Maybe it's different this time, maybe it isn't.
I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.
Personally I'm not so much worried about Microsoft going back to Microsoft'95 but more about the fact that they, like most (all?) other big tech companies, collect more and more data and integrate more and more tightly into our lives. Still I feel that currently Facebook, Google and Amazon are all scarier in that respect.
If they've managed to change that much, then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft as soon as a new CEO steps in.
That's why I prefer Microsoft to stay away from the products and projects everybody loves. Furthermore, I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.
Microsoft has experience handling online code repositories and team services. Azure integration has the potential to improve deployment pipelines for many users. Microsoft has lots of experience doing things at scale, and can potentially find cost reduction maneuvers for Github. Visual Studio integration can bring more users to Github. Cooperate users are more likely to upgrade their existing agreement with Microsoft than they are to enter a finical relationship with a new company. Microsoft has just as much or more to offer Github as any other top 5 tech company.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/03/15/gvfs-for-...
Well, the world has changed and there is no longer any opportunity for a 90s Microsoft. So I'm pretty sure that unless the world changes back to the 90s, Microsoft wouldn't survive such a turn.
Do they not engage in patents racketeering?
Do they not spy on users of Windows 10?
> like most (all?) other big tech companies
"The other children are doing it" and then you're mother would say "that doesn't make it right". It's a child's defense no doubt.
But anyway, it's also factually not true.
Corporations only exist as legal constructs. I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just saying that it is always going to be the case that a business, any business, will work within the law and with lawful government because they ultimately depend on contract and property law.
Apple doesn't give a s* about your privacy. They claim to give a s* about your privacy. Those are different things.
If you want this to change you have to get involved with legislation to change the rules/law. That's the only option. None of them "care" about you or really anything, because they aren't human. Companies respond to changes in the law which bound the approved set of behaviors. That's it.
EDIT: I got the budget wrong. Changed that.
However, I highly doubt that government and enterprise purchases make up a large share of Apple's income. And consequently I'm convinced that news of a backdoor in iMessage would cause Apple way more financial damage than these things did to Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728294, https://www.scmagazineuk.com/skype-backdoor-missed-by-micros... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
And the more Apple doubles down on protecting its users, the bigger this financial incentive becomes. Of course that doesn't stop me from supporting better legislation (GDPR was a great start).
I could even see that defaulting auto update to "on" is a good move too. If you know what you're doing you can turn them off.
I haven't adminned a windows machine since '98 -- can you really. Or turn off automatic windows updates?
As for any telemetry stuff, that should be opt in, and have a target server to send to, which you can point to your own box if you want to.
Microsoft today is different to Microsoft in the 90s though. In the 90s it was a software company that used embrace extend extinguish to maintain and extend its monopolies, but it wrote software and the software was the product.
Now it seems it uses the "user is the product" ala Google, Facebook etc. I'm not aware of apple doing that. Still I guess inevitable as companies penny pinch more and more.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/microsofts-bid-to-se...
Anyway, I can manage the limited telemetry via hosts and I can defer updates (which I will do from now on), but my biggest gripe is forced installation/reinstallation of previously removed apps and games. I run Windows 10 Pro and I end up with a few variations of Candy Crush games, Minecraft, Autodesk drawing apps, and others after initial OS installation and after every major update so far. This is while using an offline account, and even if I used my Microsoft account on this workstation I've never purchased/downloaded any of those apps in the past.
I get that "Pro" at this point means home power user, and companies should be using Enterprise, but Microsoft shouldn't be pushing any software back onto the machine once the user has uninstalled it. That's user-hostile and takes control out of the hands of the one person who should be in complete control of the system.
Once full, non-buggy support for Ryzen APUs arrives in Linux, I'm switching Windows 10 to a VM and going back to Linux on this machine as the daily driver OS.
1. Updates can introduce breaking changes.
2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes.
3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.
I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone willing to give up liberty for security will receive neither.
3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.
3. "Users have freedom to do what they choose unless it makes more work for me"?
Forced updates may suck for you, but understand that it is you they suck for, not the vast, vast majority.
I think this largely was only true of the period between the internet becoming a thing and the smartphone becoming a thing. Nowadays there's phones, tablets, and chromebooks that serve the needs of those people better and in a more convenient form factor. Desktops are for people who do work, create stuff, or are hobbiests.
I think a lot of the reasons computers suck today is because of this idea that they need to cater to some strawman drooling moron of a user.
Doubt that. "Desktop" is defined by mouse, keyboard and display. A chromebook satisfies this. I have yet to meet a user who uses a smartphone instead of a PC to do stuff that are notably easier to do on a PC. (while having both)
I would also bet that every user would chose a keyboard over a touch interface to type text.
Agreed, but this had only ever actually been true with free software.
For god's sake, even Apple, the prime example of knows-better-than-you lets you never update, if that's what you really want.
If that is allowed to pass QA in Microsoft, then it kind of scares me what can happen if they were to acquire GitHub.
But I generally agree, I want my OS to ask me every time it wants to send a crashdump (or anything else).
I feel that no big corporation should own GitHub, even if their investors feel differently.
CEO Nadella started working at Microsoft in 1992, but the executives who coined and lived the EEE phrase are all out. Is Nadella a sleeper agent? If not, what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?
I agree, it seems that both Gates and Ballmer have found new callings in life, which has left Nadella with pretty much control of the company. I remember almost feeling sorry for the guy when he took over, what freedom could he possibly have between those two? A lot, it seems in retrospect.
If "I lived through the 90s" was how I measured technology and companies, I'd sure as hell not be using Apple products - their technology was pretty terrible then, and the company was incoherent. Would any rational person say that the terrible tech and incoherence then translates to how one would accept what they produce in 2018? Some companies change, some don't (see: oracle). It seems a healthier approach is to measure the behavior and state of a company in the present.
Second its easier for people to grow to be better at their job than to grow into being better people.
I loved through the 90s and think that Microsoft not requiring Windows shows that the danger from the 90s isn’t the same today.
Now it’s cloud vs OS lockin.
Not going to deny this, but that's really the reason I'm not comfortable with the idea of a MS owned Github. Microsoft doing open source development is great. Microsoft trying to influence open source and FOSS development as a whole, not so much. Them aquiring a central hub of such development efforts doesn't signal good things to come: The users of Github have nothing to gain from this, whereas MS has, and there's a non-zero chance of them ruining the thing for everyone in the process.
However, Github is one of my favorite services, professionally and for hobbies, and I really don't want significant changes. I also use VSTS (Microsoft's code+PM online service) and it is a beast. They don't need to be heavily intermingled.
They are however embracing open source in a manner that feels very sincere to me.
For the record, the so-called "spyware" is telemetry which exists only in the SDK for .NET Core and not the actual runtime that you would ship to the user with the software. It is anonymous data, completely open source so it really is only what they say it is, and the first time you use it it tells you how to disable it.
Doublespeak.
https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...
Git was not developed as a clone of BitKeeper, it has a very different design (snapshot-based content-addressed filesystem, versus the SCCS "weave"). If anything, git was a (much faster) clone of Monotone, minus the heavy cryptography focus which made Monotone so slow.
Currently it only works for MS platforms (Windows incl. ARM, xbox, embedded) but they might make it cross platform in some future. Technically the API is not that complex, i.e. unlike WPF it’s not that hard to port from the current Direct3D to Vulkan or GLES or Metal.
So no, MS is clearly a bad steward for GitHub.
Satya Nadella has completely re-organized MS inside-and-out since taking the helm in 2014. It is a VERY different company than it was even 5 years ago. In March [1], Microsoft even went so far as to officially disband the Windows department and merge it into something called "Experiences & Devices".
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176220/microsoft-window...
It's MS only. It's more obvious in cases like Xbox, where MS don't support anything except DirectX. I.e. developers are forced to use it if they want to release for Xbox.
exFAT is an issue since it's a patented filesystem that MS pushed as a standard for SD cards. You can't freely use it (unless you just ignore those patents on your own risk).
ActiveSync doesn't have commonly available FOSS clients, so you can't use it on Linux easily. It's highly irritating (since it's widely entrenched in corporate environments). And etc. and etc.
What planet are you people on?
Lost your argument as soon as you said "spyware". It's like calling everyone you disagree with a "terrorist".
> Taking more control away from computer users than ever before?
Like what?
Like rebooting computers whenever they feel like it. Reenabling previously disabled options etc. Your head is in the sand but you don't have to live this way.
Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.