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Microsoft bought GitHub for 2 reasons: 1. They can. 2. Their version control sucked ass.
They will not make GitHub suck ass cause then they would be right back where they started, less billions of dollars.
There’s plenty of devs who say never one red cent or comfort to MS and I get that. Their past is more evil than I can recount here. And the negative externalities go wide and far. They cannot atone for their sins without going out of business. But the idea that GitHub is fucked is fucked. -
@irene I understand your point. It feels like splitting hairs, though. Officially it's not an IDE but for example you can install all the necessary extensions to write, debug, and compile code within it. The ability to install all your Integrated Development Environment tools through it makes it act an awful lot like an IDE.
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@irene you are correct.
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@jeeper great points.
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I think you got the big picture about right. Microsoft is transforming. Two things that I missed in the introduction, VS Code isn't lightweight, it runs on electron, which by definition isn't lightweight and with skype they removed e2e encryption (probably for spying/money) reason. I personally wouldn't say MS suddently had a change of heart and is now one of the good guys. They do a lot for the dev community at the moment, however at the end it's money, they're interested in...
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@Wack I didn't know that they removed the encryption with Skype. That's unfortunate. Sadly enough it kind of feels like the ads were a bigger sin, haha. Either way I stopped using it when they bought it. Other quality competing products emerged by that point that provided the same feature set and more.
As far as Microsoft's latest efforts, I'm hopeful. As you say it is always about money. For me it needs to be a reasonable trade-off. I think right now for the dev world they are nailing it. -
I see Microsoft the same way. They're of course only doing this for the money (someone already mentioned that) but they changed during the past years and some "haters" need to rethink before continuing their bashing on MS (if they every actually thought about it). I personally am not a big friend of MS. But I am mainly coding in C#, using VSTS and VS (Code). Regarding their developer-related activities they clearly evolved. When I look at some windows/office problems I just think "WTF". (This was my completly unstructured expression of my opinion... ;))
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@duckWit : Thank you very much!
Until Balmer left, Microsoft racked up an enormous amount of bad acquisitions. Since he left, Microsoft changed greatly!
And they won't be able to change Github much. It's still "only" a git frontend, and git is way out of their reach. -
Everyone might be saying "Wow, look, Microsoft are the good guys now, look how they've changed!" But that's exactly what worries me. Things do indeed appear good under Nadella, but he could quit and MS could go back to a Ballmer type era faster than a n00b question can acquire downvotes on StackOverflow. Github in that scenario would be nothing more than a ticking time bomb.
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@Wack they are not good guys, but what i think they have had their share of evilness, so windows 10 was eye opener for them. They know they can't go into mobile devices so the only thing they need now is the dev-community support to keep them alive :)
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@AlmondSauce They are definitely not "the good guys" all of a sudden. They are still a huge company with the main purpose of making money. We should not forget that.
But if somebody had told you in 2008: "Hey, Microsoft will do everything with git only, and become the worlds number one publisher of open source software repositories a decade from now!",
how hard would you have laughed?
I would have ROFLMAO'd. Literally.
No matter how much it is worth, it is at least something... -
@Yamakuzure I agree. It's frustrating when even the slightest amount of scepticism at MS these days is met with the "Ah, you're just stuck in the Ballmer era!" No, I'm happy that they seem to be better than they were, but I also wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if they returned to their old ways at the click of a finger if it suited their profit margins.
(I also feel a lot of the "MS is amazing!" camp these days are the younger players that weren't really in industry when they were screwing developers over fake patents and suchlike, but that's another story.) -
@AlmondSauce
"It's frustrating when even the slightest amount of scepticism at MS these days is met with the "Ah, you're just stuck in the Ballmer era!"
The way I see it, that's fine, be skeptical. We should all be. But, what I see here on devRant and elsewhere isn't always "the slightest amount of skepticism". Often it feels like, "Hey I want to fit in so I'm going to rip on Microsoft for [insert anything that has its name attached to it]." This isn't everyone, granted. Some people actually do have educated opinions on the matter. I can respect an educated opinion but not so much automatic hate in the name of bias. -
@duckWit some of us still haven't forgiven them for the monstrosity that was called internet explorer for mac 5.5 ;)
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@Wack haha. Internet Explorer in general was/is abysmal. Thankfully, lots of competition proved it.
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@duckWit but you have to admit, Tha if they did a great job with IE, we most probably would not have such a wide variety of browsers to choose from. 🤔
when your code is a mess but everything work out in the end
When you keep getting +1s on a rant you posted a month ago.
Made my day 😂😂
(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).
Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).
Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:
* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.
* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.
* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.
* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.
...and more.
Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.
Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.
I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.
I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.
rant
microsoft
fight me bro