It's incredibly hypocritical. If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature.

https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html

I’m no fan of big publishing, but Nature’s policy is ok in this respect, and better than eg. IEEE.

True, but perhaps the thinking goes: we'll publish another paper in an open journal, so we can have our cake and eat it too.

GitHub is stupid valuable for MS, and will make their dev tools offerings much stronger (TFS is a dog, bringing GitHub Enterprise into MS Enterprise support & sales cycle is gonna make a loooot of scratch). But the value of the GitHub community persists only so long as the community is present. MS can't start destroying Open Science, because Open Science will be open any- and everywhere.

Frankly, disciplines should be creating their own community hubs and portals based on Git and the publishing standards of GitHub: leveraging GitHubs infrastructure and standards while capturing and engaging with the relevant users. That way they can always migrate and maintain the community.

Besides, even cynically MS is more likely to do a bad job of community management trying to upsell related services moreso than poop on things for the sake of pooping on them. If it becomes offensive you'll have a nice window to find a superior collaboration hub.

Pretty much the best that can happen is GitHub will now get worse as MS puts in functionality to do with their tools. The worst is they really fuck it up like they did with Skype.

True, they've moved from a malignant stance to a more benign one recently, but their disregard for privacy and partnership with government should still make folks pause to consider. And pause we do.

I generally much prefer GUIs over command lines as I'm lazy and have a bad memory, so anything off the beaten path involves loads of unnecessary googling to remind me of the right invocation to the CLI gods.

I'd avoided using it for so long because of bad memories of using TFS, but I must admit it's pretty good for generally using git, with only a few minor UI gripes. I must admit I haven't had to do a merge yet because I'm flying solo on my newest project, which is usually the big test.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/to-be-fair-you-have-to-have-a-...

I used it before the acquisition and it was usually ok, and I've used it since and it's usually ok.

I dont' like how I can't find some menu items because they keep moving, but this happened a lot before, too.

Is it just that they didn't progress the platform? What - specifically - have they done wrong with it?

Of course, only client available to me is the same exact version they bought years before as they never updated with features just bug fixes. You would have been used an unwitting tool as you helpfully mansplained how to overcome my version deficiency.

If that is the limit of the problems people have with that acquisition then I really fail to understand what the problem is.

I have long since deleted it, too many semi-competent users telling me that all you have to do is go to this site and click on this link ...

But is that really the worst thing about it? Or have you heard other things?

I’m a desktop Linux users but even I don’t try using Skype on Linux.

What there is not is a comprehensive end-to-end support for github based workflows (issues, projects, hooks, wiki-branches, releases), as first class citizens across the entire MS platform. Github Enterprise, sufficiently tailored for MS shops, presents some huge opportunities for scaling dev teams and integrating with other languages and tool chains. I believe there are also significant opportunities in academics: something like VS Code + Jupyter notebooks + deep Github integration, aligned with K-to-PHD and classroom support, strikes right at a core MS's market and would provide significant capture of key users and key metadata.

These are not hurdles of a technically challenging nature, just product design, and will improve their offerings markedly. I see them as givens for their next product updates.

The best that can happen here is a new breed of pre-shared, DCVS based, open source projects and learning tools. MS can't do a lot to stop that, as the tools are already available for GitLab or Atlissan or a monied interest, but MS can do a lot to enable it.

1. Pointing fingers at someone else as The Bad Guy is a common tactic for diverting attention away from one's own behavior.

2. If Nature is not positioning itself as open source, then they aren't really doing anything ironic. There is nothing inconsistent with not being open source yourself while calling out a threat to open source stuff.

As to a corporations changing their ways, they do it all the time to accommodate their changing view on profit maximisation.