To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with. It's just the stickiest app of all time. Something something network effects.

How many projects are there out there that repositories hosted in GH, run in GH, and have package manifests that directly reference other GH repos. I'm sure there are a lot.

Most of the golang ecosystem, I think. Not to mention any other language-specific package managers that support pulling from GitHub...

I remember the CocoaPods debacle of 2016.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652

[1] https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...

And I was thinking JS/npm, not even golang.

Golang can be the biggest offender in this regard because you import by typing the URL to a github repository... Better hope someone mirrors those projects if they ever go poof. It's not even a generic import to a package[0]. Gotta be fun to have to update all those imports later if a project moves to another host to avoid Microsoft.

[0]: https://godoc.org/github.com/lib/pq

Well that's the beauty of git, as long as anyone anywhere has a checkout of the Repository nothing will be lost. If tags are GPG signed you don't even have to put any trust in the surviveing source. That said for mantained code 99.9% of the time you would just use one of the core develops local copies.

Except for issues and pull request metadata, which are important part of the project knowledge.

In SIT (decentralized collaborative information tracker, https://sit.fyi) there's an issue tracking module and an import tool (https://github.com/sit-fyi/sit-import) that allows to convert all issues and PRs into self-contained issues that can be worked with using SIT issue-tracking, so at least there's a relatively smooth way out to decentralized issue tracking.

It's a good thing computers are good at search and replace.

and since the standard library includes a parser for go you don't even need to do it textually

> IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with.

Linkedin is way way better than other job sites. For instance, Glassdoor doesn't even support basic keyword search. If you happen to track job ads for C programmers then you'd get all ads which may have a C character somewhere in their text, and forget abou searching for C++ because Glassdoor doesn't recognize the plus character. With linkedin at least basic keyword searches do work.

It's just the stickiest app of all time To me it barely exists. I'm a hirer in the UK.

Before anyone touts how much wider our reach might be for potential hires, can I point out that my little firm has hired people from the other end of Europe directly ("real" friend of friend etc). Oh and just in case you are wondering - we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.

If you pay everyone equally, I don't think I'd want to work there.

Maybe it isn't a thing wherever you are but here:

we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.

... means that we do not discriminate unfairly. Do I really need to spell it out?

I'd argue LinkedIn is much worse than it was pre-acquisition, but it was already on that trajectory. The "news feed" and discussions around current events, etc. They've locked down more and more of it without a $30/mo subscription. Privacy controls are a nightmare to decipher.

I think it's significantly worse albeit probably short of totally "screwed up". Just marginally worse in a lot of small ways that add up to a less useful, less efficient experience for me.

just so you know, i know quite a few people at both linkedin and microsoft and for the most part they are still very seperate entities. linkedin is still using google docs and slack for instance. most of the influence microsoft has had on linkedin in smaller isolated integrations. so anything youve seen go downhill in linkedn consumer app is very much due to independent choices/acts by linkedin itself.

As someone with lots of friends at LinkedIn (I used to work there), I can agree somewhat. But I also know that things can be screwed up in non-obvious ways to rank and file employees (Tumblr/Yahoo and Flickr/Yahoo as examples, which I sadly was there for both).

Plus I'm sure under Microsoft they will have some sort of free private repos like GitLab, Bitbucket and Visual Studio Team Services already do.

Lack of free private repos is the main (only) reason why I don't use GitHub.

When did you last look at GitHub? They've had free private repos for well over a year (maybe longer).

I have ~50 private on my account... Embarrassingly bad half-completed side projects mostly.

GitHub private repos are still $7/month, but available for free as part of the education discount

VSTS, Microsoft's hosted TFS solution, gives you unlimited private git repos for up to 5 users, 40 hours worth of hosted builds per month, complete project management, a private markdown based Wiki, and free orchestration of local build and deployment agents.

Huh? Not that I see. Private repos require a paid plan.

Paid plans of GH are too expensive.

What do you base this on?

1. They already have such offering (VS Team Services).

2. Their competitors (GitLab, Bitbucket) already have that offering.

3. I don't think they're interested in GitHub for its revenue, but for its strategic value. GitHub has to protect its revenue model by disallowing free private repos, Microsoft can afford to be more flexible.

4. They've already made similar moves. They acquired Xamarin, which was expensive, and made it free.

Last I looked, Minecraft seemed to be quite in order as well.

It got more bloated... My kids still use an old version to avoid that (they only play with each other so they don't need the latest version that is required to play on most servers online)

Shall we talk Nokia...

Pre-Nadella tbf, who was opposed to the acquisition when Ballmer was CEO.

Agreed. Buying Nokia of all things stinks of Ballmer. I was listening to an interview where he seemingly took responsibility for the whole stuff up. Not sure how much weight that holds

Buying Nokia wasn’t the issue. Microsoft’s handling of Nokia was the issue. Microsoft is not good at making a physical product and releasing it to the world like Apple and Samsung. The fact many countries had to wait > 12 months to get the latest phone was retarded. Windows phone was awesome, but Microsoft screwed themselves by not doing minimum what it’s competitors were doing.

Huh? Microsoft has several very successful hardware product lines: peripherals (the Microsoft ergo keyboard is the gold standard in many circles), Xbox, the surface line. Maybe they can’t generate Apple hype but they do know how to make consumer hardware.

I don’t think surface qualifies as good consumer hardware. It has been pleagued with driver problems and weird behaviour. But agree on periphericals and Xbox.

The surface line isn’t avaliable world wide on release. Windows phones were released in like 3 markets. Less than surface line. Xbox gets world wide releases.

Phones, people generally want what’s new. A 12-18 month old phone is not new.

I had the top-of-the-line Nokia Lumia 920 (designed just before the acquisition), and the plastic case was too soft and collected dents & scratches like crazy. The matte finish was also too slippery to hold onto (I ended up putting some skateboard tape on it).

OTOH, I found the Windows Phone operating system to be highly responsive and I was able to navigate screens more quickly than the previous iPhone or the current Android I have. The problem was that as third-place in the market, few apps were available for it, and those that were weren't being maintained.

How about Skype, though?

People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.

They had a decent Android app, then someone saw that it was too fast/responsive and was using too little memory and took that as a challenge, how can I make skype worst? React Native!

Obviously that didn't pleased people (see rating in Play Store), and they had to provide something for low/mid range phones, and skype lite was born (which is really good one).

Hey, thanks for mentioning skype lite. That a mile better than skype .

The design history of Skype for iPhone was particularly misguided: First it was a native UIKit app, then MS put a lot of effort into making it look and behave exactly like a Windows Phone app [1], down to the unusual gestures. When they gave up on that, the app reverted to a native UIKit design, but just a few updates later we got the current Snapchat clone instead. Needless to say, features regularly got lost during these radical redesigns.

That‘s still very clearly the same Microsoft where a gazillion layers of dumb middle management ruin everything[2].

[1] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/06/skype-redesign-iphone-app... [2] http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

They undoubtedly did a bad job, but I think that Skype has a lot going against it from external factors anyway.

Everyone I know is using FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. The only time I hear Skype anymore is people using it for podcasts. Obvious anecdata but it seems reasonable that services with better device integration (FaceTime) or social graph access (Facebook) would do better in the long run.

Disagreed.

Skype used to be mainstream. It was essentially a cross platform iMessage & FaceTime, almost ahead of its time. It was also efficient in terms of network usage, being peer-to-peer for the most part.

Had it continued to be usable, it would still be mainstream and might have the place of WhatsApp today. Instead, we now have this garbage Snapchat-like UI, a server-based model that doesn't even work (it was supposed to "fix" the P2P model, but for me it's been way worse than P2P which always worked), and a shitty Electron client that melts your battery and looks awful (they killed a gorgeous - especially on Mac - native client to replace it with this shit).

Or google hangouts. It's skype but in the web and with an interface that actually works.

Hangouts is a great example of another horrible UI. The whole tie in to Chrome made it unusable for anyone non technical (where did it go? What did you want me to click? I am in the call, but you're not there... oh you're in another call? How do you hangup? I don't see the window anymore, etc.)

A standalone app would fix this, but there seems to be some strange internal agenda tying it to Chrome... Chromebooks I guess?

Minus a few gigs of ram

Yup, all these came after Skype started sucking, most probably because of it.

I think people forget how bad Skype was in a lot of ways though. The big reason they shifted to the cloud model, for instance, was how unreliable message delivery was on phones with peer-to-peer. I remember when, in order to send images, you and the other person had to be online at the same time.

They made some missteps, sure, but Skype was already a very dated solution.

I am not sure how "unreliable" the peer to peer model was. From what I remember it's always been perfect for me.

Media uploads could have been solved by a server-based "media" service, while keeping the reliable & battle-tested P2P architecture.

As of currently, the server-based architecture is an absolute disaster, way worse than P2P.

I regularly had whole chatrooms that wouldn't update for days. I had no way of knowing if a message I sent would really like... ever... get delivered.

I've been a pretty big Skype user in the past, and still use it a bit now, and it is actually so much more reliable now that Microsoft runs it.

Haven't really used group chats that much on it, but for call establishment, I stand behind my words when I say it used to be a lot better.

With P2P it would sometimes take a bit longer (10 seconds?) but it would always work. When it wouldn't, it was because of a problem on either one of the endpoints, and switching network connections or rebooting the router fixed it.

With the current model it would just randomly not work (the client also sucks and sometimes hangs in an inconsistent state after the failed call attempts), without anything we can do - it's something with the software and/or servers.

I used to trust Skype calls to actually go through - now even if I see "ringing" I have no faith in whether it's actually ringing on the other side (and if it was, whether the call would actually connect once picked up).

They wanted total control over the data so they converted the p2p supernodes to Microsoft servers... now the government can get what it needs more easily.

> To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

I'm not sure if LinkedIn could be any less "screwed up" than it was when Microsoft bought it.

Can somebody explain to me why LinkedIn is screwed up? I am genuinely asking ;)

It doesn't provide any value to the regular user; most people I know receive lots of emails mostly from body shops but rarely get a job from LinkedIn. The UI is designed to make it hard to configure privacy, and to make you casually spill your contact list. They are always trying to sell premium accounts. To be fair it should provide some value to a junior dev who doesnt have a Network yet but LinkedIn doesn't even try to hide the fact that you are the product (unlike say fb).

Shameless plug here but I'm also so sick of LinkedIn that I've started building an alternative for developers by myself - https://able.bio/

Still very much alpha but the idea is to have a clean UI and allow developers to write their own insightful articles for the community to read and reward the author with reputation. Like Medium but with more specific language, library, framework topics etc. Then use that to help recruiters who can't code advertise and source candidates for technical interviews. No inbox spamming free for all, they can only contact you when you've applied for a position.

I'd be interested to know what people think of this and if they have any feedback.

LinkedIn was so screwed up I don't know what they could have done to make it worse.

To be fair, they did screw Skype.

100% to the guy that said LinkedIn wasn’t a great product to begin with. X10

They didn't need to screw up linkedin -- they bought it that way.

So, previously Microsoft used to have a program to integrate new companies, called “venture integrations”. I wonder if LinkedIn is going through VI, or not.

I don’t know, isn’t Microsoft the only software company left? I love Google, but they sell ads, their mission isn’t to make software.

Microsoft is more and more cloud and services, but they still have a developer mentality and they have done some good stuff with open source lately.

If someone is going to buy Github, Microsoft is probably the most friendly to developers. Unless Google or Facebook wants to go full altruist and buy for the credibility.

Atlassian is very much a Software Company.

I'm only a relatively casual user, but doesn't Atlassian mostly buy and then manage existing software products? They didn't develop Trello, HipChat, Bitbucket etc.

Every time I run into an issue with Atlassian software, I find a JIRA ticket from 7 years ago. If they have a capable dev team, it's probably working on projects off my radar?

Please. There was no reason to bring up JIRA. Uncalled for by any sane man's standards.

I wouldn’t exactly call them the gold standard of software. JIRA is a holy mess and well... many of us are still stuck with HipChat

Who is the gold standard?

37 Signals is well loved.

A lot of people would say Google these days... now that they're starting to move beyond Material Design 1.0 a lot of their products are becoming more visually mature and unique, along with their substantial investment in machine learning to make their software more personalized, etc.

How has Kaggle fared under Google? Just asking. Also, ms has been focusing on open source quite a bit. Largest contributor on Github. Makes sense. It'll also send a message to the tech community. Mostly Google hogs the limelight for open source stuff.

Most of the big software firms also make hardware these days (unless they are selling open source or managed services).

Examples include Apple, most of the enterprise hardware space, IoT/wearables, *aaS, the top 10-100ish cloud vendors, etc.

Even Microsoft is a hardware company now.

Adobe.

And another big one is Autodesk

Ignoring Azure, all the major MS products I can think of are at least partially ad supported (even when they release something that doesn’t serve ads, it’s a safe bet that it gathers data for better targeting...)

Office is ad-supported? vscode and typescript are ad-supported? MSSQL is ad-supported?

Hell, Windows is ad-supported now. Ever updated and get your free "gift" of Bubble Witch Saga 2: Electric Boogalo? I would pay double for an enterprise version of Win10 without that crap.

Look up windows LTSB. Don't remember if it gets rid of ads, but you don't have automatic updates every other hour.

They do have an enterprise version of Windows 10...

If it were maybe 5 years ago I would be horrified, but under Nadella they are a lot less ... Microsoft-y.

I was at a container orchestration conference the other day, and got the distinct impression that microsoft are not the great satan, and azure is probably a really good choice for cloud service. I can't believe I'm saying that. I'm having dinner with a prolific debian maintainer tonight, maybe he'll beat some sense into me.

I agree in theory, but have you ever actually tried to use Azure? The management interface is ridiculously overcomplicated. It feels very “Microsofty”

All 3 major clouds have consoles that are good in certain things but mostly bad. Azure's console made a big mistake with the vertical blade design, but at least it always loads fast.

The REST APIs and CLI/Powershell interfaces are much, much nicer. The web Portal seems to get revamped every other year and the latest incarnation is not very good.

I do, and while it's not perfect, I find it fairly serviceable.

AWS, on the other hand, I found an absolute nightmare (though to be fair, I haven't touched it in 2 years).

no I haven't used azure in anger but I have colleagues that have. Personally I care not for GUIs so by the sounds of it the API side is ok.

They actually have to compete now, is why.

I assume

I don't know why every massive corporation is trying to rebrand as "the friendly AI conglomerate!" but I'm not buying it for Microsoft or anyone else.

That's what they want you to believe :D

It could be worse, Oracle or SalesForce could have been in talks...

OTOH it speaks to the direness of the situation if you had to mention those two for an even worse scenario.

Why would Oracle buy it?

That would've been my exact reaction while reading this. Good thing I have no large projects on Github.

Well, I guess Gitlab would be happy about the new customers. If they're clever, they'll work on some tools to easen the transition.

From this perspective, Git has made some fundamental things right: Because it only functions as a decentralized system, it strongly reduces lock-in. In the case of Github, you "only" had to port over issues and pull requests. Imagine how great it would be if there was a standard way to save issues in a git repo[1] that was supported by pretty much every provider.

[1]: Such as https://pythonhosted.org/pyditz/

There's no standard, of course, but [shameless plug] I've recently built SIT (https://sit.fyi) -- a tool that allows to collaborate on information in a decentralized, "true serverless" manner. Its first application is (duh!) issue tracking and it has been operational since almost day zero and SIT itself is using it. There's even a GitHub -> SIT import tool (pre-release)

Now, what's also great (did I mention "shameless"?) about the approach used in SIT is that while you can use it with Git (and this is how I've been using it so far), it does not depend on Git's structures but just files -- so it can be easily carried over to whatever might replace Git in a decade.

Good to know, thank you very much for the link!

I've just been thinking: If one manages issues within a separate git repo -- couldn't we also store pull requests this way? I've always been very impressed by how good `git diff` and `git apply` work together, so theoretically, one should just be able to store the result of `git diff master...HEAD` in a new issue. The rest sounds like a tooling problem...

SIT's issue tracking module stores merge requests (aka patches) in SIT itself, therefore, they can all be stored in a git repo. Case in point: https://github.com/sit-fyi/sit/commit/e9f96b84edc560bb1b0c0f...

And this is how it looks in SIT: https://imgur.com/a/UCFmbsZ

I would understand if they sold, but it would make me sad. GitHub has done a great job. I'd hate to see them have to answer to someone other than themselves.

I still miss Sunrise.am

They also killed Danger Mobile.

I agree and I would feel that same way if it were any other large tech company.

So many nice products have passed on in acquisition either because users abandoned them or the acquiring party did. I'm not sure which would happen first here.

If GitHub is financially strapped and looking for a buy out, I hope they're exploring other options for funding.

GitHub clearly needs change of management. I havent seen much inmovation from them compared to GitLab. Microsoft is very strong on innovation since change of management.

GitHub is easy to use, and I’ve found the important features work really well.

I’m all for improvements, but I’m not even sure what I would want. At this point, I’m more worried any attempt at innovation would break the things I like about GitHub now, than I am excited for something new.

I use gitlab for all my private projects and don’t find it to be remarkably better in any way, and the UI always confuses me.

Any way we can improve the UI? We'd love to make it more enjoyable.

You can also open an issue directly in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

Well, my only request would be that it be more like GitHub.

The only reason for this is familiarity. GitHub is the market leader now and I use it every day at work. It's a lot easier to get used to a new UI if it is similar to the one you are used to. I'm sure if everyone used GitLab at work everyday, it would be fine. The UI doesn't strike me as bad, just very different.

Depends what you like. I prefer my Git hosting suppliers to have better than 50% uptime.

User of both GitLab and GitHub here. GitHub also goes down.

I'm not super familiar with GitLab besides self hosted instances. Even then I prefer the simplicity of gogs. So what do you feel are still be innovations GitLab has but GitHub lacks?

We have a comparison page for GitLab Premium and GHE - https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/gitlab-eep-vs-github-ent...

Most features have a link to their respective documentation for more information.

Otoh, GitLanpb seems to have a messy code that is slow and taking much memory by slapping new stuff in frequently. (My impression from reading several comments on HN.)

Our team is actively working on improving the performance of GitLab.com. If you are referring to the merge requests, we're close to converting the merge request view to Vue, this should speed it up considerably.

The list of key MS acquisitions isn't that long and out of several products only Nokia is a definite failure. Skype gotten worse but I wouldn't count it as failure just yet. Remaining big acquisitions (Forethought PowerPoint, Hotmail, Visio, Navision Dynamics, LinkedIn) where rather successful.

Success for Microsoft doesn't mean success for the users of the acquired product, e.g. Skype users on Linux, and anyone using RoboVM.

From business perspective, supporting Linux is a waste of money.

such a presumptuous statement. Why proclaim you won't use a MSFT owned github, even as a hypothetical?

Microsoft's own history answers this question.

Some of us don't have short term memories and lived through the peak-evil-microsoft years.

And in the end, it's still going to be used.

I agree, as they say, 'snakebit and doomed to die' http://www.memidex.com/snakebit

Isn't minecraft ok, under the new Microsoft?

Why does it matter to you so much who owns GitHub if it's a good tool? Sounds unnecessary vitriol.

Some of us are old enough to remember Microsoft of the 90's and early aughties. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was the name of the game then, many of us haven't forgiven Microsoft for that yet (and nor do we plan to).

And a more recent example: Skype.

Right, I know that, and that's just idiotic behavior. You should concentrate on what is happening today, not what happened decades ago and hold grudges. That attitude leads you into unhappy places.

I doubt its about grudges. The mid level exec culture in a company does not change fast.

Forgiving them too easily shows them that they can get off the hook easily, which isn't a good thing either.

Found the Microsoft stock-holder... ;-)

What's a good alternative in case it goes bad?

This Microsoft is quite different!

Yeah, I agree. I would immediately delete my github account if this happened. I don't buy that MS has seen the light and is a different company now. In the last 2 weeks, 3 people have told me their Windows 10 install updated itself and was completely borked. At least one of these people are going out and buying a new Windows machine as a result (thus giving MS a little more revenue). It absolutely disgusts me.

You must have very weird friends. My family and I havent had any issues since Vista.

Random recent example. Using an Intel or Toshiba SSD is decidedly not weird:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12742/latest-windows-10-versi...

This update has broken computers until the SSDs in question were blacklisted. For people who auto-downloaded the update after that, Windows "only" showed annoying and absolutely unhelpful error messages every single day since the 1803 release.

This is not an outlier, but a strategy: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2878026/microsoft-to-b...

I like how you attack my friends and family and ignore the main point.

https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505