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General => Tech, Science, IT discussion & News => Topic started by: gameblabla on June 04, 2018, 02:29:36 AM

Title: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: gameblabla on June 04, 2018, 02:29:36 AM
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-GitHub-Reported-Deal (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-GitHub-Reported-Deal)

Github, the biggest open-source development platform, is apparently being bought by Microsoft.
Neither Microsoft or Github have confirmed this but it does seem to look likely...

This still raises a bunch more questions :
Github was not that harsh as far DMCA claims are concerned, even keepîng a Halo's mod source code because well, it was not violating the DMCA. But with Microsoft on board, it looks like it's going to get worse.
There's no guarantee that Microsoft will keep it for free for that long. Or maybe they'll find other ways to screw over us,
like treating tor users like 2nd citizens and put more features behind paywalls. (like discord did with emojis)

Even before that, i had already doubts about Github because it was not fully open source and it did not mind cooperating with Roskomnadzor... Speaking of Roskomnadzor, i'm afraid it's about to get worse under microsoft.

Already before that, i had migrated my github repos to Gitlab :
https://gitlab.com/gameblabla (https://gitlab.com/gameblabla)

Gitlab is a very nice alternative to github : you can build your own instance and it has other features too such as setting icons for projects !
Sadly, the interface doesn't provide an alternative for "github releases". Oh well.
There's Bitbucket too and i could try that but with gitlab around, i feel like it's not necessary.

Despite this, i'll still update both my gitlab & github. I'll have to decide myself when i should drop github. (or maybe drop both but i hope not...)
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: Yuki on June 04, 2018, 02:48:30 AM
Still a rumor so far, but yeah, it's going to get pretty interesting. The relationship between Microsoft and open source is already pretty good, so is their relationship with GitHub. I mean, it's the biggest company using GitHub already, they switched most of their source code to Git, improved it so it would work with the Windows source code, and they're even in the biggest commiters to the Linux kernel. So yeah. They even almost would buy Linux at this point. But yeah, the biggest problem is how they would handle DMCAs, but eh, who knows? Maybe they would end up like Tumblr when they got bought by Yahoo! and nothing really happened.

Anyway. installing your own instance of GitLab is a cing pain in the ass even on a brand new VPS, way too much dependencies, use Gogs or whatever thing they forked it as instead. I'm using it at the job and it's magic. Also using Visual Studio Code, it's a pretty nice IDE, except I dunno what would happen to Atom...
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: Lionel Debroux on June 04, 2018, 06:05:49 AM
The biggest issue is probably the private repos, used by companies for their internal source code, falling into the hands of one of the Internet giants (whichever it is - it would largely be the same for Google, Apple or Amazon; Facebook's not really into coding in the first place). Even larger potential for industrial spying than with an independent Github, and an unfair advantage against competitors wrt. Azure integration (well, they'd better provide GCE and AWS integration at the same time if they want to avoid that pitfall) + LinkedIn integration (no alternative with remotely similar popularity).
Companies moving to their private Gitlab / Gerrit / similar instances would just be doing what they should have done much earlier.

Also, some people think that this move makes MS (even) more vulnerable to censorship, especially China's censorship: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1003397774908559360

My main TI community projects are in the process of being imported to Gitlab, though I'll probably continue updating both sides for a while.
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: Yuki on June 04, 2018, 06:45:54 AM
Any sane person dealing with sensitive, closed-source code would host their code themselves. Actually, host pretty much everything they can on their own network. Which is kind of a given if you're dealing with thousands of employees at your offices and billions of visitors on your website. (That or spinning up a cton of Amazon or Google cloud instances.) And this is one of GitHub's commercial offering, actually. GitHub Enterprise (https://enterprise.github.com/home) lets you host your own instance of GitHub on your fancy company network with LDAP integration if you want and stuff for enterprises.

Or if you're just a small company, you just need a good VPS, install Gogs and everything you need that have an open source solution you can install yourself and you're ready to go, but of course, you kinda need someone who's kinda good with Linux. That's pretty much what we do at that place I work for, the only expenses we have is pretty much getting the employees paid and a $10/month VPS full of open-source software at our favourite hosting provider. Easy profits, y'all. Same on CodeWalrus, except we don't even pay our employees.

Speaking of Facebook, you'd be surprised, you say they're not really into coding, but I know the social network itself is a huge behemoth, I mean, they even wrote their own version of PHP in hopes it would work at least decently. Twice. Well, yeah, they're not really into hosting as much as Google or Amazon are, but it's still pretty scary to think of.
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: Lionel Debroux on June 04, 2018, 06:50:16 AM
QuoteAny sane person dealing with sensitive, closed-source code would host their code themselves.
Right, but so many directors, financial people and managers aren't sane and competent that it isn't funny :)

Migrating a company's documents and e-mails to Office 365 - or the Google version thereof - shouldn't ever be an option to be considered seriously because of the privacy / confidentiality implications, let alone a decision imposed on users. My company's going through that **** at the moment, it's criminal.
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: Yuki on June 04, 2018, 07:37:21 AM
Directors, financial people and managers often aren't IT guys, will willingly take anything Microsoft or Apple throws at them if it's going to make their lifes easier and beg their IT departments to install it on their existing intrastructure. I mean, every once in a while at one point you hear about hackers going through iCloud to leak celebrities' nudes it's laughable. It may be secure, but it's open way too easily to social engineering: you just ask some guy who know nothing about IT but have a lot of power at a big company nicely and bam, you're in, stole his Office account and/or the company's domain names.

It's kinda weird, and I'm pretty sure the big ones are doing everything possible to limit hackers, but it's always going to happen, sadly. Nothing is infallible.
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: gameblabla on June 04, 2018, 04:26:53 PM
And now it was just confirmed by Microsoft themselves :
https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ (https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/)

They said that they will still maintain the choice of operating systems and the openness.
However, they haven't answered concerns about anything else...

Honestly, the so-called "IT" people with "real" jobs i've met so far don't care about privacy & security because they all put their faith on one company. Seems like unthinkable for them to run their own instances, even if they have the budget to do so.

Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: 123outerme on June 04, 2018, 08:33:11 PM
The one ray of light with the official announcement is if the deal seems sour to the end user (which to me, it does), there's always the fact that Congress has to manually approve big buyouts like this one. So, possibly, this could be denied. Although I can't personally see any big legal reasons or enough small ones to warrant this not going through, if you don't want this to happen, you can always hope for it to be denied.

Edit: Although I don't know much about this sort of thing and what qualifies a buyout to be reviewed.
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: _iPhoenix_ on June 04, 2018, 09:22:31 PM
If it was, say, Mozilla aquiring GitHub, I'd be perfectly fine with it. But this is Microsoft. Microsoft takes good things and makes them worse.
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: Yuki on June 04, 2018, 10:17:48 PM
Well, I dunno. At the same time, Microsoft changed quite a lot since 2014 when Satya Netalla became CEO. It's no longer Steve Ballmer's Microsoft, far from it. I mean, look what happened to Xamarin, a company founded by Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icasa (who is well known for the GNOME project) to support Mono, Microsoft eventually bought it, pretty much merged it with their own .NET Framework and made it open source not unlike what Mono was. Friedman went on to be VP at Microsoft and later announced CEO of GitHub after its merger.

So yeah, I dunno, I think it's going to be pretty interesting on how it's going to turn out. Yeah, Ballmer-era and even Gates-era Microsoft had a pretty bad reputation they still can't get out of but I feel they're doing a complete 180° from that era and they're doing a kinda good job so far. More or less, anyway.
Title: Re: Apparently Microsoft is acquiring Github
Post by: rowan_futurerave on August 11, 2018, 07:28:43 PM
I have loved Bill Gates since the days of having MSDOS 3.3 and QuickBASIC 4.5 and I always will woooo!