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What are the positive aspects of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, if any?
As someone who is relatively removed from the programming world (I do basic Python scripting and not much else), I'm curious to see an argument opposing what I perceive as the majority viewpoint. Those against the acquisition have cited examples of Microsoft "ruining" services such as Skype and Minecraft.
That it didn't get bought by Oracle or Google? From what I've read in other comments, Github was having leadership issues. A buyout from someplace worse than Microsoft was totally possible. Only time will tell what the MS acquisition actually means. Its not like MS isn't familiar with Github. They have over 1800 repos on there (and that's just under the MS account).
What would be the potential disadvantage of being bought by google/oracle?
I mean.. Oracle is pretty obvious. They are an insanely litigious company that seems to rely on patent lawsuits and acquisitions more than innovations these days. They also have shit corporate ethics IMO, with horrible management that tends to ruin and corrupt everything they acquire.
Google probably wouldn't be horrible... but oddly enough I actually trust MS more than Google right now since at least Nadella seems genuinely committed to making amends for previous mistakes. He is very pro cross-compatibility (platforms/OSes and even with competing services) and is pro linux/opensource. The acquisitions under him (Mojang, LinkedIn, Xamarin and now Github) have all been handled fairly well and MS has not forced any major negative fundamental shifts in the services/software they provided and instead actually helped improved them.
Nothing would prove this more than them porting DirectX to other platforms (Linux, maybe?). Now with Metal (and the Apple-given deprecation of OpenGL), we'll probably see even more OS exclusive titles.
Oh, God... how amazing would that be? I would switch full-time to linux in a heartbeat if that ever happened. The only thing really keeping me tied to Windows is my gaming obsession.
It's a little involved but you can do some pretty impressive things these days with PCI-e passthrough to virtual machines. Needs some hardware features that aren't exactly universal though: I can't set this up with my system because the 2600k doesn't support Vt-d.
I've seen this done using Xen. It left something to be desired with storage performance due to the controller not wanting to be passed through, but otherwise worked remarkably well.
Oracle is one of the most hated companies in technology. Their enterprise products are like the AOL business applications...as in, "I can't believe some people are still paying for that crap." They're known to kill good open source projects like Open Solaris and Open Office. Pretty much all they have left is suing other tech companies over Java usage. They've even lobbied the government to stop using open source.
Google? They've haven't been the "do no evil" company in a long time. They like to start projects, mine them for data, and leave them to die (like Google Code, their own GitHub competitor).
I'd be good with Google getting it, but Oracle?
Yeaaah, I guess it is for the better. Though Google probably out-bid Oracle anyway.
I can't really think of any. Could be that github gets some new features, which could be nice maybe, idk. The cynical part of me thinks those features will be under a restrictive license, and/or they only work in VS Code, etc. Maybe there'll be some idk, outlook or sharepoint integration or something. This might be nice if that's your ecosystem.
Microsoft really seems to be extending an olive branch to the open source community these days, makes me feel like maybe they could be turning a new leaf. On the other hand, we've been watching microsoft do evil shit for dozens of years, and historically this has been the first "E" in "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish".
Microsoft isn't in a great place now. The EEE model requires a clear dominance in industry to work. In my (largely one city) experience, not a lot of coders are just Microsoft people. Many more are just Apple people. Github isn't Git, and it isn't the only git-on-the-web tool. They aren't going to get very far just extinguishing it.
The clear potential to them is to make git work better for companies with massive codebases, like their own, because selling super-spiffy Github Enterprise systems that Embrace and Extend (in a backwards compatible way) to git is a way to get themselves back into the corporate ecosystem. I've expanded on the filesystem like extensions I think git could use in another post already.
I mean they bought github but they didn't buy git, so being that the whole technology it's centered around is free and opensource, what ties people to github vs gitlab or any other competitor?
True, but I mean it's not without precedent. The HTML spec is an open document, which all browser makers are supposed to follow. But in the days of IE4-IE7 they kept adding IE-proprietary extensions like ActiveX, DHTML, etc. Since they had the dominant browser, people developed for those technologies, effectively locking them into using Windows/IE for their intranet sites.
Maybe github adds some new features which only work in Microsoft products. Maybe they add git commands to Skype or Sharepoint or Outlook in some way. Gitlab et all don't have that, and never will. It could discourage people from switching to an alternative, since they lose out on functionality. Lots of companies that contribute to open-source projects add on their own proprietary things. Chrome/Chromium for example. Often people say "I don't use chromium because it doesn't have automatic translation" or the fact companies selling Android devices can't include the play store, google maps, gmail etc without paying google. Yes, you can use the free open-source alternative, but it's been deliberately made inferior.
@Elijah made a good point though, that this was a lot easier when they already controlled the market. Nowadays any new features they add to Edge are ignored, since it doesn't dictate the market anymore. On the other hand, github is by far the largest git service with a lot of momentum behind it. So, we'll see.
It secures Github financially:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is-building-a-coder-s-paradise-it-s-not-coming-cheap
I wouldn't rely on that; the article is nowhere near up-to-date. The enterprise plan could be flourishing, but we'd have no way to know.
Microsoft owns Linkedin. Has it been ruined?
Here's what I think might come of this:
git is a hackish way to get a filesystem style view of code history. In my own experience this looks a lot like ClearCase which I used in the late 1990s. Microsoft is currently using git for a lot of stuff, and they are surely running into the issues that "hackish" implies. Let's say you have a big program that includes graphics (for UI, in-app documentation, and/or for embedding in content users produce), audio (for feedback when actions happen and/or for embedding in content users produce), and video (for UI, in-app documentation, and/or for embedding in content users produce). You might really, really want to have particular versions of particular files associated with particular branches of the code. Like the Mac icon designs might be different than the Windows ones. Git isn't great at versioning binary files.
And because this is a big project, there are a lot of files. When you check out a different (existing) branch, behind the scenes, git has to track down a lot of different files from the .git directory and put them in the right place. That's going to involve a lot of filesystem operations. If some of these are big binaries, it will potentially also add a lot disk writes.
Making git be more filesystem like, and more network file system like, will make git more usable for that case. In an office environment, it's not unreasonable to expect a lot of people will use network file shares to access the code. Those people are prime targets for optimization by way of making git into a real filesystem. If you know how snapshots work in zfs, for example, branches could be snapshot equivalents. Zfs doesn't do separate snapshots on a per repo basis, though, so it isn't quite the same.
I suspect that Microsoft will put work into making Github (and the corporate private version, Github Enterprise) work more like a network filesystem for at least some larger projects.
You know that git and GitHub are separate entities right? How would MS change the fundamental workings of git?
By creating and integrating the Git Virtual File System.
Granted, it's just a kind of addon right now, but they certainly have an incentive to get people interested in GVFS.
GitHub and GVFS are mostly orthogonal projects, but I could imagine a world where GitHub starts offering GVFS support for bigger/enterprise clients.
To add to Crespyl's answer, integration of orthogonal components. Tighter integration into Microsoft software development products will get full MS shops into buying Github web and Enterprise products. Building out GVFS into something bigger and better such as a GVFS / NFS hybrid. The filesystem thing can be done in a way that makes repos exportable as if traditional git, but work differently under the hood. Swapping the plumbing but not the porcelain, if you will.
In my experience, Linkedin's user experience has become significantly more cluttered, not to mention the significant ramping up of notifications by default. They're really pushing people to use it more frequently for entirely understandable reasons, but trying to make it a social network in its own right has, IMO, made it much more irritating.
Agreed. It's easy to opt-out but the defaults suck.
How big is GitHub's role in the development of git itself? (Forgive me for not knowing.) I would think it just serves as a hosting provider, and nothing else, and that leaving a large portion of development in the hands of a centralized company could be hazardous. In addition, @pseudolobster raises a good point; if these changes ever occur, they could be proprietary to Microsoft products, as part of the second E in their Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish program.
Github is essentially irrelevant to git itself. I honestly do not think that github has enough influence over git to extinguish it. Already we see every IDE under the sun have git integration and there are already some top notch competitors to github (gitlab, bitbucket).
Git itself is opensource, anyone can contribute. Github may employ people to work specifically on git, but they seem to mostley provide features outside of git to enhance the co-coding experience. If microsoft forks git and creates a "proprietary" knock off, they have to release the source code since git is "copy left" - there is no reason for them to do this and instead would contribute to git itself. Can't provide sources this second but hopefully someone can back me up on this.
Guido (creator of Python) works at dropbox - they employ him to spend 50% of his time on dropbox work and 50% working on Python (or something like that). A few companies do this kind of thing for a few reasons, so github might do the same for git or other OS programs.
It secures github financially
Azure integration might be good
Very tiny chance it gets open sourced now but probably not
1m10s
Sure, an audio file of 45 minutes is just what I want to walk into blindly.
The segment about GitHub lasts for all of 2 minutes.
The point is, a comment with "1m10s" as content, especially if the concept to listen to is 2 minutes long, could have required 2 minutes to write up instead of linking an audio file.
I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't understand what "1m10s" meant until just now because of this comment. I may be an edge case, but this is why proper comments are necessary. Instead of "1m10s", giving a simple but much more descriptive "here's a talk that has a short segment on GitHub, which starts around 1m10s in" would have provided the valuable context needed to understand what "1m10s" is supposed to mean.
Honestly, pretty much anything would be an improvement over a contextless "1m10s" link to an audio file with no description of the source or what the audio file is supposed to be whatsoever.
I'm totally there with you. In fact I realised what that meant only after Dash comment and only because I stopped a moment and thought "and how I'm supposed to know where those 2 minutes are?"
It provides greater legitimacy, in the eyes of conservative institutions, like my own, which aren't particularly tech savvy. If Microsoft owns it, it can't be that bad! Might actually increase the odds of having anyone use it around here, from infinitesimal. So that's good.