
GitHub was talking to Google but went with Microsoft instead - coloneltcb
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/github-interest-from-google-and-others-revenue-about-300-million.html?__source=twitter%7Cmain
======
bmelton
Microsoft, love them or hate them, appear to have been turning over a new leaf
for the past while. If trends are to be used as indicators, then it seems the
trend is that more and more of Microsoft's projects are becoming more and more
open, while it _feels_ like Google is becoming more closed.

Yes, Microsoft still has closed source programs (Windows), and yes, Google
still has open source programs (Android, Tensorflow), but the general feeling
I'm getting from Google is shrinking away from a commitment to open source on
practical grounds.

I don't know if I'm ready to say that I have more respect for Microsoft than
Google at this point, but I definitely have more respect for Microsoft than I
ever have, and that's the direct result of their recent efforts to embrace the
developer community at large.

~~~
some_account
Yeah. That generally how you fool people you are a good person. You do stuff
that appears to be good hearted. Companies do that too. Just like politicians.

I can't understand why people today lack the ability to see a scam.

~~~
Joeri
Companies don't have souls. They're not intrinsically good or bad, but they
may act good or bad depending on the leadership team. When the leadership
changes the company's behavior changes along with it.

Nadella's microsoft is not the same as Ballmer's and Gates's microsoft. In
Gates' day windows licenses brought in the money, and linux and the web were
the dominant threats to microsoft's revenue, completely explaining microsoft's
behavior around 2000 that earned them their reputation.

Nadella's microsoft however is a cloud services company, with office 365 and
azure bringing in an ever larger slice of the pie, and windows reduced to a
single digit percentage of the revenue stream. Cloud services are built on
open source. It makes complete financial sense for microsoft to be a strong
open source backer now.

~~~
runarberg
> Companies don't have souls

Careful there. There is no consensus that humans do have souls. _Personality_
might have been a better word to pick, since what you are describing better
fits the idea of personality, but that is dangerous as well.

But regardless of the specific term we want that separates individuals from
companies, there is no denying that companies are more then the sum of the
individuals they are made of. Group psyche has been proven to prevail through
replacement of every member. Though one should not jump to the opposite
conclusion either—that companies’s behavior remains static through a change in
leadership.

~~~
wwweston
> Careful there. There is no consensus that humans do have souls.

"Soul" doesn't have to mean "immortal ghost." Humans have souls
tautologically; the word is one way of trying to get at something about our
experience with ourselves and others. Personality doesn't quite cover it,
psyche might be closer, but soul has the depth.

That said, I agree with the premise that human organizations can have a
culture that starts to border if not overlap conceptually with "soul."

------
spiralx
Out of the list of companies that the article says have expressed an interest
in GitHub at one point or another - Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Atlassian and
Tencent - I have to say that Microsoft seems the most best fit, especially
given their existing work on integrating GitHub with GVFS:

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/microsoft-and-
github...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/microsoft-and-github-team-
up-to-take-git-virtual-file-system-to-macos-linux/)

~~~
merinowool
I'd rather see GitHub grow and buy Docker etc.

~~~
rhacker
Microsoft will probably buy Docker too.

~~~
adtac
I think it makes more sense for RedHat to buy Docker, but I wouldn't bet on
that happening.

~~~
numbsafari
Why would anyone buy them when you can just hire away the talent and let it
devolve into the moribund consulting agency they've turned it into?

If anything, the failing "Docker the company" probably helps sell their
competing implementations of the various OCI specs.

------
gkya
I feel it has been better that the more openly "bad" one of the two has
acquired Github, because Google has this "don't be evil" face which is the
fake one of its two faces, though many still just fall in for it, forgetting
it's just another company with commercial interests.

~~~
city41
They are quietly dropping that image: [https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-
nearly-all-mentions-of-do...](https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-
mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393)

~~~
kyrra
Bad summary and bad headline. It is not removed. From the very last line of
the CoC:

> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t
> right – speak up!

[https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-
conduct.html](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html)

~~~
danvayn
To be honest, when I read that I thought of James Damore and got a good laugh
out of it.

------
maerF0x0
Makes sense. Google runs a mono-repo. Microsoft ran codeplex[2]. Microsoft
wanted to be in Github's space but couldn't compete, so bought the space.

[1]: [https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-
stor...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-
billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext)

[2]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex)

~~~
louthy
They also have Visual Studio Profiles/Visual Studio Team Services, which
appeared to be them trying to enter the space, but, bar people being forced to
have a profile to use VS I doubt many are using the team or project features
of that. Then there's one of their dev cash cows: Team Foundation Server,
which I assume has been dying a slow death over the past few years due to git
dominance in the source control space. I moved my team away from the shit show
which is TFS for git (not github) several years back now.

So, I suspect this is shoring up their position, reducing the number of man
ours needed in competing, and buying the best product on the market.

I wouldn't be surprised if github got more enterprise project management
features, where it's a bit light right now, and perhaps more around management
of super large projects. As well as tighter integration with Visual Studio (at
the project management level, rather than just the source control level) - to
phase out TFS over time.

~~~
gokhan
> moved my team away from the shit show which is TFS for git (not github)

TFS also supports git repositories. Do you use TFVC (Team Foundation Version
Control) and TFS interchangeably?

~~~
louthy
We left TFS altogether because it was just so terrible, I've lost count of the
number of hours lost to that software. We use Gitlab for source control now,
Team City for builds, and Target Process for project management.

------
astrodust
Dodged a bullet on that one.

~~~
banachtarski
I concur.

------
greggman
All these comments that MS are going to read your private repos seem really
out of place.

it makes zero sense for MS to look at private repos because the moment they
are discovered everyone would move off the system.

they also run outlook.com and office online. if they got caught spying they'd
lose all corporate customers

------
d1zzy
I find it strange to live in a time when tech people trust MS more than
Google, it could be because we think differently about the importance of
information tracking, and this is coming from someone that for the past 15
years has used only private/incognito browsers (was a lot of fun back in when
Flash was popular and had to manually remove its cookies directory after every
session), doesn't have a facebook account, doesn't use social media. But
here's something to think about, MS is in a position where they're making a
lot of money from closed source software products where a good free open
source equivalent would be a direct attack on that revenue stream, which
means, there can be many potential conflicts of interest with owning something
like GitHub. What do you think would happen in the following scenarios:

\- a researcher discovers a zero day security problem in Office/Windows/etc
that affects almost all their products in the last 10 years, tells MS about it
but doesn't wait for them to patch it for N months or whatever time they'd
take so they push a working exploit/proof of concept on GitHub before the bug
is patched. Will MS shut down the project/repository and/or sue the people
behind it using IP/time information from their own logs?

\- MS pushes another Windows 10 update that increases tracking, people write
programs to work around/disable that and post it on GitHub. MS is arguing that
without tracking they cannot determine who is pirating their Windows so they
sue the authors. Can they get access to the IPs/times of when the repository
was interacted with without a court order? Can they shut down the project on
GitHub before waiting for the lawsuit to reach a conclusion?

\- MS develops a new DirectX API that allows for many great things and some
very hyped AAA games are already in the pipeline to be released to use it, but
the catch is the new API requires Windows 11, a new version that costs money
to upgrade to, previous Windows owners cannot use it. A Wine developer
implements an emulation of the API on GitHub and releases a DLL build for
Windows, suddenly all previous Windows users can play those games. What will
MS do about that project?

I feel it's pretty easy to imagine lots of situations where there's a conflict
of interest between being a neutral Git repository and being a software
company so I can't say I'm very happy with MS purchasing it tho I agree with
others that it could have been much worse too :)

~~~
PascLeRasc
Here's a today example: there are lots of Windows 10 de-bloaters [1] to remove
awful features and telemetry disabling tools [2]. Will these stay up?

[1] [https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-
Windows-10](https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10) [2]
[https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking](https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking)

------
jacquesm
What I find interesting is that IBM and RedHat never entered the picture.

~~~
ship_it
I don't think RedHat has enough money to buyout GH like M$ did.

------
urda
Thank goodness for that. If Google had picked up GitHub I would have had to
start a migration strategy since their buyout strategy has included killing
off the service in < 2 years.

------
bsharitt
Google buys GitHub. 6 months later it launches a new different code hosting
site that is tightly tied with Google services. 3 years later new site and
GitHub both shut down.

~~~
raverbashing
Sad but true

"Why do I need a Google+ account to use GitHub?!?"

~~~
netsharc
Well nowadays Skype is tied to a Microsoft account.

I look forward to the pull requests from Xbox Live users. Commit message: "You
suck, you n00b loser. I f __*ed your mom. "

------
gmiller123456
Just three years ago Sourceforge got all the rage, and I do mean rage, and a
lot of people were giving all the love to Github.

IMHO the cost of self hosting your projects has been too low for many years
now to give control of your web presence to a third party.

~~~
JeremyBanks
The cost of self-hosting your projects remains gargantuan if you want to do a
decent reliable job.

~~~
gmiller123456
The vast majority of projects do not require reliability above what can be
simply and cheaply achieved. If/once your project gets to the point where
reliability is a concern, that's the exact reason you wouldn't want to rely on
a free/cheap 3rd party. The case in point is the one I referred to, GIMP had
already seen SourceForge as an issue and had abandoned them over two years
before the incident. And lots of other projects have taken on the task of
hosting their own. However "gargantuan" the task may be, it's still usually a
drop in the bucket compared to the overall project.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
In this case I prefer Microsoft than Google. They both spy on us, but Google
has a much more complete profile of me.

~~~
petepete
Not to mention Google's habit of buying stuff, getting bored and canning it.

~~~
paulie_a
Or making 9 different versions of the same thing like they have done with
messaging.

------
modzu
i just feel dirty logging into github now.

~~~
acdha
Why? Nothing about the service has changed.

~~~
modzu
indeed nothing has changed overnight. youre telling me it will stay that way?

the reason 'why' is that GH is no longer independent. there are thousands of
comments on all the related posts here on hn for you to figure out why that
might be significant..

~~~
acdha
You said you felt dirty now, in advance of anything actually happening. Why
not wait for some sign that random internet FUD is actually happening?

------
CodeSheikh
Don't you guys think that GitHub was meant to give heads up about acquisition
to its subscribers, at least to premium users? Yes this would give away the
whole "secret" but if acquirer is some evil corp? Or a foreign entity? I feel
like there is an important law missing regarding acquisition of companies who
run premium plans.

~~~
xenomachina
Or even just "there are certain companies I don't trust enough to let them see
what's in my private repos".

~~~
spiralx
Well GitLab is hosted on Azure, so you're out of luck there if you're that
paranoid.

