Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub

I was hoping it's EEE and the Extinguish part would be the killing of that javascript abomination that is Electron. Sadly, no deal. :(
 

No, it's not relevant. It's just proof that these people have lost the ability to think outside-the-box.
Which is not a suprize: the Internet is no longer a place of innovation, it's now just business-as-usual. And consequential, the developers are no longer able to be innovative, they're now mainstream, i.e. just the same brainwashed zombies like you see walking around your neighbourhood shopping-mall.

Recently I was hit by a defect with a piece of software. So I did what I always do, identify it, analyze it, fix it, and then - well, usually I just post a message here, so others can find the issue and adapt the workaround (and if anybody is fond of bug-reports, they have enough information so they can write themselves one).

But in that case, that piece of software was maintained on GitHup. And so I found out that I am not allowed to inform people about the defect and it's fix, unless I become customer of the GitHup corporation first!
Grotesque enough as this is, it is not yet all of it. Because furtermore, in order to provide the bug-fix, I have to provide proof that I have received proper social therapy, in order to provide the required political correctness to be allowed to participate in the software project.

Alright, this is what once was free software projects.

That same thing has been achieved already in the realm of politics: there none of the imminent work is done anymore, instead witch-hunts are celebrated against people supposedly being not politically correct enough. Onviousely now we need to achieve the same in the realm of engineering: get rid of all the skill and expertise, and replace it by proper social therapy.
 
Sounds like some awful experience. Is that the cult if the GitHup or some specific project?
 
Sounds like some awful experience. Is that the cult if the GitHup or some specific project?

I think both of it, in part. You know I'm oldschool - so maybe I don't get it fully - but I think the idea of that GitHup stuff is that you can participate in collaborative projects - but You have to "signup" to do so, which is just an euphemism for "become a customer of GitHup corporation" - with all probable implications.
Its about the same as with Facebook: if You're interested in some special interest stuff (like -in my case, neoclassical music), such information is nowadays only available on FB, so in order to get it, one has to signup to FB, which implies becoming a customer of them. which also implies handing over all of one's personal data to them for sale.
So this is an essential problem with those companies like FB, Whatsapp, GitHup and similar: the technological innovation provided by these companies is on the level of something a schoolboy can write in a couple of weeks, nevertheless they are traded for billions - not because they provide such great technology, but because they have created a monopoly, and because they concentrate user-data (which doesn't belong to them, but which they nevertheless can sell).

The other part of it was indeed specific to that specific software project - which seems to be very proud of having developed a social conduct regulatory defining what would be the proper social quality for participating in their project. I thought I'd become crazy... but then this is just the typical socialist behaviour: to crawl before the big capitalist corporations and at the same time wanna discipline and reprimand your neighbour.
 
That is not socialist. That is what we call spineless over here. It is those who were not tough enough to be the school bully, now trying to compensate.
 
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You know I'm oldschool - so maybe I don't get it fully - but I think the idea of that GitHup stuff is that you can participate in collaborative projects - but You have to "signup" to do so, which is just an euphemism for "become a customer of GitHup corporation" - with all probable implications.
Name one repository hoster that allows you to post anything (patches, bug reports, whatever) without requiring you to signing up.
 
Name one repository hoster that allows you to post anything (patches, bug reports, whatever) without requiring you to signing up.

Point NOT taken.
What is called "signup" is in fact something very different: it is agreeing to "terms and conditions" dictated by some corporation. The implication of these - well, you need a lawyer first to understand them...
 
What is called "signup" is in fact something very different: it is agreeing to "terms and conditions" dictated by some corporation.
You do realize that you actually signed up and agreed to our terms and conditions before you could post on these forums?

The implication of these - well, you need a lawyer first to understand them...
That's something I can agree with to a certain extend. A lot of terms and conditions require a masters degree in law before you're able to understand them. This is one of the reasons EU law stipulates they must be written in plain, understandable language. Those same EU laws also state that any terms and conditions I agree to can never waiver any of my legal rights.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-contract-terms/index_en.htm
 
I object. The terms and conditions for this forum are pretty straightforward and clear. The terms and conditions written by any fortune-500 law department can be read by someone with a master in law without his mind imploding, but he can only state what he believes to be the meaning. You can not compare these two.
 
You do realize that you actually signed up and agreed to our terms and conditions before you could post on these forums?

I'm well aware of that - but I didn't see a corporation there. (The only thing that might somehow resemble a corporation is the FreeBSD Foundation, but that's definitely not a corporation in the usual sense.)
 
Point NOT taken.
What is called "signup" is in fact something very different: it is agreeing to "terms and conditions" dictated by some corporation. The implication of these - well, you need a lawyer first to understand them...

your money, credit card, your friend contacts, your data,... whatever Microsoft or Apple can steal from You.
 
your money, credit card, your friend contacts, your data,... whatever Microsoft or Apple can steal from You.

Are we still on the FreeBSD support forum? As long the process of a large corporation screwing their customers doesn't involve this OS it's totally ok with me. Besides, I'm having trouble imagining how exactly MS would ruin a glorified file hosting.
 
Are we still on the FreeBSD support forum? As long the process of a large corporation screwing their customers doesn't involve this OS it's totally ok with me. Besides, I'm having trouble imagining how exactly MS would ruin a glorified file hosting.
I think they have history of successfully destroying some software packages, do they not? Skype, that 3d thing they've acquired, Nokia.. :)
 
Not really, Skype has always been a UI horror show. (Remember loading entire conversation history just to search a string?) The replacement of p2p with centralized communication was arguably successful. I can't comment on Nokia or 3d things.
 
Skype always was a UI freakshow, that is very true. Then in the glorious past days it actually worked across multiple operating systems.. While nowadays, it fails to deliver messages when Cisco anyconnect is connected on windows, and on Unices it eats 100% cpu all the time. That is proper software destruction. That is anecdotal evidence, so grain of salt must be taken but still.
At least latest update says "Sending." instead of "Sent" on non-sent messages, thats some improvement.

As per 3d package, after some thought I've recalled the name - Softimage.
 
your money, credit card, your friend contacts, your data,... whatever Microsoft or Apple can steal from You.

You sound like one of those terribly confused stallman zealots. I'm an Apple customer, and they haven't stolen anything from me.
 
your money, credit card, your friend contacts, your data,... whatever Microsoft or Apple can steal from You.
I use Microsoft products, Apple products, and products by pretty much all major computer companies. Going way back: I still have two machines made by "Digital Equipment" in my house (they only get booted roughly once every ten years). I don't think there are any Jupiter Networks in my house, but at times there was Cisco hardware here too (a small ISDN router).

And none of them have ever stolen my money (I give it to them voluntarily), my credit cards, or my contact list. I don't think I've ever seen any of the people on my contact list being contacted by computer companies I have dealt with.

My data? Good question. It's theoretically possible that someone has stolen my data. In which case I wonder what they did with it; I've never seen any effect of it. I still trust the major computer companies enough to use their infrastructure; I even use cloud services offered by the major players for managing and storing my personal data, I trust them enough.

Now, Facebook is a different story. I know full well that everything I post on Facebook is being used by them. That's a problem, but unfortunately Facebook is useful enough that I have to do things there.

On the other hand, I've had my credit card number stolen frequently (it happens roughly once every year or two). In the few cases where I was able to track back (roughly) where it happened, the fault never lied with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, IBM, HP, or any company like that. Not even with Visa, Mastercard, or AmericanExpress. But with little gas stations, restaurants and stores whose gas pumps have been modified to steal credit card numbers.

I've been attacked by hackers (in the early 2000s, a Linux machine at my house was rootkitted; fortunately, the attempt failed, because the script kiddies had bugs in their scripts).

I trust Microsoft and Apple (and all such companies, with the exception of Uber and Facebook) much more than I trust the corner hardware store, or the local gas station, and that's based on decades of experience.
 
On the original topic of this thread: I have NO idea why Microsoft bought GitHub. It makes no sense. Matter-of-fact, I never understood why running GitHub as a for-profit company makes any sense to begin with. It's very hard to make money from the "free" users of GitHub; you can't show enough ads to pay for the operating costs of such a service. And for the "non-free" users (which have to pay GitHub), the barrier to entry is very low, so users will migrate from GitHub to any cheaper service; that's a hard business to be in. So Microsoft didn't buy GitHub to become rich from it.

Microsoft didn't buy GitHub to do espionage either. All the open source software stored on GitHub is openly accessible; Microsoft could have gotten it for free.

The idea that Microsoft (which has always been at odds with a large fraction of the software development community) can improve its standing with coders by buying their favorite storage place is laughable. On the contrary, the usual microsoft-haters in that community will have it even more now.

Was it an acquihire? Unlikely. At $7.5B, and a typical valuation of roughly a million per engineer, GitHub would have had to employ thousands of star engineers; they were nowhere close to that.

I think the real answer is this: Microsoft has an unbelievably large amount of money, and no idea of how to invest that productively. So they just tried something; maybe it will pan out, and if not, the loss of $7.5B makes little difference to them. There is no point trying to analyze the purchase rationally, since Microsoft doesn't have to think about money rationally any longer.
 
On the original topic of this thread: I have NO idea why Microsoft bought GitHub. It makes no sense. Matter-of-fact, I never understood why running GitHub as a for-profit company makes any sense to begin with.

I still assume the main driver here is .NET Core. Microsoft chose GitHub as the development platform for .NET Core, obviously because a lot of open source contributors like it. They have a very vital interest in the success of .NET Core, it's a central element of their strategy. What MS aims to sell in the future seems to be cloud services and consulting, and a lot of it will be based on .NET Core. Of course, I'm surprised by the actual price they pay for it as well, but disregarding that, it makes sense for MS to operate a well-established platform for their own OSS development as well as for contributors, especially after retiring CodePlex. I expect they will keep the "free for any non-commercial use" modus, because reputation is important as well -- you have to "appear nice", so people will happily contribute to your own projects.
 
I have NO idea why Microsoft bought GitHub
The Cost of Developers
The first part is background. Toward the end is the reason Microsoft bought github.

Essentially, Microsoft owns the platform, Windows, where everybody lives. But that platform is dwindling and the cost of getting developers to work on it, versus the web which they have no control over, is getting higher. Buying github gets them those developers where they can influence them to work on Microsoft products.

As stated in Microsoft's announcement, buying github allows them to "advance Microsoft services".
 
It's gone become a dead project like other which where buyed by M$. Where is Hotmail now? Dead, Skype? Fiasco. Linkedin, Nokia,...the list is so long.
 
To bend this back to topic, what drhowarddrfine brought in looks actually be some valid reason. They need developers, and those need to be cheap and fast. Simply being a platform that stays compatible with the past does not seem to be enough these days. As a developer, I would hate my target platform change twice between design and deploy. Wait, I actually hate it. And that might be why they financed SCO and Icaza, simply to stir the water and blow the wind of change into the ecosystem. Because serious developers hate that.
 
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