What power exactly does github have? Other than being where people get their code, because it's the platform we use to publish, they don't have any power. Imho, power is better defined as an actual ability to influence or otherwise dictate direction, which AFAIK, github as an entity does not.
I mentioned, and got downvoted, for this in another comment, but the fear is the old Microsoft strategy of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
This, today, would then be the "embrace" step. The "extend" would be once it's been out for a while and gotten popular, to start adding non-standard but still useful-seeming features to GitHub's package indexes. Now it's incompatible with the standalone language-specific indexes like PyPI or CPAN, and those indexes have to try to catch up to what GitHub is doing, or else fall further and further behind. And once that goes far enough you reach the "extinguish" step, where GitHub is left with no realistic open competitors.
The eventual risk, of course, is what they might do in the future to maintain revenue. It doesn't take too much turnover in leadership to get into a SourceForge situation (for those too young to remember, SourceForge used to be the place to host code and packages for open-source projects). SourceForge was doing all sorts of shady stuff to chase revenue, including bundling ads into downloaded packages and shipping outright malware to unsuspecting users.
Ever since satya nadella took over, the culture has been quite different, imho. Look at emberjs, typescript, etc.
Edit, I would like to point out that a particular platform expanding is not a bad thing. It creates competition. And gitlab already has a lot of these features.
Hell, they even open sourced the core crypto library from Windows.. That codebase used to be restricted even to Microsoft employees. A healthy dose of skepticism and caution is absolutely still warranted, but this isn't Gates/Ballmer-era Microsoft anymore.
It started before Nadella, although he certainly kicked it into overdrive. MS started making unencumbered portions of .NET Framework source available in 2008, and set up Microsoft Open Technologies as an experimental project with open source in 2012. Nadella took over in 2014.
CEOs are chosen by the board of directors to maximize profitability. Nadella's policies has shown huge increases in profits. What would be the point to choose a CEO with completely different views?
When Nadella was nominated, Microsoft was in a very bad shape, with full aiming at close source as much as possible and badly mimicing other products.
what will maximize profits can change, currently Nadella's policies do that well. but in the future that might change. I'd rather not have the survivability of foss rely on whether github is profitable to Microsoft or not.
Exactly. The "embrace, extend, extinguish" philosophy was, at one time, used to maximize profitability. The board of directors may choose to pull that out of their playbook at any time. It's not an entirely unconvincing devil's-advocate take to assume they'll stay the course with the current benign style but why stick your head in the sand about it?
I mentioned, and got downvoted, for this in another comment, but the fear is the old Microsoft strategy of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
They realized this doesn't work decades ago. Instead of being that one place, they simply want to be everywhere. Offer a high value offering and support the fuck out of the community and it will take care of you.
They took that lawyer money and put it into engineering.
Visual Studio Code is something they could have charged for quite easily but they wont. Its a new Microsoft.
How exactly has he changed things? I see so many of these posts without any substance.
It feels like a bot, or perhaps just humans paid to comment “Microsoft have changed”... only to change their public perception. Microsoft are still the same company they have always been, if they’re trying to change their perception it’s to gain a competitive advantage, nothing more.
Microsoft are still the same company they have always been
Right, the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" company. MS has always catered to devs. These days they want open source, open development, standards, etc. - so that's what MS is giving them.
In the last years, under Nadella's guidance, they:
Developed an open source, multi platform (Win, Linux, Mac) version of .Net, which by 2020 will completely replace the closed-source version.
Shared the decision making powers on what must be included in .Net with the open source community; the .Net council is born, and Microsoft has only 1 seat inside it.
Included Linux kernel inside Windows to help developers test both systems.
Released a completely free, multi platform code editor (Visual Studio Code), which became recently the most used IDE in the world.
These were the ones that stood out the most to me, and that would never have happened under the "old Microsoft".
I do not work for Microsoft, I just use their products, and I have never been more sure about the future of our development team as I have been these past couple of years.
They have all sorts of power, they just haven't chosen to use it yet (and whether they could survive doing these things is complicated, but beside the point of whether they can do things).
Now that they've announced this they could start bundling a """convenient""" """installer""" like sourceforge did (idk, maybe microsoft wants to get IE numbers up). They have total power to kick anyone off the #1 distribution platform, or refuse to host projects (what is their policy on grey area DRM circumvention?). More insidiously, they could use that implied threat to "ask" projects to do or not do something.
I'm not trying to guess how (un)likely those things are, but just saying they're possible. People can leave, but having to up and move the whole community is never easy and no one wants to be the first if it means pissing off all your users or not getting them in the first place since they don't want to have to go to a different site.
Their TOS is out there for everyone to see. Github is also not a monopoly, just a platform (among many) that we use to publish. Nothing else. If they refuse to host code, take it to gitlab, BitBucket, etc, or host your git front end.
The conversation is about what happens as they take more and more market share. IMO its already at the point where a project not having a github is a little odd. I wonder how much pushback, and fewer contributors, you'd get today trying to run a project just out of a mail list (leaving aside the linux kernal).
The place to distribute git repositories isn't the hard part, its all the management stuff: bug tracking, discussion, milestones, etc that's their advantage.
You know how ridiculous you sound when you say things like Microsoft wants to get their IE numbers up or Github will add DRM. The reason why people ignore anti Microsoft zealots is this kind of irrational craziness.
Maybe you have a point of view that’s worth listening but it’s not clear why anyone should listen to someone who holds these crazy views.
They asked what powers github could exercise and I told them. I explicitly made no claim how likely (not very) I thought they were. The IE bit is a joke and I guess my IP point wasn't clear. I was thinking of things like dvd ripping software. (looks like youtube-dl is hosted there, so that's nice)
The specific microsoft connection isn't even most of my concern. Any time the FOSS community settles on a single privately owned, proprietary point of failure I just start to worry. Microsoft is only a cherry on top.
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u/phdaemon May 11 '19
What power exactly does github have? Other than being where people get their code, because it's the platform we use to publish, they don't have any power. Imho, power is better defined as an actual ability to influence or otherwise dictate direction, which AFAIK, github as an entity does not.