NPM Is Joining GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22594549 (March 16, 2020; 571 comments; 1829 points) - https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/npm-is-joinin...
Some of it aged... interesting.
Top comment:
> Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.
> ...
To be fair, the vibes (at the time) were that Microsoft has changed. Probably, in some way, a zero-interest rate phenomena.
Young people thought M$ was changing, the old folks knew it was just another cycle of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Young people were… right?
VS Code is open source. (Cursor is built on it!)
GitHub didn’t embrace, extend, extinguish git. You can git push to a different company (e.g. Gitlab) and you’ve migrated. The biggest problems with GitHub are scaling and availability, not lock-in.
Microsoft today is nothing like it was 30 or 20 years ago.
Fifteen years ago we were writing HTML and JavaScript specifically for Internet Explorer. Edge is built on Chromium.
VScode might be open source (to a degree), but the levers of control are on a different location. See https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ for an excellent blog on it.
Do microsoft own git now?
I don't think so
> VS Code is open source
Open core at best. It's proprietary software built on top of an open source base. The remote coding feature is proprietary and you need to run proprietary software on the remote server / container to use it. People maintaining forks (like Codium and the Theia IDE) are not allowed to use VS Code's marketplace. Many of their flagship VS Code extensions are proprietary. Why would they do this if they believed in open source?
The distinction is quite important. VS Code aims to get control of the development process of those who are not using Visual Studio. That's the only reason why VS Code exists. VS Code is not a gift no strings attached.
By the way the title of https://code.visualstudio.com/ is a lie that says "The open source AI code editor". Three lines under, there's "By using VS Code, you agree to its license and privacy statement.". The license is https://code.visualstudio.com/license, which is very much like your usual horrible Microsoft EULA, including tracking and forbidden reverse engineering, decompiling or disassembling. Really, the only thing missing there is the license key field at first run.
GitHub is still proprietary SaaS also aiming to control the whole open source ecosystem. With GitHub, a big chunk of the open source (and free software! Which is even sadder) world relies on proprietary infra. That's as close as Extinguish as you can get (it's just that git is not the thing that's Extinguished). GitHub is actually a pretty good example of lock-in, see what other commenters wrote on this.
30 years later, Microsoft, still the same lying company trying to control its users and the world with proprietary software. With the twist that they try a bit harder to look cool and open source (since the moment they realized open source wasn't going to disappear, not before). They really are not, especially for end-user facing software, including when the end-users are developers.
The only thing that dramatically changed is that they don't publicly claim Linux is cancer anymore, and that's probably because they are coerced into dealing with Linux. Exactly like the Web against their failed attempt to privatize it with MSN (MicroSoft Network) (the current MSN news frontpage and the memory of their messenger are only shadows of the original ambitions behind MSN).
At least the stability and consistency is comforting… or not.
Don't fall for their open washing. They just play along and attempt to get control on what they didn't manage to extinguish. Only forced changes happened, the spirit seems intact.
Good luck migrating the ”forge” part with the ”git” part. Your github org settings, pull requests, rulesets, CI/CD pipelines, containers, copilot... The lock-in always comes from the ”forge” part, never the ”git” part.
> GitHub didn’t embrace, extend, extinguish git.
Literally nobody has said that it did? This is a wild strawman. Who are you trying to fool.
Old folks are also aware that applies to every single big tech company that actually sponsors the FOSS tools many don't want to pay anything back, while expecting to be paid themselves.
Old folks also remember the days when it was possible to make a living out of selling software tools.
The ruthlessness of the Microsoft that we remember was probably due to influence from Bill Gates.
He is famous for hyper-competitiveness and strong desire to win at all costs.
Microsoft has been causing a lot of problems lately but I completely disagree that it fits the pattern of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
Remember when folks thought Phil Spencer was gonna right the Xbox ship lol
MSFT acquisition of NPM was a massive shit show, they fired many staff engineers and people that were at github for quite a while. Top comment was a liar.
I was part of the npm team at GitHub. They laid off almost the entire team to focus on AI (CTO literally told us on the layoff announcement call that they're doing this to focus on Copilot)
> they fired many staff engineers
Would you rather the company went under after it ran out of money and had to fire everyone instead? Not to mention a quarter of the company was laid off the year before the acquisition.
Was that the case? Can you provide sources to your claims and provide a foundation to your theories?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2019/04/01/nice-people-...
Year before the MSFT takeover. No idea about their actual financials but they were definitely shedding headcount pre 2020, including kicking people for trying to unionise.
Nothing in there suggests that this was done to save the company from bankruptcy, which was the wild claim.
It's literally a Google search away. If you had the time to write this comment, you had more than enough time to do the search.
Not my job to proof the wild claim that the layoffs were to save the company from bankruptcy .
Uhh, I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right by it's workers rather than rat fucking them to appease corporate do-nothing leeches if I'm being frank.
> I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right
you would? has any trillion dollar corporation ever?
No, and that's why we must destroy them. Figuratively then literally.
Destroy what exactly? And replace with what?
With smaller companies that can't yield global power. It would be better if cloud, office and OS would be separate. Then you wouldn't get shuffed OneDrive into the OS. It's also better for competition if the playing field is equal and one solution isn't the only one that can deeply integrate. Build APIs or don't do it.
Can y’all just state your opinions on these things rather than constantly asking bait-y questions?
it was all good until AI entered the chat