1 - https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nu...

It's not like JetBrains can't build their own debugger based on the ICorDebug interface (which is what Microsoft's implementation is also based on).

I don't even understand what that means. It was never Open Source, it was part of the IDE(s). Microsoft released an update package for their IDE(s) on NuGet which JetBrains used before their native debugger was ready.

If Microsoft are to be shamed for keeping their IDE's debugger closed source then JetBrains should be equally shamed, both have closed source proprietary IDEs.

Truly embracing open-source with .NET core would mean that, yes, even a proprietary product could make use of it. A debugger is extremely core to having a language being open-source and artificially limiting it to your own products is the exact opposite of 'embrace'

Also, JetBrains does have an open-source debugger in their community versions, but this is not what the debate is about.

This is like if Stallman released Emacs under the GPL, but kept the Elisp interpreter proprietary.

My problem is; if you're going to pretend to embrace open-source and then limit a core component this arbitrarily, you're not embracing open-source, you're still the old org afraid of competition.

It takes time to break things out from inside a larger closed source project...

There's VSCode (is that OSS?) but that's not an edition of VS but rather a whole different product.

Like I understand if you bought an Xbox, but I dont understand if you are a programmer.

Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.

This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.

So it's a little disingenuous to say only technology consumers should have positive feelings for Microsoft. Plus, making money & helping programmers are not mutually exclusive; Coupled with their business strategies (good and bad) this has always been MS's strategy to grow and profit from their markets.

They killed what small progress they’d made on their ecosystem 2 times, simply because they got bored and decided they didn’t like the technology stack they’d previously mandated and supported. They deserved to get buried in that space.

Meanwhile Apple have kept what is essentially the same technology stack for the past decade. Sure there’s been some pain, but almost all of it had some purpose that moved the development of apps forward.

Looking back on it, they took on an extremely difficult problem having a completely new marketplace and platform against competitors with tremendous amount of pre-existing traction.

There were clearly some pivots towards universal windows compatibility, and possibility of android compatibility as well. Nobody argues there's a ton of tactical failures and the net result was a loss, but I wouldnt conflate the mobile endeavor with something half-baked nor disregard to developers

Trust has two main dimensions in my view, compassion and competence. Microsoft was not competent enough to have a surviving platform in the face of iOS or Android... even though they had roughly a 8 year lead.

That doesn't earn my trust.

How did they treat Nokia employees?

Mhmmm.

I was one of them, and Microsoft treated me very well.

Windows Phone was an amazing platform. I’ve also developed for iOS a lot. Visual studio + expression blend was way ahead of apple’s xCode. Every single piece was much better: language, libraries, compiler, debugger, emulator, UI designer.

The platform is now discontinued so I no longer develop for WP. Meanwhile, most of the skills I’ve obtained working on WP7-8 apps apply to other XAML-based platforms, i.e. WPF, WinRT, and UWP. Fortunately for me, Windows is not going from desktops any time soon.

Just want to point out that Github was also a "for-profit" company.

I think self-hosting is a better choice for almost any organisation. Remember, 'the cloud' just means 'someone else's computer.'

Of course you don't need to host it all there. Just mirror enough that it gets you the "visibility", while keeping everything else on your own servers.

Then again, there's inertia. And inertia always wins.

Meanwhile, they basically invented the "buy your competitor and tank their business" strategy. That's probably what this person is referring to.

"Buy and trash competitor" isn't a real strategy. When an acquisition fails, it's usually poor management or vision, or just a lack of synergy in the first place, not a purposeful tanking.

How does tanking Github allow Microsoft to sell more copies of Office?

1) creating value for their customers

2) maintaining the moat that prevents other people from creating value for their customers

The former is constructive, the latter is destructive. They both contribute revenue.

I haven’t done a full scale analysis of Microsoft, but the argument I would entertain is that Microsoft primarily sells tools for companies and individuals to built moats around themselves.

Look at how much data Google has on every single one of us.

MSFT is going through a cultural change right now. It was the case for Google, to make money the had to be an advocate of open source. They didn't do that because they are good-hearted or anything else. It is just like geopolitics. Hit your opponent from the weakest point. And Microsoft weak point was open source at that time.

But the point is neither MSFT, Apple, Google or Facebook does not care about developers or customers. They want to make money. This is nature of corporations. Instead of nagging and being short-sighted we should embrace open source collaboration by MSFT and should hit them when they don't respect customers.

However, with the understanding of what the poster meant, it does make sense. We're talking about the company whose racket produces 10$ avg for each Android phone sold.

I'm talking especially about those FAT patents, which are against the spirit of patenting (independently of being in favour or against patents).

I understand that big companies are big and internally conflicting, however, I see a radical conflict of interest between their newfounded open source responsibility and their ruthless business attitude.

What about the data Microsoft has on you? Their Windows 10 OS is basically a data funnel right to their servers. They operate a tracking based search engine that also builds profiles on people. And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.

>And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.

BTW, tbh I don't trust data centers in USA any more than data centers in China.

Unlike Microsoft, however, they can't seem to make GUIs where the font metrics are right (eg. can you read the text properly or does the text overlap or end up being too big or too small for the space?) or scrollbars.

Linux is a winner for server apps but on the desktop it seems to get worse over time, not better.

No, not really. The problem is too many people (like you maybe) associate "Linux desktop" with "Gnome (3)". That's false; there's a bunch of different DEs for Linux. Just look at Xfce; it isn't getting worse. KDE seems to be getting no worse too.

Do they still do that?

At home, I use KDE, so of course they're not going to have system utilities binding to GTK. KDE is Qt-centric, so most stuff there is most likely in Qt-flavored C++. Xfce is GTK, but it's known to be fast (I use it at work and it's quick), so I seriously doubt it has system utilities in Python.

Honestly, I think all your complaints are really about Gnome3.

What a strange criticism. Of course Microsoft is a for-profit company and they're doing this to make more profit - no one is of the delusion of otherwise. They didn't spend $8b out of the goodness of their heart.

However, one way you make money is to do and make things people like. Here's hoping Microsoft will recognise the value Github can provide and they do right by it. I'm cautiously optimistic.

A federated or independent solution is the only way to go for infrastructure like this.

Their developer tools are pretty good for their own platform (but JetBrains actually makes great cross platform tools, some of them are proper free and open source, VSCode is playing catch up). Their C++ stdlib implementation was sucking balls for decades. Their (the dev tools') scriptability was horrible. PowerShell is nice, but it came too late, and it was too server focused.

C# is okay, MS has great teams and people, but they are still very much run by the bean counters.

EDIT: just noticed the article says it was also added to 2013, but my 2015 doesn't support it so idk.

I can conceive PowerShell being good as a scripting language, but as a day to day terminal? That would my hell. And the fact that they are forcing so much on it in win10 doesn't help.

They do produce some great things sometimes, I agree, it just doesn't average out as positive IMO.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt490614.aspx

You comment makes no sens, "I don't understand if you are a programmer', no offense but what rock do you live under?

This is not mutually exclusive. You need money to keep lights and servers ON

I wouldn't consider myself a fan, but their developer tools were (are?) some of the best out there.

I dislike Microsoft a lot. But Apple, just as much. People will take a dump on Microsoft while in the same breath fawn over Apple for identical behaviour.

They're all as bad as each other. Yep. Google included.

Not a Fan, but judging from their recent work, I am giving them the benefits of doubt.

I definitely agree. Anything Microsoft-related, or even Google-related, is a no from me. Just from a product standpoint, most of there products inherently aren’t that great. And you get that feeling when using their products, a feeling of “oh, this must be a Microsoft product because it feels very corporate.” Plus, there approach to design is subpar — it’s like there’s people out there that actually like Google’s Material Design?

> Like I understand if you bought an Xbox

I have an Xbox, and I just noticed advertisements on the dashboard that are non-gaming related. I also think I saw this when using a friend’s Windows-computer, they have advertisements within their operating system. It’s just bad.

I like Material Design...

Sure, Microsoft is ultimately out to make money, but they're doing a fair bit to "help programmers" and only making money from those efforts indirectly.

Vendor lock-in is an important concern regardless of who owns the platform you're being locked into.

Git doesn't support issue tracking and pull requests.

If we wait for it to happen by then it will be too late

Edit: Actually, I don't think the idea of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" even applies to buying out companies. The idea behind that phrase applies to technologies, not companies. You can't "extend" GitHub with proprietary tech, it was never an open source technology in the first place.

If Microsoft starts extending git with new proprietary features that only work with GitHub, _then_ it may be time to start being concerned. As of now though, I don't see how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" applies to this situation in the slightest.

As for how EEE applies to this situation: The situation is consistent with an EEE strategy currently being in the "embrace" phase. It's also consistent with a "embrace, be nice, create win-win outcomes" strategy, but that is not usually Microsoft's modus operandi.

History.

> Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have

There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced; it uses git at its core. Comments, issues, and wikis are convenient, but relatively simple to implement.

The main value in Github is the de facto community status it has, which it earned by being an open community and good steward of open source projects. The worst MS could do here is shoot themselves in the foot and ruin that value (which they just purchased for 7.5B) by driving developers to other platforms (who will make it all too easy to switch).

I think the M&A teams at MS must have seen this possiblity and have a different plan in mind for Github. Think dead simple (one-click) Azure deployments and integrations. And if you want (or need) that functionality for a different cloud provider, you'll just have to build it yourself on a different site.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Integration and workflow. Thanks to the various gubbins available in the marketplace[0], CI/CD goodies, hooks into communication and project management tools and so on, for a lot of people migrating away from Github would mean losing access to enough little convenience things that actually it's not feasible for a large organisation with not great process change management techniques.

https://github.com/marketplace

2 sides, same coin. You assume chaos, they see you assume that. They shape their narrative to fit their perspective with this data in mind. That rationalizes the behavioral pattern from their end, which continues the cycle.

Not saying I know any better solution, just that it's annoying as fuck to actually change when everyone keeps assuming you won't, and treats you as such. Chaos is probably going to happen even if there's a general mutual trust that springs forth. Can't control chaos.

They haven't fooled me since the 1990's and they won't fool me this time.

Dear reader, you should too.

This said, Free Software Devs should never have trusted GitHub in the first place.

There is a wiki, a bug tracker, a platform for pull requests and distribution, etc...

How is it spying when they present you with a full screen detailing data collection with the option to turn it off, and have several blog posts providing details.

> Do they not engage in patents racketeering?

It's not much of an excuse, but all tech companies do this.

> Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?

Didn't they give Windows Mobile one hell of a run? Like they tried for a decade and finally admitted defeat? And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.

They give you the option to fully inspect all the telemetry data your computer is sending, categorized by use.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/diagn...

Seems like refusing to disclose what is collected would run afoul of GDPR. The law requires that "categories of personal data" be disclosed, and also that Microsoft's European customers have a right to a copy of their personal data. Are you claiming that Microsoft is not or does not intend to comply with GDPR? Or perhaps there is some other qualification implied; such as this only applies to non-European customers? If so what is your basis?

Likewise. I know they neglected the Linux client (which I used to use) for years and then replaced it with some new browser based thing. This 'ruined Skype' claim has been made several times with each Microsoft buys GitHub story. What exactly do people have in mind when they claim Skype was ruined?

The new UI is absolutely counterintuitive and badly designed. The Linux version is now based on Electron and requires a ridiculous 400MB of RAM just for the login screen. It subjects the CPU to ridiculously high loads, ca. 10 times higher than before when idling (easily saturating one core periodically). It starts to jerk and studder when the chatlog reaches any realistic length, making it unusable with more than 200 to 500 messages in the visible history. The Windows 10 client, which seems mostly identical, cannot get audio from any of my microphones.

I see. By all accounts the Electron based client is garbage. I use the 'classic' Skype client; a.k.a. Skype 7. It isn't based on Electron and works great for me with two different mics. So I guess I've missed out on all the fun with the new client.

Even if the data is anonymous, Microsoft can filter it by range of competitor's IP addresses. Then by stuyding the list of used applications they can learn: how many employees the company has, how many of them use IDE (i.e. are developers), how many use Excel (marketing people), how many use social networks and chats (managers), how many man-hours they spend on development, how many DBAs are there, whether anyone works overnight or on weekends, when they have vacations etc. Now tell me it is not a spyware.

And by the way Google has similar powers because they have advertisement and analytics scripts installed on most websites, so they can spy on their competitors too.

UPD: looked through an article [1] and understood that I underestimated Microsoft. They even collect user account identifiers and hardware details. Microsoft knows about your computers more than your sysadmin.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/windo...

If you don't like data collection, then don't use Windows 10. Plenty of Microsoft tools work on macOS and Linux. But don't accuse them of spying on the user when they have made efforts to be transparent about it.

Also I remember that detailed articles about "data collection" appeared only after it was shipped and caused some negative reaction. While publishing an article is a good idea, it is unlikely that everyone will read it. A better idea would be to display a popup for Windows users saying something like "Hi there! We are going to look what programs you are running and what else do you do at your computer to improve your experience. Hope you are fine with that.".

Technically it might be not a spyware, but if the user doesn't realize that their actions are being tracked, it still would look like a spyware to them. Or should we better call it a "trojan" software? A definition from Wikipedia says "In computing, a Trojan horse, or Trojan, is any malicious computer program which misleads users of its true intent." and Windows telemetry program matches that definition.

For example, in an article about "basic" telemetry [1] they mention that full command line of an application can be recorded, potentially including any private data and passwords.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/ru-ru/windows/privacy/basic-level...

There's a reason the GDPR requires explicit opt-in: companies are expert at making their spyware look harmless and know that most people won't bother to change the defaults or won't understand what's happening.

The Privacy Panel in the new Settings applet for example has always existed.

I don't think one can say they killed Nokia. Nokia's phone business was basically doomed after Android gained traction, and Microsoft just helped the company to pivot by overpaying for that part of the business, while leaving Nokia with everything that actually was making money.

There's no way that Microsoft bought Nokia to concentrate on making that tiny hardware subdivision profitable (MSFT's market cap is $700B+ and they bought Nokia for $7.6B). They wanted a hardware platform to promote Windows Phone. For Microsoft, the dying entity in need of a Hail Mary was Windows Phone, not Nokia.

Windows Phone was native and extremely performant on even low end hardware. Microsoft dumped millions into development and couldn’t get traction. No way Maemo was going to displace Android.

Manufacturers literally do not care about anything except selling devices and are uninterested in performance except as it relates to bigger numbers that they can advertise with. Users consistently chose Android over Windows Phone demonstrating that their priorities did not align with picking the phone that would still be snappy in two years.

Nokia’s phone business was doomed. Even if they’d pivoted to Android devices they’d probably have still failed because that’s such a tough market with so much competition willing to sell phones with no margin.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee

Furthermore, Nokia wouldn't have shared a successful OS with others like Google did if they had one. That meant all other manufacturers were going to stay with Android, and I greatly doubt that they would've succeeded in building the whole ecosystem alone like Apple did.

But that was exactly the plan. When they cooperated with Intel to build Meego, the resulting OS was available to all other handset manufacturers and there were test suites in the work for vendors to be able to claim Meego compat, just as with Android.

The Meego OS was actually quite solid and very nice to develop for. Its major problem was the unwillingness of most app developers to support additional platforms besides Android and the Iphones. Just as with Windows Phone.

As for the adoption among developers, it never had a wide enough release to even start with that. N9 was available in limited countries only, and after Nokia's WP announcement.

Yes there were a few dark years, but I think most IM was struggling years ago.

Now skype is pretty good.

Finally Nokia managers were full of hubris, and believed Nokias was still the center of mobile, and so important it to change the course of industry by Adopting Windows Phone.

This is a well regurgitated lie that I see posted often. If you would like the truth about what really happened I suggest you read Operation Elop.

According to a source present, Google seemed to really want Nokia to join the Android world. The company assured that Android can be customized more than Nokia understood, especially compared with Windows Phone. Even if Google was criticized continuously for having Samsung, HTC and Sony Android phones differ from each other too much, Nokia would be given leeway to create its own user experience. Google saw that Nokia differentiated from these competitors in that it had a global area of operation. Nokia would be able to create better local services and user experiences for network providers and customers, one person present remembers being discussed. The Nokians also noticed that they had been living partially with misinformation. Nokia could continue with Android with its own maps side-by-side with Google’s maps. The same applied with the app store. Nokia’s music service as well as ovi.com could continue, as long as the phone had Google Play.

The discussions continued at a fast pace after the first visit. Google seemed to really want Nokia.

Some constraints were set by the Open Handset Alliance behind Android, OHA. Unlike Windows Phone, Android is not controlled by one company, rather by an alliance of 84 companies which is led by Google, where the members are able to use Android in an equal manner. Google was in a difficult position. By giving Nokia special privileges, it risked its relationship with other manufacturers. The reactions would be difficult to predict. Creativity was needed.

As the negotiations proceeded, a solution was found. Google offered Nokia, among other things, plenty of say in choosing the direction of Android development. By directing Android development to align with its own competitive goals, Nokia would gain some advantage, even if the changes would be available for everyone at the same time. Now Nokia was interested. Android and Nokia had an area where their interests converged in a brilliant way: Developing countries. If Android could be made to work on cheap hardware, Nokia would be best at getting in through in developing markets. The arrangement was enticing. Google would secure the position it was dreaming of in smartphones, and Nokia would become part of virgin Android markets. The precise details remained hidden, but Nokia was able to learn that Google worked Android into clearly cheaper models than Windows Phone.

Another flexible point of Android was in its predictability. Nokia wanted to publicize the new software features earlier than when the phones go into sales. The reason was brutal: Nokia was more solid than its Korean competitor and needed more time to build a phone. If the information about the new Android features was available earlier, Nokia would have enough time to get them in the first wave, like the others. Google was willing. It promised to make the publicizing of its plans earlier and to release the source code to its partners. The solution would have been useless for other Android manufacturers in relation to Nokia, but would not have broken the OHA rules.

Google made a substantial offer regarding distribution of income. Nokia would have gotten a portion of the income from Google’s search engine, app store, and other services which originate from Nokia phones, and the terms would be in relation to Nokia’s influence in the ecosystem. We don’t have information about precise percentages, but at any rate, Google’s promise was quite exceptional, considering that Nokia would still have been able to keep its own services in its phones.

Contrary to what Nokia has claimed, Google was ready for concessions. It was ready to flex as far as it could in the framework of OHA, and even then some more.

Then some big money stepped into the game, as well as the mysterious Nokia employee with the name Rahul Mewawalla.

https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

diktat just for those wondering

I don’t believe the engineers spent thousands man-years developing in-house Symbian, then significant time working on (mostly) in-house Maemo, then some day they said “screw that, let’s throw away everything we’ve developed and move to Android”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X_platform

Credibility of what? He's a Microsoft employee, being paid by Microsoft, and has made a ton of money by selling his company to Microsoft. Follow the money and you'll find nothing but allegiance to Microsoft and it's corporate goals.

For the record - I don't think MS is as nefarious as people here are insinuating, I'm just pointing out facts that people seem to overlook.

Microsoft does have a dark history, it’s also a huge company and Terry Meyerson (windows lead) was an aweful leader.

Things definitely changed. Satya knows that they need the developer mindshare, and that means to go where the developers are.

I hate windows as much as anyone, but a lot of their products are top notch. God I love vscode and Typescript. Just only use their OS products and you’ll be happy.

I think it's just that he wanted to do something Open Source based, rather than what Microsoft was doing at the time.

Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle.

Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.

Windows 10 has plenty of flaws that are worth pointing out, but using ridiculous hyperbole doesn't add to the conversation in a productive way.

There's a large gap between 'usable' and 'good'.

They destroyed the consistency of their interface (combined desktop/mobile anyone), and added a lot of cruft that literally nobody who's used Win 7 needs.

I do have a problem with people calling it barely usable, which is a much more objective (and incorrect) statement.

Ditto for dozens of Linux distro's.

> Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care.

What other things have they installed that is difficult to find out about? How about all the spying? Some game you don't use is the tip of the iceberg.

I have no idea what else they've installed, just like I have no idea what MacOS or Linux install. They're all black boxes to me. I see no reason to think Windows is any worse than it's competitors.

I assume by spying, you are referring to Windows 10's telemetry. Personally, I think concerns about it are overblown and calling it spying is misleading at best. It's for diagnostic information. You can set it to only send basic diagnostic data if you so choose. I am in favor of companies collecting diagnostic information about their products to improve them.

My contention is that you implied that Windows 10 does not even meet the low bar of "barely usable" when you said that you have to delete half of the OS to make it barely usable.

That is a lie. Windows 10 is usable out of the box without any modifications. Saying otherwise is spreading misinformation, which I don't support.

I think having different cash cows does change a company. If it's in their interest to be a good steward of VSCode, Typescript, Github etc then they're more likely to do it.

I think consolidation is actually as much of an issue as which company it is, the more consolidated, arguably the less direct incentive for intercompatibility and open standards. That's more of an issue here because GitHub is not open-source, so unlike the other examples the developer base has nothing to fall back on.

On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.

That's not the same though. I host my (company private) code on Github. I can use React or Kubernetes without giving any access to Google or Facebook to my code.

Funny that the things you mention all happened under Steve Ballmer too...

Refusing to move on to Android?

There was no real chance Symbian had in the post iPhone world.

Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well.

Motorola is doing quite good with Android.

You misremember things quite badly. Nokia was the clear leader in all phone segments, smartphones included. At the peak they sold just over 50% of all smartphones in the world. Of course they would try to hold on to that. They were better in software than their hardware competitors (Ericsson/RIM/etc), but of course that didn't amount to much when the field was upended by Google and Apple.

> Motorola is doing quite good with Android.

Motorola is now a Lenovo brand.

As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do, and even gave him a bonus for achieving it.

Did that include having secret negotiations with Steve Ballmer that the board was unaware of? For a true accounting of what really happened you can find it all in Operation Elop.

https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

If the board hadn't had such bonus (24. The bonus brouhaha boils over) as Helsingin Sanomat discovered, the outcome would be much different.

https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

As someone that used to know the Espoo HQ from inside, Microsoft is not the one I blame.

They got back many of the former mobile division employees via the partnership with HMD, currently having one of the best deals in Android devices.

Ah and Bell Labs now belongs to Nokia.

I only know that because I have one of their awesome scales (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales). I was shocked they were Nokia when I found out about them. They're absolutely awesome, highly recommend them.

The Metro version no longer supports copy/paste formatting properly (no timestamps), destroys {code} annotations, does not show alerts properly, does not actually send messages you type into the Windows 10 popup alerts, does not auto scroll to the bottom of a message list, does not let you set your status to AWAY.

The web.skype.com also has broken copy/paste but is better than the absymal Metro version.

The iPad version is probably the most usable (but not tried copy/paste on it) and the Android one is mostly alright when it lets you log in, although still a bit clunky and non-responsive (blatantly a web app in a native wrapper).

I run OOSU10.exe on all my Windows 10 instances to turn off the spyware and run PiHole at home to try and limit the insane amounts of data leakage from all my devices (TV, iPads, Android phones sending buckets of telemetry home, Windows PC and Macs) - it's insane.

Interesting to see this purchase though, but I wanted to say that Skype is getting worse and worse - bring back MSN Messenger which had more features than modern Skype!

The developer side of Microsoft has definitely changed for the better over the last several years.

And even if github fails, so what? It’s the most easily replaceable part of the stack.

The best part of GitHub is the social part and that’s not currently replaceable. Also good luck migrating issues and their history of comments and PRs.

The social part is not that big of a deal, its just because everybody happens to already have a login. Other than that, what's the big social hook? You can have the same exact discussions on the other source code sites, all of which have more features too.

I like to look at it from the perspective that they are a for-profit public company and are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and they have every right to do so.

Therefore, any plans I make regarding GitHub will not rely on them being friendly and kind-spirited in any way. If they turn out to be great, I'll just be pleasantly surprised.

There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.

> ruined Skype?

Its still pretty popular. It was crap 5 years ago, but now its on par with the other big messaging apps.

Who knows what would have happened to Nokia's Device division without Microsoft's involvement, but one thing is certain - Windows Phone exclusivity solidified their demise. At least Nokia got 7 billion for their troubles, though.

>They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it.

There's a difference between trying everything and being incompetent and constantly rebooting your platform and expecting a different outcome. As for Google sabotaging their platform - Microsoft was already doing a good job of it so they didn't need help from Google. Also, Google did have a couple of apps on their platform I believe, but let's not try and blame another company for the demise of their OS when they were ultimately responsible.

They killed msn, skype was always a turd. Nokia was dead well before Microsoft got involved.

Skype could have beat Slack to the punch. Instead Microsoft lost both the business and the consumer market.

No, Microsoft did an incredible service to all Nokia shareholders by buying the sorry handset business which had already failed in the market at that point.

You can blame Microsoft for not resurrecting a dead carcass but that's another thing entirely.

Nokia is doing quite fine manufacturing telecoms infrastructure.

Furthermore, I'd see Microsoft's reply:

> I'm not aware of any deliberate copying of the Lerna code, but let me dig into it now and call all the devs on the team to be sure. If there is, we should definitely give correct attribution, so I want to investigate. [...] I checked with the devs, and nobody's aware of any code coming from Lerna. If we inadvertently used something without credit, I really would like to know so that I can fix it.

https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673

Unrelated to the rest of the discussion, I just want to clarify that MIT License != 'Do Whatever You Want' License. MIT requires attribution and maintaining the copyright license on existing code. Yes, if you don't adhere to the license's terms when copying code, it is stealing.

To be clear, I'm not saying using MIT-licensed code without attribution is acceptable, but I feel that there is a qualitative difference between this and using code you couldn't use under any circumstances, or silently incorporating MIT code in a commercial product.

> "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited.

Attribution alone doesn't bring it into compliance. The copyright notices have to be preserved too.

Also, the rewriting of commit history, if true, sounds more shady than mere "Oops, I dropped the license and copyright texts".

Is it? Or is it copyright infringement?

When was that? Oracle famously has, but I haven't read Microsoft's version of the same.

So MS contributed to the abysmal court decision.

Companies have to make money, and originally, Microsoft made money just by selling proprietary software licenses. In these conditions, open source is their enemy, and they have to fight it. Now they do a bit of spying, a bit of cloud, a bit of hardware, etc... which mean they can cut open source some slack and focus on other evils.

This is small compared potatoes to the sort of thing Microsoft used to pull before. Microsoft spent years in the courts and narrowly avoided some very drastic government intervention and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. That doesn't happen because someone might not like the new Skype UI or really misses flip phones.

Nokia, isn't a person. It's another corporation. Patents racketeering...this is literally only going to be fixed with legislation. I'm all for it. There is no such thing as a corporation that won't chase every dollar that it can. That's what they do. Want to stop patent BS? Remove the incentives through legislation.

To be really frank Nokia killed itself in the after math of the iPhone. But that was long time coming. When a company which wasn't even your prime competitor an year or two back, out innovates you to the graveyard, you really were setting yourself up for something like this for a while.

And yes, WhatsApp did the same to Skype.

Literally every for-profit desktop OS vendor has "spied on users" by the definition you're trying to use. Including OSX and Ubuntu.

>Do they not engage in patents racketeering?

So Google boxes Microsoft out of the phone market by refusing to support any of their services on Windows Phone. And Microsoft is the bad guy for leveraging their patents against vendors selling Android phones? Satya Nadella would be looking for a new job if he weren't leveraging their patent portfolio. End of story.

>Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?

See comment above. Nokia is dead because they couldn't get a handful of table-stakes apps. Primarily because of google.

Skype... well that was just fumbling the ball, but it wasn't for no-reason. The way Skype was originally architected wasn't going to scale. That was by no means nefarious in nature though. Github has no fundamental flaws that I've seen that they would require them making significant changes.

And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering? Talk about Torchlighting....

>And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering?

You should look into the Microsoft vs Barnes and Noble case[1] as well as review their detailed patent racketeering practices at Groklaw. Additionally, the Chinese government made Microsoft expose all of their patents that they wouldn't allow companies they were shaking down to see and, well, they were full of old, obsolete and prior art ridden patents - be sure to look those up too.

[1]http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111111222912...

Nokia is still alive. But it's not like it was doing well before Microsoft bought them.

But their MO is to buy up companies people like or love and run them into the ground, then replace them with a Me Too product that is just enough different that getting out is challenging. To the rest of us that’s indistinguishable from destroying the competition and reducing options.

And here they are buying a company people like, having recently killed off others.

This tiger has the same stripes. When it eats your remaining arm, try to remember people told you so.

To be fair, Nokia was already dead when Microsoft bought them. MS just pulled the plug.