[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.
Related Stories
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.
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]
In its fifth year of life, some promising development of a Playstation 4 emulator has emerged thanks to its mostly standard PC architecture and abundant FOSS projects to draw from. From wololo.net:
Orbital is the combination of three separate projects which together allow us to boot into PS4 kernels. Those being:
orbital-bios, orbital-grub and the most important part: orbital-qemu. A summary of these would be that orbital-bios is a SeaBIOS fork to add support to the PS4 quirks (no VGA, no ISA bus, etc.). This is needed because the PS4 is not really a PC. orbital-grub simply forks GRUB and adds a modified freebsd bootloader to add support for Orbis kernels, since they include custom sections written by Sony and orbital-qemu is a QEMU fork that adds support for PS4 hardware: Aeolia (USB, Ethernet, etc. etc.) and Liverpool (GPU and Audio).
It seems they were able to translate the graphics stack to run on top of Vulcan fairly well, but this system currently requires a physical DualShock 4 connected to the host with USB passthrough. Further, it can only work with decrypted firmwares made available via previously known exploits on physical consoles.
The repository is hosted, somewhat amusingly, at GitHub: https://github.com/AlexAltea/orbital
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published five of the white papers it funded regarding questions about Microsoft Copilot. After Microsoft acquired GitHub, it set up a machine learning system to cull through its archive of software, called Copilot. The approach chosen and even the basic activity raises many questions starting with those of licensing.
Microsoft GitHub's announcement of an AI-driven Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) program called Copilot -- which uses machine learning to autocomplete code for developers as they write software -- immediately raised serious questions for the free software movement and our ability to safeguard user and developer freedom. We felt these questions needed to be addressed, as a variety of serious implications were foreseen for the free software community and developers who use GitHub. These inquiries -- and others possibly yet to be discovered -- needed to be reviewed in depth.
In our call for papers, we set forth several areas of interest. Most of these areas centered around copyright law, questions of ownership for AI-generated code, and legal impacts for GitHub authors who use a GNU or other copyleft license(s) for their works. We are pleased to announce the community-provided research into these areas, and much more.
First, we want to thank everyone who participated by sending in their papers. We received a healthy response of twenty-two papers from members of the community. The papers weighed-in on the multiple areas of interest we had indicated in our announcement. Using an anonymous review process, we concluded there were five papers that would be best suited to inform the community and foster critical conversations to help guide our actions in the search for solutions.
(Score: 5, Informative) by riT-k0MA on Monday June 04 2018, @01:43PM (15 children)
Gitlab is really struggling... to keep up with demand, as many developers abandon Github:
https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200 [twitter.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Monday June 04 2018, @01:58PM (2 children)
I noticed... moving now
(Score: 5, Informative) by riT-k0MA on Monday June 04 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)
I forgot to mention:
Gitlab is hosted by Azure. For now. They'll be moving to Google Cloud "soon".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Monday June 04 2018, @08:05PM
Shit soup either way.
(Score: 5, Funny) by SomeGuy on Monday June 04 2018, @02:07PM
Now, only if Microsoft would buy Twitter. :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 04 2018, @02:08PM (3 children)
Github is 6 letters and the last one is a 'b'. Gitlab is 6 letters and the last one is a 'b'. Is it time for Microsoft to sue Gitlab yet?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Monday June 04 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)
The US and EU regulatory system must say "OK" before the acquisition is final. It is expected to go through by the end of the year. That is when they will be able to perform an "extinguish" round and kill the competition. So far, only "embrace" (use it) and "extend" (buy your way in) have been on the agenda. The final step comes in due time.
(Score: 2, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 04 2018, @04:42PM
Microsoft, if you're listening, fax the papers to my staff at 202-456-2461 and I'll sign them right away. With the most beautiful signature you've seen in your entire life. I am sitting in the Oval Office with a pen in hand. Waiting!!!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @05:26PM
hu la ... hu la ... hu la
Sounds like it needs to be tried in a Hawaiian court.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @02:10PM (5 children)
Attempted to register for a GitLab account about 30 minutes ago, still haven't received the confirmation e-mail yet.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 04 2018, @02:12PM (1 child)
Maybe... wait a day? Lol.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @02:41PM
The confirmation e-mail arrived a few minutes later, and I've got the repo pushed to a new project on GitLab already... not a big deal at all, it seems.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @02:15PM (2 children)
Reminds me of the day Google cancelled Google Reader and every alternative was swamped for a week. Still using NewsBlur, have an open tab right now...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @11:11PM
Sadly when they destroyed DejaNews by embracing and extinguishing it there were no alternatives around, and now it's too late.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:00AM
I've settled on Claws Mail with the RSSyl plugin.
But Live Bookmarks in Firefox works fine too. It's insane that Google Chrome displays an XML blob instead of a properly formatted list and "Subscribe Now" button like Firefox does. That should just be the default for .rss/.atom handling in browsers.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Monday June 04 2018, @03:45PM
They already struggle on a regular basis, what's it going to be... Hopefully that can help them scale things up and get organized to be a real sensible alternative that offers much more than github.
sidenote: for those doing research where we use githubarchive.org, the github api etc. to study the software development ecosystem in OSS and other projects, this is a bit of a scary moment. GH has so far proven to be a great, reliable source of current data that was pretty open (their graph api is nowhere functional yet but at least there's the old api available). With this purchase, I don't know how long I will still have access to that data, especially since githubarchive posts the data on... BigQuery :D
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @01:50PM (20 children)
Anyone who experienced what happened to skype must be very worried.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:02PM
I'm worried about Atom. Thx $DEITY it is open source, and a fork can happen.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 04 2018, @02:10PM (2 children)
Also pay attention to what Microsoft did to Hotmail when they acquired that.
Move it from Unix to . . . . Windows NT 4!
And it took four times as many systems to run. Wasn't stable. Etc.
At least this time they can migrate GitHub to Windows 10 S. (I think that's what it's called . . . I wouldn't know.)
GitHub's scaling problems will be over! And it will have stability! The kind of reliability you've come to expect from Microsoft products. [techcrunch.com]
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:27PM
But a windoze machine power button pusher costs 20% of what a unix admin does, so it is all good.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @03:09PM
"GitHub's scaling problems will be over! And it will have stability!"
And all they'll have to do is figure out what to do with all the tumbleweeds rolling around.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @02:14PM (8 children)
Skype (still) doesn't have good technical alternatives that are as easy to use and migrate over to from Skype.
I think if the GitHub community mostly migrates to GitLab, this is going to be pretty painless overall. Juggling remotes on git repos is pretty minor hassle compared to writing code and tracking bugs. The problem with migrating from Skype is that it's compared to POTS for ease of use, and that's a pretty low bar to match.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @04:25PM (7 children)
I have had good experience* with wire [wire.com]. It connects reliably, has great call quality, and works across multiple platforms.
I tried Jitsi, Stallman's platform of choice, but found that it only connected calls rarely (50-70% connection rate some days, 5-10% other days, and some days, sorry, ICE failure all day long).
I tried Tox but found utox and qtox pretty feature poor, with poor call quality (distorted and "buzzy"). It works great; most of the problems will probably disappear with time. Lot of bugs with status "Yeah, will fix in a rewrite of the (whatever part) code."
Note that when wire's website says things like "free trial" etc. they are talking about a business-targeted service, not the wire messenger, which is free/libre software and free/gratis to use.
* One-on-one text chat, video chat, screen sharing (which is the best I have seen in a messenger)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @05:23PM
Cool, I'll check wire.
I've used Tox, and it's not a bad start, but it definitely had stability/compatibility issues that would keep me from considering it as a solution to recommend to friends - last time I tried it was maybe a year ago now.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @05:30PM (3 children)
A cynical person would say that Microsoft/Skype is looking to derail Wire's pending self-hosted server option before it goes live...
It's not possible to use it without paying, yet - right? (other than the 30 day trial) With the self-hosted server and GPL license, that should change.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @08:05PM (2 children)
They are selling some "wire business service" very aggressively on their website, but "wire desktop" (the messenger) is both free/libre and free/gratis.
Their https://wire.com/en/download/ [wire.com] page has the downloads for a Linux binary (as well as links to repositories for Debian and Ubuntu), and binaries for Android, Mac OSX, Windows, and iOS.
Also usable in a browser at http://app.wire.com [wire.com]. At this link, if not signed in, you will see "For personal use" -- which is the free/libre/gratis thing that is like Skype -- or "For Organizations-Create A Team" which is the thing they are selling. Click "For personal use" to make a free account. I have found it to be a drop-in replacement for Skype on my Debian desktop and on my Android phone.
Their source code is here: https://github.com/wireapp/wire [github.com].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @09:22PM (1 child)
So, I suppose that 2.5 years is too long to expect an OS to remain useful?
Node.js 8.x won't install on wily, and while 6.x installed, the wire client has some problem with React that it is pointing at Node.js being too old as a likely source...
Have I ever mentioned what a royal PITA I have found Java and javascript to be over the past 20 years?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @09:42PM
"Wily" has been officially EOL since July 28, 2016. You haven't received a single update, security or otherwise, since then. I would not be expecting much from your OS.
(Score: 1) by Burz on Tuesday June 05 2018, @03:05AM (1 child)
I looked at Wire but Riot looks even more interesting. So far it works well, has e2e encryption and its server architecture is federated:
https://riot.im/ [riot.im]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:50PM
i didn't know they had put the e2e in beta. it wasn't included last time i looked which looked very fishy to me. maybe they were just lagging behind.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @03:03PM (6 children)
I'm currently involved in a business with one of the very early Skype guys, and to be perfectly honest, thanks MS - without that windfall of cash in his pocket this new business may never have been founded!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @06:34PM
It's just too bad Nokia's phone division had to die without convincing a competitor to produce a compelling keyboard+discrete baseband alternative first :(
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @06:39PM (4 children)
Misdirected thanks. The first to buy Skype was eBay, in September 2005, for $2.6 billion in cash and stock [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @09:21PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday June 04 2018, @11:02PM (2 children)
Care to share the business model/plans...?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:32AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:55AM
Yuuup!
Nice! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by nekomata on Monday June 04 2018, @02:00PM (22 children)
I have looked around for some alternatives, what I found was:
I also found FossilSCM (https://www.fossil-scm.org/ [fossil-scm.org]) but this seems to throw out the baby with the bathwater and replace git itself.
Any experiences/recommendations of those?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:12PM (1 child)
Whats wrong with bitbucket?
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday June 04 2018, @07:04PM
What is wrong with BitBucket? Some news I wan't aware of?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @02:12PM (5 children)
If you want self hosted SCM, not so much world wide public membership in a project management, there's gitolite, I used that for years, professionally at one site.
Gitlab is where its at, has been where its at for some years now, also used that professionally at several sites and at home.
Now are you looking for strictly SCM or project management or wheres your balance between? I'm just saying if you want something weighted more toward project mismanangement there's always good old redmine.
Just remember that conceptually there's a difference between a SCM that happens to have some project mismanagement stuff cheaply bolted on, vs a complete project mismanagement suite that has a SCM bolted on almost as afterthought. I'm just saying that given a starting point of github, you can wiggle either direction quite a far way from the original balance.
The ultimate extreme of pure SCM is a host everyone can SSH into a shared project account (single sign on with kerberos, nfs home dirs, and ldap help a lot with this) and use SSH URLs in your git config, this actually works pretty well at implementing its extremely small list of features. Gitolite merely automates ACL stuff for that design.
The ultimate extreme of project mismanagement is one of those project management suites without any SCM integration at all, just a URL link on its project wiki to your git repo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nekomata on Monday June 04 2018, @02:40PM (4 children)
We started out on redmine (later w/ gitolite integration) but found it lacking for our "agile" needs. Basically managing a lot of very small tickets in redmine sucks (even with the agile plugin). However I very much like redmine for strategy/documentation/backlog tickets. Basically larger stuff that you won't "assign" to somebody, but first break apart. We still use redmine for that.
For development we moved to github, and also used the github project feature (for the small do-it implementation tickets). Now what we really use in github is the merge-req workflow, especially for commenting/reviewing. The kanban board. And the issues (a little). (And the repository itself obviously.) So not very much.
I played around with gitlab on a private server, but the amount of ressources it needs are quite massive. Also the whole system seems to be more complex than it needs to for us. That's why I was hoping to read some experiences, esp. from non-gitlab users ;)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @03:03PM (3 children)
Eh ... I was motivated enough to check the vmware production image, ours has one CPU, 1.5 G ram (claims 250 megs active, probably doesn't need 1.5 G), 20 G storage, honestly not doing terribly much with not much resources. Its pretty wimpy compared to production servers (DB, etc) but pretty beefy compared to one of the DNS servers or one of the openldap servers. I would say its a solid medium size application.
My understanding of "gitlab on raspberry pi" is its usable, but not fast, although I've never seen it myself.
Most of its optional or OK to ignore. I remember spending maybe two hours getting jenkins and gitlab talking such that jenkins would autobuild and auto-test and auto-deploy to dev images when gitlab got a push, and jenkins would insert build results back graphically into the GUI on gitlab, and it was kinda complicated but all documented online and 100% possible to completely ignore if you don't want to do that kind of stuff. Kinda like MS Office products where the average user ignores 99% of the features but which 99% is ignored seems different for each user. But yeah gitlab is huge and you can spend a week messing with its weirder corners if you treat it like an adventure game RPG in exploration mode.
(Score: 1) by nekomata on Monday June 04 2018, @06:39PM (2 children)
>My understanding of "gitlab on raspberry pi" is its usable, but not fast, although I've never seen it myself.
I ran it on a 2G/2CPU VM for 2 users with maybe 3 small projects at the time, absolutely nothing special. After constant insane slowdowns I set up a cronjob to restart the whole thing every night just to work around the memory leakage. (don't remember the version, but it was 1 year ago, newest version at that time.)
I just killed the VM, never checked to see why it behaved like that (but it was a standard CentOS7 with the standard gitlab community install). My assumption at the time being "that's probably normal behaviour and nobody runs this thing on less than 16G of memory". Given your experiences, maybe I should give it another try.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @06:54PM
Never ran into anything like that in any location, with about 20 times the use stats you post but lower resources, musta been some kind of bug or config issue. Could be a unique feature thing where you had to enable XYZ for some local reason and XYZ is blowing it up, or some log file is getting spammed.
I once had a problem with a corporate vuln scanner that terrorized every open port 80, even internal use only ones, with roughly 5000 HTTP reqs per day one after another like a denial of service strike. That was annoying.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 04 2018, @08:11PM
We see that at work too, we have a team of ~20 using Gitlab and we have to give the VM 10GB of RAM (with Gitlab as the only thing on it) and kill the process overnight in order for it not to hang. The source code repository is ~ 6GB and maybe 1.5 million LOC, but the speed problems are all in the web UI, clones, commits, and so forth are as fast as always.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @02:18PM (1 child)
Just to stir the pot, if you're leaving the cloud and hosting your own, trac-on-git is old school and quite reliable / trouble free.
One caution: back in 2009 I tried customizing the trac look, and it wasn't too hard to do, but I regretted it when we moved buildings and migrated the server off of an ancient desktop box onto a newer machine - other migrations without customization of the look and feel have been ridiculously easy by comparison.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @03:03PM
Please ensure the lawn is vacated by the time I get home from work.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:33PM
For anybody looking for the code, here's the github links.
You're welcome.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @02:46PM
Maybe GitHub had these features, but if they did they didn't pop up "in my face" the way they just did in GitLab:
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:56PM
bitbucket can handle git just fine, so you may want to look into that as well.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @02:58PM
Org hosted repo: https://osdn.net/docs/About_OSDN [osdn.net]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @03:07PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @03:14PM (1 child)
So, do we laugh or cry here..?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @06:43PM
Me thinks 'fallacy' is distorted beyond recognition in the product/service name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by rigrig on Monday June 04 2018, @03:38PM (4 children)
I used Fossil for a while, as I liked the idea of one single (sqlite) file which includes everything related to the project (issues+wiki etc.).
It worked fine, but it's not git, so
* Integration with my IDE was nowhere near as smooth as for git
* You have to learn another tool, and the rest of the world uses git, so you keep switching between two almost-but-not-quite the same ways of doing things, which is annoying
* Even most technical people won't know how to use it, so instead of simply "git clone , poke around the code", they have to "learn about Fossil, install Fossil, learn how to use Fossil" before they can even download the code.
The git import/export both worked fine though, so the transition to and from Fossil is easy enough if you want to give it a try.
At work we use GitLab (as we want our data to stay inside our own servers) and we're quite happy with it.
Personally I'm not a fan of the open-core [wikipedia.org] business model though.
My hobby projects are now hosted in Gitea, because the system requirements are something my tiny server can actually handle.
It works great for my hobby projects, but being lighter also means it has a lot less features than GitLab.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 1) by nekomata on Monday June 04 2018, @06:47PM (3 children)
Well, after dismissing it out of hand earlier today I actually spent an hour playing around with it. And I have to say that the idea behind it seems to be pretty good. Also if history is part of your project, why shouldn't the wiki and issues and documents be? And the author of fossil is the main developer behind SQLite which I hold in quite high regard, just an amazing tool in general!
Here is a link [fossil-scm.org] explaining the main differences between fossil and git for anyone interested.
However I completely agree that there are a lot of downsides since, well, I first heard of fossil today for example ;) But it still might be worth trying out, esp. for a small closed-source team. Plus, while I think git is solid, it must have the worst fcking interface I have used in a terminal. The amount of pain that has caused me is probably sufficient for a case in Den Haag.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 04 2018, @08:14PM (2 children)
:D our team is about 20 people, and the 10 or so software engineers are excellent. All but three of us learned git on this job, and we're fine. But having the QA team and sysadmins use git = pain. Lots and lots of pain. Some of the people on both teams climbed the same learning curve at the same speed as any of the engineers. Most are still climbing, and have a long way to go.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:45AM (1 child)
Because maybe it's explained to them wrong??
Git is a multi-version file system. Every commit is a snapshot of how things were at a given time. And all the operations you do, like diffs, are simply run between the two versions of the source tree. Once you understand this, Git (conceptually) becomes easy to understand.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday June 05 2018, @03:10PM
Even the terms you used in your "simple" definition assume a strong understanding of file systems, versioning, snapshots, and diffs.
I work with incredibly bright people who teach me things about all levels of computer science from networking to compiler design. But some of my other colleagues don't understand the distinction between a "commit" and a "push", they only have a partial grasp of "branches", they only have a partial branch of what, why, and how ".gitignore" works, and they absolutely don't understand how the different types of merges between branches changes the commit ordering in the history. Every few months someone does a bad branch merge and wreaks havoc for a while. (We have continuous integration that will tell us which set of commits introduced the chaos, but we don't have anything automated to revert merges.)
And on top of that, when things go wrong at your local command line, figuring out the correct solutions can be a nightmare. Conflicts, merge failures, line ending errors, etc...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @02:01PM (3 children)
Watching the social politics of this unfold will be interesting.
On one hand its the usual monopoly buying a related monopoly, nothing interesting to see.
Also there is a side dish of past github weird behavior like pushing "codes of conduct" mostly weird rando mix of "behave like adults" wrapped up with a toxic dose of leftist stuff about equality of outcome and the only acceptable measure of quality being demographic diversity, to propagandize the appearance of inseparability of those two concepts.
I've always found it bizarre that seemingly moments after inventing and rolling out a massively decentralized source code management system, the logical next step is a hyper centralized single point of failure using that hyper decentralized SCM, kinda ridiculous system design.
Another novelty of the github culture is the two groups who prefer to pretend the other doesn't exist; the enterprise guys see some random Russian hacker having access to a 3rd party system containing their secret sauce source code to be a disaster and will install gitlab or alternatives to avoid the "github community" whereas on the other side you have community organizer types who seem to think the only purpose of a SCM is to increase the size of a vibrant and diverse culture oh and there's computers involved or something as a side effect, and having some random Russian hacker gaining access to your little hello_world.java repo is not a bug as the enterprise people see it but some kind of holy obligation. Of course the enterprise is where ALL the revenue comes from, despite the freeloading hippies claiming the only thing is their community, so that'll be interesting to watch.
A third item is Google famously has a SCM but they brand the hell out of it trying to encourage its use with their cloud offering. My guess is github will meet the microsoft fate, in that it'll remain github, but it'll be branded as something like "Microsoft(tm) Azure(tm) Cloud Computing(tm) SCM(tm)" and they'll be hooks added to trivially connect it to Azure (and if the Jenkins interoperability mysteriously breaks, too bad so sad). MS doesn't really have anything like the google offering (AFAIK...) so I imagine MS has billions of (dollars) reasons to want to integrate this into being their version.
Personally I use locally hosted gitlab both at home and professionally; I don't care about github directly, only indirectly as in bazillions of FOSS projects possibly having to move or otherwise be impacted, so I don't have a dog in the fight other than eating popcorn watching this unfold... I will say gitlab works really well.
My only comment on gitlab is source code user devs and sysadmins don't care that it doesn't scale to over 100K users because they'll spin up an instance for a new project used by 5 dudes, but the "community organizer" types absolutely freak out about it not scaling because obviously "it takes a village to raise a hello_world.c" and all that.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday June 04 2018, @02:15PM (2 children)
Maybe Microsoft wants GitHub as a reliable back end for Team Foundation Server. But TFS seems more akin to SVN than to Git. Of course, that won't stop Microsoft from trying to copy (poorly) or acquire something and bolt it together with their own crapware. With a heaping helping of proprietary goodness!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 04 2018, @02:30PM
We were using git on TFS a couple of years ago, and have since migrated to git on VSTS (TFS in the cloud) - it's still git, you can use it from command line like real git, VS has attempted to put a VS face on it which sort of hides git, but it's still not 100% of the git cli functionality.
The microsofties bitched about how it wasn't the latest flavor of MS source control with shelf sets and whatever for about a year after the transition to git, but I think they've finally come to the understanding that: yes, you can screw up in git and make work for yourself, but it's no different from the screwups and work needed in other source control systems, and that git is actually easier/faster than most of them in significant ways.
Our repo-access speed took a hit when TFS moved to VSTS in the cloud, but not by enough to matter, and the great thing is that we have a local mirror of the repo that's just about zero effort to maintain and solves all kinds of firewall/access issues while also being local-net speed instead of cloud-speed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 04 2018, @02:33PM
Don't worry. They'll fix that during the "Extend" phase.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:16PM (15 children)
This, to me, signals a failure of the FSF, nothing more, nothing less.
Rather than being friendly toward imperfect licenses and making themselves/savannah into 'The Github', their frozen behinds and exclusionary - even of investment and capital - policies under RMS, who's now wondering out loud about the potential harm inflicted by those that seem to get things done, we're left with the rights-holder to all our core tools looking more or less stuck in the 70's.
This was that way 10 years ago. Now its clear that .. no matter what greatness is in the pipeline .. its just not an organization that can work for the common good .. even though thats the impression you get from reading their brochure. For a moment, github's organization had 'the commons'. now that door is closed.
I find this development sad. Then again I've been cringing everytime i see stallman remind people of his importance and his position. I've cringed seeing him pull rank and squash positive and creative impulses in too many posts. So it was inevitable that they'd get quagmired through his hubris.
Anyway, there's a tectonic shift signaled here and I wonder what perspectives people have on it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday June 04 2018, @02:34PM (11 children)
On the contrary, I think this is a success of the FSF.
Git is GPL'd software. That means that Github didn't control git legally. Which is important, because it meant that there are a bunch of competitors to Github, and the moment people didn't want to use Github they could switch to a competitor in a matter of hours without losing any features or being in any legal trouble. That's good for users, good for the state of the art of technology, and good for business competition.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @03:11PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @03:36PM (4 children)
git is gpl. But that also means it can be forked. So my guess is there will be a MS git coming out soon, that isn't backwards compatible of course. And it will have some new useless features added for no other reason to provide an excuse for that malicious incompatibility. MS is just a billion dollar child breaking other peoples toys because it can't have them.
The only way to fight back against this, is to license software in a way that it is resistant to this kind of thing. Which is why the activist public license was written. It is free to humans, and small organizations, but requires large institutions to seek other licensing. Similar to a typical student software license, but restricting based on institutional size rather than for commercial use. It allows developers to develop in the open, but have some say over their products when they are used by large companies that abuse the public.
apl.folkcamper.com
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday June 04 2018, @03:59PM (3 children)
You are forgetting an important aspect of the GPL: The so-called "viral" nature of GPL means Microsoft is required per the license to distribute the source code for those new maliciously incompatible features. Which means mainline git can quickly be modified to handle both standard git and MS-git, with MS-git being probably the less featureful version.
That wouldn't have been true had git been BSD-licensed, but thankfully that's not the case here. Proof that RMS, once again, was more far-sighted than many of his detractors.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @06:46PM
software. If it is a 'supporting library' 'above' the software, it can be proprietary. Which means all microsoft has to do is make a windows only library implementing a bunch of proprietary metadata, source code generation, code signing, etc features which are restrictively licensed and patent encumbered, convince enough plebs to start using it and the majority of git code goes back behind a paywall, just like they did with kerberos, early vpn/pptp stuff, etc.
Nadella made a comment about being 'all in with open source': if that was really true, he'd be telling us the open source release plans for all legacy versions of windows.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @07:32PM
Only if you distribute binaries. E.g. if everything you need to access those 'features' is a Web browser, they are not forced to distribute the modified server code (git is not Affero-GPLed).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @03:06PM
"You are forgetting an important aspect of the GPL"
And you are forgetting what a "silicon valley virgin" is. The value of github is in the user base and the infrastructure.
Generally, communications protocols are not patentable. This is part of the reason the APL works the way it does. In I.P. law there is no statutory recongition for the value inherent in compatability. Which is in part, why EEE is effective even when serves no other purpose but destroying vibrant markets. Making a compatible version of git that is closed source is trivial for MS. Then moving users over to it, is as simple as releasing it, and then breaking github. This is how they've done business since the 80's.
Github built trust with thousands of users. Microsoft destroyed that trust with the stroke of a pen. The total economic cost to the U.S. is tremendous, not just in long term GDP value, but in the dilution of the rule of law. Essentially there is a race condition in the statutory law that MS exploits to perpetrate acts that are economically destructive to everyone but them.
There is value being destroyed. It does constitute an experienced loss for those effected. The crime is preserved like crumbs in the pocket seams of the law. It is a tragedy of commons thing, and it is only lawful because nobody has effectively articulated it before a jury... Yet. And the only way it is going to ever see a jury, is if software licensing compels the fight. GPL is not compelling in that regard. APL is an attempt at creating a user base that can compel that kind of litigation.
YMMV, but at least somebody is doing something.
(Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 04 2018, @04:58PM (1 child)
Trust me, Microsoft is gonna want to buy Git too. So that they can own the whole shebang. Whoever owns Git is about to become very very rich!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:01PM
You mean Linus Torvalds?
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 04 2018, @08:20PM (2 children)
Actually, this is great news. I was really annoyed that git, this grand decentralized revision control system, was in practice being used almost entirely on one big centralized service.
So then my heroes from Microsoft are fixing the problem for me. You can bet Github is going to start sucking, and the decentralization will happen as a consequence. Hooray Microsoft! Maybe someone at the top has decided they like the FSF and this is their guerrilla tactic to help out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:48AM (1 child)
Git != Github. Github is a service using Git. Kind of like water is great, but bottled water is big business.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:53PM
I know git != Github. My point is that git source code hosting by the very nature of git should be spread across dozens of providers. There just shouldn't be One Revision Control Hosting Site To Rule Them All. There should be competition in the space. Also, there are a number of free-as-in-freedom source code hosting platforms out there that never got much attention because everybody is on Github. It's another form of the same problem that keeps Facebook and Twitter so popular. "I don't care how nice Mastodon/Friendica/Status.net/Diaspora/Fritter/whatever is, all my friends and family are already on Facebook!"
If Github starts to be mediocre, then it will cease to be the king of project hosting. Project owners will be more likely to host code on competing services, including fully free ones. The attitude "Either it's on Github or it doesn't matter" will die.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @03:07PM (2 children)
Mostly "Git Good, Github
GoodBad, Microsoft Bad."(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @09:04PM (1 child)
I thought the advice was "Git Gud!"
Oh, wait, that's Darksouls.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 04 2018, @09:15PM
git got [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:44PM (4 children)
Here I was having a perfectly good day so far. Now this happens.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @03:13PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @05:13PM (2 children)
the op didn't say they were surprised, ya douche.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:37AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:18AM
It literally states that they were having a good day and then this happened. It doesn't even "literally state" that it made their day worse (it could have made it better). There is no mention of surprise or shock at the event.
So the question is.. did you respond to the wrong post?
(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @03:05PM (5 children)
Welcome to Microsoft GitHub!
Access to GitHub is FREE. All you need to do is agree to our new, improved terms of service and log in with your Microsoft account.
Github System requirements:
Windows 10
Github Client For Windows 10 (from the Windows Store)*
*For limited access to only basic features, the legacy git client may be used until July 31, 2018. You should use the official native Github Client for Windows 10 for access to extended features and a fully supported customer experience. Thank you for helping Microsoft to embrace Github technology.
-----
This post is satire. Microsoft has not done this. It's still might-or-might-not.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @07:35PM (2 children)
Not gonna work like that, unless Microsoft comes with a clean-room implementation of a bit client that does not use any of the original code base. Because GPL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @08:20PM (1 child)
They could write a nonfree but gratis wrapper that does the network connections, and produce a GPL fork of git that expects the wrapper. I am not encouraging this, nor do I believe it likely. But perfectly possible.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @08:39PM
Good point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday June 04 2018, @11:16PM (1 child)
Welcome to Microsoft GitHub, which we are renaming as Microsoft StupidGit!
We were thinking on "GithubGoesTheWayOfNokiaAndSkype", but were worried our lawyers would try to sue us for copyright infringement, so yeah, StupidGit suited us best.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:09PM
GitSuck?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @03:42PM (1 child)
I wonder if they have plans to integrate (the other) GVFS into the OS proper - I know that they've been using it internally at M$ for a while now:
https://github.com/Microsoft/gvfs [github.com]
It seems to fit with their dream SKU of having a dumb terminal that you rent various services for. Hitting the enterprise customers with an extra $5/month for a novel interface to hosted SCM would probably sell well to tech-illiterates.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @08:16PM
Not gonna happen until they don't embrace emacs too (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday June 04 2018, @05:15PM (1 child)
How long until the user agreement for GitHub gets changed to include a clause that GitHub and it's associated companies, including MS, can use any code on the site for without compensation or notification to the original creator?
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @07:37PM
GitHub hosts private projects as well. For those, not gonna happen.
For anything else, though...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @05:27PM
as if github wasn't already a compromise...
i'm not hosting anything with MS. I will have to speed up my prep to migrate now (work on my own issue tracker or set up gitea). thanks, you stupid whores. i hope someone beats you with your mac books while you're sipping your cappuccinos and twisting your mustaches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @06:02PM (2 children)
A couple of years back I was looking for somewhere to (privately) host my crazy home-made nonsense and chose gitlab. One of the first things I looked for when making my decision after looking at the license agreements was the ability to completely delete your files if you decide you don't want them up there any more. Gitlab seems to be quite nice. It "just works" so far for (very) simple SCM.
Always stay one step ahead of the Borg,
(Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Monday June 04 2018, @07:14PM (1 child)
> Always stay one step ahead of the Borg,
You know GitLab is hosted on Borg Azure right? Or at least it was (not sure if they've finished moving it into Romulan space yet).
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Monday June 04 2018, @11:39PM
So if Microsoft is the Borg, and Google are Romulans, does that make Apple the Ferengi?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 04 2018, @07:35PM
See https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-management [github.com] for a long list of alternatives, among a long list of related long lists.