RE: Microsoft Acquires Github And Developers Start Acting Like Children
My Personal Feelings
Hey, check me out, I am talking about my feelings, jk, these are my opinions. I am not a fan of anything Microsoft; their software is sub-par, their OS is a conglomerate of *NIX based systems and their business practices questionable at times, they are the personification of the Borg.
Microsoft's CEO
I do agree that Satya is performing better than his predecessor, but let's be frank here, an ape could outperform Balmer, he is an absolute clown. I for one cannot trust MS with running Github, I know as an entity, they are the top contributor too many projects but this is too little too late for many old skool coders. The innate and intense passion within the open source community runs deep, as does the disdain for outfits like Microsoft.
Microsoft's Other Ventures
Agreed, Linkin is still an excellent platform, Azure is outpacing AWS, but that is not because Microsoft adds benefit actively, AWS are shooting themselves in the foot with the piss poor connectivity options (Single cryptographic phase 2 possibilities for L2L VPN's as an example) and the interface presented at login is a joke.Azure is just the best of the worst right now so nothing to do with Microsoft's efforts, just AWS's fallings.
My Next Steps
I will be moving to a private GitLab setup as are many of my peers and colleagues. I assure you I am not acting like a spoilt brat here, I simply cannot willingly support Microsoft if it can be avoided, they have caused me too much pain and lost time over my 20-year career.
Anyway, great thought-provoking post.
Great comment @aclarkuk82 and understandably for long-term developers, Microsoft's previous anti-consumer/competition and open source stifling actions are still fresh in their minds. For me, I am only a little over ten years in my career, so Microsoft's previous actions are before my time.
Although, admittedly, I still remember having to make things work in Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0. A dark period in my development career when Microsoft really set the industry back quite a few years. To their credit, Microsoft is responsible for AJAX, so that was a forward-thinking effort on their part.
If people want to leave, I think that's fine. But I think applying Microsoft's past actions to their present self is holding a grudge so-to-speak given they've made serious efforts to turn things around and embrace open source. Eventually, it gets to the point where the only way you can heal is to move on.
As someone who has been using Github since 2010, I have seen first-hand its decline. They've failed to innovate and they've also been losing money the last couple of years as well. I think Microsoft is well-suited to turning Github around in the cashflow department. The UI of Github is in desperate need of an overhaul, it looks really outdated and it's clunky in comparison to Gitlab and Bitbucket.
One thing I didn't talk about in my post is Github has become dangerously big. It is a centralised Git hosting platform and a company offering free repositories and struggling to be profitable in the cashflow department is a recipe for disaster. The way Github was running just wasn't sustainable in the long-term, a buyer like Microsoft can integrate into its existing services (MSDN subscription, Azure, etc) and offer value to attract enterprise customers.
So the good thing about some moving to Gitlab and others staying is that it makes Github less of a liability. Instead of everyone relying on one service (which has been routinely attacked over the years mostly in the form of DDoS attacks) we are now spreading things out and that's a good thing. I see Github as a bank for code and having one bank is bad and having multiple banks is good.
As always, fair clear and concise rebuttal.
It is always a pleasure talking with you sir.