From a Chinese multinational to an American multinational. I'm not convinced that any sort of data safety will arise from this. This is really just US giving China a taste of its own medicine.
I bought a laptop from Best Buy recently, and the limited amount of contact was great. Just pressed a button on my phone when I arrived, confirmed with the employee that the order was in-fact mine, and he put in my trunk without even getting close to me!
And then you end up with Best Buy crapware on your computer and usually they have worse specs. I have never seen as many 14 and 15 inch laptop screens with less than 1080p in my life.
I actually just used Best Buy as a vendor. I found the laptop elsewhere and it was the only place it was available (coronavirus shortages). It doesn't have any bloatware other than from OEM itself.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I don't think GitHub has a monopoly. Git was created to be decentralized, so every developer has a "backup" of sorts on their own machine.
If GitHub is truely hostile to you, taking your business elsewhere (or hosting it yourself) shouldn't be too much of a roadblock for people with sponsors like OP.
Git being decentralized or not has no bearing on GitHub/Microsoft having a de-facto monopoly here. If you want to bring a counter argument that should at least include the name GitLab.
GitHub and other forges are value added services on top of git. They wouldn't be this popular if it weren't for issue trackers and merge managers, CI and that sort of stuff. They are centralized and can't be migrated out once an account is locked. GitHub can be considered a monopoly because recruiters tend to neglect repos elsewhere. We really need decentralized/federated alternatives to that.
> Microsoft have really turned it around with developers, embraced open source, built great developer tools.
I'm still taking these changes with a grain of salt. If devs are still getting the same treatment in say, 5 or 10 years, I'll believe that Microsoft has changed. But to me the whole thing smells of "Use our open-source programs that just so happen to work really well with our paid-for closed-source software! Why not just switch to Windows and grab our Office 365 subscription while you're at it?"
That might well be true, but right now it's great for many of us. If in a decade VSCode becomes a subscription-only thing, or it requires usage of sharepoint, or something similarly horrible, it'll still have been a wonderful editor to me at this moment in time.
But yeah, considering Microsoft's history it's probably good to stay vigilant.
Yeah that's the real kicker. If you're a company with the resources to buy a small server (such as a raspberry pi if you're being cheap about it) and run an IRC chat, why not do it and be in total control of an essential part of your business?
Most companies aren't exclusively comprised of developers.
If you were to somehow manage to convince exec or director level leadership to implement something like IRC as your main communication platform, I'm sure they'll be more than happy to let you be the person who's full time job becomes fielding helpdesk requests from non-technical users who are struggling to use IRC :)
Tools like Slack and Teams win because they're all-but-frictionless. One of the competitive edges that Teams has out of the gate is integration with an existing account that is tied to your entire workplace identity if you're in a Microsoft-heavy shop.
It's really easy to assume that things that are easy for us as devs are a "no brainer" for everyone else, but they really aren't. My parents recently had to begin using chat apps for work under COVID restrictions, and although both are plenty proficient at general computing, IRC configuration would be an absolute nightmare for them.
Not to mention the bigger issues of security, log preservation, HR compliance, or any other myriad things that a toy implementation of IRC wouldn't offer. What happens if you lose your backups? What happens if your server becomes compromised? What happens if an employee textually assaults another employee through DMs and you need to audit it? These are all very real questions that people ask, and are questions that Slack and Teams have very sleek answers for. It's not just emojis - it's letting someone else handle the headache of maintaining a critical piece of your communication infrastructure.
Slack does a lot more than your basic IRC server. It offers search, SSO integration, mobile app with offline notifications, phone / video chat, screen sharing.
Sure you could build that on a small server with open source tools, but is it really worth the effort to build and maintain it for most people?
