What's your opinion on Microsoft's GitHub Acquisition?

Let us all think about the story of Nokia!!

Well I have MicroSoft baggage going way back and have avoided using their tech, just out of pure economics, not wanting to depend on components under the control of what I've always though to be a purely self-serving entity.

However, in recent years I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) MicroSoft have suffered a bit from being so self-serving and closed. And management weirdnesses like Balmer's "stack ranking" system can't have done much for software quality!

I'm hoping that MicroSoft is taking its next evolutionary step. People have speculated that this is the "embrace" phase of an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, but I think they are outnumbered on the open source front and are joining in.

We'll see. In the meantime, I'm mirroring my repos at gitlab, just to be sure ;)

they will destroy it these companies are just looking for a way to harvest money.

I thought about moving to Gitlab, but I just obey network effect, and it seems like the storm is over and most people stay at Github... see even the login option here! 😁 And Microsoft’s OSS have done a lot of good things lately.

I have mixed feelings. I'm one of those many people who really hated microsoft a while ago. Though, I liked a few of their products. I liked C# as a language and despite that initially it looked like a Java clone, it forced Java to introduce new features like generics which they initially were against.

I also like the openness they lately adopted towards open source. They seem to understand better than any other large company that the code is not important, but the people behind it. I migrated from Java to Typescript and JS and I'm a big fan of both and of VSCode.

I think their plan is to make it easy to deploy from github to Azure in order to get some competitive advantage against AWS. If they don't desperately try to lock people in, I don't think people will mind. So, as I just said, I have mixed feelings. I started to look for github alternatives and I created a small site listing them: gitcomp.com. Funny enough the site is hosted on github so if you want to add something to it you can do it by forking and creating pull requests...

I have never trusted Microsoft and still don't.

Case in point: in Microsoft Office for Mac, each and every time I fire up any of the products, I get a nag screen, "Share how you use Office" with two choices, Full diagnostic data, or Basic diagnostic data. There is no "opt out" button, only "Learn More" and "Accept" for choices. The "Learn More" just circles back to the same non-choice. As a user experience designer, this is offensive on many levels including interrupting the user with a very selfish and persistent request and not offering the user a way to opt out or even dismiss the nag screen.

I've read articles and comments about this acquisition and still haven't formed an opinion, though from my experience it would be a stretch to accept that this action will result in good things for the open source community. I've been inside Microsoft and I've seen the Dr. Strangelove board where every installed instance of Windows is plotted on a huge world map, including a rather startling amount of personal information about owners of those instances, whether paid or pirated.

I completely abandoned LinkedIn when Microsoft bought it and am about to do the same with GitHub.

None of us should forget that the monopolistic proven behavior of Micro$oft has been a prime cause of the free software and the open source movements. Furthermore Windows' hegemony has directly fueled the development of the Linux operating system.

The M$ open source shift is a smoke screen to enable them to lock little by little GitHub inside of their proprietary software which are costly and of questionable quality.

So now, the wolf is guarding the sheeps... Sorry, I would like to believe in M$ sincerity but I can't when I see every moves M$ did with their deep pockets to weave their spiderweb to lock the developers (linda.com buying, linkedin.com buying then GitHub buying). That said, I'm afraid for StackOverflow..

What does Linus Torvalds think about it?

A few bullet points:

• Microsoft decided to put the Windows kernel into Git, but it is HUGE and so created the Git Virtual File System (GVFS), so only the parts you work with are local to your machine.

• Microsoft put out WSL last year, and their bug tracking is done in github.com/Microsoft/WSL. I have three issues (using Ubuntu's apt-check to show if I have updates, using cpan under WSL (solved) and lack of unicode/emoji support (because I use emoji in my prompt)), and the cpan issue got solved, the apt-check issue hasn't and the emoji issue got pushed over to Console, which should have an update allowing better Unicode support soon.

I am writing this on Chrome in Ubuntu. I use VS Code, but I use Vim a lot to fix things I can't get Code to do right, yet. (The perltidy extension does not read my wildly-ideosyncratic perltidyrc, for example.)

I came up in programming in the 1990s, where friends and Slashdot comments gave me "M$" and "MicroSucks" as preferred names. My objection to Microsoft projects is that they were heavy and didn't do what I wanted. You can see your files in Explorer, but you can do anything with your files with a terminal, bash and a few other tools.

If I have to touch most things in Office, I take it as a sign that I have sinned and must be punished. (Excel is the exception.) I use Windows for 1) the toys (Does XCOM2 work on Linux?) and because I need to know it for work. But, having tried Atom and Sublime Text (2, not 3), I use VS Code because it is the best tool for the job.

Plus, of course: Microsoft buying GitHub is good because it means that Oracle can't buy GitHub, which means we're not in the darkest timeline.

I really can't complain since I'm using VSCode daily - a fruit of Microsoft's open-source contributions. We'll see!

While I have a GitHub account, I use BitBucket almost exclusively. This will probably not change, especially now that they have made this announcement.

microsoft will own all our work and coding mark my words github coding is now belongs to microsoft

As long as Microsoft doesn't change any policy on existing repos, I won't migrate from GitHub to GitLab(or other alternatives).

I think the most exciting part of this purchase is that Ruby/Rails now may have the kind of corporate backing that Facebook provides PHP, pushing development for the next tens years.

if it is Google or Microsoft in OSS - It is Google to me who has done more OSS work. We should not forget Kubernetes, Tensorflow. Android to some extent too..

But MSFT is my new favorite, they are making right moves. Under Satya Nadella, MSFT has a different image definitely.

I think it's an interesting acquisition. Microsoft have been successfully improving their culture over the past 5 to 10 years, which is positive. I think they will be a good custodian and will have the resources to improve the service which it needs to stay relevant, but I'm against having everything owned by a small number of huge companies. Overall I'm sitting on the fence about the whole thing, so we'll see how it pans out. It's annoying to see people just jumping ship without understanding the situation properly and making an informed decision; they're still thinking, Microsoft! Oh no! Abandon ship...