> Microsoft would never do that unless their hands were forced. Too much potential business with them.

The upside of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub (and the entire strategy that resulted in the acquisition) is that Microsoft has created incentives for themselves to have GitHub being regarded as a truly open platform that you can depend on. Having repositories exposed to flimsy DMCA takedowns is not part of that.

Microsoft, very transparently, wants to make money by being important in how people develop software. If exposure to flimsy takedowns is a part of GitHub, then people will be more motivated to send their money to GitLab, Atlassian's stuff, or a bunch of other options. They have legitimate competition here.

Developer's opinions of GitHub and Microsoft in general may be of more longer term importance to them than the MPAA's opinion of them. I'm not saying that that is definitely the case (maybe they're still getting there), but it's worth acknowledging that Microsoft has legitimate actual cold money reasons to fight this. No need to rely only on personal convictions of the people at GitHub.

I bet Microsoft can have it's cake and eat it, too. If enough github users are willing to defend them, they can placate both parties.

Microsoft should be paying us to use github.

Indeed, as always competition benefits the costumer

More effective would be those who are at orgs paying for Github Enterprise to express to their account managers they'll take their business elsewhere if Github is unable to defend it's platform from malicious actors.

Github don't care if you take your code elsewhere. They most definitely care about revenue (and developer mindshare a somewhat close second).

Such a claim is pretty weak, actually. MS would not be held responsible for code in someone's GHE instance any more than they would for a movie stored on an NTFS file system.

So the sales rep is likely just going to be confused by the attempt to use unrelated leverage.

No, but GHE is paid software. And not like it's impossible to migrate, it's just a fancy git frontend after all. Gogs/Gitea/Gitlab CE is completely capable of doing what it does.

Cost of migrating from GHE to something else usually exceeds the cost of GHE itself.

Migrations generally are non trivial. They don't generally happen just to push one's principles.

Depends on how you do it. Of course if you want to move instantly then that's gonna be hard. But slowly moving isn't that bad, or creating new projects somewhere else and slowly porting old ones.

Even then, it's possible that just companies that planned to buy GHE will simply not buy it and use something open source instead.

Wrong, Microsoft’s internal incentives are aligned with GitHub remaining independent and building developer mindshare. The, relatively, minuscule business they get from MPA (No Azure, Office subs, Windows subs) is extremely fringe in comparison to losing long term developer mindshare. Even if you thought of representative companies in the MPA,e.g., Netflix, Warner, etc., which are only loosely coupled to the MPA itself, this is still tiny in contrast to overall developer mindshare. This is why they reinstated popcorntime etc etc.

I'm anxiously waiting for a quit-GitHub movement. I hold my source code there because of its popularity and "defaultish" nature. Of course I can go someplace else right now, but then people won't find my software.

You can make GH be just a mirror

The occasional prominent developer has left GitHub for GitLab, but it hasn’t made much of a difference. I don’t see organizations moving off GitHub if they’re already using it. I think GitHub is independent enough from Microsoft that the two could take different stances on these disputes. Certainly I’d expect a DMCA takedown of content on a Microsoft service like OneDrive to be ultimately handled differently from a takedown aimed at source code on GitHub...

Github is as independent from Microsoft as WhatsApp is from Facebook.

Thankfully I am not yet required to sign on to github using 2FA that can only be confirmed on a Zune. Microsoft has been pretty good at leveraging github for the publicity of supporting developers (hosting informational streams and the like) while leaving the platform pretty independent.

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft viewed Github like McDonalds views the Ronald McDonald House - a long term PR investment that's well worth the marginal cost.

> Thankfully I am not yet required to sign on to github using 2FA that can only be confirmed on a Zune.

Strawman: Microsoft doesn't require you to come from their hardware for any of their properties, and of course Zune is a dead platform.

Except that Facebook has been integrating their sign on service into various acquisitions - using Zune (or any hardware) was quite hyperbolic of me. For a more even handed comparison: I'm not required to use a Live login to authorize with github.

Mojang acquired by Microsoft: 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojang_Studios )

Mojang users required to move to Microsoft (formerly Live) accounts: 2021 (https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21527647/minecraft-micro... )

I expect the same will happen for github eventually. Given the were acquired in 2018, by this timeline, I'm guessing by 2025.

I'm a bit doubtful of this. It's possible but Microsoft uses Live for both business and gaming, but they've only had a track record of forcing Live account adoption onto users in the gaming sphere. It may happen, sure, but I don't think it's likely.

That all said I didn't think it was likely that Minecraft would switch over to using Live accounts since Minecraft is so famously cross platform and Live accounts have struggled with that in the past.

They're also boiling the frog on Windows local accounts at the moment. It's no longer possible to set up a new install of Home, or Windows 10 (any SKU) in S mode with a local account without either disconnecting internet during installation or going back and converting to a local account after

I use gitlab, myself.