Big company takeovers
 

So Microsoft just bought GitHub for $7.5 billion. They say they won't change anything, but I'm suspicious that they'll want to somehow make a return on their $7.5 billion investment.

I suspect lots of independent developers will now be looking for a GitHub alternative even if Microsoft keep their word - lots of people distrust Microsoft - and for good reason.

Re: Big company takeovers
 

So, I'm working for MS - something I couldn't have even imagined 5-10 years ago.

I'm torn as to whether or not this is a good idea, for exactly the reasons you state. In the cloud space (Azure), Microsoft is very much into openness and honesty. You really can't run a cloud based service if people are distrustful of you. However, it's not like people distrust MS for mistakes long past, and I'd image that there will be some fallout from this.

Microsoft is big into GitHub. A lot of Azure services are open-source, and the employees are working on both MS products on GitHub as well as contributing to other open source projects. I also think it spends a lot of money on GitHub already (Azure alone has over 2200 public repositories), so buying it probably makes some sense.

Re: Big company takeovers
 

Is nothing safe? :freakout:

Re: Big company takeovers
 

Good article: Everyone complaining about Microsoft buying GitHub needs to offer a better solution | Ars Technica More balanced and detailed than the title might suggest.

Quotes from other sites I can't be bothered to link to ...

:clippy:

Re: Big company takeovers
 

I fundamentally don't like the fact that we rely on such massive centralisation for what should be decentralised version control.

But for source code dependencies and packages, I need to point people to a canonical resource, and for that, I currently need something centralised like Github. If that need is to be "fixed", we need to have a broader argument about how to distribute internet resources in a decentralised fashion, but no-one is really clear at this stage how the tech for that works (I'm still crossing my fingers for IPFS).

For private stuff, I worked at a shop that hosted their own Git repositories, and for a few years now, I've been setting my git origin to my VPS.

To fully embrace the irrational argument, I have a feeling that part of my love for Github was the cute Octocat brand, and the juxtaposing of the Microsoft logo is one of those few times I year that I go "ewwwww....."

Re: Big company takeovers
 

For real. It's like "git" and "hub" are a contradiction in terms.

Re: Big company takeovers
 

The fact is people hate version control, and github has made it easy to not bother. The nerds can have their controlled space while everyone else downloads the branch zip instead of the tar just to make you twitch and pound on it with their IDE of choice until it works.

We've always had the option of hosting elsewhere but who wants to? We can't trust sourceforge any more. And home servers aren't an option when ISP's seldom give public IP's any more. Seems like the choice will be adapt, VPS/VPN, or nothing.

What shocks me is that github was an entity which could be bought at all. Step one for "don't be evil" seems to be "don't be a publicly traded corporation".

Re: Big company takeovers
 

Apologies. I don't follow. Can you expand a bit?

That didn't shock me much. I thought the modern SV MO was to pretend to be the hip independent thing, hoover up enough users, and then get acquired because you're not actually turning much profit by simply being hip.

As I say, I'm still holding out hope that a decentralised method of distributing internet resources can actually work at some point. There was apparently a cute idea from a few years ago called GitTorrent, but the developer is asking interested folk to look instead to stuff like IPFS.

My current doubts about IPFS are solely due to this issue. I went looking for that when I found that running the IPFS daemon on my VPS was consuming several gig a day in bandwidth when I wasn't serving any data. Tracing the comments on that issue, there is possibly a fundamental scaling problem with distributed hash tables. If so, :(

Re: Big company takeovers
 

People need version control, but don't exactly enjoy it. The centralization in github and its nice webby interface made it easier to involve less technical people.

Re: Big company takeovers
 

Are you saying ... without being forced to, people can't ... commit?

Re: Big company takeovers
 

Something I noticed reading Hacker News comments and chatting with other developers is that the mindshare of github has meant that some coders don't realise that "push" and "pull" don't have to be to and from a central webserver.

I used to work on long lived experimental branches by setting my remote to my office machine which I could get to via an ssh tunnel, making it a clean sync when I carried on working from home. My boss used to worry about my work being backup up, to which I pointed out that Github isn't a cloud-backup solution, and that my six month rotating backups on all my machines, as well as the daily university backups that went onto year-lived tape archives were probably already adequate.

I've also ported repositories by setting up an additional remote for the old one at its directory.

I've worked at a shop where we just had a server that had our repositories in a git user directory on one of our servers and our remote url were ssh urls. I still do that for my VPS repos. I'd like it if we could do that at our own place. I think it would be a pretty small amount of work to automate pull requests compared to all the other administrative tasks that have to be done.

Re: Big company takeovers
 

Doctorow talking about antitrust

Pluralistic: 09 May 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow