long way. So many times are
there 30 pages of the same file.

~~~
adamnemecek
Deduction = deduplication

------
kyleperik
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.

------
0xfeeddeadbeef
Nitpick: Nat Friedman's GitHub profile [1] does not have STAFF badge yet.

[1] [https://github.com/nat](https://github.com/nat)

------
zzo38computer
I sometimes view projects on GitHub, but do not use it (nor do I use git at
all; I prefer Fossil) for my own projects, so I am unaffected.

------
spork12
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.

~~~
arethuza
A lot of the Azure documentation has been in GitHub for ages - made me wonder
if MS viewed them as an acquisition target more than a year ago.

------
walrus01
Embrace, extend, extinguish.

~~~
alpeb
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!

~~~
usr1106
Everybody does open source now. IBM, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, you name it.

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?

------
aerialcombat
Crossing fingers...

------
whoopdedo
I'm keeping a close eye on repos such as py-kms.

------
lrvick
How long before GitHub moves to Azure?

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.

~~~
partiallypro
"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.

~~~
marenkay
From practical experience, I would say Azure is a moving target currently.
Things beyond virtual machine and networks feel like moving targets.

For the sectors you cited that might not matter since those will not be using
cloud resources but rather the common virtual machine workload.

------
dustinmoris
> 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.

~~~
sjroot
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.

~~~
btasovac
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?

~~~
fefehern
Not OP, but is there a way to preview Markdown when writing up your project's
Wiki as you are typing?

Alongside this, is there also a way to change the order of Wiki Pages?

~~~
sytse
The wiki edit screen has a Markdown preview tab
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouq7mwgazyyv6nc/Screenshot%202018-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouq7mwgazyyv6nc/Screenshot%202018-10-26%2008.21.06.png?dl=0)
but it disables typing.

I think you can override the default index of pages with a custom one.

