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from the good-business-or-something-else dept.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/06/01/microsoft--github-acquisition-talks-resume.html
Microsoft held talks in the past few weeks to acquire software developer platform GitHub, Business Insider reports.
One person familiar with the discussions between the companies told CNBC that they had been considering a joint marketing partnership valued around $35 million, and that those discussions had progressed to a possible investment or outright acquisition. It is unclear whether talks are still ongoing, but this person said that GitHub's price for a full acquisition was more than Microsoft currently wanted to pay.
GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in its last funding round 2015, but the price tag for an acquisition could be $5 billion or more, based on a price that was floated last year.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:32PM (9 children)
First they bought into the Linux Foundation (Linux Foundations's fault for putting itself up for sale), now they are looking to control a good chunk of the free software community (community's fault for worshiping a single failure point instead of sensibly using decentralized or varied SCM). That is not a good sign.
If you are part of a free software project, please decide NOW if you haven't already:
(a) I wish to be Microsoft's next embrace-extend-extinguish target
(b) I do not wish this, therefore I will reform my actions
If you have already decided, then no action is necessary. If you "haven't really thought about it", then by Stallman, man, get with it!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 02 2018, @05:51PM (4 children)
Alternatives?
I'd like a site like GitHub with a decent trac wiki attached to the account... who's good out there? I thought GitHub was... until this week.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:10PM
gitlab?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @03:12AM
Depending on your development model, Fossil SCM might be for you. It is a single binary with repos being a single sqlite database. If you don't mind a more cathedral model and a slightly higher entry-cost compared to Gitlab or Gitea, it will serve you well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:59AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 03 2018, @02:16PM
Thanks, and that's really it, isn't it? Account maintenance.
AC above mentioned Fossil SCM... I've set up ~6 large-ish trac sites over the past ~12 years, early days on svn, lately on git, and trac has never disappointed in terms of ease of setup, maintenance and features, but... account maintenance has always been a headache - one place integrated it with Active Directory, but for some reason keeping that working was even worse than manually maintaining a passwd file for ~12 users.
Where I am now I have 2 trac sites, one that's providing long term maintenance support for a project from 2013, and another that got subsumed by the TFS/VSTS beast. With 20+ developers, we're paying ~3% M$ tax for our licenses, and I surely don't see $100K of value in VSTS compared to trac, but 40% of them have drunk the MS kool-aid hard, so here we are.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Sunday June 03 2018, @02:51PM
At least the content is not locked in. Github did contribute improvements to the development workflow. However, their technical leverage is not deep. In a few days all of the github's content can be pushed to new similar sites. Gitlab will be holding them honest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @02:53PM (2 children)
This situation is why the Activist Public License (APL) was written:
http://apl.folkcamper.com/APL-0-2.html [folkcamper.com]
I really like Stallman, and I agree with the intent of the GPL. But the GPL does not take into account corporate personhood. While software empowers the individual, software still functions under the governance of law. That law in the greater scope, is corrupt. Which is to say that GPL serves corporate persons as much as it serves real persons. By doing so it empowers those who subvert the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 14th, 15th amendments, article 1, and the very first clause of the document itself.
If SCOTUS is willing to redefine "We the people", based on a non-constitutional-congress-session-statute from 1871 any time a big company asks them to, then "We the people" are on our own. In consequence our licenses need to defend the rights that the courts do not, every single time we release a piece of software.
You only have those civil rights that you defend. The GPL defends those rights statutory law recognizes. But you have more rights than that.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday June 03 2018, @03:54PM (1 child)
Perhaps so, but the Activist Public License is a proprietary nonfree license that discriminates against fields of endeavor (large categories of commercial, government, political, and nonprofit; heck it discriminates against everybody except a nonparticipating, noncontributing zero who sits in his parents' basement eating cheese puffs, and it may discriminate against him and I just missed it).
From a rigid, fixed, certain point of view and cultural context, something like the Activist Public License might look useful, but there exist in the world many other cultural and political contexts in which someone under government or cultural oppression may only exercise his or her human rights by being a member of something that the Activist Public License deems "ineligible", in which case the Activist Public License is an instrument of oppression, far from being any factor reducing it.
Just because somebody said "Hey! *I* know what somebody ought to do to stick it to the man!" doesn't make their proposed solution helpful nor useful. Sure, it's your right to be an oppressing jerk, and that license can be a great tool to exercise that right in particular, but I wouldn't go around recommending it. Just my two-cents opinion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @06:27PM
"Just my two-cents opinion."
Considering your post gave no useful information related to either software licensing or EEE, I would say you are overvalueing your contribution.