back to article Microsoft commits: We're buying GitHub for $7.5 beeeeeeellion

Microsoft has agreed to acquire development platform GitHub in a deal worth $7.5bn, sending developers scurrying for cover. The Office-maker is chuffed to call itself the most active organisation on GitHub, claiming more than two million commits made to projects. The Seattle software slinger has its origins in development …

  1. J. R. Hartley

    Shite

    Wonder which new and exciting way they're gonna fuck it up.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      Re: Shite

      They will probably try to force everyone onto Windows 10 and Edge...

      (No wonder coders are leaving like rats leaving a sinking ship...)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Shite

      DILLIGAF.

      What little I had on Github was migrated to my Bitbucket account earlier.

      I wasn't be the first and sure as hell won't be the last.

      1. Lusty

        Re: Shite

        "What little I had on Github was migrated to my Bitbucket account earlier."

        So, presumably just you accessing those anyway then? Not so easy to move real projects, and not so desirable to randomly change platforms for real projects which have real work to do.

        The most likely outcome here is that MS will add enterprise authentication integration - the main thing that's been missing for a long time.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shite

        Trivial, 3 git commands to move your code repository from github to butbucket, and then a couple of clicks and type in "delete me" and it's job done.

        1. werdsmith Silver badge

          Re: Shite

          Trivial, 3 git commands to move your code repository from github to butbucket, and then a couple of clicks and type in "delete me" and it's job done.

          But there are webhooks all over my cloudy code, and they never offered me a bitbucket or gitlab hook.

    3. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Shite

      Split it into Github and Github-for-Business but not allow you to use both at the same time

      Github for Business only supported on Windows

      Only allow Office365 subscribers to reset their passwords, or sometimes only outlook.com emails or occasionally only live.com - which depends on the phase of the moon.

      Remove the code checkin/out feature but add new options to post photos to your project timeline

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Joke

        Re: Skype

        "Only allow Office365 subscribers to reset their passwords, or sometimes only outlook.com emails or occasionally only live.com - which depends on the phase of the moon.

        Remove the code checkin/out feature but add new options to post photos to your project timeline"

        Oh, I see you have used Skype then.

    4. Sammy Smalls

      Re: Shite

      As much as anything, it's the negative feeling that it engenders. Unless they do something really stupid like making private repos accessible to M$ 'for usage statistics' etc then there's not much they can do.

      Maybe I answered my own question....

      1. Mark 85

        Re: Shite

        As much as anything, it's the negative feeling that it engenders. Unless they do something really stupid like making private repos accessible to M$ 'for usage statistics' etc then there's not much they can do.

        Well, they can force ads for starters and insist on "user tracking" perhaps. Possibly even wanting a % of any code ownership. This is MS we're talking about and they WILL find a way to monetize it to their benefit at a cost to everyone else, A benevolent despot they are not. I'd very much be afraid.. very afraid.

    5. Aladdin Sane

      Re: Shite

      They might not fuck it up.

      1. DJV Silver badge

        Re: Shite

        "They might not fuck it up."

        Ha ha! Fat chance (of NOT fucking it up, that is)!

        1. JassMan

          Re: Shite @DJV

          Ha ha! vFat chance (of NOT fucking it up, that is)!

          FTFY

        2. nematoad
          FAIL

          Re: Shite

          As ye sow so shall ye reap.

          See also Oracle/Open Office.

      2. Tigra 07

        Re: Aladdin

        Maybe not...But, they're not spending all that money for nothing. They'll want to monetise it somehow

        1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Re: Aladdin

          But, they're not spending all that money for nothing

          Hmmm.. Nokia?

          NOKIA!

          (Yes - they spent a lot of money for precisely nothing. )

          1. Richard Plinston

            Re: Aladdin

            > NOKIA! (Yes - they spent a lot of money for precisely nothing. )

            You may think so, but it was not just Nokia that was wrecked it was also Symbian Bella, Series 40 (Asha), Maemo/Meego, Tizen and Nokia-X (Android). Without getting those killed by the MS contract (mafia reference) Windows Phone would have had even a smaller market share.

            Killing the competition is what Microsoft does.

            Linux survives because of the GPL. MS could buy the Linux companies or pay them and kill their distros, but they would just be forked. This is evolution at work, Linux has survived because it is the fittest in the Microsoft created environment.

        2. nijam Silver badge

          Re: Aladdin

          > They'll want to monetise it somehow...

          N..., No..., Nokia

        3. Kabukiwookie

          Re: Aladdin

          They'll want to monetise it somehow

          They'll have access to lots and lots of private repos, full of IP of companies doing software development.

      3. J. R. Hartley

        Re: They might not fuck it up.

        Wrong.

      4. TVU Silver badge

        Re: Shite

        "They might not fuck it up"

        I was very disappointed that the early rumours turned into real facts.

        That said, they have given an undertaking that GitHub will remain autonomous like LinkedIn is and they have appointed Nat Friedman as the new GitHub CEO. There is the opportunity now for them not to completely stuff things up and alienate developers. Time will tell.

        I would have still much preferred GitHub to have gone down the route of an initial public share offering since that could have avoided corporate dominance but that's history and a lost opportunity now.

        1. JohnFen

          Re: Shite

          " they have given an undertaking that GitHub will remain autonomous like LinkedIn is "

          And yet, understanding or not, Microsoft did destroy what made LinkedIn useful.

      5. DrBobK

        Re: Shite

        They don't always fuck things up. I had the Microsoft C compiler v4.0 and CodeView in the mid 80s and it was genuinely good. Not sure anything since then has been though...

        1. GBE

          Re: Shite

          Microsoft C compiler v4.0 and CodeView in the mid 80s

          That was indeed a solid product. IIRC, it was basically a repackaged version of a compiler/debugger by a company they bought. (Whitesmiths?)

          It took a while, but they eventually f*&^#d it up: it turned into VisualStudio.

          EDIT:

          Nope, I misremembered. The first couple versions of Microsoft C were repackaged versions of Liveboat's Lattice-C compiler. Supposedly versions 3 and up were developed entirely by MS:

          https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-c-c/2x

          1. CheesyTheClown

            Re: Shite

            haha I actually should have read the entire post first. I went to the same website you did. I have to admit, I shamelessly download software from there all the time because sometimes I forget how good things are today unless I compare them to the days that came before.

            I tried writing a compiler using Turbo C 2.0 recently. That simple did not go well.

            Even though they had an IDE, it was single file and it lacked all the great new features we love and adore in modern IDEs. Now I managed to do it. I had a simple compiler up and running within about an hour, but to be fair, it was an absolute nightmare.

            That said, the compile times and executable sizes were really impressive.

            But of course things like real mode memory was not a great deal of fun. Also whenever you start coding in C, you get this obsessive need to start rewriting the entire planet. I was 10 minutes away from writing a transpiler to generate C code because C is such a miserable language to write anything useful in. No concept of a string and pathetic support for data structures and non-relocatable memory... YUCK!!!

            I will gladly take Visual Studio 2017 over 1980s text editors. Heck, I'll take Notepad++ over those old tools.

            You should get a copy of some of those old tools up and running and try to write something in them. It's actually really funny to find out that the keys actually don't do what you fingers think they do anymore. And what's worse, try doing it without using Google. :) I swear it's painful but entertaining. GWBASIC is a real hoot.

        2. Richard Plinston

          Re: Shite

          > They don't always fuck things up. I had the Microsoft C compiler v4.0 and CodeView in the mid 80s and it was genuinely good.

          Microsoft had bought those from Lattice.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Shite

          I had the Microsoft C compiler v4.0 and CodeView in the mid 80s and it was genuinely good.

          That's because it was originally written by Lattice, not Microsoft.

      6. JohnFen

        Re: Shite

        True. And I might wake up to find myself a billionaire tomorrow.

      7. Multivac

        Re: Shite

        "They might not fuck it up."

        LOL, that's awesome man, I'm taking that!

      8. pɹɐʍoɔ snoɯʎuouɐ
        Coffee/keyboard

        Re: Shite

        They might not fuck it up.

        LMAO, that's the funniest thing I have heard all year !!

      9. macjules

        Re: Shite

        This is MSFT. If they were called Dyson we could at least say they make a product that does not suck.

        1. Tigra 07
          Trollface

          Re: macjules

          This is MSFT. If they were called Dyson we could at least say they make a product that does not suck.

          They do however make a product that blows...

        2. Alligator

          Re: Shite

          They make a hairdryer now. It blows.

      10. wanderer3

        Re: Shite

        About as likely as Wile E Coyote catching the road runner.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Shite

      I don't think it'll be new and exciting more like tried and trusted.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        M$ evil tactic: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

        Embrace, extend, and extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

        When will people learn that products from the YCombinator mafia are bad!? Their president, Sam Altman, is a M$ trojan horse and Bilderberger. Avoid these companies: https://yclist.com (Github, Docker, Reddit, Dropbox, AirBnb, Scribd, Heroku, WePay, Mixpanel, Stripe, PagerDuty, Humble Bundle, Coinbase, Zenefits, ...)

        Read the book "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" about the YCombinator mafia and Sam Altman M$ connection: https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Monkeys-Obscene-Fortune-Failure/dp/0062458191/

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: M$ evil tactic: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

          I think it's hilarious that you provide a list of companies that we should apparently avoid, but link to a book on Amazon.

          1. JLV

            Re: M$ evil tactic: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

            Got there before me.

            I wonder if AC's prose in the book is as lame as his post's.

        2. HieronymusBloggs

          Re: M$ evil tactic: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

          "Read the book "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley""

          Post by author?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: M$ evil tactic: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

            > Post by author?

            No, I just read the book the other week. And "the boys" named themself "mafia", until it wasn't cool anymore I guess. You know, like the Paypal founders called themself (Thiel, Musk, ...) the "Paypal mafia". Some downvotes just means the post got upset them, and they enabled their peers. It's nothing to the anger WE the COMMUNITY have now, as they sold out to M$.

      2. Glenn Booth

        Re: Shite

        @AC - don't think it'll be new and exciting more like tried and trusted

        Is that 'tried and trusted' in the same way that uk.guv is "strong and stable". If so, I'll pass.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Shite

          I meant tried and trusted way of fucking things up but hey ho.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Worst thing: M$FT has now full access to our PRIVATE REPOS!!

      Now our worst competitor (M$FT) has now full access to our private repos with our software source code !

      Worst situation ever!!

      What should I do now? Migrating off Github, won't delete the data - right? Given that M$FT gives a shit about GDPR and slurps data like never before on Win10. I don't trust them at all.

      1. theblackhand

        Re: Worst thing: M$FT has now full access to our PRIVATE REPOS!!

        "Now our worst competitor (M$FT) has now full access to our private repos with our software source code !"

        Wasn't this considered when you started to use Github or at some point in the product life cycle when things reached the point where they could justify a solution that allowed you to protect against this type of eventuality? While it is convenient, it's not the only option and if you have concerns about third party competitors wouldn't that justify keeping your crown jewels in-house? Or at least hosted in a cloud solution (assuming a cloud solution provides the availability/accessibility that an in-house solution may not) where you had the ability to control things like encryption etc to prevent unauthorised third parties accessing your crown jewels?

      2. Multivac

        Re: Worst thing: M$FT has now full access to our PRIVATE REPOS!!

        All your code are belong to us.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Worst thing: M$FT has now full access to our PRIVATE REPOS!!

        If you're keeping your source code *anywhere* on the internet in a form where it's not encrypted then at some point this is going to hapoen. The only defense is contracts with teeth and a supplier which operates in a jurisdiction where such contracts mean something (so, not the US, at least).

      4. Kabukiwookie

        Re: Worst thing: M$FT has now full access to our PRIVATE REPOS!!

        Why else do you think MS would pay 7.5 billion USD?

        This'll teach you to use any service that's owned by a US company.

        With the rise of huge mega corps in the US, your data is not safe if it's stored with any US company. Even if the data is not directly stored in the US.

        Stop shooting yourself in the foot and go somewhere that does take privacy seriously.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Shite

      > Wonder which new and exciting way they're gonna fuck it up.

      Sometimes the old ways are the best

      1. Stumpy
        Thumb Down

        Re: Shite

        "Wonder which new and exciting way they're gonna fuck it up."

        Well, first they'll swap Git for SourceSafe ....

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Shite

          They have abandoned the sourcesafe TFSVC backend and it appears to be GIT all the way and has been for 3+ years now.

          Anyone going to TFS in 2018 would have to be a total cretin to opt for the non default TFSVC backend. Even Microsoft don't use it....

    9. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Harley

      Wonder which new and exciting way they're gonna fuck it up.

      It doesn't have to go down that way though.

      I'm a vivid Minecraft player, a game Microsoft bought for around 2.5 billion, and we've had the same share of doom scenario's: it would mean the end of Minecraft because $Microsoft. And of course also because originally Minecraft is build on Java and we all know Microsoft somewhat competes against that with their C#.NET platform. This would be bad(tm).

      Now, in all honesty they have made a somewhat controversial decision by renaming the original Minecraft version into "Minecraft - Java edition" while they focused themselves on the so called "Pocket Edition" which is now dubbed the 'default' or 'real' Minecraft edition.

      Not a popular decision for sure, but it does make some sense if you consider that there are more players on the consoles than on the Java version.

      But this is the thing: the so called "doomed" Java version is still going strong and is still being actively maintained. In fact: the Java version is currently used to pitch and test new features and ideas and after they have been tested and set up on Java do they get moved to the Windows 10 version and beyond ("PE").

      At the time of writing the Java edition is anxiously awaiting release 1.13, dubbed Project Aquatica.

      Microsoft being bad for Minecraft? Sorry, but so far I haven't noticed any of that. In fact I can even say that it is the opposite. Because also... please mention a game where you can play multiplayer on the PC and across gaming consoles alike? I'm not that big a gamer, but to my knowledge there aren't that many, if maybe none at all. Minecraft does.

      There's a lot of prejudice and negativity towards Microsoft and sure: some of the stories are definitely true. But it doesn't have to be all bad. I've (sporadically) used their Codeplex website and that too wasn't all that bad. Heck, Microsoft was even realistic enough to eventually conclude that Github was the better website.

      So yeah, I'm not worried. I think this could also turn out into a good thing for Github.

      1. J. R. Hartley

        Re: @Harley

        I've been writing books since I was an infant, I have been published in 47 languages, and still some cunts get my name wrong.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @Harley

          @ J R Hartley

          'still some c*nts can' spell my name.'

          Yes, but your books are all about fly fishing, decades old and mostly out of print - very few people under 50 will have heard of you.

        2. uptoeleven

          Re: @Harley

          > I've been writing books since I was an infant, I have been published in 47 languages, and still some cunts get my name wrong.

          Now you're just (fly)-fishing for sympathy...

        3. CheesyTheClown

          Re: @Harley

          I hope you don't mind me asking.

          Have you written anything that would signify anyone actually knowing your name?

          Writing books since you were an infant?

          "and still some cunts get me name wrong"

          I'm curious, where is the connection? Just because you have a book that has been published in a small handful of languages, 47 languages suggests that your books probably weren't interesting enough to be picked up broadly. I would say that if your book was published in 47 languages then :

          a) It was probably some fiction novel of some type

          b) It didn't catch on enough to justify translating it for lower volume markets

          c) It probably hasn't seen the NY Times best seller list and if it had, it was at 97th place for a week.

          I suppose I could go on, but let me say that if your book was only to translated to 47 languages, there could be a good reason no one has heard of you and certainly no one would know how to spell your name.

          Also, while I'm possibly one of the most arrogant and stuck up assholes on the register, I like to occasionally contribute something positive and informative. In the last month, you've written not a single positive or informative comment on any article or as a response to someone else's comments. Your entire purpose for posting on the comments is purely to make snotty one line remarks that are generally degrading.

          Now I'm not going to suggest that I'm "Mr. Ray of Fucking Sunshine" over here. But seriously man, did you actually just refer to someone as a cunt... for mistyping a name that probably no one has ever heard of outside of your personal social circle?

          I'll make the assumption that you're English as I've never seen another culture on Earth that tosses that word around so nonchalantly as the English do. And to help you better understand yourself, I'll use something I learned from a fellow countryman of yours.

          Simon Cowell one time make a remark "Miss, it is your parents job to tell you how pretty you are and how pretty you sing. But did you ever consider recording yourself and listening to your own singing before coming on this show? You're awful."

          Now I'm sure that girl is running around telling everyone how she should be taken more seriously because she has been seen performing in 47 countries and subtitled in 47 languages. And I'm sure that your mom and dad read the first 15 or 20 pages of your book(s) so they can tell you how great of an author you are. But let's be honest, the depths of your thinking are far too shallow to be successful as a writer. A creative mind would be able to perform far better than to revert to choosing the most offensive word in his vocabulary to describe a person who mis-typed the name of someone no one has ever heard of.

          I think I'll try to help make you famous. I do a great deal of public speaking in my work. I do this is at least 47 countries where people have actually paid to hear me speak in all of them. I'm really famous you know... I'm probably almost as big as David Hasselhoff is in Germany... umm maybe not quite.

          So what I'll do for you is that from now on, whenever I am trying to explain a person who sees themselves as being more impressive than they really are, I'll refer to them as a "J.R. Hartley... and that's with a T". So for example :

          I was listening to a climate denier on Fox News the other morning and he made a real ass of himself by publicly claiming he has the ears of the leaders of 47 nations. I mean seriously, could he possibly be more of a J.R. Hartley... and that's Hartley with a T... like the great author as opposed to Hartley without a T... like the broken motorcycle.

          I bet with that kind of publicity, you might even get translated to a 48th language someday and then... you will be REALLY famous and no one will ever be a cunt and mistype your name again. And I'm willing to do this just for you... because you my good friend J.R. Hartley with a T are a ray of fucking sunshine!

          1. Aspie73

            Re: @Harley

            @CheesyTheClown, I can't tell if this is a tongue in cheek rant, or whether the 1980's Yellow Pages ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv1VQ7uSC-s completely passed you by.

      2. JohnFen

        Re: @Harley

        It's a little sad when you have to reach to something as trivial and relatively unimportant as Minecraft in order to find an example of something that Microsoft didn't fuck up.

        1. Zakhar

          Re: @Harley

          Indeed, and what Harley didn't say, they probably ditched the Linux version of Minecraft didn't they?

        2. Tigra 07
          Devil

          Re: JohnFen

          Minecraft hasn't been fucked up yet.

          They've only just fucked up solitaire after all these years. (For those not aware it now has adverts unless you pay)

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: @Harley @ ShelLuser

        >I'm a vivid Minecraft player, a game Microsoft bought for around 2.5 billion, and we've had the same share of doom scenario's

        Vivid Girl, avid Minecraft player, livid Github user

        Oh, and it's scenarios too. You're welcome.

      4. Ken 16 Silver badge
        Windows

        Never a great customer experience but

        a) better than you get from Oracle

        b) less likely to scrap and replace with something new than Google

        c) in business for 40+ years and still making money

        d) getting there on the cloudy stuff

        MS are usually the 2nd best, good enough, solution across a wide range of markets and able to win by bundling licensing for multiple products and being cheaper and easier to operate than going best of breed. They probably won't make it better, but they won't kill it either and even if 10-20% developers drift to other platforms the result won't be big enough to survive long term.

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: Never a great customer experience but

          solution across a wide range of markets and able to win by bundling licensing for multiple products

          So not by using their monopoly to lock you into buying a monthly subscription for everything ?

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Never a great customer experience but

          Thirty-four years software, hardware and embedded engineering, it would take me days to recount all the times Microsoft has ripped something out from under me. Same especially applies to the "developers" of the world. Google are amateurs compared to Microsoft.

    10. TheVogon

      Re: Shite

      At least it wasn't Google.

      1. JohnFen

        Re: Shite

        "At least it wasn't Google."

        I don't see how Google would have been any worse. Certainly not better, of course.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shite

        Google would have been a far more palatable situation, they have proven to care about OSS, and not have a hidden agenda (AOSP, VP9 etc), and are pretty transparent when it comes to the deal on offer and the difference between pay with cash and pay with privacy deals on the table, GSuite pay offerings and Chrome OS for education are examples of this.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Shite

          Google would have been a far more palatable situation, they have proven to care about OSS, and not have a hidden agenda (AOSP, VP9 etc), and are pretty transparent when it comes to the deal on offer and the difference between pay with cash and pay with privacy deals on the table, GSuite pay offerings and Chrome OS for education are examples of this.

          Er, what? The most important proprietary piece of software on the planet is Google Play Services, the thing that Google uses to ensure that Android pushes their services and products no matter who is assembling the phone. Heard of that?

          And as for gsuite, oh deary me.

          Google are in the business of selling you, not selling software to you.

    11. andyo

      Re: Shite

      Er, insist all development is on Microsoft platforms and none of this Linux malarkey?

      1. Champ

        Re: Shite

        > Er, insist all development is on Microsoft platforms and none of this Linux malarkey?

        You do know that over 25% of the VMs in Azure is running some version of Linuxm, yes?

    12. thames

      Re: Shite

      @J. R. Hartley said: "Wonder which new and exciting way they're gonna fuck it up."

      They'll integrate it with Linkdin, Skype, Azure and MS developer tools.

      Their press release said: "... bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences."

      Expect to see Github features appearing which hook your code repos directly into MS Azure for deployment. Your Github rankings will be reflected in your Linkdin profile. If you don't have a Linkdin profile, one will be automatically created for you based on your Github data. Skype will be integrated into team meetings for projects. MS Visual Studio will have deep integration into GitHub beyond just being a Git client.

      So, you'll still be able to use Github via the web interface and via the command line Git client, but every possible Microsoft service that can be integrated into Github will be to the degree that a software developer could work through the life of an entire project without ever leaving the Microsoft walled garden.

      Microsoft just paid a staggering amount for Github (three times as much as press analysts were speculating) and they will be looking for ways to make that back. Introducing a variety of forms of vendor lock-in in order to sell other goods and services is the obvious choice here.

      I'm looking into what is involved in setting up a Gitlab account. I won't pull my open source projects from Github, but I won't use it as the sole public repo any more. Just like a lot of Youtubers have come to the realisation that they need to diversify their options rather than being at the mercy of Youtube's latest policies, I'm going to make sure that I can pull the plug on Github at any time if necessary just like I did with Sourceforge.

      P.S. Don't be surprised if Amazon come out with some sort of response to this.

      1. Tigra 07
        Linux

        Re: Shite

        They're idiots. Everyone is using Github...Microsoft is not happy with simply using it, they have to own it and drive everyone away.

        Microsoft...The unpopular kid with money who wants to ruin everyone else's fun because they're selfish.

        1. bombastic bob Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: Shite

          "Microsoft...The unpopular kid with money who wants to ruin everyone else's fun because they're selfish."

          Best! Assessment! Yet!

          Beer, sir!

      2. JohnFen

        Re: Shite

        "They'll integrate it with Linkdin, Skype, Azure and MS developer tools."

        This is what I expect, and is why I'm done with Github.

      3. largefile

        GitHub was basically free.

        Microsoft's stock price and market cap have risen more than 8 billion USD in the last two days. GitHub was free.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shite

        Their press release said: "... bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences." - Yeah, exactly, like they have with free VS Code - which supports shit loads of languages - (almost) fully functional free VS, cross platform PowerShell, SQL on Linux, I could go on. What is so wrong with that? Do you not think the other tech giants try to sway you to their technologies by investing in open source and supporting certain foundations? Here’s a clue – these companies do not contribute to open source because it makes them feel all nice and fuzzy, they do it for a return; more market share, more big data (your data), and more profit. MS will no doubt realise they can achieve far more in the long run by using GitHub to build trust, relationships and familiarity, rather than quick monetization strategies. But even if they don’t behave you have the option to go elsewhere. Also, do you really think your code is of such interest to them? In 99.9% of cases it really won’t be.

        So many people on here seem to think Microsoft has a uniquely nefarious approach to business. That is patently delusional - in 40 years they have caused nowhere near the damage of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Furthermore, they have not a fraction of the insight into your whereabouts, activities, phone calls, liaisons and internet habits that Facebook, Google, Instagram and the rest of that bunch enjoy. You may remember that Google, not Microsoft read your emails to find out what you are up to and sell shit you didn’t realise you ‘wanted’. Some concerns are reasonable: “Github rankings will be reflected in your Linkdin profile. If you don't have a Linkdin profile, one will be automatically created for you based on your Github data”, but in the EU, GDPR will stop that, and in the US the market will have to do the same. However, even if they do try this crap, do you think that the other tech behemoths wouldn’t try exactly the same?

        The most important thing to remember here is that Microsoft is one of a very few of these giants that provides an actual product in return for a fee, whether that be software or cloud services. To the others, YOU and YOUR DATA are the products being flogged to anyone with a full wallet and no scruples.

        The truth is that many, maybe most, of us that work in IT probably wouldn’t be doing so if it weren’t for the enormous impact MS made on the widespread adoption of computing technology in the last decades of last century. And ironically, most of those calling Microsoft and its employees idiots wouldn't have a chance in hell of working for them as they’re neither smart enough or good enough at what they do.

        Microsoft are by no means perfect, and have done some shitty things, but neither are any of the others mentioned above, and most are worse. The rabid attacks on their tech are sometimes justified (i.e. Win 10 data slurping) but often have no basis other than bias and irrational hatred. Indeed, they have some world-leading technologies but many on here would never concede that is the case. I do get that this is a tribe that people want to feel part of, and it makes many feel superior to the ‘MS fanboy click monkeys… blah blah.......’ , and that is especially true on El Reg. It is however enormously tiresome, juvenile and just plain silly – I personally find it ridiculous, and quite hilarious. Get a grip!

        Lastly, anybody who criticises MS business practices has failed to realise that EVERY company would behave similarly in similar circumstances. Just look at all the never-ending patent wars or Facebook’s designs on a global social media monopoly. It’s just that Microsoft had the smartest people at the right time, were lucky and made the most of it.

      5. onefang

        Re: Shite

        "If you don't have a Linkdin profile, one will be automatically created for you based on your Github data."

        Hmmm, that'll be interesting. Before I requested LinkedIn to delete my profile, I had changed my name to "Deleted User", and since then I've been getting emails from LinkedIn addressed "Dear Deleted". Right up to the last one a month or three ago that threatened to actually delete my account if I didn't agree to their new terms of service. I wonder if they did?

        If I change my GitHub name to "Fuckoff Microsoft", and delete everything else, will there be an unholy marriage of Deleted User and Fuckoff Microsoft? Will I end up being Deleted Microsoft, or Fuckoff User?

    13. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: Shite

      How will they FUBAR github? They'll implement the #1 thing that Micro-shaft seems to be interested in at the moment:

      Use your github login to TRACK YOU online.

      Or worse, they'll make it a "Microsoft Logon", so it ties in with _EVERYTHING_ _ELSE_. Same with LinkedIn, no doubt.

      One login to rule them all, one login to FIND YOU. One login to track you all and in the darkness BIND YOU (to Micro-shaft's "services" and slurp and tracking).

      "YOU are 'the commodity'"

      1. Mark 85

        Re: Shite

        How will they FUBAR github? They'll implement the #1 thing that Micro-shaft seems to be interested in at the moment:

        Use your github login to TRACK YOU online.

        So the Google/Facebook modus operandi then. No surprise here.

    14. macjules

      Re: Shite

      Added support with Skype? A way to actually link a proper CI process to Azure?

      The possibilities are endless ..

    15. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Hollywood predicted it, check out "Conspiracy.com" (film)

      Watch the movie "Conspiracy.com" (2001, also released as "Antitrust"), it's about a fiction tech-corp that closely resembles Microsoft. The story is about a tech-corp slurping source code from free software movement.

      "Conspiracy.com's pro–open source story excited industry leaders and professionals, with the prospects of expanding the public's awareness and knowledge level of the availability of open-source software. The film heavily features Linux and its community, using screenshots of the Gnome desktop, consulting Linux professionals, and including cameos by Miguel de Icaza and Scott McNealy [Sun Microsystems]. Jon Hall, executive director of Linux International and consultant on the film, said "[Conspiracy.com] is a way of bringing the concept of open source and the fact that there is an alternative to the general public, who often don't even know that there is one."

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Paris Hilton

        Re: Hollywood predicted it, check out "Conspiracy.com" (film)

        The story is about a tech-corp slurping source code from free software movement.

        But why would one want to do that?

        The source code is useless. The skills that come with it is what counts.

        Unless the company is manned by Alien Students doing Galactic Anthropology Studies....

    16. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Shite

      Who cares. It literally takes 6 minutes to pull, change the remote, push to BitBucket and delete your Github account.

      You also get the benefit of private and public repositories, for free, and most of all, not participating in Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish games they are so renowned for.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Shite

        Who cares. It literally takes 6 minutes to pull, change the remote, push to BitBucket and delete your Github account.

        And how long to tell everybody else searching for your project that you are now on BitBucket and not just gone?

        How many of your contributors are going to switch, or do they just abandon it?

        How do you really delete all your existing data now that it is owned by MSFT?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shite

        You are all wrong. The FIRST move that M$ will make will be to create some hindrance to simply moving your project to bitbucket. They cannot enact any other method of screwing you until they do. Once they make it tooth-pulling painful for you to move, THEN they start the slow process of monetizing their purchase. They are not going to screw you until they figure out how to cut off your exit.

    17. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Shite

      All your code are belong to us.

  2. steviebuk Silver badge

    Hmm...

    ....not sure about this. I think Nadella will balls it up and instead of leaving it as is, with interfere with it making it worth a lot less than what they've paid for it. Especially if he turns it into a subscription based service, then he'll knock billions off it's worth.

    I assume all the competitors code will be staying? Or will they have to pay a fee? Like GAM for GSuite that is run by an independent but for Googles E-mail system instead of Exchange.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmm...

      Hey, look no further than Linkedin. Before and after Microsoft acquisition.

      Githubbers, back up your stuff and move elsewhere.

      1. LosD

        Re: Hmm...

        LinkedIn before MS: Complete shit, but necessary

        LinkedIn after MS: Complete shit, but necessary

        I don't see much of a change?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Hmm...

          I have noticed an increase in emails from Linkedin over the past few years about things like synergising agile blue sky thinking

        2. Bill Gates

          Re: Hmm...

          Linkedln after MS: Deleted my account, never went back. No big loss.

          1. TheVogon

            Re: Hmm...

            "Linkedln after MS: Deleted my account, never went back. No big loss."

            Except job offers of course. If someone didn't have a Linked in profile we could verify them from we wouldn't usually consider making an offer.

            1. bombastic bob Silver badge
              WTF?

              Re: Hmm...

              " If someone didn't have a Linked in profile we could verify them from we wouldn't usually consider making an offer."

              You should cease with this NARROW MINDED THINKING immediately!

              Just because a potential employee is NOT WHORING HIMSELF on a "social media" site, does NOT mean the employee isn't WORTH SOMETHING. How about if this person has HIS OWN DOMAIN? If you have your OWN DOMAIN, you do NOT need LinkedIn, FaeceB[ook,itch], Tw[a,i]tter, or anything similar. Granted you won't need Github, either [except for its ease of offline storage and issues tracking, wiki, etc.].

              So why should "buying into THOSE things" affect whether a candidate is employable or not?

              There are 2 basic things a potential employee should have: 1) demonstrable skills, and 2) no serious reasons to mistrust. The resume covers the first. A simple background check covers the 2nd. And I _GUARANTEE_ that online presence on LinkedIn, Faeceb[ook,itch] etc., can be a bunch of LIES, if hiring managers are too lazy to do things the RIGHT way.

              LACKING "all of that social media", in MY view, would make someone a better candidate. Why? The future employee won't be WASTING TIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA AT WORK!! [similarly, not hiring smokers so they're not constantly taking "smoke breaks" - same idea]

            2. JohnFen

              Re: Hmm...

              "If someone didn't have a Linked in profile we could verify them from we wouldn't usually consider making an offer."

              Excellent! I wouldn't want to work for a company that showed such a degree of poor judgement, so that helps me to dodge a potential bullet.

            3. cbars Bronze badge

              Re: Hmm...

              "If someone didn't have a Linked in profile we could verify them from we wouldn't usually consider making an offer."

              I have not down-voted you - but I feel like old fashioned references will still work - what makes a profile on linked-in more trustworthy? I could go and create a plausible profile, follow a bunch of "industry" pages and spam out friend requests, I bet a fair few would accept, and if not - hell I could create some other profiles and link them all together...

              Why is a 3rd party social media platform necessary for your applicants? If jimmy blogginsworth has got to the point where you are ready to make an offer but he HAS to know a contact you have, then as you know that contact, you could contact them and say, "hey, did you ever work with jiiimy blogginsworth?"

              1. TheVogon

                Re: Hmm...

                "but I feel like old fashioned references will still work - what makes a profile on linked-in more trustworthy?"

                Because it's a small world in the city, and someone I know or someone they know will be connected to any candidate of note and I can give them a yell and ask about the candidate...

              2. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Hmm...

                “...but I feel like old fashioned references will still work - what makes a profile on linked-in more trustworthy?”

                It depends on the location/past-employers - some of my previous employers go out of their way to provide useful references, while other companies who I worked for for a number of years (I believe with some success...) only provide “X worked for us from Y to Z” to all former employees requesting references as HR policy.

                LinkedIn has provided future employers a way of verifying the details aren’t completely made up and new employers have general got informal verbal references from colleagues for roles I’ve applied for.

                YMMV

                1. JohnFen

                  Re: Hmm...

                  "some of my previous employers go out of their way to provide useful references"

                  I never use previous employers for references (although I'll supply the letters of reference I get from them). I use colleagues.

                  1. TheVogon

                    Re: Hmm...

                    "I use colleagues."

                    And of course you would only use colleagues that you know will give you a good reference - So that's next to useless to check out if you will be a good hire.

                2. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Hmm...

                  Nope, LinkedIn has provided a wonderful way to phish CxOs and VPs.

                  And a great way to create an awesome persona by the application of a really quite small number of sockpuppets.

                  Even worse, Hotmail won't mark LinkedIn emails as spam.

                  1. doublelayer Silver badge

                    Re: Hmm...

                    It is dangerous to refuse to trust someone on the basis of not having a linkedin account. Their account is likely to have exactly what you already have--their resume, their references, and some contact info. The one thing that linkedin has that they didn't give to you is a list of many people they know, knew at one point, or who sent them a connection request when they thought "Oh, I recognize that guy". If you're going to look through that list with the hope of recognizing someone and asking them, you're going to a lot of effort for little reward. Any person with something to hide isn't going to hide it in their linkedin profile; it won't be there at all. If you need to find it, more serious effort will be required. I have a linkedin account, but not for getting jobs. I assume that my qualifications, my performance in interviews, my open source contributions, and my references will be considered. Trust me, there is no other information in my linkedin account that could help you. I have my linkedin account so that I can find a job there, so that people looking for someone might see the profile, and because they haven't managed to spam me enough for me to shut it down.

            4. HolySchmoley

              Re: Hmm...

              "If someone didn't have a Linked in profile we could verify them from we wouldn't usually consider making an offer."

              I can imagine Sherlock Holmes deducing that you work for a third-rate company that has trouble attracting anyone who knows about IT.

              Elementary, my dear Watson.

              1. TheVogon

                Re: Hmm...

                "I can imagine Sherlock Holmes deducing that you work for a third-rate company that has trouble attracting anyone who knows about IT."

                Try again - Large and rapidly growing financial with mission critical IT.

                Oh and lots of jobs are only listed on linked in these days too. Less competition for those of us that do use Linked in then.

            5. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Hmm...

              If validation via social media is your gold standard, I feel sorry for you and your company. Personally, if there's any question after you see my security clearance, I'll follow with a copy of every evaluation, good or bad, done on me. That, and all my bosses contact information (probably not legal in EU now). Social media is for socializing, not getting "the job" done.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Hmm...

          > LinkedIn after MS: Complete shit, but necessary

          After MS, they definitely lost any kind of "necessary" attribute.

        4. JohnFen

          Re: Hmm...

          "Complete shit, but necessary"

          There is literally nothing "necessary" about LinkedIn.

        5. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
          Windows

          Re: Hmm...

          LinkedIn after MS: Complete shit, but necessary

          Millenials and puffers are annoying.

      2. GBE

        Re: Hmm...

        Githubbers, back up your stuff and move elsewhere.

        Yep. I assume that's what's going to happen.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RIP Github

    That is all.

    Inb4 the pro-Microsoft shills insist that the current Microsoft administration is 'open source / developer-friendly' etc.

    Expect an exodus to Gitlab etc.

    1. Zippy's Sausage Factory

      Re: RIP Github

      Yep. Deleting my account and moving back to SourceForge tonight...

      1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

        Re: RIP Github

        Yep. Deleting my account and moving back to SourceForge tonight...

        Wash your mouth.

      2. JLV

        Re: RIP Github

        the SF that was embedding extra stuff - can't remember what, but easy to look up - in repos to generate revenue? And not telling anyone? The one with the early 00s look and feel to their site?

        I'll wait to see a while which site seems like getting as popular as Github and move there. Pretty sure it won't be SF.

        1. Justin Clift

          Re: RIP Github

          > the SF that was embedding extra stuff - can't remember what, ...

          They were bundling malware with the Windows downloads of popular Open Source projects, and giving the developers a cut of the profits.

          FileZilla comes to mind, their forums have many archived/closed threads from people negatively affected (eg spyware installed on the PCs) but the Filezilla admin just stuck their fingers in their ears and went "la la la".

          Disgusting behaviour all around.

        2. fandom

          Re: RIP Github

          "the SF that was embedding extra stuff "

          Didn't the new owners stop doing that?

          Not a retorical question, I read they had but I don't know for certain

          1. JohnFen

            Re: RIP Github

            "Didn't the new owners stop doing that?"

            Don't know, don't care. There's a line that, once crossed, means that I will never again do business with that organization, period.

          2. AdamWill

            Re: RIP Github

            "Didn't the new owners stop doing that?"

            Mostly, I think, yeah. Sourceforge is probably not actively evil any more, it's just...awful. The sites for SF-hosted projects are horribly laid out and stuffed with ads, and their repository hosting is also painfully slow, you can usually make afternoon tea and read War and Peace in the time it takes to check out anything moderate sized from an SF-hosted repo.

          3. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: RIP Github

            Didn't the new owners stop doing that?

            Yes but, "come to S. Todd's pie shop - now under new management" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement/.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: RIP Github

          The problem with Sourceforge (just like its sister site Slashdot): acquired by Dice Holdings, a terrible company. Many controversies.

          Since then they were both sold to another company, but now I care for neither Slashdot nor Sourceforge, so they're irrelevant to me.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

      Don't switch to GitLab, it's the same story. Both Github and Gitlab are YC companies, no business model, looking for an IPO or an exit (Github chose the worst exit, M$).

      Switch to Git as in Gitea: https://gitea.io (an open source lightweight Golang app, that is faster than GitLab, and a pure community project)

      Or BitBucket (SaaS), Sourceforge (got a new better owner in 2016), Git (itself) or to another repository system like SVN/Subversion or Mercurial.

      1. corrodedmonkee

        Re: Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

        I'm not sure I trust gitea.io since they can't even make a website that functions in a vertical alignment properly.

        Assuming that 50% of the page being blank wasn't intentional of course.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

          And they spaff activity info to Google as they can't be arsed to host a few KB of fonts locally. What other bad privacy do they practise?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

        Github chose the worst exit, M$.

        Colour me confused, but if you're looking for an exit, than $7.5 beeellion seems like a pretty succesful exit and where it's coming from rather of secondary importance.

        It's called business and nobody said it was going to be pretty...

      3. TVU Silver badge

        Re: Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

        "Or BitBucket (SaaS), Sourceforge (got a new better owner in 2016), Git (itself) or to another repository system like SVN/Subversion or Mercurial"

        Under the new owners, Sourceforge has been cleaned up and modernised so it's way better now than in the neglected old days.

        1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

          Re: Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

          Sourceforge, cleaned up and modernized, of course.

          Your download will begin in 3, 2, 1... meanwhile, here's an advert! All they need is some blink tags and a marquee.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

        "Don't switch to GitLab, it's the same story."

        GitLab is actually open source at the core and you can deploy it on-prem if you want to, which is what I did a couple of months ago. The public gitlab.com can vanish for all I care and my functionality here won't be affected. GitLab at least offers that escape route if Microsoft come knocking on their door too.

        Other than that it is extremely good software, even with just the open source software you get issue tracking (lists/boards), a simple Wiki, CI/CD, a web IDE, git obv. merge requests and so on. It'll also let you hook it up to AD/LDAP and comes with 2FA out-of-the-box.

        I'd recommend anyone with the technical ability who doesn't want to face this sort of thing again look into GitLab on-prem. It needs a recommended 4-cores and 8GB RAM.

        Best decision I've made in a long time.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Gitlab is bad as well, looking for an exit

          GitLab is not open source, it's "open core". Meaning the company switched from generous to milking the community and users. Now you have to fear the next version, it will touch you with a cold hand, wanting $$$ from you so that you can update, as suddenly another part of the former open source software switched to be paid-only "addon" - that's called "open core" and many VC (venture capital) baked open source software goes down that road (and often die a slow dead). That's why it's so important that a "real open source community" is around and supports the open source project, and fork it in case such things happen. Has GitLab a healthy open source community, I doubt it. The good thing, other competitive alternatives are completely written by open source devs with no company involved, and their software is a factor of ten faster than the slow ruby code too.

    3. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: RIP Github

      "Expect an exodus to Gitlab etc."

      How about a new survey: Top 10 alternatives to GitHub

      Or, at least a really good review article.

      **PLEASE**???

  4. Derek Jones

    Register reader predicted this 2 years ago

    One of my list of predictions waiting to become true, has become true. I have added a new one to the pending list:

    http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2018/06/02/edg-and-github-are-both-logical-purchases-for-microsoft/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Register reader predicted this 2 years ago

      I was going to leave a comment, but it asked for my email address on a http site.....Chrome is not going to like you!

  5. }{amis}{
    Devil

    Nokia Redoux??

    Let's hope they do better with Git than their previous acquisitions.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nokia Redoux??

      Doubt it. All Microsoft acquisitions met with a tragic end.

      1. katrinab Silver badge

        Re: Nokia Redoux??

        The Seattle Computer Products acquisition made them a lot of money.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nokia Redoux??

        "All Microsoft acquisitions met with a tragic end."

        Bungie seem to be doing just fine. As are Skype, Yammer and Linked In to name a few.

        1. Mage Silver badge

          Re: Skype and LinkedIn

          Massive drop in use of Skype vs other services.

          LinkedIn encourages spam and illegal sharing of address books and not been improved by MS.

          MS spent a fortune for ZERO in the Nokia debacle. No brand or IP and had to pay redundancies for all the factories and devs that Nokia was going to let go. Whose "Trojan" was Elop?

          Skype was doomed by eBay buying it and has been wrecked by resale to MS.

          "All Microsoft acquisitions met with a tragic end." Not True.

          SQL was bought in from Sybase. It's done well (Powerpoint & Access should have been strangled 20 years ago, I think PP bought in).

          Visio bought in, but MS has never improved.

          So some have done great, some stagnate and some are unreal disasters. Like Homebase & CPW.

        2. JohnFen

          Re: Nokia Redoux??

          Don't know about Bungie and Yammer, as I've not heard of them, but Skype and LinkedIn aren't doing just fine. They were both utterly ruined and are no longer fit for purpose. I call that a "tragic end".

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Childcatcher

    It's like Gary Glitter running Barnardos.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      Or Jimmy Savile being allowed full access to a hospital mortuary.

      1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

        Or Jimmy Savile being allowed full access to a hospital mortuary.

        Come on, not all forked trees in GitHub are dead. Some are still twitching.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Ooh, I hope Adria Richards isn’t reading this. She’ll get all triggered.

        2. bombastic bob Silver badge
          Meh

          " not all forked trees in GitHub are dead. Some are still twitching."

          well, I had Arduino forked at one time to submit a pull request (since it was kinda necessary). A few months after the change was accepted, I deleted the fork. I wonder how many OTHER people do that?

          Having to fork a repo to do pull requests may be efficient on the back-end, but it's "noisy" on the web end, especially when searching for stuff.

  7. John70

    Wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to merge GitHub into Team Services and rebrand as Team Hub.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Get your code off there now.

    ^ my advice. Free.

  9. Noonoot

    Alternatives?

    We're shutting down our repository - one, we don't trust MS, two they fucked up Skype, I can just see the same thing happening here. A good project ruined.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: Alternatives?

      Skype was always crap, and is a user-facing application.

      MS are good at developer tools... VS is not only great but free for commercial use.

      Also MS might already use Git (?) or if not, want to use it. If they are going to use it internally, it probably won't be terrible.

      I'd wait a year at least before making a silly jump just because it's owned by MS.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Alternatives?

        "Also MS might already use Git (?) or if not, want to use it"

        erm they are one of the largest users of it and have been for some time.

      2. IneptAdept

        Re: Alternatives?

        Microsoft TFS has only really been developing new features for their GIT repos of late

        Microsoft actually use GIT as their own repo provider

        I dont see much changing

        Just my 2ps worth

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Alternatives?

          Those who believe that "oh, MS use GitHub, they're not going to change it" need to really ask themselves why MS would splurge $7.5bn on a company with revenues of a couple of hundred million if they didn't intend to change it?

        2. JohnFen

          Re: Alternatives?

          "I dont see much changing"

          A lot has to change -- Github isn't worth anything close to 7.5 billion dollars, and Microsoft certainly wants their investment back somehow, which means there have to be some rather large changes.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "VS is not only great but free for commercial use."

        You may want to read the license:

        https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/

        Basically it's free only if:

        1) You're small enough

        2) You develop open source software

        Otherwise you have to buy a commercial license.

        1. BA

          Re: "VS is not only great but free for commercial use."

          Section 4.a of that license agreement is the killer for me.

          I.E. giving M$haft a license to slurp my machine and project to death.

        2. JDX Gold badge

          Re: You may want to read the license

          You certainly used to be allowed to use VS Express for commercial stuff pretty freely, I had thought the same was true of community edition. Annoying if so... seems they keep swinging back and forth on this!

          I do wish they'd stop treating it as an income stream - it can't bring in THAT much and surely more developers! developers! developers! means a better ecosystem

      4. JohnFen

        Re: Alternatives?

        "VS is not only great"

        I suppose this is something reasonable people can disagree about. I don't consider VS to be "great".

        1. bombastic bob Silver badge
          Unhappy

          Re: Alternatives?

          "I don't consider VS to be 'great'."

          *ESPECIALLY* versions after 2010. 2010 is the _LAST_ VS I will _EVAR_ use.

          1. The newer ones have a 2D FLATSO look, jammed down your throat (or elsewhere)

          2. The newer ones are oriented around 'The Metro' and UWP, from what I can tell

          3. I thought the BEST IDE was DevStudio '98 where you could do EVERYTHING without lifting your hands of the keyboard, including the class wizard and dialog editor. It's been DOWNHILL since "DevStudio .Net" in the early 2000's

          The _ONLY_ feature that I like in VS that's NOT in anything else is "virtual space". That's it.

          Autocomplete gets in my way [I shut it off]. Background code scanning (for class info, etc.) is irritating, but I haven't had to shut it off (yet). The VB-ness of the UI, particularly 'property' displays for things like dialog box entries, are CUMBERSOME and require TOO MUCH "mousie, clickie, mousie, clickie" and moving my hand between keyboard and mouse, finding home row again, etc.. PAIN IN THE ASS.

          VS is an example of what _MIGHT_ happen to GitHub, too. Wait until it becomes all 2D FLATSO and "touch friendly" and CIRCLE-JERKS you around when you try to find something in the help system (like MSDN has become). Too many pages with too little information, and ginormous 2D FLATSO "buttons" on them to go elsewhere, ending up back at themselves after a few mis-directions. Circle-Jerking.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Alternatives?

            > VS: *ESPECIALLY* versions after 2010. 2010 is the _LAST_ VS I will _EVAR_ use.

            Exactly. Visual Studio VC++ 6 ('98), VS 2005 and VS 2010 were great.

            Everything else incl VS 2003/2004, 2012, 2013, 2014,... and VScode (aka Atom.io fork) were worse and shit and contained spyware.

            Xcode, IntelliJ, and even Eclipse and NetBeans are more in favor these days than the buggy spying shit from M$$$.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: > VS: *ESPECIALLY* versions after 2010. 2010 is the _LAST_ VS I will _EVAR_ use.

              What is it with you people. How can you work in IT for any period of time and yet still be so frightened of change? "Oh, I'm not familiar with that, they changed to all capitals for the menu headings, I simply can't use it!"

              Maybe think about changing career to something a bit more sedate?

          2. JDX Gold badge

            Re: Alternatives?

            Oh no, flat 2D buttons. Definitely unusable now. Sheesh. And you complain Windows users can easily adapt to Linux...

        2. sabroni Silver badge

          Re: I don't consider VS to be "great".

          That's because you know of a better IDE!! Go on, enlighten us!

          (Last time i asked this the best responses i got were "eclipse isn't too bad" and "I'm writing my own".)

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            "That's because you know of a better IDE!! Go on, enlighten us!"

            Unluckily, there's been a time when too many people blabbed around that after Eclipse IDEs would have been just commodities and there were no need to develop others.

            The result was just a stall in IDE development, and their dreadful state is well under our eyes.

            There was also the vi crowd who never understood some class of applications - especially those with a GUI - are far better handled using an IDE.

          2. bombastic bob Silver badge
            Devil

            Re: I don't consider VS to be "great".

            I am writing my own. it's taking too long.

            In the mean time I use pluma and csh/bash to do things. Sometimes I even edit with ee or nano [especially Makefile where you need hard tabs].

            newer pluma has a built-in that lets you trim the extra characters off of the end of a line, too. Unfotunately not yet in devuan (last I checked), but FreeBSD's ports system has had this change for around 2 years.

            who needs devstudio? I don't, not for open source on non-windows systems at any rate (or in cygwin).

          3. JohnFen

            Re: I don't consider VS to be "great".

            I don't know your needs, and so I don't know what would be a better development environment for you. I'm not saying that VS is bad. I'm saying that it's not really accurate to portray it as if it were substantially better than its competitors -- but how true that is depends on your use case.

            1. sabroni Silver badge

              Re: it's not really accurate to portray it as if it were substantially better than its competitors

              Why not? The list of alternatives supplied here is shorter than in my original question. Good to hear that Bob's is still in development but what are the other IDEs that VS isn't substantially better than? Just saying "it's not that much better" is no help if you don't add "than" and give alternatives.

          4. onefang

            Re: I don't consider VS to be "great".

            'That's because you know of a better IDE!! Go on, enlighten us!

            '(Last time i asked this the best responses i got were "eclipse isn't too bad" and "I'm writing my own".)'

            Midnight Command isn't too bad as an IDE, and I'm writing my own, version of Midnight Commander, which is currently on GitHub, but likely gonna move it elsewhere soonish.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Alternatives?

      I've ben using BitBucket for years (before there was GitHub), initially because it was the service I was recommended and it used Mercurial, which I prefer but YMMV, but later on because I compared the T&C's and business models: BitBucket always had a revenue stream which gave it focus and less of a need to pimp user data; GitHub's business model was always hoping to find a way to monetise user data. And now it looks like they've succeeded. You can do a back of an envelope calculation as to how much MS thinks your code and programming metadata are worth for when they fold the service in LinkedIn and try and sell metrics to employers.

      GitHub used to have the richer ecosystem for things like CI but these are now generally available for any (git) repo and BitBucket has continued to add its own features such as Pipelines.

    3. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Alternatives?

      "We're shutting down our repository"

      I'm going to play 'wait and see' for now. My business does not require github (or anything like it) for success. However, it's probably an enhancement. A lot of open source code projects will remain, at least for a while. I'll wait and see where they end up, since I'd probably need to do pull requests on THAT system anyway if I wanted to submit anything.

      Then I'll probably leave my stuff 'as-is' (for now) on github, and make them a "clone" of the _REAL_ repository "elsewhere" [sort of what I had done with stuff I had on sourceforge], continue to update it, and so on.

      THEN, if things become 'really heinous', I'll dump my 'clone' repos [since they won't be "the official site"] and say 'why' on the MAIN site.

      In any case, no need to 'rage-quit'. Not yet. Wait and see. And watch my ass.

      1. JohnFen

        Re: Alternatives?

        "In any case, no need to 'rage-quit'"

        I didn't "rage quit". I quit because I prefer to avoid Microsoft anything to the greatest degree possible. Microsoft is a horrific company.

        Right now, I'm keeping my own Git repo on my own servers. Whether I'll move to a third party Git host eventually, I don't know. I'll keep an eye on the situation and if one appears that looks reasonable, I'll move to it.

  10. steviebuk Silver badge

    And another thing....

    ...although reading they will be staying independent it looks like Chris will become a technical fellow at MS so will have to work for them.

    This happened with WinInternals. When they got bought out by Microsoft it made Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell rich men (I assume). However, both had to become Technical Fellows at MS first for a few years as part of the deal. Appears Mark enjoyed it and is still there. But Bryce, the day the clause was up, retired. Whether that's due to not enjoying working at MS or just deciding he'd rather just enjoy life and the money he now has only he knows.

    1. Boothy

      Re: And another thing....

      Sysinternals is a good set of tools, usually one of my first downloads for any new PC.

      Interestingly, if you look at the updated Task Manager in Win 10, it now has quite a few of the features that Sysinternals Process Explorer has had for years.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: And another thing....

        > Sysinternals IS a good set of tools

        "Sysinternals WAS a good set of tools" - fixed that for ya.

        Unfortunately, Mark isn't working on them anymore. Rare updates and regressions all over the place. I am staying with older known to be good versions of his tools. The same with Windows, trusted Windows 7 keeps running great until the 2025 and beyond on modern 2018 hardware. And I laugh at all the Win10 sheeps that rely on spyware these days. Sad.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: And I laugh at all the Win10 sheeps that rely on spyware these days. Sad.

          I bet that gives you such a wonderful feeling of self satisfaction! Well done you!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How can it possibly be worth that much?

    Does it sling ads at people? Charge money for businesses to keep their code there?

    Looks like Microsoft has found yet another way to throw away piles of cash on failed acquisitions. I'm sure glad Apple isn't so dumb as to be splashing out $7.5 billion on a company that's probably worth a tenth of that at best.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      Most of their money is for providing Enterprise services. The company I work for (50k+ employees) uses it, and I've talked to quite a few people in other Enterprise sized organisations that also use it.

      Last lot of figures I've seen shows $140m in profit in 2016, up from $90m in 2015, and $70m in 2014. Assuming that growth continued, they are likely making $200-$250m profit per year currently.

      1. Milton

        Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

        I rashly suggested most people weren't paying for GitHub (sorry) and your numbers astonish me. I don't doubt them, I'm just amazed. Why would anyone pay non-trivial sums for something they could set up and run themselves? Is it sheer laziness?

        I'm beginning to think that the Age of Stupid will reach its asymptote of cretinism when the Internet of Shyte literally offers an app-gadget to wipe people's arses.

        1. Geoffrey W

          Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

          @Milton

          There are lots of things I could do myself - grow food, supply my own water, mow my own lawns, catch my own mouses - but choose not to because there are lots of other more fun things I would rather do instead. My cat would be annoyed if I caught her mouses. Didn't know I was being stupid. Sorry!

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

            "My cat would be annoyed if I caught her mouses. Didn't know I was being stupid. Sorry!"

            Mouses?

            Mice....or meeces if you are of a certain generation.

            1. Geoffrey W

              Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

              @Lost all faith...("My cat would be annoyed if I caught her mouses. Didn't know I was being stupid. Sorry!" Mouses? Mice....or meeces if you are of a certain generation.)

              My cat calls them mouses. I don't dare deviate. Cat haz claws...

          2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

            @ Geoffrey W

            There are all sorts of things you could get someone to do for you better than doing it yourself. Looking after your trade secrets might not be one of them.

        2. John Gamble

          Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

          "... for something they could set up ..."

          Who's "they"? I can certainly set up something on my home computer here, but that's not going to help my sometimes collaborators in Canada and France (who, by the way, only discovered my project by searching/browsing GitHub repositories in the first place).

          It's not just the version control. Git can be set up on anything. It's GitHub's collaboration features that made it such a powerful tool.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

          @Milton

          I'm the AC in the 50k+ employees who posted the numbers earlier.

          When we were setting up the GitHub, I had a chat with one of the team who were managing the roll out. Asking things like why GitHub etc.

          Bearing in mind we have several DCs around the world (2 or 3 depending on region), so we have places to host our own services and the expertise to do this ourselves. Git itself itself isn't difficult, but obviously it needs hosting, it needs resilience, security (this is for internal commercial projects, not Open Source). etc etc.

          Bottom line was cost. Once you took into account that someone would need to build and maintain this, and it was being rolled out to all developers in our org, so needed to scale etc. It turned out far cheaper per head to get Enterprise GitHub, with a floating license, than it would have been to do it ourselves,

          Plus most of our developers were already familiar with GitHub, due to people contributing, or just looking at, Open Source projects, so there was no real learning curve, just an email saying you now have Enterprise access to GitHub.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

            "Bottom line was cost."

            Did you work out the possible cost of not having control?

        4. JohnFen

          Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

          "Why would anyone pay non-trivial sums for something they could set up and run themselves? Is it sheer laziness?"

          Usually, it's because those people have better and/or more profitable things to do with their time.

        5. teknopaul

          Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

          git != github.

          github gave us the pull-request, git cli will print something to stdout but github makes the whole process pointy clicky. They made the fork / edit / pull request thing possible from a person without commit rights to your project. This is a key feature, gitlab have it too now, neither are trivial to setup and manage. Github then wraps a social media thing around contributions, its far more than a repository.

          If you install github locally or an opensource alternative you don't get "enough eyeballs" on your code. Microsoft is buying the ruby code and the eyeballs.

      2. AdamWill

        Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

        "Last lot of figures I've seen shows $140m in profit in 2016, up from $90m in 2015, and $70m in 2014."

        Those numbers were *revenue*. Not profit.

        https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/809809075756273664

        https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is-building-a-coder-s-paradise-it-s-not-coming-cheap

      3. teknopaul

        Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

        I think those are revenue figures, not profit. Microsoft is assuming a lot of growth.

    2. Aitor 1

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      they do charge money for private repositories, etc.

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

        "they do charge money for private repositories"

        and it seems to be cost-effective for small development projects in which you have one or more people working from home (or even more remotely). it's actually pretty good that way, as you can use issues and pull requests to manage collaboration, and the wiki to manage documentation.

        I have a previous customer that managed their project this way. For the most part, it worked well. When done right, you could test a change in a branch, then commit it, and do 'git pull' and re-build things [as needed] in a very short period time, to update the production system. Down, git pull, build, up. pretty fast. And private repos, so the 'secret sauce' was kept secret [still had open source but it was in the form of taballs that were snapshots of firmware releases, not day-to-day history visible to the public].

    3. Milton

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      It isn't worth that much. But the ability to further manipulate you might be.

      I think the real question is—

      What is Microsoft's strategy to extract that much value from GitHub?

      Pridefully foolish as Microsoft's strategic decisions so often are—El Reg readers can probably list half a dozen blatantly stupid screwups off the top of their heads, and not all of those are from the days of arrogantly halfwitted Ballmerups—the intention is to get surplus value from the money paid. Thus the horrible LinkedIn (it isn't 'necessary' at all, BTW: it's much nicer to get work by word of mouth) wasn't really about improving the value of the platform, it was about buying eyeballs and thereby entrapping yet more people into the MS 'ecosystem'. Thus the Skype experience: MS wanted the users, had no interest in improving the product for anyone, cares only about the captive userbase ... which is why it keeps getting worse.

      So you must ask, how will MS try to extract that enormous value—not from expanding or improving GitHub—but from you, the users? You do not pay a fee for GitHub, do you? And you've no intention of ever paying. So that $7.5bn is coming out of your skin. MS is willing to bet that it knows how to squeeze the cash out of you.

      That's the modern internet-giant business approach. Customers are now the product to be sold, rented, hired, wrung out and have their privacy prostituted at every turn, so the top priorities are—

      • How do we catch them

      • How can we rape their wallets

      • How can we sell them

      —and, super important—

      • How do we trap them here?

      Ecosystem = Punji-stake-pit

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

        Customers Users are now the product to be sold, rented, hired, wrung out and have their privacy prostituted at every turn

        FTFY - the real customers are those to whom the users are sold, or at least rented, but otherwise spot on.

    4. JLV

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      I don't know how much money it would have been worth before MS bought it, but with the Anti-Midas in charge, it will likely be less in short order.

      I wonder, we talk big about how much we dislike MS - I do as well, though not as much as some. How will this work out? General rule of thumb is that in case like this, most of the public does not share the outrage of the engaged community and the unwashed masses continue to graze contentedly.

      Win 10 is not a great success, true, but then again most stores still sell PCs with it, companies run it, etc... Apple is pricey enough that Windows stays in the running and are not to everyone's taste either. Linux is still patiently waiting on its desktop year.

      The sky didn't fall for Win 10 + telemetry, not even for 8. Face it, some of us care, most people don't.

      But Github is different: its constituents are precisely developers, open-sources ones to boot. Technically, individuals could easily move, if they knew where to go. Companies maybe less easily, but one thing MS has achieved is giving Google a black eye for relying on Github - at least some big organizations will be motivated to fly the coop. Unlike Linkedin (or FB), Github has limited built-in network effects - the apt-get/pypy/npm/yarn/etc... type endpoint installers can be just rerouted to look elsewhere - they're their respective ecosystems network-effect bits, not the hosting providers. Many devs may take considerably less pride in having their calling cards on MS properties.

      We're on Github because we choose to be, not because we have to.

      If this ends up turning into a referendum on the popularity of Microsoft with developers in the late 10s, what will it tell us? What will it look like if, in 2-3 years, Github is now #2 or #3 in growth?

      I am very doubtful about the upsides for MS, but a severe drop in Github influence and market share from now on would be a gigantic and very public egg in the face for MS, bought at the cost of $7.5B.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

        > but one thing MS has achieved is giving Google a black eye for relying on Github

        Maybe it's a reason to bring Google Code back?

    5. TheVogon

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      "Does it sling ads at people?"

      Probably it will - not hard to just use an ad blocker.

      "Charge money for businesses to keep their code there?"

      Of course if they want private repositories and any level of support. Just like now.

      I'm sure they will (subject to GDPR optin of course) try to sell you stuff such as developer tools and related services too.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      How can it possibly be worth that much?

      It does not. And neither do most Californication endeavors. However, the way taxation in USA is set-up it is significantly more efficient for a large company to spaff a few Bn up the wall every year in M&A than to spend the SAME amount on internal R&D. In fact, no company in software, telecoms, networking as well as most other high tech industries can spend a few Bn to develop a product. The beancounters will not allow it because the stock market ambulance-chasers will disembowel it the moment they hear about it.

      As a result this vastly overvalues the valley scene and feeds a never ending circle of "innovation" in it.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      > How can it possibly be worth that much?

      1) Developers: No one who hasn't lived behind a rock the last 15 years would ever again develop against a Microsoft API. Their platform and their brands got burned. So Microsoft is seeking to brainwash young devs.

      2) Open Source: the open source community at large is basically on GitHub. It's "their go-to platform". They have already started to brainwash younger devs to release their code under BSD license instead of GNU GPL a few years ago. Their Atom fork "VSCode" and their Javascript fork "Typescript" were attempts to get young developers back to their wasteland of platform (UWP Windows Store, Windows Mobile anyone, oh it's dead haha).

      3) Private repositories: Many companies outsourced the Git repo hosting to Github. They pay to have it hosted as a "private repo". Guess what. Now Microsoft has full read access to all their competitors source code (minus the big 4 Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon; but all the rest). So today Microsoft is lacking behind in several gartner Quadrant, in 2019 Microsoft will have magically be the "leader" by simply knowing all secrets by looking through all competitors source code! Given that Microsoft was in talk with Github for more than two years, rest assure that all source code that was on Github starting in 2016 has been kept on backups, even if it was marked as deleted. They don't care about GDPR, etc at all anyway. They are too big and have too much money. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't been split up in the 1990s, they are still a huge monopoly and a very bad actor.

      Shouldn't they sit in jail incl Bill, for evil anti-competitive behaviour over so many decades?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @AC - Microsoft having access to all that source code

        Their lawyers will make damn sure they don't look at others' private source code, because it would be VERY easy for a company to sue them if that code was misused by Microsoft because proving they had access to it would no longer be necessary to the case!

    8. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

      Yeah, Beats was "only" 3bn.

  12. Francis Boyle Silver badge

    Time

    to investigate ways of becoming a lesbian.

    1. Hollerithevo

      Re: Time

      @Mr Boyle,

      What TF? Did you just come here so you could use that word?

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: Time

        It is never too late to investigate ways of becoming a lesbian!

      2. Francis Boyle Silver badge

        Re: Time

        @Hollerithevo

        No, I came here to make a joke, which apparently flew over the heads of 11 people. Unfortunately there's no explainfrancisboyle.com.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Time

          A joke that relies on being familiar with a particular xkcd cartoon that is most definitely not a well known Internet meme is not much of a joke, so rather than flying over the heads of your 11 downvoters it more flew over your head that you were trying too hard.

          1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

            Re: Time

            If I were remotely interested in making jokes that rely on "well known Internet meme[s]" I wouldn't be doing it here. I come here, and to the comment threads in particular, because it's full of people who know all sorts of interesting (and sometimes obscure) stuff that I don't. And sometimes they make jokes about that stuff. And if I'm interested I look it up* and maybe have a laugh. Or, you know, I don't and move on to the next comment.

            *like say typing "github lesbian" into a well-known search engine.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    About turn

    IBM employee strategists:

    2016 - "everybody use Rational Clearcase, it's great"

    2017 - "Clearcase sucks, everybody use Github, we've got an enterprise license, it's great"

    2018 - "Github sucks, everybody back to Clearcase, it's great"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: About turn

      Nope. Clearcase still sucks and always will.

      Just spin up your own Git servers. If you currently have pretty much anything nontrivial in-house and don't need access outside your VPN then it's trivial and a really tiny load compared to anything else.

      If you do need to expose it without VPN then it's not trivial, but not hard.

      The bugtrackers etc are also all open source, so the entire stack can be ported away.

      Take this opportunity to look at doing so.

  14. Steve Foster
    Devil

    Rebrand?

    Perhaps Microsoft will be thinking of resurrecting CodePlex...

    (or possibly it's just business as usual, only done in slightly the wrong order!)

  15. Justice
    Mushroom

    A great disturbance in the Force...

    ...as if millions of Devs suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: A great disturbance in the Force...

      this level of brilliance belongs on the FIRST PAGE!

  16. theExecutive

    RUN FORREST RUN!

    Before you get fucked in the ass!

  17. John Crisp

    I'm out

    I'll be dumping all my little bits elsewhere as a matter of principle.

    Don't trust M$ as far as I can kick them. It'll be yet another clusterfcuk.

    Embrace, extend, extinguish.

    Last one out please turn out the lights.

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: I'm out

      Actually it's now 4 'E's

      Embrace

      Encapsulate

      Extend

      Extinguish

      Just look at all the ways they now 'support' Linux

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: I'm out

        "Eh Eh Eh Eh"

        (as heard in the imperial throneroom)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'm out

        > Just look at all the ways they now 'support' Linux

        Yes, see the"systemd" shit, and who is responsible for it (RedHat). And how Microsoft "sponsors" now both RedHat and Ubuntu/Canonical and even Debian devs. Of course all these distros now force you to use "systemd". And of course systemd is backdoored, like Win10. And how Gnome and KDE desktop got more shit every release after the good Gnome 2 and KDE 3.5. Now it makes sense, M$ paid devs to make it worse and waste years doing shitty rewrites.

        It was very telling with Canonical suddenly dropped both Ubuntu Phone and Unity desktop (the only successful Linux desktop it was in 2017), and got sponsored by Microsoft to develop the usermode Linux for Win10.

        Or when Microsoft "sponsored" Cyanogen Inc (the company behind the former "CyanogenMod") to develop a "Cyanogen" Android distro that included M$ apps with spyware enabled by default. And suddenly both the Cyanogen Inc and the CyanogenMod vanished. Hurting the Android community to this very day, and many moved to iOS. Of course Windows Phone failed too, good, at least something. But the rooted Android market got almost destroyed an is nowadays a far cry. Who benefited from this. Microsoft, now their spyware Word/Excel/"fake Outlook" apps aren't run on rooted Android versions anymore, at least not so often as before. And the LineageOS is not really a successor, the community is almost dead and too small, and the few devices get dropped after single digit months.

        Thank you Linus for Linux, but be more careful. Work together with GNU and cut the strings with Debian, RedHat, Canonical, Microsoft! Otherwise Linux is dead in the water in a few years, and we all will move to GNU Hurd or Magenta or BSD.

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

          Re: I'm out

          Better stop your "innawoods with GNU-AK47 with a can of Heintz beans" spiel.

          "Otherwise Linux is dead in the water in a few years, and we all will move to GNU Hurd or Magenta or BSD."

          Does GNU Hurd even exist yet.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It was kind of obvious...

    ...from the get go, which is why I never entered any personal details in there or hosted any code. I do file bugs on people's repos though.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    At this rate, CVS on a linux box in the corner of the room is starting to look like a suitable alternative again.

    1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
      Joke

      Surely you mean SCCS?

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      "CVS on a linux box in the corner of the room is starting to look like a suitable alternative again."

      Make that SVN on a FreeBSD box (with ZFS and replication on the repo) and it's what I already do. It's just that I need to do my own backups, and that last part is pretty important.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The great thing about CVS and SVN/Subversion. You are the owner of the repo. You can grant permissions to only a sub-tree. The whole repo only exists on the main repo server, that you host on your hardware.

        It seems Git is a failed experiment, a product waiting for a problem. No one is offline anyway. But no one needs the whole repo with him and the whole history. It's just way to easy to get the whole repo with Git. Something that is unheard off with "older" repo systems.

        On the flip-side, let's hope Archive.org does a backup of Github, with Git it's (for now) easy to get a full repo. But don't wait too long, M$ will destroy any open API interface in a minute.

    3. JohnFen

      When was that not a suitable alternative?

  20. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    How to destroy a service

    1) Just add a few integration features, like linking GitHub to LinkedIn.

    2) Authenticate against a shared, multi-purpose Microsoft cloud account

    3) Announce partnerships with slow and bloated IT departments

    5) Create a new safe GIT client (Windows only) that allows an employer to monitor and restrict use

    6) Interactive code review via Skype

    7) Tools to monitor employee access patterns for plagiarism, leaking corporate secrets, etc.

    8) Code analysis tools block access to repositories not meeting corporate best practice policies

    9) Sophisticated AI-driven source code anti-virus and threat detection

    10) Launch an investigation into failing sales and the missing step 4

    11) Buy next thing

  21. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    Walking Dead

    1) 5.56 and good old-fashioned AR-15

    2) 12-gauge shotgun

    3) Katana

    4) Flamethrower to bore through all of those SUDDEN MOUNTAINS OF CASH

  22. Mage Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    projecting a caring, sharing image

    "Share all your usage with us!" exclaims Microsoft.

    "We care about not using up the chisels and color paints of the daemons that paint your screen. That's why you have to have the flat monochrome interface, like a Hercules card and a B&W monitor."

    "We want to cuddle and protect you like a mother hen, so we intend moving you to monthly subscription instead of buying a stable version. It's also why you can't disable stuff we gratuitously add on each mandatory included update. It's all for your own good."

  23. Mage Silver badge

    Opposite of Midas touch

    All that's gold or glitters is turned to rust and rags.

    More than $9 billion wasted on Nokia, windows phone now a rounding error market share.

    Skype wrecked

    Kin

    Zune

    Visio

    They had Xenix once.

    They bought in the stuff for MS Services For Unix, but messed up by never having an Explore X-window client. Now they've pretended to re-invent it as Linux subsystem

    Office after 2003

    Windows NT after 2003

    Windows CE once had 22% phones/PDA before iPhone existed.

    Win 10s

    Surface Windows on ARM

    1. CAPS LOCK

      "They had Xenix once."

      I'm STILL narked about the demise of MS FoxPro for Unix/Xenix. I've recently transitioned to Harbour Compiler, but I still miss FoxPro. Bastards.

    2. Lomax

      Re: Opposite of Midas touch

      And at one point they had 95% of the browser market. Not that I miss Internet Explorer (or whatever stupid name their marketing dept has rebranded it as in their latest vain attempt at remaining relevant) and it's stubbornly non-standard take on every goddam element - even on fundamental things like box-model and flow. I see it's down to 10% now. Good riddance IMO, but shockingly poor from a business perspective.

      Edit: And yeah, don't get me started on Nokia / WP :o

  24. Borg.King

    End of SourceDepot?

    Adios.

  25. JohnFen

    Migrating today

    Goodbye, Github! It was nice while it lasted.

  26. cjcox

    GitHub 365

    GitHub 365. It's GitHub with Azure cloud reliability.

  27. Howard Hanek
    Happy

    Another Glorious Chapter

    In the epic Microsoft Develflop series........

  28. arctic_haze

    It costs them about the same price as Nokia did

    I believe they will write it down equally soon.

  29. Not Enough Coffee

    That's a lot of money to spend to pretend they're cool. Will they be buying Starbucks next?

  30. sawatts

    sourcesafe for git

    No wait - its Microsoft - so it will be git for sourcesafe.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Abandon ship!

  32. sabroni Silver badge

    Top thread!

    It's been a joy to read!! Thanks everyone!!

  33. AdamWill

    ?!?!?!?!?

    "There are other alternatives – such as...SourceForge..."

    ahahahahahaahahahah

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

    *stops to mop up flood caused by tears of laughter*

    AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHA

    hahahahahahahaha

    that's a good one.

  34. Dwarf

    Telemetry and compatibility

    Any guesses how long it will be before there is embedded telemetry on by default and how long it will take until other OS's find themselves experiencing odd problems that don't get any priority for bug fixes.

    Like many others here, will be moving to somewhere else.

  35. GrapeBunch

    Poisson the well.

    If you think something fishy's up.

    There must be a reason why all the projects won't just leave and set up elsewhere. It's in MS's commercial interest to [re-entrant]. So why would anybody stay? There must be a reason....

    1. whitepines
      Windows

      Re: Poisson the well.

      Well, what's the alternative? Us IT guys can spin up a replacement in half an hour from open source stuff online. A siloed low-skill programmer offshore somewhere that only knows (barely) how to commit and push? A manager type that set up the organization container on GitHub and enabled bug reporting, and doesn't want to see two separate services (gasp!) used for code hosting and bug tracking?

      Never underestimate the power of inertia or the allure of centralized one-stop services...

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In other news

    MSFT hit an all time high on the stock market today. Apparently not everbody is a hater

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: In other news

      Apparently not everbody is a hater

      AI-fueled fast trading algorithms will buy ANYTHING.

      The total crash of putrescent death can't come too soon.

      We will yet see pigeons roost in the gutted remains of F-35, sheltering from the cold rain as elder people shuffle around on the tarmac, moaning for pension payouts and food packages.

  37. whitepines
    Facepalm

    Bye Bye GitHub....not gonna feed my personal life to Slurp. Accounts being deleted today and tomorrow, thankfully there are easy ways to host Git services (e.g. a cloud VPS and something like SCM Manager) and easy ways to host bugtrackers (e.g. a cloud VPS and something like Bugzilla).

  38. Dippywood

    Time...

    ... to git while the gittings good

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't panic, shame about the orphans though

    Other than a great time to check that standalone repo that should already be syncing your crown jewels to hardware you control, most people reading this shouldn't have any big knee-jerk reactions. Much like when Google Code shutdown, people should dust of their risk management playbook and update their exit strategy section.

    The real worry for me is that there are bunch of abandon-ware projects at risk just like when Google Code wound down. This could be the cause of the worst case of link rot in recent times. All of those individually trivial but collectively useful code snippets that are lurking in a decade of StackExchange posts. Things that the original author posted and moved on.

    Even cloning the public repos can't fix fix it, because you can't edit archived posts from someone else's account.

  40. Pete Hinch

    Microsoft Code Assist® has detected that this project is written in MIPS Assembler.

    Press any key to convert to Microsoft Visual FoxPro for Windows®

  41. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ouch! no please no!!

    Abandon ship! Everyone to the lifeboats!! (wait! how far is land?)

  42. ettery

    Whiners

    Wow, so negative. Loving what MS are doing with VS Code, .NET Core, etc. Reckon they'll do a good job. I'll certainly give them the benefit of doubt until they prove otherwise.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Whiners

      "The Microsoft Hasbara Desk is now open!"

  43. herman

    Not all MS products are bad. They used to make a pretty good mouse.

    1. AJ MacLeod

      I still have mine (quite a modern one - from 1996) stored away just in case I ever need to use a serial mouse again. Unlikely, but probably more likely than with 99% of the other ancient technology I have stored away for much the same reason!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Microsoft keyboards are great too

      That very avant garde Microsoft 'Natural' keyboard.

      Had the pleasure to use one in the late 1990s, Gen 1 vintage white-beige, PS/2 port, no silly function shortcut buttons at the top, addictively clicky and responsive keys.

    3. Zakhar

      I beg to disagree, I had one of those mouse, it was awful!

  44. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Git theee gone

    anti-competitive crap killing off competition

    i have deactivated telemetry and it still runs, they see people using Git products and not Microsoft shop cloud subscription shit.

    Booooooooo

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Re: Git theee gone

      Telemetry by Microsoft is Espionage flat and simple. it has happened for years while the US then decried the likes of other major countries. One rule for them another for US.

      EULA

      I do not EVER license Microsoft or other organization or person to use any software supplied & sold, licensed or whatever other to me to fulfill my purpose, and being required to be fit for purpose in my country of Australia to use my device or any device I have authority over or responsibility for, for their purposes whatsoever, Said software it is a functional tool, a device devised by devisors and running such things as telemetry at all, (silently or whilst excusing or justifying themselves using any words or statement) is for the purposes of espionage, but especially when it is switched off IS Espionage flat and simple.

      The U.S. has decried Kaspersky for that very reason of using scan data for Espionage.

      Say NO I command you to GO!

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    haters gonna hate

    All the negative comments have no basis, other than just I hate Microsoft.

    How about actually providing some basis for the negativity.

    How about, because Microsoft support is run by trained monkey's with poor communication skills and sucks every single time I have used it.

    Or because Microsoft cannot even provide decent support for their 2 biggest and most well known products, Xbox and Windows.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: haters gonna hate

      I can't see how anyone can defend them anymore. Planned obsolescence, slurp, mission creep, bloat... Ironically current releases of visual studio are probably Microsofts best efforts but one can not simply ignore the downright criminal history of their organisation. Aardcode is the most famous and likely the tip of the iceberg of malpractice. When ms bought linked in, my details were removed immediately. Git will have the same fate. Regrettable because both can be useful tools. I encourage all to move on. The grass may not be as tall but it is green!

      1. Zakhar

        Re: haters gonna hate

        Good advise, and I am in the process of moving all my repos to GitLab.

    2. Zakhar

      Re: haters gonna hate

      There is a very objective grudge: did they stop charging you for a W$ license on each new PC even if you have zero intention to use this O.S.?

      Well, the day they will stop that racketeering, I'll stop hating.

      That's probably not tomorrow I guess!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: haters gonna hate

      When you are working on projects that may, even most likely will. compete with Microsoft's portfolio, it's called risk management to not use their platform(s). I do the same with all the large players.

  46. kraftdinner

    They must be running low on good programmers...

    1. stiine Silver badge
      Coffee/keyboard

      ha ha

      That's the funniest thing I've read in a decade.

  47. Herby

    All I can say is:

    "There goes the neighborhood".

    There is a certain understanding that data is fungable, and can be moved anywhere.

    As an outsider (I don't have anything on GitHub), it seems to be that somebody has bought all the marbles, and MIGHT not let everyone play without changing the rules.

    We can only hope that the previous owners might start up something new (It could happen, you never know). A couple of billion goes a pretty long way.

  48. rmstock

    Frontal assault on Linus Torvalds and open source

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git "Git (/ɡɪt/[7]) is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. [ ... ] Original author(s) Linus Torvalds[1]"

    GitHub - torvalds/linux: Linux kernel source tree

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux

    GitHub is where people build software. More than 27 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 80 million projects

    In December 2015 the same happened to the founder of Debian, Ian Murdock. On 28 December 2015 the founder of Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, was killed in his apartment under suspicious circumstances. The next year early spring, on 9 Mar 2016 Linux hackers were kindly summoned to put their coffees down and listen up as Microsoft had just launched a Debian Linux-based switch operating system. The story of Hans Reiser, whose journaled computer file systems ReiserFS has become a integral part of Microsoft NTFS is even more graveling. See also the movie "The Adderall Diaries (2015)"

    1. Zakhar

      Re: Frontal assault on Linus Torvalds and open source

      I can't see the relation between "The Adderall Diaries" and your conspiracy theory. Can you enlighten us?

      1. CRConrad

        Re: "The Adderall Diaries"

        I can't see the relation between "The Adderall Diaries" and your conspiracy theory. Can you enlighten us?
        From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adderall_Diaries_(film):
        The Adderall Diaries is a 2015 American crime thriller film written and directed by Pamela Romanowsky, based on a "true-crime memoir" book of the same name by Stephen Elliott. The underlying true crime is the Hans Reiser murder case.
        Does that help?

  49. StevieP

    split between free and paid

    Out of interest, does anyone know what the split is between free and paid users on Github?

  50. razorfishsl

    They are not after github

    They are after all the personal data and interrelations, plus the business info of who they can sell their shit to.

    Then they will gradually leverage thier own personnel into top opensource projects, get control of the direction and use the hundreds of thousands of contributors as slave labour.

    They set the direction .... You do the work.

    Then you can bet there will be the EULA that will be changed over time.

    They made it clear in 2010 they WANT linux or they want it DEAD. that was why they probably funded SCO against IBM

  51. Skymonrie

    Won't someone think of the automatons?

    What is going to happen to tools that automatically pull from GitHub such as npm, composer, etc? Or, are we just pretending this isn't really happening?

    I place myself in the same camp as many other here in clearly stating that, I will be moving away from GitHub (stop Microsoft patent racket and I may reconsider).

  52. Andy Denton

    This industry is insane. People blindly trust their source code to some random startup that could disappear overnight. A company that's known for supporting stuff for years takes over and everyone starts panicking and getting bent out of shape?

    1. Inspector71
      Joke

      "This industry is insane"

      You only just noticed!

    2. nematoad

      "A company that's known for supporting stuff for years..."

      The trouble is that's not all it is known for. Lose trust and you lose everything.

    3. ZeiXi

      The clear difference is the spirit.

  53. steamdesk_ross

    I can see where this is going. Just like Xamarin, within a couple of years the "live" system won't match much of the documentation, every month new feature releases will break your old systems, and you'll need to spend weeks and weeks learning silly little tricks because the implementation of features isn't consistent across the board. Soon the basic Git install will be a 2Gb ISO that includes every version of Java made since 1996.

    Yay! Once again Microsoft raises the wrong bar, and we developers get to charge more and deliver less, more slowly, because the barriers to entry into our profession have gone even higher.

  54. MJI Silver badge

    Just told my C programmer

    And he let out a stream of expletives.

    Not happy at all

    1. Geoffrey W

      Re: Just told my C programmer

      What else do you expect from a C programmer? They all live on the edge of their nerves at the best of times. I like to creep up behind one and shout "BUG!" and watch him fall off his chair with his hair on end. Takes the edge off my own day.

  55. bartcee

    Another one bites the dust :-(

    They will "improved" it, like they did with Skype, which I don't use anymore.

  56. Lomax

    Subvert the Borg

    Am I the only one still happily using self-hosted Subversion repos, sometimes even for non-code content?

  57. CPU

    a fool and his money...

    ... are soon parted. Expect a lot of redundancies to make up for this loss.

  58. Geoffrey W

    The M$ Hate Porn Fetishists are having a field trip, sitting round the camp fire egging each other on with increasingly horrific and lurid tales of what slurp is absolutely certain to do to our code, not to mention our bottoms. I could write a thesis on the phenomenon and get my Psychology masters. Fascinating Captain.

  59. rmstock

    github licensed ?

    The new EULA of github.com no doubt will ensure that Anyone submitting code to github, has to agree that Microsoft will become the sole owner of your code. Second Linus Torvalds will be visited by the Microsoft Lawyers and forced to sign an agreement that any further use of the github protocol on other venues than github.com like e.g. linuxhub.com, can only occur when signing the Microsoft owned github protocol license, which comes at a hefty price for Multiuser Microroost Enterprise Environments. Not knowing anything further, i would suggest that Linus has had a massive brain aneurysm.

  60. jimbo60

    Stop assuming such evil intent!

    Wow, everyone is assuming such evil intent on Microsoft's part! That's not the Microsoft way.

    The Microsoft way is:

    - Decide to change the web interfaces every few months, especially rearranging all the menus every time.

    - Decide that git and http aren't the best interfaces. Come out with new mandatory interfaces and APIs and associated client tools.

    - Add significant new capabilities. And introduce lots of bugs. Don't fix the bugs.

    - A year later change the APIs again.

    - Bind all the interfaces to Microsoft single-login services. But don't provide fully functional account management.

    - Change the APIs again.

    - Wonder where everyone went.

    - Decide the level of interest no longer warrants focus on that business. Cancel it.

    No evil intent necessary.

  61. jamesgartland

    Azure

    It's just another ploy to pull more users into Azure. GitHub will become tightly integrated with Azure for business accounts with the use of dev ops tools and the likes.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Azure

      Your words amaze me, Mystic Meg, what else do you see in your crystal balls?

  62. roeltz
    Unhappy

    Just when I was getting cozy with Atom...

  63. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One more reason...

    to outlaw mergers and acquisitions.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: One more reason...

      damn, if only it was all that simple. I might agree, if I felt like screaming about Google acquiring Android Inc. and unleashing that mess upon the masses, but w/e...

      DROPPINGS GONNA DROP

  64. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As a customer of Microsoft since MS-DOS days, I’ve lived with their take-it-or-leave-it business model. It finally came to a head when I had to attempt walking my child through getting Windows Vista to connect to the internet, all the while talking over an expensive international phone call. That marks the end of Microsoft computers in my family. And the beginning of using computers as a tool. Nine MacBooks later, requests for help with a Mac is still unheard of. They just work.

    Now that they took over Github, will their corporate arrogance be in full conflict with the essence of Github?

  65. Nano nano

    GitHub down - any connection ?

    Just saying ....

  66. jimbo60

    Gotta love twitter humor. Post below is accompanied by a screen shot showing gitlab is being hosted by Microsoft Azure. Numerous related posts show the same. :)

    @EdgarSanchez

    Jun 5

    For all the people who left #github and migrated to #gitlab on a rush because you don't like Microsoft, welcome to Microsoft #Azure

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      except...

      These, from April-- first article points to second:

      Why and how GitLab abandoned Microsoft Azure for Google Cloud

      GitLab + Google Cloud Platform = simplified, scalable deployment

      Does it matter? Here's a joke: When MS sites were showing up in e.g. Netcraft as running Linux, it was just the caching & content delivery systems (forget whose) that were closer to the whole net than MS's own Windows Server systems, and they pointed out "we buy a service from someone and whatever platform they choose is not really our problem." Or something like that.

      So they said/did a mature thing quite a few years ago, and it seems we could be as rational.

  67. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    My take on this is that a few get billions of dollars for the work done, for free, by thousands of people.

    What do the the contributors get? Those that actually made Github worth anything at all?

    Not only did those thousands do the work for free. They also gave it away to be re-used for free.

  68. Temmokan

    One more to bite the dust...

    It's hard to believe the Microsoft won't pollute and befoul GitHub as well, but let's see.

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