I agree. Sorting huge, multinational, publicly traded companies in friends and enemies list is so obviously bogus and immature that it baffles me that this is so prevalent.
Microsoft is not your enemy. It's not your friend (unless you're one of the shareholders). It's profit driven and amoral. They'll always line up with whatever they believe will maximize profits because that their entire reason for existing.
Apparently Microsoft decided that being more FLOSS friendly (after decades of trying to annihilate these projects, lest we forget) because they decided that it would favor them in the long run.
If they ever decide that they stand to make more profit by throwing the whole github ethos under the bus they will. A few people will make strongly worded blog posts that will reach the top of HN. A few employees might even quit and loudly slap the door on the way out. Then probably nothing will happen.
People are not rational actors, and the myth that we are is incredibly harmful.
- Interests of the shareholders and other stakeholders, who most likely cannot agree on most of their goals, but they will agree on "money = good";
- Competitors who wait for the company to make a mistake they can exploit to get ahead, or possibly kill the company
Combined, these forces all but ensure the company has no choice but to be a amoral profit maximizer, or die.
A different analogy, that doubles down on "corporation is essentially an AI" view, but may make it easier to explain the main point: if you apply Maslow's pyramid to companies, most of them do not have their Physiological and Safety levels met. They operate in survival mode. Rarely, a company "feels" secure enough to ponder long-term visions or some ideals that aren't directly survival-related.
Companies are not perfect optimizers. Arguably not even that strong. If someone in Purchasing is willing to reward their buddy instead of picking the best vendor for the job, well, that happens. It's noise. Doesn't change the overall behavior of the company. And it only happens within limits - do it too much, and the person in Purchasing will find themselves fired, maybe even charged with a crime. If they're too good, maybe they can kill their own company - much like a sickness can kill a human. Other companies will then be more vigilant.
Also worth noting that companies strive to improve their process and develop various means of ensuring and enforcing accountability - this, in essence, is trying to reduce the "noise" of individual humans within the larger AI of the company.
During that time Google was very friendly to FLOSS, and open protocols (remember when GChat was just a XMPP client)
Today MS and Google seems to have flipped, Google now is fully embracing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, where MS seems to be attempting to wind that back though with mixed success
From what I could see it was also difficult to switch the office suite. My OEM installed trial versions of word, excel, etc. which were set to be opened by default on all related file extensions. Switching to libreoffice was a PITA, I couldnt find a simple, one-click way to change all these. I had to go over them one-by-one.. (.doc, .docx, .dochtml, .docxhtml, .xls, .xlsx, .xlshtml, .xslsxhtml,....)
The only way to actually make a local account is to either (a) refuse to connect to WiFi until after an account is made or (b) disconnect the router while it is trying to talk to Microsoft. Option (a) is inaccessible by the time you realize that there is a problem, and option (b) is ridiculous and needs to be found on third-party suggestions. All so that Microsoft can pull in another email address.
Windows 10 installation has become a maze which only the really savvy can escape with their privacy somewhat in tact.
I never had this bullshit on PRO versions, but I'm connected through cable tho.
Back when I used Gmail, I'd open my email and get not one, but TWO separate things, one a popup box, and one a top bar, telling me I should switch to Chrome, and dismissing it never stuck. It'd come back in a week or so. Even once Edge started running on Chrome code, Google stepped up writing new tricks to claim that Edge was "less secure" because it didn't direct telemetry straight to Google servers.
Google's underhanded push with Chrome has hurt everyone, and unfortunately, Microsoft probably can't "target just Chrome" in retaliating against such messaging, so Firefox gets hit too.
Install a Package Manager like Chocolety [1], AppGet [2] or the new "Official" one WinGet
>>I couldnt find a simple, one-click way to change all these. I had to go over them one-by-one.. (.doc, .docx, .dochtml, .docxhtml, .xls, .xlsx, .xlshtml, .xslsxhtml,....)
Yea MS has tried to bork this, but in the "Default Apps" settings page of the new "Settings" Application, there is a link called "Set Defaults by App" that makes it MUCH easier than what you did which was "Choose Default Apps by File Type"
There are perhaps better anecdotes for reasons to dislike windows...
Personally, I'm still annoyed that removed the File Types settings in Windows 7(?), though some of them have made their way back with the new settings.
Lately, I love what they've been doing. Even github -- there have been disappointments, for sure, but nothing like the egregious misbehavior in the bad old days. But given their history; given Google's "do no evil" bait&switch... I don't want to hand them more power.
It'd be cool if an interested third party could build out an app store that automatically sources from github (and its competitors), though.
That’s called a package repository and there are hundreds (thousands?) of them.
An “App Store” is a vertically integrated package repo.
Element is actually in the F-droid store but the version is outdated.
Do you really believe Microsoft is changing their tactics because they want to?
They needed to change.
Their goal which has always been Platform, around 12 years ago they realized it had to be open open towards everything else than Windows only. Otherwise they would be seriously under pressure.
Why do you think Azure is so popular with other platforms too, other than ms tech?
Microsoft is really really good at setting and reaching goals. They excel at it. And believe you me, that their goal is not to approve and support open source because they shifted their mindset towards it - it's because they had to - and they will make money doing it.
These statements about companies, being kind towards this or that, has to be read carefully. They are savages in the end and will do pretty much anything to win.
I worked at MS for many years. Not any longer.
https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode/issues/1863#issuecomme...
If that's true, then why do brands exist?
For most companies, the best way to drive profit is to build a long term relationship of trust with their customers and suppliers.
Edit: this doesn't mean I'm ready to join the Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon fan club, but I can see that some companies regularly behave better than others, and I'm happy to act on that reputation. Take Oracle, for example.
This is a bogus line of thinking. For example, Apple have a very strong stance on privacy compared to FB and Google.
Does this mean they are more moral or trustworthy when it comes to privacy, or that you should trust them to remain focussed on privacy in the future?
Not at all! Their focus on privacy is a smart business model that they use to differentiate themselves from the competition. As soon as it stops being a smart model, or a better model presents itself, under the bus their focus on privacy will go. Apple being focussed on privacy right now should not be taken as them having a good reputation. They do not care about your privacy. They care about you buying their products. The same applies to all apparent "good" or "moral" behavior of any large company. It's not genuine morality, they don't care about the benefits to you or society at large. They just want you to generate money for them.
By all means, choose products from a company whose presented morality currently aligns with yours. But don't believe that morality is genuine, and don't get hooked on that company. Instead use them, just as they are using you, for as long as it benefits you, then dump them in a second when they inevitably change... Just as they would do to you.
Taking my Oracle example, I'm definitely never going to recommend my company adopts Oracle. Given their historical behaviour, it's just too much risk!
This position that all companies are equally amoral seems 1. blind to reality and 2. to be throwing away useful information.
The likely actions of a company are embedded in their culture, their structure, the people who choose to work there, and the personalities of their leadership. That can all change, but you have the ability to observe that change and punish companies which violate your trust.
When Github restored youtube-dl, they increased user trust while undermining media industry trust. When they pulled popcorntime, they did the reverse.
In each case, they were presumably acting rationally to preserve their relationships as best as they could. But whether or not that benefits you as an individual is more or less a toss of a coin.
Microsoft and Google being recent examples of companies shifting their moral compass fairly quickly.
That's both unfair, and quite frankly lets companies like Boeing off the hook. Executives get paid egregious amounts of money to set the direction of companies. Yes, some do focus solely on profit and it's generally obvious when they do. Some focus on making customers happy at nearly all costs. And there is everything in between. Of course management at all those companies believe their approach will make the company money, but plenty aren't solely focused on maximizing profits, I'd argue MS included.
I'm very sceptical that such a company exists (at least of any size beyond a small restaurant or similar). Can you give an example?
Of course, there might be reasons form Microsoft to create an alternative to the App Stores say for a gaming marketplace etc. But specifically for GitHub I cannot see why they would be interested in the overhead.
The specific advantage is that it makes switching providers really hard. You develop in Atom, store the code in GitHub, use GitHub Actions for CI/CD (if that's viable, I'm not super familiar with the product), use GitHub to manage the released artifacts, and publish them to GitHub's app store.
That makes it really appealing to buy because you don't have to talk to 7 different vendors and duct tape their solutions together with Python scripts. You talk to 1 vendor, who gives you all the pieces, and the pieces are already able to communicate natively.
It makes it really appealing to sell because once you buy in, it's really hard to get back out. Imagine trying to replace all of those components, and the developer time you lose as people get used to the new systems and how they all work together. Bonus points if you can only publish to the GitHub app store from GitHub installations. GitLab can do a lot of those things, but they don't have an app store.
As others pointed out though, it would compete with Microsoft's existing app store. I would not be terribly surprised to see some kind of integration between GitHub and MS's app store, or Azure and their app store though.
Apple - Blocked
Android - Pointless without a drop in replacement for Google Services.
Windows- This is possible, but Windows doesn't really have a distribution problem. There's no real need here.
Linux - Again possible, but no real need
You have a source for that claim?
They charge said developers a few dollars a month per seat. GitHub could somehow instead be taking a 0%-20% cut topline revenue from some of the apps they host.
Lots of work to make that happen the upside might make it worth while.
I dont know what a normal person would be doing on github.
If GitHub could somehow solve the demand side (Phone users) they'd be sorted.
That light at the end of this tunnel is an oncoming train. Not freedom.
I’m not saying it’s the best thing for GitHub to do, but...
Let’s say 15% of Android top 1000 apps are sitting in private repos on GitHub. With their build tools GitHub make it possible to automatically push builds to this imaginary store, they offer devs 50% discount on whatever cut google take if on the play store.
Average user is less than poorly educated about technology. Their level of competence when raising a bug is simply pathetic, a lot of times. I manage an email server for a family, they write to me "email doesn't work", I check issue and respond "domain should be gmail.com not gmail,com" (notice the comma).
This reminded me how sqlite team was getting emails or calls at night, from some random people because another software was crashing. User went to "about/legal" and found license of SQLite, so obviously they decided to contact SQLite and complain on bad software. https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d/src/os.h#L52-...
Now imagine facebook api breaks backwards compatibility, so you get 1000 of new issues in a day with title "broken", "doesn't work", "shit is crahing so gave 1* fix it now I might review it later".
It would be business as usual under a different Big Tech name.
I don't think people understand what an average (and below average) cell phone user is like. Just read some of the App store reviews (fraction of the people that use apps actually write reviews).
This pipe-dreaming would come crashing down from being a minor issue to major, the wrath of an average user is insane.
And the way they run a store is consistently horrible that it feels impossible to make worse. Full of horror stories, bans and rejections, sometimes even random pick deletions since Xbox Live Indie Games days, to at least as recent as just few quarters ago.
There are reasons why people choose iOS, Android, .msi file download from GitHub and so on over Microsoft Store.
Given the garbage-grade issues I have often seen from professional engineers, this sounds like a complete nightmare.
Samsung is bothering me. I have an S8 and they want to replace all the standard Google apps - including the basic text messageing one - with Samsung equivalents.
It's not clear why and I haven't gone looking. It feels like they're just trying to displace Google and be another company reading my messages and monitoring my activity. I figure I don't need another one of those in my life. If their intent is to help me by offering privacy respecting alternatives they have not done so. I'm also completely unaware of any app-store Samsung may have beyond a place for them to push their versions of these apps.
Am I wrong? Should I be looking closer at what Samsung has to offer?
But things like Samsung health send data home too unfortunately.
They are stepping back from cloud services a bit now and letting Microsoft step in, also not privacy driven but more financial I think.
Dog bites man is not news, and neither are most of the Samsung software travesties ranging from software supply chain debacles to TV spying to data breaches.
Nobody even cares in the tech community because no one expects anything of them.
I think Google is doing a good job with their Pixel phones indeed in terms of security, though they need longer support IMO. Samsung seems to just call everything 'knox' but not really specify what exactly they're doing. So from a security point of view I agree.
What? It can get way worse than Google. For all the privacy invasive things that Google does it’s one of the least bad. Unlike most companies that collect data it doesn’t directly sell user data, and it has a good history of avoiding security vulnerabilities that leak data.
I suppose the Chinese state and the apps they control like WeChat is worse in terms of what they do with the data (this social credit score etc). You're right. I was mainly thinking about the collection itself, not what is done with it.
What I mind mainly about Google is that they use it as payment for their services but don't provide any option to opt out and just pay with money. Though I suppose even if they did that at this stage, I wouldn't trust them.
Well, what about Huawei who want to send your data to China?
I wish I could do this. I have 32 GB space on my phone. Half of it is wasted on pre-installed junk I cannot delete because "it came with the phone". This involves games, or something like "Booking.com", and so forth.
Samsung is vastly worse. Consider off the bat that South Korea has wildly different (read ‘permissive and lax’) laws about police and government access to stored data.
There has never been any indication that Microsoft would unilaterally shut down Windows software. If fact they are uniquely open in terms of modern proprietary OS's.
Yes, so far they've ended up backpedaling every time they've tried to enforce the store, but it's pretty clear what their intentions are.
This honestly sounds like it could be a feature with the right automation. Devs are often separated from customers by multiple layers of "flappers" who's sole job is to triage, organize, and perform manual resolution of customer issues.
If your app is large enough to receive hundreds of issues a day, then it's likely there are entire teams of "flappers". What if that could be entirely automated such that customer complaints were grouped by pain point, and automatically ranked based on how many customers are affected and how severely they are affected?
This seems like an oddly practical problem to solve in 2021.
Perhaps they could integrate github and winget/snap (for the linux side).
Like, here your Github release page, just one extra click and you can automatically publish to winget (for Windows) and to snap (for Linux).
There's a more fundamental issue: GitHub issues are for developers to report bugs and file feature-requests, they aren't intended for user support, even if that's sometimes how they're used.
What's the controversy? Popcorn Time IS illegal. Butter-desktop however is not, and is still active on GitHub.
Go on...
As soon as someone starts complaining about "woke" and "SJWs" and "cancel culture" and so on, I know I can just switch off and disengage, as anything they have to say on the topic will be some reactionary bullshit they're parroting at me.
If you have something to say, then please just say it without couching it behind vague terms and "you can connect the dots yourself" conspiratorial thinking.
It’s been known as “political correctness”, “social justice warriors”, “wokeness” and certainly a bunch of other names. The fundamental premise doesn’t change because it’s rooted in some deeper fear.
I'm not saying that the response to it isn't rooted in some deeper fear, but that doesn't mean that the phenomenon they are afraid of doesn't exist.
I'm reluctant to name specific individuals, but there are people who embrace the "SJW" term for themselves. For example, the flair next to the username of this semi-famous developer[0] is a self-description that he is known for.[1]
Perhaps you could argue that he is being ironic, but it is a self-description and he certainly doesn't mean to mock people who identify that way.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2fddvg/im_matthew_ga...
[1] https://ostatic.com/blog/matthew-garrett-quits-kernel-to-do-...
Just like "cosmopolitan" is a neutral/positive adjective by its dictionary definition, but has a very negative connotation in certain right-wing and/or anti-Semite circles.
That's not how I took their response at all. I believe they were specifically picking up your derogatory use of the term "woke". If you meant "illiberal", why not use that term? It's far less ambiguous and less loaded.
The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen. But the goal of abandoning liberalism is not actually to abandon those things, but to actually really realize them.
The thesis is that our current systems are not principled either in their means or their ends.
And it is true. Free speech is proportional to your means to challenge threats to your livelihood. Rule of law, universality under the law, equality of opportunity, simply do not exist - depending mainly on your socio-economic status but also on other axes such as racial perception of the individual by society, and so on.
Equally, the thesis isn't that we shouldn't have color-blindness, simply that the current social and material reality makes this impossible. As a result of this, attempts/pretensions at color-blindness simply make the problem worse.
If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex. The exact same set of theories are applied to race, before racial abolition there must be a realization of the existence of racial identity (which is indeed the definition of race in the leftist sense - racial identity is completely orthogonal to traits and genetics, it is indeed a completely cultural and social phenomenon and process), then true racial equality, then essentially complete racial abolition.
Systems that actually provide real equality of opportunity will always provide actually equitable collective outcomes on the average.
Equally, the leftist opposition is not to markets themselves. The leftist opposition is to our current set of property relations and to the relationships of productions. Attempts to change those when the time is not opportune have been disastrous, so the aim is to compensate and slowly work towards actually fixing them using state intervention that ancillary limit the freedom of the free market. But there is no inherent opposition to markets at all.
This worldview is only a few decades younger than classical liberalism itself, and started with the disappointed third estate of the French Revolution. Put simply, the thesis is that classical liberalism failed to achieve its promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that making good on those promises requires more careful and less idealistic theories of society and social change than the idealist ones of classical liberalism.
I just thought you would enjoy not arguing against strawmen.
I would take issue with your first point: many of those who ascribe to these theories believe that the principles you mention like free speech are inherently platonic: they cannot be achieved in any meaningful sense, regardless of what is done, due to the inherent nature of human beings. The measures you refer to often do not have the goal of bringing about justice through mechanisms other than coercion of society against its inherent nature (Ie, by force.) So I would argue that many abandon the goal of achieving them in the first place due to their unattainability. Ironically, honest liberals acknowledge the realities of the difficulty of ever attaining them in full - however the liberalist approach is that there is no other moral effort other than to try to close the gap as small as reality will permit, and that ultimately the method of steady, incremental progress towards attaining these things will in fact result in the best of all possible worlds.
I also agree that steady, incremental progress has a lot of value, and that there is probably a bit more improvement that is feasible within the liberal framework, which is why I'm glad to work with liberals on those.
The issue I have with the liberal perspective on this is that most of the imperfection (or gross deficiency, depending on the specific aspect) ultimately originates in economics, both socially and economically. The result of this is that (reluctantly) I had to recognize that these deficiencies are not solvable within the liberal framework, as it presupposes the economic and social relations that cause the issues. That said, I don't think that this change of framework shouldn't be done incrementally, if such a thing is at all possible.
On the moral side, though arguing morals of the internet quickly gets hairy, the leftist argument (this one I consider incomplete), is that there is quite some absurdity in claiming that using coercion for the goal of changing social relations in a way that will clearly improve society, since liberal society itself is ultimately based on massive amounts of coercion, which is reproduced by the perpetuation of the current framework.
I'd also take issue with the idea that society has an inherent nature which social change butts against. Indeed, not only are the mechanisms for social change, coercive as they may be, themselves a part of society and not extrinsic to it, but there is very little in the way of inherent nature as far as society is concerned, as society itself has seen almost total change in a great many ways as the relationships between the self, the social, and the material changed.
That said, I certainly understand your position, and my goal wasn't really to attempt to debate which viewpoint is right - not only is it that I cannot fully do them justice, but the nuances of of each one of our contentions I think merit a full thread or more by themselves. I just think a lot of liberals do not really understand the illiberal left at all. I think the peak of this was the Peterson vs Zizek debate, where Peterson read the Communist Manifesto once, and then operated in idées reçues for the actual positions of the illiberal left, in the process completely missing the point and leading to a non-debate.
To address some of your points. You say
> The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen
Liberalism doesn't make a claim regarding whether or not things exist or not. It is a fixed compass of procedural principles. Completely consistent of means, independent of ends, and independent of the state of things. You can't say that "free speech doesn't exist in the real world," when free speech is a procedural description of the way the system should run. If there is a failure of free speech to be applied unilaterally, that isn't a failure of liberalism, so much as an implementation error, and a failure to actually run the system as described. Your argument is like saying that "habeas corpus doesn't exist because the Japanese were interned in WW2." Habeas corpus is a procedural description of a process. What happened in WW2 wasn't habeas corpus not existing, but an implementation failure where habeas corpus was not implemented.
Much of the liberal ethos was present in the country since the get-go, and the failures of the country were actually failures of implementation. How can you have slaves, how can you treat people differently in accordance with their race, how can women not vote, in a country whose espoused ethics describe systems that would in no way tolerate these failings? The strongest leaps forward in progress have come from making the claim "this is what the liberal ethos describes, and this is how you're failing at it." MLK or the suffragettes are making the case that they're being denied their ability to act as individual actors, being denied equality under the law.
Now, compare this to the modern left.
> If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex.
You have described the exact opposite of what the modern left is. In the 60s-00s, the movement regarding gender equality was primarily what I would have described as a liberal movement. One that is hyper focused on individualism, and asserting that identity could exist as independently from sex or race as one wanted. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, that is as valid an expression of what it means to be a female as any other variant. This is an anti-collective, purely individualistic position, and is spot on with the liberal assertions of individualism and (gender)-blindness.
The modern leftist position is a complete inversion of this. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, are you sure you're not a boy? Your gender presentation is rather male, you must at least be non-binary? Do you see how this is a complete inversion? It goes back to making the assertion that these gender expressions are actually fundamentally to be associated with fixed collectives. I find it to be a much more powerful expression for a man to have long hair, wear dresses and makeup, love whoever they want to love, and say "I'm a man, and this is what being a man means to me." I don't take any issue with that same person asserting that they're a woman, I just think, again, that it could not stand in starker opposition to what is clearly the extension of the liberal movement regarding gender identity.
I'd keep discussing more of your points, and I'd be happy to continue later, but I'm honestly slightly apprehensive by your tone that you might not actually be interested in a conversation. Like I said, though, if you're looking to continue the conversation genuinely, then I'd be happy to.
In summary, I think the illiberal left DO think that universality under the law, free speech, individualism, color-blindness, equality of opportunity shouldn't exist. Your argument is that they do think that they should exist, but believe that they don't exist. My case against this is that, not only do I virtually never see any of these things espoused as values by leftists, but often see them ridiculed. And as I said, these are all descriptions of procedural means, they are not ends. So you literally cannot believe in those things if the procedures you want to see implemented are done so in pursuit of corrective ends. I can't say I believe in free speech, but then restrict the speech that I think that is harmful to the equitable outcomes I want. Controlling speech in pursuit of outcomes is itself the opposite of what free speech is. The desired outcomes are irrelevant. To then say that leftists "don't believe these shouldn't exist," is not correct. They very much don't believe that these procedural systems should exist, because none of the procedures they design or implement remotely resemble any of these systems.
More seriously if you think that's a problem IMO the solution is to ask for better employee protection laws so that people can't be fired at will. This is not a free speech problem IMO, it's a worker right issue.
And if it turns out that her contract did mention that she shouldn't publicly engage in something that would damage the company's image or something of the sort, well, that's just the way it works really.
For anyone who doesn’t believe this is a thing, here’s a Washington Post article:
“Opinion: To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness”
Gab isn't a far right white supremacist website. It's just right wing Twitter. I don't understand where all this hyperbole comes from but it's a perfect example of the low-information individuals we have in society today.
Just take a quick look at the comments on the top stories in the “Gab trends” section:
https://trends.gab.com/item/60163b8f144291532b8bccb0 Bill gates conspiracy theorists
https://trends.gab.com/item/601682466beb1e3de3156fe1 “Pence is a traitor!”
https://trends.gab.com/item/6016992e144291532b8d5986 “Socialists are murderers!”
Are these normal right wing talking points?
I've seen equally whacky things trending on the left side, e.g. "Russian Ads on Facebook won Trump the election".
Why is that "whacky"? There were Russian ads.[1] They obviously intended to affect the election result (because why bother otherwise). Whether or not they were actually successful in affecting the election is unknowable. But it's not flat-earther-whacky to think they succeeded.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Social_media_ca...
I'm aware I'm biased, but in this case the facts are in plain sight for Russian ads. A Republican authored that report. You may think yourself unbiased by saying "both sides are the same" but both sides are in fact not the same at all.
The "right" may say the same about "election fraud" but saying is not the same as having a well-sourced report, and federal investigation that netted multiple indictments and convictions.
3 of the top 10 gab groups are pushing the Qanon conspiracy theory, one is pushing the “StopTheSteal” extremist movement.
Release integration is trivial for anyone. It's the easiest and most irrelevant part of the app stores.
> Unlike Google they actually listen to their users. They were awesome during youtube-dl debacle.
And controversial on others, like shutting down Popcorn Time's repository. As any other, they'll listen if there's enough outcry.
> Backed by Microsoft. Microsoft has been playing good by the developers for years now. I trust them more than Apple and Google.
This is situational and opportunistic. It can change any day. In fact, managing an important app store is exactly one way to re-(un)-balance this relationship.
> They could finally give the desktop the app store it deserves
Microsoft won't have GitHub compete with the Microsoft Store and its newer efforts like winget. It would unermine their unifying vision that has been in the works for years for no benefit.
> This is a minor but users will be able to raise issues with developers directly instead writing comments over app pages which I think you would agree completely suck.
Sure, lets pipe user feedback directly into GitHub issues. Good luck with that if you have a hundred issues a day.
I don't think there's a single angle that would paint this as a good idea. Phone manufacturers like Samsung are in a much much better position to try. And indeed they have been trying an failing.