Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me.
Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back.
Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom, this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks. It's sad to see they now own Github.
So, are you saying that both Lenovo (that say in manual for x280 that in select countries it ships with Ubuntu) and Ubuntu (That here https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201801-26057/ claim "certified pre-install for Ubuntu.") are lying?
If you are using Linux you are using Linux kernel that is managed by git. Microsoft contributes to git.
>>We had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back.
The only thing taking your freedom back is the economics of selling Linux Desktops/Laptops. And the only thing stopping that is the Linux ecosystem fragmentation.
I'm sorry but no hardware vendor will lose sleep over some thousand developers wanting to run fragmented versions of Linux on their hardware.
>>Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom
The purpose of companies is to maximize their profits.
>> this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks.
And they've by and large failed. The other part about open source's economics is beyond the scope of Microsoft's actions.
The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me.
Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted)
There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.
Is that to say that the Github acquisition will be an unalloyed good, no.
but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a disaster...
That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it.
And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus has done for the world is incredible.
What you say is worth considering, but I think you implicitly overstate two points: 1) their shenanigans aren't as old as you imply 2) these crimes happen over the course of years.
You talk about the 90s, but it was in 2004 that the EU ruled against them, and 2008 that they were fined for ignoring that ruling. It was in 2011 that Ireland and Spain started to investigate them for additional anticompetitive practices (though I can't seem to find what cam from this).
Much more recently, they've been rather litigious with respect to patents (Microsoft uses patents offensively).
Then there's the telemetry stuff in windows and Skype centralization, and probably more that I don't know because...
What _has_ changed, is Microsoft's relevance. They're still huge in some markets, but many business' and individuals barely interact directly with the Microsoft platform/ecosystem.
Personally I believe that the only difference is the marketing. There is little two way communication going which is the same old Microsoft. Are they listening to their customers complain about telemetry, enterprise licensing, support and product stability and dependability? No. They're blinding everyone in an attempt to cover up the decrease in privacy, data collection ramping, gouging of enterprises to force them into the cloud, the declining quality of support and declining product quality. Even targeting the platform is like hitting a moving target that is on fire.
But it's ok because someone said they're a new company and they have a new figurehead.
I don't buy it. I'd be an idiot to buy it. I've been around a long time and this is a typical corporate cycle. They run like the sunspot cycle. We're at a solar minima at the moment.
First, MS hasn't stop its bad behavior. When did you think it stopped ? They became better at PR (their teams even pop in HN, Reddit or ...Imgur, they are very good), and they can get away with less BS because they have better competition. They did not get better.
Secondly, with your point of view, as a society, you just promote abusing entities. Politicians, companies, anything with power really. They make a lot of bad things, on a lot of years, then benefit from it, and now boom, what ? Stairway to heaven, along with the loot they got from the misdeeds ?
This is how you end up with corrupted systems and unfair societies.
You don't have to punish them again and again for the crimes of yesterday. But yes, it's perfectly fair, and actually sane, to remember, and say you don't want to have more relationship with them now.
Tainted for the past? Did you see what happened with windows 10 or that they are not able to fix skype? To be honest there are screens popping up every day from one stupid mistake after another from ms. They have more dead products in their portfolio than anyone else they embraced change on the xbox to do a 360 afterwards. NO ONE and I mean NO ONE should put any hope into MS doing the right thing or be a reliable partner for a business. They just burned way to many bridges. Don't get me wrong if you are going for core business stuff like windows ltsb or azure you gonna be fine but never jump on anything new and hype from ms.
> There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.
Their senior leadership consists of people who were obviously OK with working for Microsoft when it was performing all those misdeeds. They may have changed as people perhaps, but at some point the very same people who are making the strategic decisions now decided that working for the 90's incarnation of Microsoft was a morally acceptable choice. I'm not sure why I should suddenly start trusting these people now?
It's not like GitHub was the perfect open source place anyway. The platform itself is not open source in any way and it has been plagued by a few scandals.
'i've deleted my account' seems very pedantic and most of the arguments brought up are rather old. However, i do agree on the skype thing - man it got bad after MS bought it.
Don't think any company that can afford to buy another company for well above 1.5 billion (i understand the worth of GitHub in 2016 was around 2 billion) has a pristine past.
What's wrong with this? I don't want unauthorized infringing projects jeopardizing the service the rest of us use legally and ethically. Invalid DMCAs are another story, but what's the harm of respecting an IP owner's valid DMCA request?
These are absolutely legal software, they don't violate any DMCA rules, M$ and github don't have right to remove it.
The behavior of using these software maybe illegal, and violate EULA, the company can punish the user who is using the software according to their EULA, but there is nothing directly related to the software itself.
The biggest surprise to me was that Github was running at a loss for a considerable amount of time. Given their roots as a bootstrapped company, I would've assumed that they would be more disciplined in their spending. I'm disappointed that they've decided to sell rather than go public, I would've happily been a shareholder of Github if given the choice.
Going public would probaly have been near impossible with large losses and a competitive marketplace where there are alternatives available you can switch to if price is too high.
GitHub has always been proprietary and centralised. If you choose to host your open source project on a proprietary service, you can't exactly be surprised when a different company buys that service.
> The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases, for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was detected.
IIRC the main reasons this was done are (i) due to the complexity of porting P2P code across many platforms and (ii) for resource consumption on mobile devices. These are hardly edge cases.
I know lots of people think Microsoft did this to kowtow to the NSA, but I'm willing to bet it was really done for the same reason that Apple fundamentally re-architected FaceTime: patent threats.
How about the alternate reality where GitHub is desperate to monetize and/or is acquired by a company that is... don't think it could happen? Let me tell you a little story about SourceForge...
I don't disagree with any of what he says. But he only includes the negative things they did. It's also worth remembering that ms also helped democratise computing. In the late eighties, early nineties Unix was an ivory tower. Only large organisations could afford it. Apple was expensive and closed. Windows was cheap and open. It worked with every kind of hardware and peripheral. And with dev tools like VB a lot of software was written and systems built for people that otherwise would just have had to stick with paper.
I find that laughable. Their client and processor licensing model is of the Oracle school.
Large OEM's are still paying the MS tax on machines supplied are they not? (MS get fee on every OEM machine sold regardless of whether it includes Windows. Buy a Dell Linux laptop and MS still get their $x)
> Unix was an ivory tower
Hmm. What of BSD+FreeBSD? Hell even MS Xenix ran on 10x the range of machines that Windows did.
Late 80s, early 90s folks like Sequent were charging a bomb because they included 4 or 8 processors and gobs of memory (for the time). Sun and SGI charged a fortune because 50% of the machine cost was the graphics and IO, and a net stack that worked. A Sun lunchbox wasn't that much more than an equivalent spec PC of the time but gave SCSI and networking. None of that plug and pray or fucking around with INT settings in BIOS, driver settings or it suddenly developing amnesia.
SunOS (usually) just worked, Windows usually didn't until Win2k finally arrived and you could actually have uptime over a daily reboot.
The expensive stuff in the Unix world was where there was no comparison in teh PC world or you scaled up. Multi processors, Sun pizza boxes where 50% of the cost was the top end graphics (always buy the flight sim CD when speccing that one), 100+ serial ports, racks full of USR Couriers etc. NT didn't scale (see Hotmail and the infamous scaling demo scam).
Some of the shenanigans I've seen recently from MS employees in the .NET Core and JS space doesn't inspire me with confidence... For all of Nadella's "turning over a new leaf", it will still take a generation to change the culture of 120 000 employees
Could you give some details? I’m no longer intimately involved with either technology but from what I can see Microsoft has been doing a lot of good things in .NET Core and with TypeScript. What are the shenanigans you’re referring to?
Microsoft’s brute force approache has never worked and will never work. It really doesn’t matter who heads it. As indicate by RMS, and proven time and again, these ethical questions at the heart of the free software movement are important and there for a reason. You can slap “open source” on anything these days, and it has been the case for a while, but it’s missing the point. And dangerous for the free software movement.
Assuming GitHub was actually losing money and couldn't fix that problem quickly enough it's fair to assume they had to sell, and it's reasonable to believe there aren't that many companies who could have bought them if you think an understanding of the domain is important, then you're really limited to Facebook (user surveillance, adverts), Apple (bad at software, not developer friendly), Google (user surveillance, adverts), Microsoft (history of extinguishing things) and maybe Oracle (very hostile).
Regardless of who GH sold to they'd be facing a ton of negative reactions. Microsoft's actions recently make me thing maybe they're actually the least bad as far as their dealings with developers go.
How much Microsoft loves open source is also proofed by the case of MeeGo. Their agent, a certain Mr. Elop, hugged it to death.
> The first MeeGo device came out in 2011 and won all kinds of awards and is to this date the only flagship consistently ranked better than its contemporary iPhone, while MeeGo is the only OS ever launched in smartphones to be ranked as good as - or in some reviews even better than - Apple's iPhone iOS operating system. THAT was Nokia's strategy in January 2011. Only a delusional idiot would change this.
Microsoft acquiring Github has completely busted my chops. I am totally depressed now. Is deleting your account from Github is a viable solution? Where to go from here. Bitbucket?
GitHub is for all intents and purposes dead. They just don't know it yet. Open Source is the closet thing to a religion in programming and selling to Microsoft, while it makes commercial sense, is heresy in all but name.
I moved all my workflow to Linux back-in-the-day (actually just over 2 years ago, but hey) and never looked back. I'll be damned if I let Microsoft in by this particular backdoor.
Microsoft is on the good direction today (comparing to what it was).
But problem is when management changes. after all their values are different. All classic big corporate stuff, their business model and expectations from investors. things can change in the future when making money is the main goal..
But the good thing is that GIT is easy to migrate. So we can migrate anytime that things goes wrong..
Github is still a great product/service. Hope they don't ruin it.
[+] [-] _fwu1|7 years ago|reply
Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back.
Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom, this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks. It's sad to see they now own Github.
[+] [-] pritambaral|7 years ago|reply
As a Linux on ThinkPad user, I'd be very interested to learn more about this.
[+] [-] MikusR|7 years ago|reply
If you are using Linux you are using Linux kernel that is managed by git. Microsoft contributes to git.
[+] [-] jgaa|7 years ago|reply
A Thinkpad lasts for a very long time.
[+] [-] kamaal|7 years ago|reply
The only thing taking your freedom back is the economics of selling Linux Desktops/Laptops. And the only thing stopping that is the Linux ecosystem fragmentation.
I'm sorry but no hardware vendor will lose sleep over some thousand developers wanting to run fragmented versions of Linux on their hardware.
>>Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom
The purpose of companies is to maximize their profits.
>> this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks.
And they've by and large failed. The other part about open source's economics is beyond the scope of Microsoft's actions.
[+] [-] raesene9|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raesene9|7 years ago|reply
Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted)
There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.
Is that to say that the Github acquisition will be an unalloyed good, no.
but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a disaster...
[+] [-] RyanZAG|7 years ago|reply
That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it.
And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus has done for the world is incredible.
[+] [-] latch|7 years ago|reply
You talk about the 90s, but it was in 2004 that the EU ruled against them, and 2008 that they were fined for ignoring that ruling. It was in 2011 that Ireland and Spain started to investigate them for additional anticompetitive practices (though I can't seem to find what cam from this).
Much more recently, they've been rather litigious with respect to patents (Microsoft uses patents offensively).
Then there's the telemetry stuff in windows and Skype centralization, and probably more that I don't know because...
What _has_ changed, is Microsoft's relevance. They're still huge in some markets, but many business' and individuals barely interact directly with the Microsoft platform/ecosystem.
[+] [-] setquk|7 years ago|reply
But it's ok because someone said they're a new company and they have a new figurehead.
I don't buy it. I'd be an idiot to buy it. I've been around a long time and this is a typical corporate cycle. They run like the sunspot cycle. We're at a solar minima at the moment.
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
Secondly, with your point of view, as a society, you just promote abusing entities. Politicians, companies, anything with power really. They make a lot of bad things, on a lot of years, then benefit from it, and now boom, what ? Stairway to heaven, along with the loot they got from the misdeeds ?
This is how you end up with corrupted systems and unfair societies.
You don't have to punish them again and again for the crimes of yesterday. But yes, it's perfectly fair, and actually sane, to remember, and say you don't want to have more relationship with them now.
[+] [-] cecja|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|7 years ago|reply
Not disagreeing with your overall point, but culture can persist through employee and leadership turnover.
[+] [-] scbrg|7 years ago|reply
Their senior leadership consists of people who were obviously OK with working for Microsoft when it was performing all those misdeeds. They may have changed as people perhaps, but at some point the very same people who are making the strategic decisions now decided that working for the 90's incarnation of Microsoft was a morally acceptable choice. I'm not sure why I should suddenly start trusting these people now?
[+] [-] pi-victor|7 years ago|reply
'i've deleted my account' seems very pedantic and most of the arguments brought up are rather old. However, i do agree on the skype thing - man it got bad after MS bought it.
Don't think any company that can afford to buy another company for well above 1.5 billion (i understand the worth of GitHub in 2016 was around 2 billion) has a pristine past.
[+] [-] gressquel|7 years ago|reply
Microsoft is very proactive removing things from azure and shutting down sites as soon as they receive DMCA complaint or abuse complaint.
Are they going to remove important github repos like these if they get DMCA or other complaints?
https://github.com/Roy47Zhang/CSGO-Aimbot-Project (cheat for Counter strike)
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl (download from video streamers)
https://github.com/kurtcoke/DemonHunter_Exploitkit (exploit kit)
https://github.com/lontivero/vinchuca (p2p botnet)
the second I hear any repos being removed by Microsoft, I i will dump my private repos and leave.
[+] [-] vortico|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kraptor|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd
[+] [-] lewisj489|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikusR|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiojfwoswo|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zealot0630|7 years ago|reply
The behavior of using these software maybe illegal, and violate EULA, the company can punish the user who is using the software according to their EULA, but there is nothing directly related to the software itself.
[+] [-] pg_bot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_duke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregknicholson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Artemis2|7 years ago|reply
> The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases, for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was detected.
IIRC the main reasons this was done are (i) due to the complexity of porting P2P code across many platforms and (ii) for resource consumption on mobile devices. These are hardly edge cases.
[+] [-] culturestate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trixie_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erk__|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discreteevent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldcynic|7 years ago|reply
I find that laughable. Their client and processor licensing model is of the Oracle school.
Large OEM's are still paying the MS tax on machines supplied are they not? (MS get fee on every OEM machine sold regardless of whether it includes Windows. Buy a Dell Linux laptop and MS still get their $x)
> Unix was an ivory tower
Hmm. What of BSD+FreeBSD? Hell even MS Xenix ran on 10x the range of machines that Windows did.
Late 80s, early 90s folks like Sequent were charging a bomb because they included 4 or 8 processors and gobs of memory (for the time). Sun and SGI charged a fortune because 50% of the machine cost was the graphics and IO, and a net stack that worked. A Sun lunchbox wasn't that much more than an equivalent spec PC of the time but gave SCSI and networking. None of that plug and pray or fucking around with INT settings in BIOS, driver settings or it suddenly developing amnesia.
SunOS (usually) just worked, Windows usually didn't until Win2k finally arrived and you could actually have uptime over a daily reboot.
The expensive stuff in the Unix world was where there was no comparison in teh PC world or you scaled up. Multi processors, Sun pizza boxes where 50% of the cost was the top end graphics (always buy the flight sim CD when speccing that one), 100+ serial ports, racks full of USR Couriers etc. NT didn't scale (see Hotmail and the infamous scaling demo scam).
> Windows was cheap and open
It was neither.
I'm not going to reopen VB memories. :)
[+] [-] mwj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klmr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sydd|7 years ago|reply
Do you have links? I Havent heard MS doing anything malicious recently in these spaces.
[+] [-] rejschaap|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onyva|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|7 years ago|reply
Regardless of who GH sold to they'd be facing a ton of negative reactions. Microsoft's actions recently make me thing maybe they're actually the least bad as far as their dealings with developers go.
[+] [-] jasonvorhe|7 years ago|reply
So clever.
[+] [-] katnegermis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
Sabotaging a pivotal part of your own development workflow entirely based on internet speculation doesn't seem "clever" at all to me.
[+] [-] thr0000waay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bevax|7 years ago|reply
> The first MeeGo device came out in 2011 and won all kinds of awards and is to this date the only flagship consistently ranked better than its contemporary iPhone, while MeeGo is the only OS ever launched in smartphones to be ranked as good as - or in some reviews even better than - Apple's iPhone iOS operating system. THAT was Nokia's strategy in January 2011. Only a delusional idiot would change this.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/the-nok...
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
Sabotaging a pivotal part of your own development workflow entirely based on internet speculation doesn't seem "clever" at all to me.
[+] [-] kjeetgill|7 years ago|reply
My vote would be Mozilla. I can't think of any other company I'd want running a service for "the greater good".
[+] [-] heygema|7 years ago|reply
Second, More ms tools in github.
Third, atom is dead.
Bright enough I guess.
[+] [-] shishirsharma|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lordarminius|7 years ago|reply
I moved all my workflow to Linux back-in-the-day (actually just over 2 years ago, but hey) and never looked back. I'll be damned if I let Microsoft in by this particular backdoor.
Like the author, I'm deleting my account as well.
[+] [-] stunt|7 years ago|reply
But problem is when management changes. after all their values are different. All classic big corporate stuff, their business model and expectations from investors. things can change in the future when making money is the main goal..
But the good thing is that GIT is easy to migrate. So we can migrate anytime that things goes wrong..
Github is still a great product/service. Hope they don't ruin it.