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posted by janrinok on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:08PM (1 child)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:08PM (#687769) Journal

    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?

    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.

    Trying to host from your home or office instead of a VPS doesn't work well [with EVIL ISPS who block you] using acceptable use policy (AUP) or technically using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) or both.

    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.)

    For each of these, which "elsewhere" would you recommend?

    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.)

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Sunday June 03 2018, @12:40PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Sunday June 03 2018, @12:40PM (#687994) Journal

    Or should every project be required to lease a virtual private server* and pay a sysadmin to maintain all this stuff on a VPS?

    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

    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.

    Fork Tracking: Makes less sense in terms of a small repo/server

    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.