> Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.
GitHub didn’t embrace, extend, extinguish git. You can git push to a different company (e.g. Gitlab) and you’ve migrated. The biggest problems with GitHub are scaling and availability, not lock-in.
Microsoft today is nothing like it was 30 or 20 years ago.
Fifteen years ago we were writing HTML and JavaScript specifically for Internet Explorer. Edge is built on Chromium.
VScode might be open source (to a degree), but the levers of control are on a different location. See https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ for an excellent blog on it.
Good luck migrating the ”forge” part with the ”git” part. Your github org settings, pull requests, rulesets, CI/CD pipelines, containers, copilot...
The lock-in always comes from the ”forge” part, never the ”git” part.
Open core at best. It's proprietary software built on top of an open source base. The remote coding feature is proprietary and you need to run proprietary software on the remote server / container to use it. People maintaining forks (like Codium and the Theia IDE) are not allowed to use VS Code's marketplace. Many of their flagship VS Code extensions are proprietary. Why would they do this if they believed in open source?
The distinction is quite important. VS Code aims to get control of the development process of those who are not using Visual Studio. That's the only reason why VS Code exists. VS Code is not a gift no strings attached.
By the way the title of https://code.visualstudio.com/ is a lie that says "The open source AI code editor". Three lines under, there's "By using VS Code, you agree to its license and privacy statement.". The license is https://code.visualstudio.com/license, which is very much like your usual horrible Microsoft EULA, including tracking and forbidden reverse engineering, decompiling or disassembling. Really, the only thing missing there is the license key field at first run.
GitHub is still proprietary SaaS also aiming to control the whole open source ecosystem. With GitHub, a big chunk of the open source (and free software! Which is even sadder) world relies on proprietary infra. That's as close as Extinguish as you can get (it's just that git is not the thing that's Extinguished). GitHub is actually a pretty good example of lock-in, see what other commenters wrote on this.
30 years later, Microsoft, still the same lying company trying to control its users and the world with proprietary software. With the twist that they try a bit harder to look cool and open source (since the moment they realized open source wasn't going to disappear, not before). They really are not, especially for end-user facing software, including when the end-users are developers.
The only thing that dramatically changed is that they don't publicly claim Linux is cancer anymore, and that's probably because they are coerced into dealing with Linux. Exactly like the Web against their failed attempt to privatize it with MSN (MicroSoft Network) (the current MSN news frontpage and the memory of their messenger are only shadows of the original ambitions behind MSN).
At least the stability and consistency is comforting… or not.
Don't fall for their open washing. They just play along and attempt to get control on what they didn't manage to extinguish. Only forced changes happened, the spirit seems intact.
Old folks are also aware that applies to every single big tech company that actually sponsors the FOSS tools many don't want to pay anything back, while expecting to be paid themselves.
Old folks also remember the days when it was possible to make a living out of selling software tools.
Yeah but I worked with enough ex MS employees to know that Bill built a cult. Cults don't die just because the cult leader retires to go buy his way into heaven.
MSFT acquisition of NPM was a massive shit show, they fired many staff engineers and people that were at github for quite a while. Top comment was a liar.
I was part of the npm team at GitHub. They laid off almost the entire team to focus on AI (CTO literally told us on the layoff announcement call that they're doing this to focus on Copilot)
Would you rather the company went under after it ran out of money and had to fire everyone instead? Not to mention a quarter of the company was laid off the year before the acquisition.
Year before the MSFT takeover. No idea about their actual financials but they were definitely shedding headcount pre 2020, including kicking people for trying to unionise.
Yeah, it's like people are forgetting that the executive team at GitHub was composed of sex pests and people defending said sex pest. Of course they'll call any attempt at unionizing as "damaging" to the company and must be blamed accordingly!
After all the company was in such dire straights that they were acquired for $7.5 billion! Only companies with terrible prospects get acquired, that's just business 102.
No one said anything about bankruptcy, you seem to have made that up for your "argument" or whatever this is. The company didn't have a viable business model and was running out of cash. MSFT right-sized the team for the project they wanted it to be, rather than the business model the prior company was trying to be.
Apparently you don't understand what bankruptcy means. A company can run out of funds and not be able to meet payroll without declaring bankruptcy, they're different things. But by all means keep talking out of your ass.
The company raised $10M, did two rounds of layoffs totaling a quarter of the company, and was then acquired not long after. Early stage companies like that don't do layoffs unless it's to extend cash runway, but run wild with whatever unfounded fantasy you have about it all.
Uhh, I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right by it's workers rather than rat fucking them to appease corporate do-nothing leeches if I'm being frank.
With smaller companies that can't yield global power. It would be better if cloud, office and OS would be separate. Then you wouldn't get shuffed OneDrive into the OS. It's also better for competition if the playing field is equal and one solution isn't the only one that can deeply integrate. Build APIs or don't do it.
Enemies of democracy don't want to do this because it would require acknowledge that technology companies in the US have been mostly a force of evil rather than good and the idea we should change that makes a small minority of people uncomfortable.
Some of it aged... interesting.
Top comment:
> Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.
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