If a business is paying for this product, then THEY (not you) are the customer. And in that context - yes, Microsoft may be asked or build a product for managers to manage their workforce, particularly if remote. This could involve presence tracking, engagement tracking (ie, do you open alerts / read your bug reports) etc.

One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees and also on employees who have gone on PIP's - then train the AI on that data set. You'd then be able to drive various alerts to manager and HR dashboards (ie, if a manager was failing to address alerts / manager their team it would be surfaced up a level).

Dystopia may be coming indeed. Remember, usually the key issue is not if product is a paid product, but are YOU paying for it. If not - someone else is the revenue source, and Microsoft et al will serve them. Maybe the individual licenses will not have this "management" layer add-on as an option.

But I think a very real chance of something like this occurring! If not right now eventually. In Sci-fi this is an inevitability (monitored through a smart watch or something etc).

> One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees and also on employees who have gone on PIP's - then train the AI on that data set.

I look forward to the papers on how to slack off on your job while the AI classifies you as "a straight shooter with upper management written all over him". Possible title: "An adversarial approach to the TwoBobs Productivity Classifier"

(/s if this was not clear)

Sadly, not /s.

I’ve been pitched the TwoBobs Productivity Classifier.

My feedback was anyone who needs it has classified themselves as an unproductive dev manager.

I suggested the concept be made available as being by devs, for devs, purposed as a personal coach, with no uplink to the mothership.

> I suggested the concept be made available as being by devs, for devs, purposed as a personal coach, with no uplink to the mothership.

Ah yes, the classic "foot in the door" approach. Despite all the good intentions behind it, it still would end badly.

As long as there's more demand than supply for SWE workers, something like that would never become the norm.

All of the dystopic news stories of WFH employees being subject to monitoring are invariably from fungible employees.

I often read on HN that it's a norm for US employers to install spying software on developers computers. I don't see how is it different. I would try to avoid from working in such a companies, because I don't feel secure knowing that someone is spying on me.

> I often read on HN that it's a norm for US employers to install spying software on developers computers.

I haven't heard of this happening at all.

Whereas it is commonplace for people to use time-tracking software (like Toggl, RescueTime, etc) - and it is also not-uncommon for companies to require employees to use such software (software-eng or otherwise) for the purposes of reporting their time/hours/what-they're-doing, they all have web-based UIs for doing data-entry: which is definitely not the same thing as installing monitoring software on an employees' own personal hardware with or without their informed consent and it being a condition of employment.

I think people are getting terms-conflated and using overloaded terms with negative connotations: "time tracking software" which does active-software-application-window-tracking for the benefit of the direct user can easily be mischaracterized as "monitoring software".

Not only have I heard of this happening, it's literally on my computer right now! Most of the monitoring on it is automated - but I also write that software. There's not a lot of ML involved in the kinds of automated activity checking that my employer is doing, but if they suspected I was not being productive, they could basically pull my entire body of network requests, which at the very least has addresses of sites, and can tell you roughly how long someone spent on them. Since 90% of my work is on the internet, this is pretty effective spying.

Interestingly, I'd much prefer Microsoft's algorithms classifying me as productive or unproductive, based on how I code - while there's a lot to be said for different patterns of work being equally productive, I trust Microsoft to implement the same heuristics across the board, and not take a look at my gender and race and make assumptions about me based on that.

(Of course, since the ML data of productivity will come from nearly entirely white males, if it's only available to github enterprise cloud subscribers, then the ML data will be pretty biased as it is. Guess discrimination is inevitable!)

> but are YOU paying for it. If not - someone else is the revenue source

even if you are paying for it, it's quite possible that they also have other revenue sources that conflict with your interests.

Exactly, this heuristic doesn't work all (or even most?) of the times. A more accurate approach is to rely on the terms you agree to when you buy/use software (if you don't want to read them, then you can depend on faulty shortcuts instead).

> if you don't want to read them, then you can depend on faulty shortcuts instead

Or refuse to use software that requires you to agree to long and confusing terms and conditions.

I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).

Everyone is already doing it. Not to engineers yet, but look at Amazon warehouses.

These things are always deployed against the least powerful first.

It's also easiest to implement in the warehouse.

Do you have a right to privacy in the workplace?

Back in the day the boss would be right there with you in the store etc and could watch you all the time.

Or maybe this will be something that really only shows up in china etc? I think they are a bit further along on some of these types of things.

I prefer to say "they're a bit less developed on some of these types of things". Their attitude is still very much that of the Industrial Revolution, where a worker was no more than a replaceable meat unit with no rights and no expectations of a life of any kind outside of productive work.

You don't have the same rights to privacy when performing your job for a corporation, and everyone else is already doing it in other industries.

Just this week was a big story about how a call center provider (used by Apple and others) was forcing employees to install cameras in their own homes to monitor their remote work: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-...

I was just going to mention customer service reps, who traditionally would have worked out of call centers and been subject to restrictions to make it more difficult for them to steal customer data (with the side 'benefit' of micromanaging productivity). With the pandemic, businesses that had considered CS staff they couldn't replace with AI as not sitting for remote were forced to figure out a way, and that way was essentially to replicate many of the security conditions of the call centers in the home, rationalized as a necessity to keep people employed and get through the pandemic. But let's be real, CS has long been a race to the bottom cost segment, often outsourced and run as a computer with a mere human overlay. So it was only a matter of time before management was satisfied that the security risks were mitigated enough to justify the new coat savings. Some big companies have already decided to stick with the home-based support setups they put in place only because of the pandemic. And now to apply the formula elsewhere.

Customer support is a computer with a mere human overlay. A profound statement.

I am not sure what is possible in other jurisdictions such as the EU, but I have not seen something like this so far.

I'm not sure about individual member states, but there was this story in Germany the other day:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/gdpr-german-laptop-retailer-fi...

€10M fine for keeping employees under video surveillance for no good reason.

This is an example showing that there are limits to employee surveillance on-site.

In the US, or in Europe?

woah, this is bonkers !

What’s a DPA, please?

Data Protection Authority

I believe it's data privacy advocate?

Data Processing Agreement: https://gdpr.eu/data-processing-agreement/

Thank you!

Not that hard to imagine, it's happening already in their other products[0], it's what the management wants.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198713

It doesn't matter who is paying for the product. You could pay for the product and they could still add usage terms about monetizing and sharing your personal data.

I think that any workplace that would do this in the future, is already doing similarly toxic things. This isn't an excuse - there's a danger in commodifying and making things like this even easier - but there's already shit workplaces out there with plenty of red flags.

> It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them.

Replace Facebook with another major ad company, and you are basically describing the most popular browser right now.

If they do, the competition is just a click away: https://www.gitpod.io/

Stackblitz Webcontainers[0] look promising too. I read the creators plan on open-sourcing the underlying tech once more mature.

0. https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/

Yes for all of us but all corporate clients will flock to github to benefit from those surveillance capabilities.

How about moving all our code off GitHub while we're at it?

In this worst case scenario (which hasn't happened yet), I'm sure GitHub would expect the good will of open source projects and contributors while simultaneously being the boot on their face in the workplace.

I have projects on github because some of my clients requested it. My own projects stay off. Other than renting physical servers I do not use a single piece of software for my own business that forces me to subscribe and be online.

I've been on sourcehut for a while now. It's great.

Unfortunately it's your company that signs up to this sort of thing, not you.

As slownew45 points out, Github does not make money from individuals who use it for free. Of course such use will become increasingly difficult over time for Microsoft pinheads to justify from a business perspective. Telemetry, full-on surveillance and ultimately subtle manipulation of individual software authors seems an obvious choice to try to justify why Github should continue to allow non-paying individuals to use their repository.

The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google.

> The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google.

Google were already making money off targeted ads at that point. There was even an outcry about GMail scanning people’s emails several years before Chrome was released. But you could probably argue that we didn’t fully appreciate just how bad things would get at that stage. Many of us were just happy to see Microsoft get some competition.

> we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google.

I still try to, but it’s a lost battle already. (Don’t use Chrome, BTW.)

The fact that they will be able to do it, is problem, we should not put ourselves in position to rely on their future morality.

Github at this point needs to be open source, atleast then they would be an easier way out.

Lol, like Microsoft paid the billions to give it out now for free. Besides, do you want your index funds to do well? Because that's exactly where the proceeds go to.

More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user.

Don't want to rely on Microsoft for GitHub? The underlying 'git' is open source. Just deal with your git repos raw.

No one is forcing you to use github.

This is completely false. Microsoft bought GitHub to appeal to developers. They had TFS and Azure DevOps with Git for years before the purchase. I'm also 100% certain Microsoft was/is not GitHub's largest customer.

You don’t pay $7.5B for things which are “floundering economically” usually. It was a strategic buy, and likely reflects a healthy multiple on revenue. Kudos to Microsoft for being the one to get the deal done, I’m very confident GitHub had multiple suitors.

> More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user.

Yeah they paid 7.5B so they can continue using their favorite web app? This is possibly the most naive take I've read on it that ignores any of the strategic reasons for actually acquiring them.

>More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user.

Was it a common knowledge at the time? I don’t recall seeing info about MS being largest user and unfortunately their newspost on acquisition returns an error…

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...

> More than that, github was floundering economically

I do not think we actually know that. Was there any release of any financial data?

Also, part of the "beauty" of the modern "tech" giants is that they manage to find alternative sources of revenue, in some cases (notably Google and Facebook) completely replacing the old school user subscription revenue. By and large people seem to be OK selling their data for either a price reduction or complete price removal for services. It is what it is.

Github is not the only git web frontend. I worked with Gerrit (fully open source) for a while and really enjoyed it.

Github wasn't profitable but had plenty of marketshare to guarantee more funding.

Also Microsoft has plenty of infrastructure and did not need Github. How do you think Windows and Office were built for decades?

Wow. I have memories reading Github is a bootstrapped, profitable and dominant 90 person company. What happened to profitability?

Venture capital happened: https://archive.is/1t6qi

Github does not need to be open source.

Open source needs to pull its head out of its collective ass and not hand over its entire workflow to private companies.

Github may be the single greatest execution of embrace/extend/extinguish in computing history.

Where are we seeing the extend or extinguish with GitHub? It's been 3.5 years and GitHub is just as compatible with git as it has ever been.

Microsoft plays a very long game. 3-4 years is not enough time to boil a frog; it takes much longer or the frog will realize what's happening. Be patient. Give them 10-15 years after their "We love Linux" shift and you'll see. They love it so much, they will own it.

Just think of Microsoft like the Borg.

Microsoft is a trillion dollar company in large part because they embraced open source. Azure is extraordinarily profitable.

Why would they fuck with their number one audience, developers?

According to this site, Microsoft's profit is divided into thirds:

https://www.investopedia.com/how-microsoft-makes-money-47988...

A third is for Office, a third for cloud, and a third is Windows.

IMO Microsoft is a trillion-dollar company because of their long monopoly with Windows. It's so entrenched that their "punishment" for abusing their monopoly position (according to the DOJ) was to give all schools free copies of Microsoft Office, thereby forcing every parent to own a copy of Microsoft office to be able to read reports from their kids' schools. Ingenious!

You know why they would fuck with developers? Because developers have choices now, and Microsoft doesn't like it when anyone has a choice besides Microsoft. They are remedying that.

You know how they added Github CLI[0], right? There may be a time where you must use Github CLI instead of a "standard" git client to interact with Github projects. That would be the "extinguish" phase. Right now they have embraced and are extending (such as with Github CLI).

[0] https://cli.github.com/

If you wish to leverage the advanced features of github, the CLI gives you direct access rather than rolling your own api client. git will always be a first class citizen at GIThub.. but how do you open, close, or comment on PRs with a standard git client?

Edit: The last part came across a bit snarky, but I’m trying to stimulate the thought process. Such as leveraging GitHub Actions to automate all aspects of PRs via gitops instead of using the GitHub client. Many ways to avoid dependence of the CLI!

As another commenter pointed out, we're at extend part of embrace, extend, extinguish. This part is just making Github tools work easier than non Github.

In extinguish phase - Git won't prevent GitHub from rejecting a commit if it doesn't contain <TrackingMethodSignature>.

That sounds very much like the "extend" part of the process.

It feels like an open source standard on top of git that defines how to do this stuff would be helpful to reduce lockin. I wonder if Fossil or Gitlab have something.

I made this comment elsewhere [0], but by this logic anyone who builds an ecosystem for an open source tool should be accused of the EEE strategy.

> There may be a time where you must use Github CLI instead of a "standard" git client to interact with Github projects

So we're accusing MS of a slippery slope based on a phrase from 25 years ago, which there is absolutely zero proof or indication of them pursuing in the last decade (at least).

When GitHub show the _slightest_ inclination to do anything of the sort, I will be standing there with you, screaming blue murder. As of right now, they're progressing the development of git, "embracing" the open standards that have been developed (lfs being exemplary) and have shown absolutely zero signs of extending git in incompatible ways. See elasticsearch [1] for what "extend" _actually_ looks like.

> Right now they have embraced and are extending (such as with Github CLI).

If they _hadn't_ embraced, people would be complaining that GH are forcing non-open standards to be used. I firmly disagree that the GH issue tracker and pull request management are an "extension" of git. They have nothing to do with git whatsoever.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28149098 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28110610

> I made this comment elsewhere [0], but by this logic anyone who builds an ecosystem for an open source tool should be accused of the EEE strategy.

Yes, of course.

Why, did you somehow think otherwise?

In practice, it doesn't matter what an "actual" extension looks like, but how your product is viewed by customers, because those are the ones you want to lock in. And judging by HN comments, to very many people, Git means Github, making it an extension, if not outright a synonym.

And their extending has nothing to do with open standards, which is worrying due to the potential to create lock-in.

By that logic, anyone who builds a product around an open standard is guilty of EEE. A web browser that implements a sync feature, an XML editor that implements syntax highlighting , an RSS reader that implements link previews all "embrace" open source standards and "extend" their core open standards with non-standard features, which is _exactly_ what github have done. They have been excellent players in the git ecosystem.

I think this conundrum can be broken up by noticing how pervasive one extension is. A feature that has become identical with the core product in the eyes of a layman is problematic in the same way as thinking "IE6" is the same as "the web". If there's no awreness of choice, then the only outcome is further lock-in.

Implementing "sync" on its own doesn't matter that much, because few people think "sync" is a defining feature of the web standards, or that preview is an inherent part of web feeds. The awareness of alternatives still exists (I hope).

That's the trick, the git is open, but the metadata is what matters. Issues, PRs, integrations into various code auditing services. That's the whole "extend" bit.

By that logic any proprietary product that provides an interface with an open source tool is guilty. I think accusing MS of EEE in this case is a huge stretch; GitHub is a commercial product that uses a popular open source tool with 100% compatibility (that I'm aware of) and actively participates in the development and features of that tool. When Ms start implementing extensions to git that only work with GitHub, we can point fingers but accusing them of extending git to extinguish based on pull requests is baseless

> By that logic any proprietary product that provides an interface with an open source tool is guilty.

In my view, the entire PaaS ecosystem modus operandi is building on top of open hardware & software, allowing and enticing people to move in easily (familiar tech/open source), and making locked-in products out of them. If that's not EEE I don't know what is.

I can’t think of a single person I’ve worked with in the last 10 years who understands the difference between vanilla git and GitHub. Nobody really understands why pull requests are named that way, or that it’s possible to have very different workflows to what GitHub offers.

I don’t know that this is the result of a deliberate strategy by GitHub, but by any metric the extend step is a resounding success.

> I can’t think of a single person I’ve worked with in the last 10 years who understands the difference between vanilla git and GitHub.

If not one developer in a decade can tell the difference between a source control hosting service and a tool they use, that's not really GitHub's problem. This is the same as my parents not konwing that "facebook" isn't the internet.

> Nobody really understands why pull requests are named that way,

Sure they do, the answer is one google search away on the largest Q&A forum for programmers [0]. it was the first google hit for "why are pull requests called pull requests"

> or that it’s possible to have very different workflows to what GitHub offers.

Maybe inside your circle, but plenty of people are aware of different workflows. Some of the largest open source projects in the world exist on github and don't use the pull request workflow (linux kernel, firefox, chromium off the top of my head).

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14817051/why-does-github...

> If not one developer in a decade can tell the difference between a source control hosting service and a tool they use, that's not really GitHub's problem. This is the same as my parents not konwing that "facebook" isn't the internet.

Nobody said it was GitHub's problem just like nobody said it's Facebook's problem in your example. They're both laughing their heads off all the way to the bank. It's everybody else's problem.

GitHub isn't the only one using pull requests, Stash and Gitlab does too. Pull requests have just become standard workflow without it ever being part of git.

FWIW, Gitlab calls them merge requests instead of pull requests, which IMO is a more descriptive name.

there's never a stretch with Microsoft. It is always, and has always been the same play. You can make excuses all you like, but in the end they will attemtp to embrace, extend and extinguish all competition.

Wheh they show any signs of extending git, or extinguishing any other open source competitors, I will be standing there with you calling them out. Until then, they're developing an excellent product that people want to use, built with open tooling

Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.

I'm arguing against soundbytes here, which is really unfortunate and something I hoped would be above HN. It's very easy to shut down an argument with a soundbyte or a famous quote when you don't have any actual proof that history is repeating itself. The situation and landscape is _very_ different from the mid 90s, Microsoft are showing _no_ indication of being bad actors whatsoever, (in fact they're showing the exact opposite) and haven't done for at least a decade.

We're down to soundbites because all of the arguments already happened and we're down to agree to disagree. You are basically asking for proof of a future event already occuring when the best we can do is look at the historic behavior of not just MS but similar companies. Your entire stance is to ignore any historical trends or behavior and only agree once the damage is already done. There's no constructive argument to be had there.

Effectively you're saying that all decision making should be based on current observable reality only and any projections about the future should be ignored because they are not 100% provable. I guess that's a way to function, and based on how bad people often get the future wrong it might even be a productive one, but it does explain why we're down to soundbites, because we've reached a fundamental disagreement not on opensource or Github, but a disagreement on how to plan for the future.

If you're going to tell me to look at the history, then I should tell you to do the same. The history says the did it, 25 years ago, and haven't been doing it for almost 20. The history says they are being good citizens in all their open source contributions in the last decade. It says they're actively working to further the open standards they're building on. At a certain point, a specific incident becomes an outlier, which is a point I believe we have passed.

That is somewhat fair - there aren't great alternatives to migrate issues and the like to today. But all of those bits of metadata are easy to pull out of the service via API hooks. If someone wanted to start a serious competitor to github that shares the same basic data model it'd be pretty trivial to write up migration aides.

I don't disbelieve that it's possible for microsoft to severely restrict these - but entirely removing them is off the table unless they cut out a lot of value. Inter-service communication to third party review tools and CI/CD tools all depend strongly on those API hooks.

> If someone wanted to start a serious competitor to github that shares the same basic data model it'd be pretty trivial to write up migration aides.

Like Gitlab? I assumed Gitlab would dominate after the MS purchase of Github, but I was incorrect that people wouldn't want to trust their data and personal projects to the epic abusers of privacy that is Microsoft.

Well I don't think the personal projects are really a significant factor in terms of where MS's paychecks are coming from - they care more about the commercial subscribers. And, speaking as someone employed at a commercial subscriber, objecting to continuing to use github due to the microsoft acquisition when we use office for pretty much all document production is going to be a pretty hard argument.

There are really simple ways to play dirty with APIs like making sure that they are incomplete in subtle and inconvenient ways like leaving out some of the metadata. Hypothetical example: make it impossible to query tags on issues. You'd still be able to do most things through the API, but if you have a workflow that's heavily dependent on tags, the data is effectively siloed.

So to be clear, the proof the GitHub is extending is a hypothetical example of an incomplete api that is not based on an open standard?

I didn't want to prove anything. I just pointed out what is possible.

Sorry, I misread the username and assumed you were the commentor I replied to. Yes, these things are _possible_ but there is no evidence or indication that they are happening with Github.

I agree that there are no signs at the moment. Companies change over time, so a certain risk - however small - is present, as with all 3rd party services.

Are there any foss initiatives to making these metadata bits portable?

What is going to be extinguished?

> Open source needs to pull its head out of its collective ass and not hand over its entire workflow to private companies.

Well, for starters, there is GitLab which attempts to do a lot of what GitHub does, while allowing you to self host it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab

In some respects, i'd say that it does things better, for example, GitLab CI seems way easier to use in comparison to GitHub Actions: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/

As far as alternative source code management platforms go, with some code review and issue management functionality added on top, there is also Gogs, which is a far more lightweight solution and better fits smaller deployments: https://github.com/gogs/gogs

It was also forked by the Gitea project, which is largely compatible with it but is also in active development: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

Oh and there's also GitBucket which also attempts something similar to these: https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket

Now, you can probably hook those up with Jenkins or most other CI solutions, but personally i rather enjoyed how Gogs/Gitea integrated with Drone, which allowed for container based builds (no more plugin hell like in Jenkins): https://github.com/drone/drone

Then, you can throw in some additional tools, for example, for code analysis you could use SonarQube ( https://github.com/SonarSource ) and for security scanning of infrastructure you could look at OpenVAS ( https://github.com/greenbone ).

Oh, and on the organizational side something like Rocket.Chat ( https://github.com/RocketChat ) or Mattermost ( https://github.com/mattermost ) for communication and perhaps OpenProject ( https://github.com/opf/openproject ) for project management.

And there you have it! An open source based workflow that allows you to do most of the stuff that GitHub would let you! Of course, concessions might need to be made depending on what your definition of "open" is and whether you're okay with certain features being restricted to paid tiers in some software; if you do have a problem with that, there's also the possibility of looking at some libre alternatives, though that might lead to the occasional half-dead piece of software that doesn't really have financial incentives for maintenance anymore on anyone's part.

That said, i believe that few choose this approach, because it's somewhat complicated to run all of that and all of the sudden you become responsible for your own SLAs, which many don't want. It's often the same reason why people just provision VPSes from AWS, instead of running their own servers in a server room. I think the amount of links to GitHub for open source above speaks volumes about the state of the industry.

I don't think that there's an easy answer to the implications of this, maybe people should just familiarize themselves with the concept of "Service as a Software Substitute", so that they're at least aware of the trade-offs that their choices have: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

GitLab CI is not only easier to use , it also isn't a half-baked product like GitHub Actions.

For example, GH Actions don't support YAML anchors but also have basically no other way of cutting down on repetition in your CI config files (actions can't call other actions, for example), so your CI config is full of brittle boilerplate.

Also noteworthy is how you can't rerun single actions. If your deployment failed, you might have to rerun the whole workflow, including the 10 min test run.

Meanwhile, if you use dependabot, PRs issued by that tool have no access to secrets, so if you need to connect to e.g. AWS to run tests, you need to implement weird workarounds.

I don't understand why GitHub is so popular, GitLab seems like such a better tool and it's also developed totally in the open. Some of the CI stuff is literally amazing (e.g. merge trains).

Technically speaking, Microsoft is a public company. A private company implies not open to investment on a public market.

This is not the first time I see this exact pedantry on HN and I can't help but feel the same way as with people who immediately yell "it's not free! Nothing in life is free!" when you talk about free healthcare or free public transportation.

We know. We understand that it is technically correct. But it's completely useless in the discussion. You know perfectly well what the other person meant.

You are technically correct - but it's overly pedantic. Another commonly accepted definition of public companies outside of the US is companies that are partially or wholly owned by the government and thus act as a public service. This includes crown corporations in Canada or the USPS in the US. I think within the context they used that calling Microsoft a private company is fair since they have no obligation to "act in the public good".

> Github may be the single greatest execution of embrace/extend/extinguish in computing history.

Oh ffs are you even aware that MS didn't originally build GitHub?

And your comment is super out of touch with what MS was doing in the 90s and early 00s. GitHub has plenty of competition, Gitlab for example is a fantastic platform, overall more powerful than GitHub as well. GH's strength is how much better it is for open source projects and if MS messes with that they'll be killing their golden goose.

There is no all-powerful benevolent deity you can hand your code to and say "here, take care of this for me, for free, for all eternity". At some point private companies will have to get involved (or would you rather have your government get involved instead? Because I don't want your government hosting my code). So you want their incentives to be nicely aligned.

> Oh ffs are you even aware that MS didn't originally build GitHub?

Purchasing a popular product is definitely qualifies for the "embrace" part of the strategy.

But that's not unique to MS - AWS and Google follow similar playbooks, as does almost any large company that provide a platform-like product. The goal is to make the platform as sticky as possible for as many customers as possible.

If your employer decides that they need such an analytics dashboard, one that is spying on every keystroke, then they will have one. That one doesn't depend on you working on a laptop, or in a remote environment - the company owns and is administrating that laptop, and they can install everything they regard as necessary.

Therefore the real question is if Codespaces is helping to get your job done; I guess that depends on the complexity and structure of the code, the complexity of the build environment/how you work with the CI environment and how the project is being deployed. I guess that this complex of issues will increasingly dictate how things will get done - if these are too complex, then you are better off with a remote environment.

Upon re-examination: if github/microsoft is owning the analytics data gathered from monitoring the keystrokes, then they are a third party, and could possibly make that data available across time; so that a prospective employer can get a view on past performance of a candidate, or the new employer will have access to analytics data gathered on you while working at a previous company. Now that one has the potential to make the whole thing much more sinister. There might be a big difference between the situation where your current employer has a keylogger on you, as compared to the keylogger sitting in the cloud. Grandparent poster Bogwog has a solid argument here.

It all depends if the industry will act this way or not, I still hope that there is some level of desency left somewhere, because being too paranoid about all of it will not get me anyway either. Also the utility of all this analytics data is limited, for example they could possible get the 'number of lines of code' written by someone, but it is impossible to judge how essential all these lines of code were to the business. Also there would be a significant backlash, if they get too invasive on the privacy of developers. (that's the moment for the video where Steve Balmer is flipping out on stage and shouting 'developers' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY )

Don't underestimate trivial inconveniences[0]. There's a difference between being able to install employee surveillance in principle, and having it handed to you on a golden platter.

Some manager may toy with an idea of getting IT to install and manage monitoring software, but ultimately reject it as not worth the cost. But if the company starts to work over something like Codespaces - even if only for purely technical reasons - then suddenly they'll find themselves having a dashboard for free, and for sure they'll start using it.

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[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...

On second thought, the move to remote environments may have an interesting side effect: if people are no longer familiar with setting up their local development environments, then it will be a bit harder to set up their own side projects to tinker and try out new stuff; in a reality where everyone is working on a remote/preset environment, we will have just another small, but very significant inhibition to deal with our own side projects.

now there is a bit of an irony - github helped open source, now this development will be very helpful to corporate software developers, but might turn out to be harmful to open source as such.

I don’t know if this is a good indicator or not, but Codespaces costs money. So there is a non-zero probability that you are not the product.

Businesses can both charge money for a service and sell / analyze user data. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

I agree. But as a rule of thumb, if someone gives you the service for free, they have no choice but to collect value from you by other means. Whereas when you pay money for the service, the business does have a choice not to sell your data. Either way, I guess we need to read the terms to be sure.

If a company has a certain type of investors or shareholders, they may have no choice but to collect value from you all means possible regardless of how much value they are already collecting.

One very underrated (or overrated depending on your pessimism) way to deliver value to customers is by offering privacy as one of the products you deliver. The issue is that privacy is hard to prove and so most claims of privacy are accepted at face value and many proclaimed privacy minded services are very much the opposite under the hood.

This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions. We could potentially manage the definitions as an industry group - but we'd need the government to get the big stick.

> This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions.

I 100% agree with you, but doubt this will ever happen in a heavily pro-surveillance government in an effective corporatocracy. Therefore, I think open source can and needs to do better in providing free competition against potentially-dystopian closed-source alternatives

> Codespaces costs money.

It's going to be paid by your employer which leads to GP's concern about,

> or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did)

Which is more likely. If your employer sets something like this up - will they use it to calculate a productivity score and use that for lay offs? Seems rather probable to me.

My company is stupid, but not that stupid. We already have vast amounts of data about checkins that could, in the hands of a stupid person, be used to create stupid developer metrics for performance evaluation, and yet I've never once in my many cross-team performance ranking meetings heard a manager who had the gall to trot out "lines of code" as a serious metric for comparing people. And I'm at a FAAMNG. ;)

Windows also costs money and is chock full of spyware.

Businesses rarely ever leave money on the table.

If they can sell the product AND sell developer productivity metrics to management, they will.

Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 costs money, but they still analyze your activity and report so called "productivity score". Maybe not sell, but I have no doubt they will analyze the data if they can.

Unfortunately, that rule doesn't apply to Microsoft and the other tech giants.

I would like for MS to collect information that would make the product better. If there is a feature that I am always using, i want them to know it so that they can either improve it or not get rid of it.

Context is hugely important, and equally important is not to get sucked in by the HN echo chamber - that is, consider the MS of _now_ as opposed to that of 15 years ago which HN likes to bash (and give a free pass to other companies doing nefarious things). The FB example is considering the FB of _now_ and not 15 years ago.

In terms of the biggest companies in the sector, MS has been doing much more for developers and developer productivity than others. At the same time it's not a monolith and so you should not expect boyscout behavior either.

Privacy is a concern, and the onus is on you the user to ensure that you remain in control of your data. When using a service (any service), the answer is to always be ready to bail at a moment's notice. That means using source control and not tying yourself to a specific ecosystem.

> consider the MS of _now_

Not sure if that's supposed to be an argument for using/trusting MS.

The levels of user and privacy hostility they went to (and are continuously going to) with Windows 10/11 makes me see this as a strong argument against.

The MS that's killing their own single most popular product, Windows, with anti-user features, is the MS of now. Releasing VS code and WSL doesn't redeem their sins.

is this not another example of the 'HN echo chamber'? Is Windows market share budging? Windows currently is by far not the worst iteration of the OS and nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades

> nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades

The one thing that used to set Microsoft apart from the likes of Google and Facebook was that their main product, Windows, was not anti-user. No matter what you thought about the OS or Microsoft's business practices, it was a paid piece of software that worked for the user. Windows now is filled with user-hostile features and it works for MS instead. And they don't even grant us the courtesy of giving it away for free.

Market share or the fact that the public at large isn't punishing them for it doesn't mean anything. It was already clear that most people are willing to walk headfirst into a dystopia.

If i sum all the instances of Ubuntu but doing what i wanted it to do and compare that to the dystopia that windows theoretically exposes me to I'm not sure what's better tbh. But if you want to play modern games on your PC then the choice of OS has been made for you.

The fact that microsoft's user hostile moves haven't affected windows' market share does very little to reassure people that they won't pull similar shit with any other product.

By the same reasoning, since we're talking about data collection, and that data doesn't just disappear in most cases, consider the MS, FB and Google of 15 years in the future. Given the changes already mentioned, what can we reliably say about them, other than that massive change is at least possible, and possibly even likely?

This is why I don't like Google collecting data on me now. Not because I don't trust them now, I for the most part still think them trustworthy, but 15 years is a long time and there's no way I can intelligently trust that they will act in a certain way 15 years from now, given the available information at my disposal.

And that's with a company that I think is heavily incentivized monetarily and has a strong employee culture of keeping data private and in-house. Until there are better laws protecting my data or a clear legal relationship with me and an entity with regards to my data, I think the only prudent course of action is to keep as much information about me as possible out of their and others hands.

You think? I'm just completely drained and I want Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, to get off my lawn.

https://rentry.co/areweweloveopensauceyet

Top comments always have to be so negative every time there’s something cool on the front page…

That's because people here have grown up and see the world for what it is, how products like these play out, how incentives around them are structured. Most of the cool things like this are bait.

Seriously. It takes extreme naivety to take a SaaS business at face value today. Patterns of exploitation are well-established and easy to spot. Once you see this a couple of times, including in offerings you got so excited about - or worse, you get burned by them personally - it's hard to be anything but bitchy about tech.

The comments may be negative, but the bigger problem is that they're also not wrong.

Look how tech is employed against lower wage workers. It is a good idea to be extremely vigilant about anything "reporting". I think people working in tech have a responsibility to not behave like 14-year old fangirls.

The business incentive is quite easy. It is to evaluate code monkeys and to quantify development efficiency in the eyes of a salesmen, those that approve projects at Microsoft and possibly GitHub. They want to offer services to large corporate entities and they deem this valuable. Call it collaborative and something-cloud and you have your green-lit project.

The road is to quantify the work in small packages is a decent one though, dissect a problem until only trivial tasks remain.

Still, I think your intuition is pretty much on point. But with anything, just take the features you like. If your business can dictate this for you, search for other businesses. Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of those, although pay might indeed be a bit lower.

So, maybe? But these products already exist. Your company doesn't need to pay Microsoft to get that data, they can install stuff on your work machine and get all that info right now.

Semi serious answer: couple of years ago we devs used to joke about putting ourselves out of business by teaching AIs how to code. I guess the joke's no longer funny; I also guess current situation shouldn't be a surprise.

> code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc

That's not the most valuable info at all.

What would be valuable is to know which ecosystem, languages and tech people are investing time and resources into. These are the ones you need to prioritize for your dev tools. For instance, Microsoft decided to invest in supporting Rust https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rus... as well as making sure .NET works on all OS.

> or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did)

When a competitor decides to start using these, it's awesome. You get a nice window of opportunity to poach high performers.

They already do with Teams. Of course they will do it here sooner or later as well.

Yes, and that is how they will train the AI that will replace us all. It's a brilliant strategy, so I can't help but play along.

Of course.

I’m surprised Facebook hasn’t yet. I kinda assume that Facebook isn’t a browser on iOS simply because that’d make it a 18+ app.

> It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them.

Is this satire? A little too on the nose, you know cause Google…