Hey
I’ve just learned that Microsoft is acquiring Github. I’ve planned to host my source code in my own server at home for months, I’ve already started to reduce my presence on Github.
I totally agree with the author of this article. I don’t feel reassured by this acquisition.
I assume that StackOverflow will be sold to a very big company later too… 
I feel sad now
Hopefully this’ll kill git off too 
Cas 
What’s wrong with git?
An answer best Googled for I think.
Cas
Nothing lasts forever. Can’t be worse then that time I used to upload my code in zip archives to S3.
Yes, I know that and I agree with you. Github had some financial problems and as I had some doubts on its viability on the long term, some projects were only mirrored on Github and hosted elsewhere. I’ve been switching to self hosting for months as I’m aware of the weak business models adopted by lots of service providers on Internet. Either they end up lacking of money like Github, or their sources of income are mostly based on the collection of personal data :s
I prefer paying a subscription for a service or managing it by myself instead of hoping that a for profit organization will go on providing it for free without any compensation. Work must pay and Github wasn’t a philanthropic organization.
Yes and there are alternatives to Github. Gitlab is open source and can be hosted on your own server. I’ve had to temporarily move some projects from Github to Sourceforge, I have the feeling to be between a rock and a hard place.
In my humble opinion, if a service is important for you, you should worry about its sustainability.
Maybe Bitbucket will do.
I use BitBucket for pretty much everything.
It also isn’t certain that GitHub is going away either. Although; purchase, assimilate, destroy, is a common play in Microsoft’s playbook.
But if it is any group of people who can handle uncertainty, and ever changing environments, it is us programmers right? :persecutioncomplex:
It’s a matter of taste. Its financial situation seems to be good since its acquisition by Atlassian but it’s fully proprietary whereas Gitlab is partially open source (only the community edition). Sourceforge is fully open source but there are too much ads :s I prefer GitBlit as it’s open source, Java based and not very difficult to run with Apache Tomcat, Wildfly, Glassfish, …
Chrissakes man. What a pathetic answer.
I don’t like this move of Microsoft at all…
As always, they’re probably following the same strategy “embrace, extend, extinguish” with Github as they did with so many other projects/organizations.
Very interesting read here: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buying-github
Cheers
GitHub stopped innovating years ago, and has been coasting on its wide adoption while playing politics and relying on investors losing money to stay online. It’s great that open source centralized on GitHub, as it makes it so much easier to find new great projects to learn from, and the new CEO for GitHub seems intent on keeping the good parts.
Yes I quoted this article in my very first post about this acquisition. “Embrace, extend and extinguish” is explained on Wikipedia:
Is this centralization really necessary? It’s possible to find great open source projects with a good search engine. By the way, I remind that Github is inaccessible in some countries.
[quote]Is this centralization really necessary? It’s possible to find great open source projects with a good search engine. By the way, I remind that Github is inaccessible in some countries.
[/quote]
Is this centralization really necessary? It’s possible to find great videos with a good search engine. By the way, I remind that Youtube is inaccessible in some countries.
Yeah sure you could, but Youtube does it better overall, it’s free, the unified interface is convenient, it’s safe to browse (vs visiting random sites) and content+creators are already there, the same goes for GitHub, there’s a reason not every open source project maintains their own website, many good projects wouldn’t even be available to the public without the convenience of GitHub.
It’s funny reading all the panic on the internet. Personally I don’t think we’re in any different a position to what we were the day before, and this could go good or bad - I’m waiting to see what happens. It was commercial before and it’s commercial now. In a different context (Java and Oracle) someone said to me recently they don’t like swimming with sharks - well, the FLOSS world is full of sharks, and sometimes I prefer those who don’t hide in teddy bear costumes.
Old gits always like to moan about other gits! No vcs is perfect, but I think git is the best of the bunch. Time to make the most of the d in dvcs!
Is this centralization really necessary? It’s possible to find great videos with a good search engine. By the way, I remind that Youtube is inaccessible in some countries.
Yeah sure you could, but Youtube does it better overall, it’s free, the unified interface is convenient, it’s safe to browse (vs visiting random sites) and content+creators are already there, the same goes for GitHub, there’s a reason not every open source project maintains their own website, many good projects wouldn’t even be available to the public without the convenience of GitHub.
[/quote]
Youtube isn’t free of charge, it’s provided by a for profit organization that makes money from your personal data. The price is the one you pay when something done with your data ends up by harming you.
I see what you mean by “convenience” because not everybody wants to maintain a server and when I began publishing my source code, I wasn’t ready to have my own server at home. There are several kinds of solutions for different purposes and different needs. I agree with nsigma; sometimes you just choose your “shark”. I’m not surprised by this acquisition, it just forces me to do something earlier than I thought. Somebody who doesn’t care about publishing an open source project on a proprietary code sharing platform can choose Bitbucket or a non free flavor of Gitlab instead of Github, somebody who does but who doesn’t want to manage the hosting and who can trust some private corporations can choose Gitlab CE (community edition) or Sourceforge, somebody who cares about using mostly free software but who doesn’t want to manage the hosting and who prefers trusting some associations or cooperatives rather than some private corporations can use Framagit, somebody who wants to have the full control on her/his own server can use Gitlab, gitolite, Gitblit, …
A member of the Linux Foundation recently defended Microsoft, I hesitated between laughing or thinking that this organization no longer deserves my trust:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/microsoft-buys-github-the-linux-foundations-reaction/
[quote]Youtube isn’t free of charge
[/quote]
It isn’t? I understand “free of charge” exclusively as “no payment in the form of currency required”. What else is done with you and your data doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t have to pay up front.
Not having to pay actual money or investing lots of time to get going is what most people care about IMHO.
What i’m arguing is that these big platforms must eventually (=>necessarily) form because of what they got to offer. I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad thing, it just happens.
Really?! I think that’s a great (and realistic) article, and really echoes my own feelings on the subject. Microsoft is (has) changed in its attitude to FLOSS, but if it doesn’t earn our trust with this one, we move on.
Hey, it could be worse - imagine if it had been Apple! 
Who seem to be steadily going in the opposite direction. Interesting everyone talking about the GitHub move, but haven’t seen a post on here about Apple’s plans on deprecating and removing OpenGL support yet?!
I’m about ready to throw the towel in on MacOS to be honest. I suspect Apple would too if they could.
Cas