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Are we giving GitHub too much control?

Syed Faraaz Ahmad on May 25, 2019

It's great that GitHub is announcing all these cool new features that developers need, but with open source development happening mostly on GitHub,...
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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Migration is just a git push away (you add a new remote and push there), I'm not worried about the lock-in.

Git was created as a distributed source control system from the start fortunately.

It might be harder to move for some projects now that sponsorships are offered through the platform but I don't know if the agreement requires for the Git repo to be hosted on github.com at all times, maybe you know.

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Morgen Peschke

I don't think it's that big of an "if".

For all of the talk about embracing Open Source, MS is following a very familiar playbook.

They embraced Open Source, and are extending Github in ways that make it harder to leave their ecosystem. Maybe they've changed their MO, but in the past "extinguish" tends to follow.

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Roy Larsen

Personally, since MS has gone all-in on Azure, they don't have a reason to care about OS wars. Windows on the Desktop isn't going anywhere and don't really have a threat, Xbox couldn't be bigger, and the only real competitor to O365 is Google Apps.

They figured out how to monetize their biggest OS rival. They have no reason to extinguish. It's in their best interest to contribute to Open Source in good faith these days.

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Morgen Peschke

EEE was never about the OS wars, Microsoft has always controlled the desktop market share via supplier contracts.

EEE was about controlling the web. At this point, with Edge now built on top of Chromium, they've conceded that battle.

Currently, it looks like this article may have correctly identified why Microsoft wanted GitHub: that's where the developers are.

If they leverage this the way they seem headed, they'll try to funnel projects into the Azure ecosystem, with the aim of reducing Google and Amazon's dominance of the Cloud Services market. Note: I don't particularly trust Google, and I definitely don't trust Amazon, so the reduction of their marketshare isn't a bad thing, as long as it doesn't result from Microsoft going rouge again.

They might try leverage their dominance in other areas to push out GitLab and other git hosting competitors, as a way to increase their GitHub to Azure pipeline, or they might compete fairly. We don't currently know how this will play out, Microsoft may well keep things above board, but I don't think we can necessarily trust them to do so, based on the blemishes on their record.

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roylarsen profile image
Roy Larsen

Oh, we should absolutely trust none of these companies.

I just think that the MSFT under Nadella is night and day different than the MSFT under Ballmer.

I'm absolutely expecting them to prove me wrong and that nothing is different.

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Nicolas Musset

Still living in 1990 I see...

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morgenpeschke profile image
Morgen Peschke

Nice ad hominem, do you have any response to what I actually said, rather than simply taking a jab?

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George

I wonder about control over what?

Any T&C’s that could change to change ownership etc. Would cause them to lose future business.

Being based entirely around git stops them from creating vendor lock, gitlab also keeps them in check with that.

Imo: Github offers less than Gitlab, but has the benefit of being almost synonymous with git for people new to the industry. The free tier is what gets them business in the long term.

I’m curious for any examples of something that would be a lot of work to transfer from github to any other git-repo hosting site.

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James Velasquez • Edited

All of this tinfoil hat stuff was fun when I was in my twenties, its honestly tiring now.

I have access to gitlab, I can make local gits.. github is just a name people can easily forget like Myspace.

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Jimmy McArthur

Here's a completely open source alternative: opendev.org/

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William J.N. Breuer

This is a really good point you raise, it's heaven as a user right now having so many tools readily available. On the other hand, being owned by Microsoft makes me a little nervous.

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Syed Faraaz Ahmad

That's essentially what my concern is, all this feels too good to be true and I feel like some shit is about to go down soon. That might just be being paranoid or something, but I like to know my options, just in case I'd ever need them.