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.
Related Stories
[Update 20180604 @ 14:00 UTC: Acquisition confirmed. Microsoft is paying $7.5 billion in stock. Coverage at Microsoft, Security Week, The Register, and The Verge. Also, see the Microsoft blog post. --martyb]
Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub
Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub, and could announce the deal as early as Monday. Bloomberg reports that the software giant has agreed to acquire GitHub, and that the company chose Microsoft partly because of CEO Satya Nadella. Business Insider first reported that Microsoft had been in talks with GitHub recently.
Time to move off GitHub?
Previously: Microsoft Holds Acquisition Talks with Github
An AC also submitted Bloomberg's article.
Google admits it lost out to Microsoft buying GitHub
A Google executive has admitted the search giant lost out on buying GitHub. Speaking at a Fortune Magazine event yesterday, Diane Greene Google's head of cloud made an interesting admission. "I wouldn't have minded buying them, but it's OK," said Greene, Bloomberg reports.
Previous rumors suggest Google was also trying to acquire GitHub, alongside Microsoft's bids. GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath reportedly chose Microsoft because of his relationship with CEO Satya Nadella. GitHub is a large code repository that has become very popular with developers and companies to host projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. There are 85 million repositories hosted on GitHub, and 28 million developers contribute to them.
Previously: Microsoft Holds Acquisition Talks with Github
Microsoft Agrees to Acquire GitHub... for $7.5 Billion [Updated]
(Score: 2) by idiot_king on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:26PM (1 child)
I was curious about some of their recent moves, which I thought was indicative of some strange activity, but it looks like they're the same old, same old Microsoft.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 04 2018, @12:14AM
Apparently as of June 3 The Verge is reporting It is a done deal and will be Announced on Monday.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/3/17422752/microsoft-github-acquisition-rumors [theverge.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:30PM
divide and conquer. embrace and extend.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:32PM
If MS buys github, then the credibility is gone IMO. Old habits die hard and MS has shown plenty of bad habits.
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fadrian on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:39PM (6 children)
... for Microsoft; bad for everyone else.
That is all.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:55PM (1 child)
M$ has made a lot of big purchases in recent years. If you look at them individually they do not make economic sense and have no possibility for return on investment. However, if you look at the fact that M$ makes its money from monopoly rents, not software or services, then they make sense in that they cut out competitors to the monopoly. M$ has purchased lately these:
And there are more, too, but none of those will bring in anything close to their purchase price, let alone leave room for a profit on top of that. All of those are past peak and M$ overpaid. If you take the devices that people actually use into consideration, M$ Windows has dropped to 36% of the market [statcounter.com] and even if you limit the scope M$ Windows has dropped to 82% of the market [statcounter.com]. The cutoff to be able to pull in those rents probably was around 85% of the desktop market, but when it drops below 80% even people not paying attention will notice.
M$ also seems to be shuffling its budget around to give the illusion that Azure is doing ok economically.
So when it goes, it will deflate rather quickly though because of its cultlike nature there will be a very long tail.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 02 2018, @05:57PM
the biggest and fastest growth market in history... buggy whips, indeed.
I anticipate a periodic gasp of mildly exciting profitability to emanate from Redmond in the future, similar to IBM's performance over the past 25 years. We do need to keep them on a short leash with respect to monopoly rents, that has always been the nature of their beast.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:57PM
It would be good for gitlab
For internal non-FOSS use, Google cloud source is a nice looking product hampered and punished by a disturbingly marketing influenced name. Its just your average hosted git, its hardly limited to cloud-y stupidity. It has some integration with google cloud services making it easy to use, but its hardly required. So aside from the stupid name the billing is bizarre something like people times repos and just so you don't turn it into a file sharing site they have ridiculous high limits by source code standards for storage and network, so like one project with four people is free but two project with three people you gotta pay.
I always kinda thought Redmine with a separate git repo would be nicer than github, but I've never tried it. Its Ruby on Rails IIRC so its gonna be slow and unscalable but for corporate internal use its certainly good enough for companies with less than 10000 people.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @03:31PM (2 children)
The only way this could work out OK is if Microsoft just buys them for physical and intellectual property.
If the people are kept, some of them may be able to work their way up into the rest of Microsoft. Many of the people who founded github were great, but mostly they are gone now. The company is coasting along, now run by a bunch of toxic SJWs who refuse to focus on the business.
This, BTW, is why gitlab is pulling ahead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @07:55PM (1 child)
> The only way this could work out OK is if Microsoft just buys them for physical and intellectual property.
Expect a "burning platform" speech 2 hours after the acquisition.
I never shook off the fishy sensation with github, caused by their wanting to become the single point of failure of free software projects. Start cloning to your HD, guys.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday June 02 2018, @08:38PM
that's why as much flack as GIT get's we all use it. Github is (was) for sharing, but git works just fine when LDAP/SSH/VPN etc...
And anyway, SOURCEFORGE and their clicky-insert malware tendencies will be followed by Micro$oft.
They have form. When they (M$) bought Nokia , and foisted their Crapware M$ tools onto my N8 with NO way of removing.
This will not end well....
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:48PM (2 children)
I remember reading their semi-leaked possibly even true, financials around 2016 and their revenues and burn rate were accelerating indicting a wall would be hit around 2018-ish timeframe.
So here we are. Get bought, get more investment money, something. Not quite April of 2000 yet, but eventually the VCs want some return on the investment, so if the VCs are tired of lighting money on fire, and the company doesn't want to simply close, they're gonna have to get bought.
Noticing the impressive burn rate, and comparing my financials in 2016 to today, I can't think of anything new they've done I'd want to pay for in that interval, thats kinda a problem for an older startup like github, the growth in what people want and use happens very early, while the suits are hoping for an equally insane growth rate at the end. That kinda summarizes the struggle of VC startups; the business model demands the growth rate be constant if not increasing, but natural engineering constraints mean the growth rate always decreases eventually to zero if not negative, so the longer a startup goes without getting bought, the more likely it'll get flushed instead of bought.
Not to mention, gitlab is simply better. Why pay more for github when you'd get something better cheaper if you used (or bought) gitlab. Certainly I'd never use github other than the residual popularity and culture (kinda like using myspace in 2010 because there are still eyeballs there even if its not the best anymore). Thats the natural startup race to the bottom, which also causes a hyperinflation in new startup perceived values.
I could make an interesting analogy between startups and women and marriage... Github is almost at the wall about to become the financial equivalent of a cat lady, somebody gotta wife up github real soon before her market value drops to about zero.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @03:04PM (1 child)
They have moved office to 365 (cloud). They are also one of the largest cloud providers. That is where their burn rate is going. From what I see it is working.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday June 02 2018, @05:27PM
I thought GP was talking about Github's burn rate.
Office in Cloud vs libre office. No brainier.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday June 02 2018, @03:53PM (13 children)
1. It's at most a couple of hours work to set up your own git repository,
2. Anybody who has a checkout of the code can do that setup, and
3. It's really easy for a set of collaborators to switch to a new git repository as the canonical repo.
That's all a testament to the quality of git's design.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Wootery on Saturday June 02 2018, @03:58PM (11 children)
Anyone can replace their Git host, but replacing GitHub would mean far more than that.
GitHub has wikis, bug-trackers, fork-tracking, and most importantly, community.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday June 02 2018, @04:59PM (10 children)
None of those are features essential to Github are things that can't be had elsewhere.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Pino P on Saturday June 02 2018, @05:23PM (7 children)
For each of these, which "elsewhere" would you recommend? Or should every project be required to lease a virtual private server* and pay a sysadmin to maintain all this stuff on a VPS?
* Trying to host from your home or office instead of a VPS doesn't work well when your Internet service provider doesn't let you forward the appropriate ports from the Internet to your network. An ISP can implement this legally using acceptable use policy (AUP) or technically using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) or both.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:05PM (3 children)
1. Many devs are passable sysadmins. Alternately, there may be sysadmins who would benefit from your project and be willing to volunteer time. That solves that problem.
2. Cloud servers are quite cheap these days.
3. If you can't afford cloud servers, you can at least ask any business or institution you're affiliated with to give you some space.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:53AM (2 children)
"Passable" means "I know enough to be dangerous." University and high school computer science programs teach programming, not the technical or legal aspects of administration of a public-facing Internet server. Thus an armchair sysadmin is likely to miss some major detail of security or compliance, such as how to make notifications from Bugzilla go to the contributor's inbox rather than be rejected as spam, or when a project based outside the European Union that accepts a patch from a contributor in the Union is required to hire a representative in the Union pursuant to article 27 of the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) because it is now the "data controller" of "personal data" of a "data subject" in the Union.
Provided the application is in a class of applications that have direct benefit to sysadmins. A library useful on Python or Node servers might. So might a text editor extension. But a completely client-side application that isn't used in the process of running a server, such as a video game, might not. Or what am I missing?
How long will they remain so, particularly for access by users behind networks with no IPv6 connectivity, as the supply of scarce IPv4 addresses grows tighter?
The situation I was in for several years involved being between institutions, such as having graduated from university and looking for a place to host a portfolio where prospective employers can see.
(Score: 1) by babywombat on Sunday June 03 2018, @06:13PM (1 child)
... or when a project based outside the European Union that accepts a patch from a contributor in the Union is required to hire a representative in the Union pursuant to article 27 of the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR)
That's just spreading some FUD. The same article 27 which you are quoting also says this obligation does not apply if the processing of personal data is not large-scale and is "unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons". It might be that storing a git user name in the repo history can be considered as "processing of personal data" in some stretched way, but surely it is not large-scale and surely it it is not likely to risk any rights or freedoms.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday June 04 2018, @12:24AM
True. But in practice, I'll believe it once a judge sets forth a test for what's "large-scale" and what's "occasional".
(Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:08PM (1 child)
The choice of either using github or paying zomg expensive salaries to someone is a false dichotomy. It isn't that hard to find among volunteer coders someone who can volunteer sysadmin (1) the setup of a VPS (5 minutes instantiate + a weekend installing your repo, wiki engine, and bugzilla, and setting up access and permissions) and (2) its upkeep (sudo apt-get* update; sudo apt-get upgrade; sudo rinse; sudo repeat).**
That's not to say that github is without value in already having mostly done these things and keeping them up in an ongoing manner--it can be nice to just use a server that someone else keeps up-to-date for you gratis--but "finding a server" isn't that hard nor time-consuming.
A trip to Low End Box [lowendbox.com] pretty reliably nets you a VPS for around US$1 - US$2 a month, and poof, you are your own cloud. I maintain several of these "low end boxes" from a few different providers, and I find that they (http://virmach.com [virmach.com] and http://budgetnode.com [budgetnode.com] in my case) generally renew at the end of your term at same dirt cheap rates, and uptime and service have been top-notch. The costs are so low that I just pay out of my pocket instead of bothering to spread the cost around to the members and contributors.
Yes, it's possible to get stuck with an ISP that doesn't fulfill the I and P in its acronym. It's even (less) possible that everyone on your team is stuck on such an ISP. If it's that bad, part with the one US dollar and get a VPS *shrug*. (My ISP does the annoying CGNAT but for an extra $10/month they will rent you a static IP which solves that problem. But frankly, all my several VPSes put together are cheaper than my static IP, and anyone can get them, even if their Internet access is by public library.)
I know this might be rhetorical, but there are good answers.
Bug tracker: Bugzilla [bugzilla.org] (Mozilla Public License) (Or your favorite one)
Wiki: Mediawiki [wikimedia.org] (GPL2+) (Or your favorite one)
Fork Tracking: Makes less sense in terms of a small repo/server, but use pointers in your bug tracker and wiki.
Again, none of those are features unique to Github. For most projects, you could easily host them all on a single-board ARM computer stuck to your router with velcro.
-----
* or yum or dnf or pacman or whatever suits you
** I don't mean to suggest that being a sysadmin is simple or easy. But if you only have one or two or even twelve users, neither is it a full-time job to set up a server to host a project that you love. (or even like.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Sunday June 03 2018, @12:40PM
By "pay" I didn't mean full time or even part time. But even monitoring a server for intrusions, interpreting data privacy regulations, and maintaining deliverability of notification mails takes more ongoing time than just putting an update script in the cron job. And someone who recently graduated from university (in a specialization other than web application development) and is looking for a host for his portfolio so that he can land a first full-time job might not have the bucks to pay for a weekend of a sysadmin's time.
You'd be surprised. Even in the emulation and chiptune community, you see a lot of forks cross-pollinating one another. j0CC-FamiTracker was forked from 0CC-FamiTracker, which was in turn forked from FamiTracker. bsnes-plus was forked from bsnes-classic, which was originally forked from bsnes before it became higan.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:31PM
Atlassian's BitBucket.org [bitbucket.org] is a solid alternative to GitHub, with similar features. Pretty source-browsing in-browser, bug-tracker, wiki. I forget if they have project-planning or code-review support. They're cheaper than GitHub, and they offer private repos for free. (Which makes sense - they're desperate to compete with GitHub.) They have fancy features reserved for those who pay enough.
They don't have GitHub's community though. It seems to be one of those winner-takes-all things.
An example public repo on BitBucket is the old SCons repo. [bitbucket.org] (Ironically they've moved to GitHub.)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 03 2018, @02:24PM
Community isn't to be underestimated.
If you control all your developers, then it doesn't matter - but when you're making stone soup, you need exposure, ease of access, and trust to make it work.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday June 03 2018, @06:03PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:33PM
Actually it takes about 5mins to spin up a Linux VPS on DigitalOcean with an SSH key and a Git repo.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday June 02 2018, @05:48PM (5 children)
How hard is it for me to set up my own Git server? I can't be bothered to google a tutorial.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by tomp on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:02PM (2 children)
It's way harder than googling a tutorial. Safe to assume you can't be bothered to set up your own Git server either.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 02 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)
Tutorial for Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install git
mkdir repo.git
cd repo.git
git init --bare
and, if you haven't disabled the default ssh server, your repo is live and ready to use. There are, of course, several hundred nuanced security considerations - all left as an exercise for the reader. Basically: if you're going to start giving people access to your machine via the ssh server - handle your ssh server with all due care. Personally, I like creating a git user with the git (no command line access) shell and only exposing ssh access to that, and requiring my outside users to give me their public ssh key so I can add them to the /home/git/.ssh/authorized_keys file - hopefully the git user's shell access is limited enough that my repo users can't monkey with the authorized_keys file, hmmm.....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday June 03 2018, @12:38AM
I have a useful command line tool that I've decided to release as Free Softwary
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:16PM
I am pretty sure, don't use me as a tutorial or anything, that a "git server" is a computer that you have ssh access to, with one or more local git repositories on it that you have permission to access.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:57PM
If you've got a box that's running any flavor of Linux, it's about 2 minutes to get a git server working, and maybe 30 to think through a few security issues you'd want to nail down before opening a hole in your firewall to let the internet in to get at it.
All in all, I'd recommend a minimum of 2 hours dedicated research time on Google to get to know about the issues before setting up your own - I've set up an exposed git repo to work with some consultants overseas, neither of our corporate IT departments could manage to navigate their bureaucracy in any kind of timely fashion to expose a port to a company server so we could collaborate that way, so I punched a hole in the home firewall and exposed my laptop - we still mirror to the company repositories, but when we want to sync with each other we go through my laptop.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:25PM (2 children)
If your code is proprietary, letting someone else host it seems like a very bad idea. At least it's my own damn fault if someone hacks my server.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday June 03 2018, @02:51PM (1 child)
To present another point of view, this could merely be handled with licensing ("This Project Is Licensed Under The Terms Of The You-Have-No-Rights-Go-Away Public License, All And We Do Mean All Rights Reserved"), otherwise it's arguably simply security through obscurity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @06:31AM
And how do you deal with infringement if you are a small company who doesn't want to hire lawyers? Are you going to leave $1000 cash on the street and say don't take it, it belongs to Mr. Naive?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @12:47AM
Instead of focusing on their core business, their entire ecosystem now reeks of mediocrity.
Heaven forbid they actually fix issues with their ENTIRE product range first. Microsoft would yet again be a force.
Instead they are pushing their way into irrelevance.
This shit will continue while that stupid ape nadalla is at the helm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @04:16AM (1 child)
there's always good ol' bitbucket
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:40AM
There are many alternative software:
https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-management [github.com]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday June 04 2018, @08:34AM (1 child)
I don't see any posts analyzing this situation rationally.
What exactly can MS do to FOSS projects on Github? The worst I can think of is to make the service really crappy, long downtimes, add bugs, etc. The code is already public with copyright and licenses. MS can't claim ownership of the code or surreptitiously insert bugs or backdoors into the code (since Git uses a Merkle chain and has signed tags and commits). They could replace binary packages with compromised versions if they aren't signed, although I'm not sure what MS would gain from doing something so risky. They could shut down FOSS repos, but that will just cause people to move somewhere else and tank GitHub's value. By the nature of Git, there are multiple copies of every repo hosted on GitHub, so it's not like MS could hold a project hostage (although it could hold the bugs and wikis hostage). It sounds like a great way to write off a $2 billion loss on your taxes.
The source code, the most important thing, won't be affected and can be easily moved thanks to Git being decentralized. Other supporting services like bug tracking might be harder to move, but the worst that can happen is MS outright shutting them down with no export option, and that isn't very likely to happen.
I think the most likely outcomes are:
1. Nothing happens.
2. Github gets shittier for FOSS projects over the course of a year and everyone migrates to somewhere else, maybe Gitlab. There will be full migration scripts within two or three months; the most annoying thing will be changing all the URLs.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @01:09PM
Fair enough.
This part is certain:
Github can view anything in a private repository (they aren't encrypted). If Microsoft buys Github, that sentence changes to "Microsoft has full access to any private repository." The implications are similar, but much more far reaching.
This part is simply FUD, admittedly, but very plausible:
Github could have management problems like Sourceforge did. Sourceforge had a serious problem where its management was very out of sync with its membership such that management thought it was okay to put crapware on top of free software, turn the site into a malicious advertisement cesspool, and other such things that made it evil for someone to send a customer/client there for a download, leading to the great mass exodus away from Sourceforge (and largely to another single point of failure, Github).
If Microsoft buys Github, then instantly, at a stroke, Github will have management that is very out of sync with its membership. I do not suggest that Microsoft will suddenly start adding malware, but that isn't out of the realm of possibility since Microsoft isn't really cognizant of what features make a product malware (and many of their software products intentionally have a range of malware features that they don't consider malware). More to the point, I don't know *what* nonsense Microsoft will come up with, because I don't think like them--but I know enough about them, and about free software, to know whether I want to depend on Microsoft to keep any project I work on alive. (It's a "no" for most of them.)
Pro-Microsoft Bit: I think VSCode is a really good programming editor. I am using a MS Natural Keyboard 4000 to type this. Not hating on Microsoft, just pointing out that oil and water don't mix all that well.