On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 12:40:06PM +0300, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > On Du, 12 apr 20, 10:52:08, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: > > > > But in a more general sense... > > > > - the snotty way to put it is that they have the Midas touch [...] > I am a strong believer of Hanlon's razor. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor I'm usually too, but within limits. There's also this bastard of Clarke's Third Law and Hanlon's Razor: "Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity". > > - the more philosophical way would be to go philosophical about > > cultural hegemony [...] > So far it seems Microsoft's intention is to use Github to host its own > Open Source software while also making a profit from it. Nothing wrong > with any of that. Yah, but $7B is a hell of a lot of money. Do we know how much Github makes a year? > Could Github disappear at some point due to bad management? Sure it > could, just as well as with any other owner. There is no guarantee that > it would have done better without Microsoft. > > Could Microsoft at some point change hosting policies or even close it > down completely? Sure they can, and they would be fully within their > rights as owner trying to make a profit. > > Would that make like harder for projects hosted there? Sure it will, > they might need to migrate, and not only the repositories themselves, > but also issues, pages, etc. > > Will the software disappear due to that? Unlikely in my opinion, even if > only due to git's distributed nature (local checkouts are in general > full clones). I do strongly agree on all of those points. My blathering about cultural hegemony and that is just: mindshare. People already believed that git "is Github" (at my old workplace, most people didn't know the difference). That's what imho worth $7B to Microsoft. If they succeed in driving that nail deeper, the more, the merrier. As a free software advocate, I'd like to see that nail go away, as you might understand :-) > The acquisition by Microsoft also served as a reminder that no one > platform is guaranteed to exist forever. > > It also helped increase the popularity of Gitlab (and others) which in > addition to a hosting platform is also (mostly) free software that can > be deployed on own infrastructure (as Debian does). That was actually > quite a good outcome :) Yah, but :) This wouldn't have happened without Microsoft having the bad reputation it already has, and that's why I see it as my responsibility to remind people of all those episodes: the mentioned Nokia thing. The ballot stuffing in the OOXML standardization process. And all those little, nasty worsenings of open standards to gain some market advantage. Granted, "the others" are as bad, but size and longevity matter. Cheers -- t
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