Microsoft Is Talking About Acquiring GitHub, Says Report (zdnet.com) 164
The Welcome Rain shares a report from ZDNet: Microsoft officials have been talking to GitHub about possibly acquiring the company, according to a June 1 report in Business Insider. BI claims that the two have discussed the possibility of an acquisition on an on-and-off-again basis over the years "but in the last few weeks talks have grown more serious." BI is citing unnamed "people close to the companies" as its sources. "This isn't as surprising as it would have been ten or more years ago," writes The Welcome Rain. "Microsoft is investing a lot in git, including GVFS, a Git Virtual File System to help Git work with very large codebases. What might this mean for the future of Github?"
Zombie (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years ago I would have said it is the end of GitHub. Now it is most likely to be turned into a zombie
Re:Zombie (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, it wont be that bad, it will just auto update all repos, insert ad's into every code and break on every 2nd tuesday in a month...
Re:Zombie (Score:4, Informative)
We use their paid version at work. It's okay... But lacks some basic features, like a way to organize your 300+ repos in some sensible way.
Honestly if Microsoft spur some development of the site it would be welcome. The industry seems to have stagnated a bit - all the rivals like GitLab and Bitbucket are pretty much clones of GitHub and while they have some interesting features there isn't really anything radically different.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it's better than being acquired by Oracle. At least Microsoft lets things die a slow death and eventually pulls the plug, pushing people to a new product,instead of pretending to support a product while refusing to update it, meanwhile pulling a few key features from it to further bloat their database offerings.
Re: American dichotomy. (Score:1)
Well since Stalin has been dead firba long time he tends not to cause problems anymire (mostly anyway) MRs Clinton on the ither hand,,, :)
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A few years ago I would have said it is the end of GitHub. Now it is most likely to be turned into a zombie
That seems reasonable... ...
If GitHub lets this happen they should already be out seeking BRAINS
R.I.P. (Score:2)
R.I.P. Github.
Re:Glad I switched to Bitbucket so MS gets no cash (Score:5, Insightful)
This has not been my experience in any way, shape, form, or manner.
Linkedin has become absolutely insufferable since Microsoft acquired them.
Re:Glad I switched to Bitbucket so MS gets no cash (Score:4, Interesting)
It is definitely worse, I ignore it entirely at this point. I would also stop using Github for different reasons, just on principle. MS needs to slink off into the night and be happy with its monopoly on dumb users who need invasive IT support.
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Yes
Like the 419'ers use illiteracy to shake out people who are insufficiently gullible, MS/LinkedIn use spam to shake out the kind of people who might have some resistance to advertising.
Re:Glad I switched to Bitbucket so MS gets no cash (Score:5, Insightful)
"Has become"? When was LinkedIn not insufferable, with their constant reminder of contact requests that I was ignoring in the first place (and didn't want to log into their website to officially ignore)?
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It's also caused a problem for units in my organization that can't tell the difference between a public and private repository. They've uploaded api keys and other really sensitive secrets like database passwords. Dummies. I wouldn't post that stuff online even if I though the repo was private. I use my own servers for git. Like a real man (or woman) does.https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/06/01/2034202/microsoft-is-talking-about-acquiring-github-says-report#
What does this mean? (Score:1)
It means it's time to migrate your projects and close your Github account.
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At the very least I think it is safe to say this would be good news for gitlab!
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Agreed, created an account there just to camp on my username. I'm not migrating from GitHub *yet*, but I will jump at the first mention of "migrating to windows".
Good idea. I just did the same (different from my /. username).
Approve my Pull Request ! (Score:1)
Re: Approve my Pull Request ! (Score:2)
I may have agreed, but I donâ(TM)t believe he is the one approving pull requests.
What would it mean for VSTS? (Score:1)
For those of us that work on VSTS based systems and like everything all together, this is actually bad news.
I LIKE the calmness of VSTS over GitHub. (Sure, for social / open development, GitHub is great. For private, within the organisation? VSTS is just plain calmer.) Problem is, there will be this push to use private GitHub for things that are just easier in VSTS. And, often, what is technologically the best isn't really what matters, it's what people are paying attention to.
Re: What would it mean for VSTS? (Score:2)
Bad in what way?
Re: What would it mean for VSTS? (Score:2)
I've only used VSTS so far and haven't had too much trouble doing any of that. What's better and why?
It will become as crappy as Skype and LinkedIn (Score:1)
Microsoft is a master in killing off good services and scaring away users by bad product management.
Nokia, Skype, Hotmail, and LinkedIn (Score:5, Interesting)
QuarterDeck, OS/2, Xenix.
But Google kills off just as much. Remember the much-loved Google-Reader? Wave? Google-Talk?
I was a paying skype customer before MSFT.
I was a paying Nokia Maemo customer, before MSFT.
I was an early adopter for LinkedIn.
Cancelled my accounts in each, when Microsoft broke each of them.
Re: (Score:2)
All of your examples of Google killing off stuff were Google-developed stuff, that presumably was killed off because it either failed - or Google developed something else that suited their purposes better (if not, admittedly, always the users').
The Microsoft examples discussed here were all acquisitions of popular services that, presumably, were bought by Microsoft to keep them from developing into a threat - or, I guess, to compete with Google or Amazon in cases where they had something similar. One case
ditto (Score:2)
Re: It will become as crappy as Skype and LinkedIn (Score:3, Insightful)
LinkedIn was shit before Microsoft bought it.
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LoB
Reason enough for immediate account deletion (Score:1)
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Came here to read exactly that type comment from slashdotters. Was not disappointed.
You're such a predictable bunch.
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Not a chance. I remember when Sourceforge was a decent place. Now? Slathered in ads, ads in the downloads, those hideous add-ons in the downloads. Honestly, CVS is still sane, despite being old. OpenBSD still thrives there, as do many, many others. GitHub, while not "new" is still the new shiny for so many coders. I keep my code in my own private tree. I do commits, merges, etc., and keep my code to myself. Even the code I write for work has backup copies in my private tree if I leave. Code re-use, baby, co
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amen to that!
I'm pretty happy that I never left. sad to see the CVS/SVN repositories go, but nice that I can do sane binary releases for end users, and it not look like 21century ASS like github.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has good build tools. They have build chains that build onto iOS and Android (mostly to try to tempt people into also building for Windows Phone).
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
As a former Microsoft developer, I can tell you, this is a really bad idea. Microsoft internally has one of the best revision control systems I've ever used (Source Depot), so we know they won't use it, but they will control how source code is managed and he who controls the keys to the repository also controls the builds.
I vote really, really bad idea. Start moving your projects back to SourceForge.
The Windows code base is already hosted on Git. It was migrated from Source Depot to Git and in the process GVFS was created to allow Git to scale. This is no secret, it's been reported in the news for over a year.
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Source Depot is no more - Windows is now built using Git
https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/61pnmv/source_depot_is_no_more_windows_is_now_built/
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like you haven't worked there for a while. Source Depot is pretty much abandonware at this point, and only a few teams with a lot of legacy dependencies are using it. Most teams are moving to git.
Have you noticed all the tight git integration occurring in Visual Studio, or how Microsoft has actually been contributing to git to improve performance on extremely large projects? It's because all their internal teams are using git, and we get the integration as a benefit.
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Man WTH is up with Microsoft? Someone way high up there seems to be able to mess up a wet dream. They had infopath which wasn't that bad. I know a number of people, even recently that were developing on it only to find out it's gone and Microsoft wouldn't even tell them that it's abandoned. They just would never get back to them. I keep reading and finding out about things like this. Maybe they have too many Harvard MBAs on staff?
Now they want to spread their incompetence to other areas? Wonderful. Seems li
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Well you're right you're certainly not a current employee at least because Microsoft has been using Git for years and embracing open source internally for just as long. Once Nadella took over this moved from side project to wholesale way of working. Microsoft now has a massive interest in Git succeeding because they've bet their horse on it.
I'm surprised even as a former employee you don't know this, even former employees tend to know what their ex employers are doing through past colleagues, especially one
hmm (Score:2)
Microsoft kills products over time (Score:5, Insightful)
What an incredibly effective way to piss off a large set of developers! The early adopters of git obviously were non-microsoft devs. Just discussing this now will be seen as a very serious threat to most of that population subset. Just look at any other product MS has purchased over the years to see what happened to the linux (or non-MS) version 1-2 years after the purchase.
E.g., anyone had any trouble using Skype in Linux over the last year, versus 3-5 years ago?
How long would it take before access to github is integrated into VisualStudio, and how long after that will the command-line version of git start failing to pull/push/etc to github? "Pull must be performed from within VisualStudio Team Explorer. Command-line version of git is no longer supported. Please upgrade to VisualStudio 2020."
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Git is already supported by VS, what is the problem?
The problem is when Visual Studio becomes the *only* way to access it.
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Re:Microsoft kills products over time (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they are Microsoft and they live and die by NIH. That is why they have strangled so may other projects they acquired. They are even better at destroying other peoples work then Oracle, and that is world class competition.
In Microsoft Land the sequence is acquisition => integration => brain death. For example if they buy GitHub then they will "integrate" it with Linkedin, and it will be like using Facebook as a development platform. Good luck with that.
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"why would they do that?"
Because they are Microsoft and they live and die by NIH. That is why they have strangled so may other projects they acquired.
Yeah... about that. So go back in time to 2003 (or so) when a small company called Navision up and sold their ERP solution Axapta to Microsoft. Fast-forward to today, and Axapta 3 has morphed into the Azure-hosted Dynamics 365. The original codebase is still there, but it's a vastly superior product and expanded product.
They acquired it; they improved it out of sight!
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E.g., anyone had any trouble using Skype in Linux^W^W over the last year, versus 3-5 years ago?
FTFY. It's been astounding to me how they have somehow managed to make a video chat app nearly impossible to use for video chatting.
Re:Microsoft kills products over time (Score:5, Insightful)
Git itself is still GPL'd. They can't distribute modified (or unmodified) versions without also providing the source code. Which means that any changes they make to provide a "special" version can easily be taken up by the folks who make the command-line version.
And even if they could, the result, if they tried such a thing, would be to fragment the community. Which is Github's main asset. Git, if you recall, is a distributed system. There's no need for a central point. A site like Github is merely a convenience for users. The only real benefit of Github is its community. If they damage that, they damage Github, but don't harm Git, because Git users aren't locked into Github.
Lots of big projects (including lots of big enterprise-y projects that MS customers care about) are already hosted on other sites, especially Gitlab. Plenty of big projects (including lots of big enterprise-y projects that MS customers care about) are cross-platform, and would quickly move to something else (e.g. Gitlab) if Github tried to turn MS-only. There simply isn't enough leverage there for MS to do anything nefarious at this stage.
Granted, I'd be watching like a hawk for their next move if they bought Github. But this move by itself doesn't really seem to give them any real opportunities, beyond the obvious of making money off of all the commercial projects hosted on Github.
(And frankly, if they do buy Github, I predict a lot of projects move to Gitlab or some other site anyway, as a just-in-case measure. Probably not enough to damage Github, but enough to help drive the point home: we're not locked in, guys.)
Re: (Score:2)
Hence the 2nd through nth paragraphs of my post, pointing out all the negatives to MS and Github were they to attempt any such thing.
It would be a huge amount of work to implement their not-quite-Git from scratch, and nobody is locked into Github, so I can't see anything they could gain from all that effort. If they make Github incompatible with many of its users, many projects will simply move off of Github. Because, again, nobody is locked into Github.
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Or they could rewrite the code from scratch. But that doesn't matter, because, as I pointed out at some length, nobody is locked into Github, and if they try to replace the protocol it speaks, projects will simply move somewhere else where git still works.
(And VS will have to continue to support regular git because of the many critical projects that aren't hosted on Github, or that would move off of Github if Github became MS-only.)
The only reason people use Github is because it's convenient and has a large
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The notion that MS would somehow lock out command-line access to GitHub or turn it into a MS or Visual Studio-only product is absurd, if for no other reason than it would screw over MS devs just as badly as everyone else. Yeah, shocker, a lot of MS and Windows devs use command line tools as well, and a lot of their stuff is on GitHub.
I mean, MS is moving in the complete opposite direction, making Windows work better with Linux tools, Visual Studio targeting multiple platforms and using multiple toolchains,
Big no (Score:1)
Goodbye (Score:5, Insightful)
I have already said goodbye to Skype and Linked-In after they had been taken over.
If this happens, I would say goodbye to Github too for sure.
The users of Github are not sheep. They are not like Microsoft's typical users that would accept lock-in and clunky interfaces because they don't know any better.
Hello GitLab! (Score:2)
If Microsoft buys GitHub, I am moving all my code to GitLab or Bitbucket.
Import GitHub to SourceForge (Score:1)
Host your own? (Score:2)
It's pretty easy to set up your own git repo... I don't understand why more people don't do it.
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Github offers a lot more than just git. But yeah, few projects would have much difficulty moving to another system, like, say, Gitlab, if Github went rogue. Which makes me doubt that MS has any plans to turn Github rogue. There's simply not enough lock-in there.
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Assuming you're not talking about strictly personal projects, that means managing your own internet-facing servers. What could possibly go wrong with an amateur doing that?
GitHub is free for open source projects, and most everyone knows about it and knows how to use it. What's not to like? One of the great things about git is the fact that you always have a copy of the entire repo locally, which means lock-in is pretty much impossible.
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Assuming you're not talking about strictly personal projects, that means managing your own internet-facing servers. What could possibly go wrong with an amateur doing that?
At least some of us already manage internet-facing servers for a living. And while no protocol is problem-free, ssh should be easier to keep secure than most.
But that’s mainly speaking to the people who use GitHub for work purposes. Adding a web interface, like you’d probably want to do for community projects, would indeed increase the degree of difficulty.
Pls No (Score:1)
Code Assistant looks over your code (Score:2)
It looks like your trying to share code that will circumvent DRM...
Comment removed (Score:3)
Like Skype (Score:2)
Once Microsoft bought it, Skype turned into the default business communication tool, but everybody else ran away.
If they buy GitHub, businesses will use it for their own development teams. But the rest of us will probably go to Bitbucket or elsewhere.
What's a good alternative? (Score:2)
Just to be ready for MS' take over!
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Indeed there are a number of advantages to gitlab presently. And most importantly if gitlab were also taken over, that codebase is free for anyone to use and setup their own gitlab instance. Because git handles multiple remotes, it is also possible to be on both sites for visibility, and that makes it easy to leave either one of them, too...
For me the concern is with golang, which uses the actual git repo host as part of the source path of your local code. To migrate that entire eco system cleanly does no
Login on Github using your 90's hotmail account... (Score:2)
Soon you will be able to login on github with the hotmail email account you created in the 90's... Gross....
How to download content from Github? (Score:3)
In the event of Github selling out to Microsoft, I want to be sure I can download all issue discussion, wikis, and so on from my projects and then upload that information to a new service, say Gitlab. Could I get some people to suggest programs/scripts for accomplishing this?
Please no (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s not that I dislike Microsoft, but itâ(TM)s recent track record, that includes Skype and Nokia, suggest that they are best to leave the good stuff alone.
Buying an important stake in GitHub would be fine, but having so much control they meddle with a good thing, no thank you.
Not surprised at all (Score:2)
Microsoft isn't the 90s Microsoft anymore. They're banking on getting out of the software business and into the cloud business. Every single project they build these days beyond core Windows and Office has at least some open source component and they're already using Github to host all their code. Owning Github would be a way for them to build an even more seamless bridge into Azure for developers' applications. It's already incredibly easy to publish something through VSTS and the other 10,000 CI/CD tools
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If they like the look and feel of Github so much, why don't they just implement something like Github on their own servers? They could buy a site license of the software from Github, Gitlab, or wherever if they don't want to roll their own solution. They can continue to use Github as they do now. That's all fine and dandy. That won't hurt the other users of Github. Why do they feel the need to own Github unless the objective is to infect Github itself with Microsoftish idiocy?
I love this! Go for it! Now! (Score:2)
We use an on-premise enterprise edition of Gitlab.
I would love for MSFT to acquire Github, simply because a lot of developers who live in a world of "Everything and everyone is on github, get there already!" would finally wake up and enable their tools to integrate with other repositories. The one in particular that I have in mind is Ansible Galaxy.
Its about the IP (Score:3)
Bye em out boys (Score:2)
"What might this mean..." == time_to_move (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"It is impossible for the culture in MS not to destroy GH."
I think they'd just leave them alone. Microsoft wanted Nokia so they could make an iPhone killer and sell their software and app ecosystem. They wanted Skype so they could get a better video conferencing system for O365/Teams to sell more subscriptions. I think they want Github to drive Azure adoption. To make that work you can't just take them over and apply the old license-based software company culture. The open source crowd would never tolerate