I loved that they explained how the name github came to be in one of the older landing pages.
2020 - https://github.com
2019 - http://web.archive.org/web/20190317031034/https://github.com...
2018 - http://web.archive.org/web/20180317031034/https://github.com...
2017 - http://web.archive.org/web/20170317031034/https://github.com...
2016 - http://web.archive.org/web/20160317164519/https://github.com...
2015 - http://web.archive.org/web/20150317031034/https://github.com...
2012 - http://web.archive.org/web/20120317031034/https://github.com...
2008 - http://web.archive.org/web/20081211021557/http://github.com/
On the other hand, GitHub had a reputation for offering a first class freemium experience and this does chip away at that a bit.
I like that they don't have 30 day retention policy when you want to delete something (repos, account) which is what everyone else does to keep you on the site. Really hate that.
But apart from the fact that they followed the unfortunate modern trend to add telemetry to things, I can't really say Microsoft has done anything particularly offensive to me in the past... nearly a decade?
Just because you've been a developer for 25 years doesn't mean you should evaluate a company based on 25 year old events.
https://hothardware.com/news/microsoft-changes-offline-accou...
https://www.howtogeek.com/519572/microsoft-is-testing-ads-in...
And that is all recent, on top of all the other stuff they won’t fix, like issues where file extensions magically reset to Windows defaults, nagging you to just please try Edge because its better for real this time, and the unavoidable mandatory Candy Crush - seriously, if you install with no internet connection, it will keep a placeholder there for you that will install as soon as you’re online.
The telemetry issues are annoying too, not because they exist but because you have to read a books worth of literature to understand what they chose to document. Seriously:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w...
Windows 10, I wanted to like it but I can hardly tolerate it. Has Microsoft changed? Maybe, but apparently the Windows team didn’t get the memo.
And the Candy Crush thing... like, if it was just Home edition? Fine. If it was even smart enough to realize it need not preinstall that on a domain account (the installation of UWP apps is technically per-user), like, if they'd demonstrated any recognition that Windows is used in professional settings... I'm right there with you on this one.
However...
> like issues where file extensions magically reset to Windows defaults
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190225-00/?p=10... is probably the best response to that. Given the number of Windows app developers who do unholy things with their apps, it's hardly a surprise. (My understanding is Windows has a huge number of secret compatibility shims just to keep major software vendors' bad hacks and API misuses working.)
> nagging you to just please try Edge
I literally can't escape "switch to Chrome" nags, as a Firefox user. Every Google site has at least one, Google's home page has displayed an amazing three Chrome popups at the same time before. I'd maybe give you this one if they weren't waging a war on it to a far more aggressive foe, and losing badly.
edit: So far I’ve tried switching my user agent, turning off adblock, using a private/logged out window, on docs and search. Not that I’m doubting you or anything, but I am surprised I’ve not noticed it much since switching back to Firefox.
It’s also probably worth disclosing that I work for Google, though at home I am using Firefox and Duckduckgo.
Your mileage may vary on any given month, as Google frontend code seems to come and go regularly and randomly, indeed varying by platform, OS, and lunar cycle.
Furthermore, basically everything Microsoft did that made developers hate them is legal. Why is it okay to hold a grudge for “embrace, extend, extinguish” but not for aiding and abetting an organization that consistently violates our civil liberties?
They're made up of many small and hardly interconnected parts.
Whoever made some despicable decisions 25 years ago, almost certainly don't work there anymore.
Microsoft has the Windows Subsystem for Linux, allowing Linux binaries to run on Windows. How about the reverse? Get WINE to the point where Linux (or FreeBSD or some fully source OS) can reliably run Windows binaries.
Along the same line, provide portable libraries to allow other office suites to reliably edit MS Office files (docx, pptx, etc). Maybe Adobe or someone will come up with a commercial competitor, instead of just LibreOffice.
Make Windows and MS Office a choice, rather than a tax businesses have to pay to be compatible with everyone else. That would go a long way to establishing trust.
Windows is like three decades of legacy systems, but I would argue many of Microsoft's recent decisions have been at the cost of their Windows division.
EDIT: I'm mostly kidding, but you can't really expect true change of morals when the vast majority of the upper management is the same under the new CEO as under the old one.
That said, I'm thinking Moon Microsystems :-) Not as big or as hot as Sun. (ok that is a bad punalogy) I did get the domain though, it was available and I couldn't resist.
But can you make a cool logo out of "Moon"?
No, but with minor butchery you can re-use the Sun logo with the letters MMS (Moon Micro Systems) :-)
There's something hilariously farcical about holding a grudge toward Microsoft for a quarter of a century.
Ever since I have been able to get the Microsoft out of my systems, I find myself naturally predisposed to keep it out. I am not against Microsoft, I really am a fan of a lot of the open and developer-focused things they are doing, certainly not least of which is their support for Kubernetes through Azure, but this does not make me more receptive to going back to living in a Microsoft OS-flavored ecosystem today, it just is not happening for me and it's nothing to do with holding a grudge or similar.
I use a Mac now because it was provided by work, if they offer me a trade for a Windows machine I would probably consider it because of the progress made by WSL2, but our group policy lags somewhat behind and certainly not on insider ring, so none of my coworkers have been able to try WSL2 on their work-provided Windows machines, or likely will for some time, and that makes me seriously think twice about it.
My natural inclination is that I would much rather install Linux as the host OS so I have control over things like when updates get applied, or whether a reboot needs to take place immediately, in spite of the struggle that sometimes comes with that, it is really much better to have the source and keep the capability to control your own hardware. And then only run Windows in a VM whenever it is really needed. (In other words, to be able to occasionally run Windows apps in a similar way as I do when I have to use them on a Mac.)
Sun’s hardware was expensive although their software was nice. Their handling of Java put me off them and led to this current state with Oracle.
They had many positives, but I’d rather have old Microsoft than old Sun if I had to pick only one to eat everything. Definitely prefer new Microsoft.
I just find it tragic that the only way GitHub could survive (I guess) was to be BOUGHT. Like why couldn't they stay smaller, focus on what they were good at, and standardize with the community all the integrations in an orderly manner?
Although, Microsoft has shown they care more about the developer community than Apple as of late. So for that, I can at least say my trust is rising. But it's a bit too late for me, I'm happily running Linux for most of my daily life.
Recently I installed win10 pro and was appalled at the way I had you jump through hoops to NOT have a m$ account, not to mention the blatant adware. And this was win10 professional.
It certainly reminded me that m$ is a long long way away from where it was in the 90s and early naughties.
So, a good start would be a stable and private os without all the adware and telemetry.
PS: I use gitea instead of GitHub these days. Nor do I use vscode, but sublime text, for the same reasons: too much telemetry that cant be disabled permanently.
An oxymoron?
Just like a cancer! Oh wait...
Maybe Microsoft's reputation is exactly the reason why it was left out of this announcement.
Sometimes a brand is so tarnished that the owner tries to hide it from the people who hate it. (For example, Comcast → Xfinity. I expect Monsanto to go the same way and become Bayer.)
The same also goes for Charter → Spectrum.
When the company that commercialized heroin and was complicit in the holocaust is a better brand you really got a PR problem.
Microsoft doesn't want to be Microsoft anymore; it wants to be Oracle and IBM and primarily make money off of business consulting and the cloud.
I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux, similar to the way macOS became Unix, but even less different than its underlying OS.
However, it should be noted that I'm not very good at predicting things.
I think this is unlikely. In many ways the NT kernel is superior to the Linux kernel. I just wish it were open source and didn't have the rest of windows around it.
The Linux kernel is ubiquitous and free-as-in-beer, so it might win out. Android has already shown how you can build a proprietary userland on top of it.
Good point.
Wine is 26 years old.
Depends on what you mean by "good enough". Wine is an incredible project that has achieved amazing successes, but it still falls short in a lot of ways.
I personally don't use Wine but I've encountered people online in the last 10+ years that use the argument that it's "good enough" for people to fully switch to Linux. Realistically, I don't think Wine actually convinced more than a handful of users to abandon Windows
WSL1 was a proprietary reimplementation of the Linux system call ABI as an NT subsystem. WSL2 is actual Linux running in a VM. That seems to be moving in exactly the opposite direction.
Reason one is because Linux is GPL'd, Microsoft can't extend Linux without giving its extensions back to the community.
Reason two is because Linux is already established in multiple realms, so Microsoft can't bully its way into dominance. Microsoft has a respectable presence in server rooms, but it isn't absolutely dominant by a long shot. Microsoft probably has something going on in the embedded/hobbyist SBC space, but there's no path for them to dominate there. And, FWIW, Linux owns the supercomputer world. I also can't see IBM falling over itself to put Windows on mainframes.
A decentralized web or a non-for-profit like Wikipedia is a much better model for these infrastructure projects.
Discoverability and pull requests are two big benefits that GitHub has offered. Could we create decentralized open source solutions to provide those benefits? Are there other benefits that we’d need to provide to have viable alternatives to centralization?
Pagure supports submitting pull requests with Git repos on any server (regardless of whether it's running Pagure or not) with its remote pull requests feature. Issues, docs, and pull request metadata are all stored as git repos using JSON files as data, making it easy and portable to other Pagure instances and easy to convert for any other system.
As far as I know, Pagure is now the only Git forge software packaged in all major Linux distributions (Fedora+EPEL[1], openSUSE[2], Mageia[3], Debian[4], Ubuntu[5], Arch Linux AUR[6]).
It'd be nice to see people interested in this helping to build a future supporting portable, decentralized development.
[1]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/pagure
[2]: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE:Factory/pag...
[3]: http://madb.mageia.org/package/show/name/pagure/release/caul...
[4]: https://packages.debian.org/sid/pagure
Why would there be a mention of Microsoft? That many modules in npm are ES5 is completely irrelevant for npm's purpose.
And Microsoft changed, how exactly?
And why are you advertising for them?
https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
Could you tell me more about that?
This is independent of what Microsoft's doing with .NET Core. I'm excited about the work that they're doing, but this isn't going to stop us from making sure that npm is outstanding.
Sounds like it won't be shielded from the cult-like MS mentality, then.
I would expect that there was at least a mention, considering the reason that most modules in npm are still in ES5 is exactly because of the monopolistic practices that Microsoft followed back in the day which makes Internet Explorer still relevant.
Not negative, not positive comment. Just surprising there was no mention. And I do think Microsoft is doing a great job recently with Open Source in general.
[1] https://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase-mo...