Indigo Domotics

Not sure if this is the best forum to discuss this but ....

A bright future for GitHub

Microsoft + GitHub = Empowering Developers

I'll reserve my judgement. My fear is that the "free" GitHub levels will become more and more restrictive and less useful over time as an attempt to monetize the service. But maybe that won't happen.

Git, the underlying technology, remains open source so I someone could create a GitHub competitor if GitHub doesn't remain a free and open service.

Love it Matt!


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Oh clippy, how we (don’t) miss you. Perhaps M&J could implement “Indie” into Indigo 8.. “Hey it looks like you’re trying to use a Aeotec Multisensor 6... “


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I'm sticking with Github for the moment because I've invested far too much time in it but I feel that Microsoft is going to ruin Githb as they have with most things that that have acquired until they figure out how to make it work again. Skype sucked pretty bad after being acquired but is actually pretty good again. I can say the same for most MS products since they have a long history of acquiring, rather than developing, their software products since day one.

Note that we're talking GitHub, not Git itself. There are already GitHub competitors, like Bitbucket (which is quite mature) and GitLab which use Git as the underlying technology making the move less painful.

Still, I think it's probably best to take a wait and see approach at this point. The deal doesn't even close until the end of the year.

My Github annual subscription was coming up for renewal in a week or so. I have now removed my private repositories and downgraded to Free.

An interesting article and reader comments from The register - Nadella tells worried GitHub devs: Judge us by our actions

Soon to be rebranded as Microsoft Git? Goes right with Microsoft Bob.

lanbrown wrote:

The point I was making is that Microsoft will start to move away from Git; so moving to another service that is compatible won't be a seamless move. So Github could turn into a closed system.

I wasn't, in fact, addressing my post to you, but rather to the more general audience that may not have completely understood the difference/relationshop between GitHub (service) and Git (technology).

Having said that, there are a lot of products using Git client technology (both to communicate to GitHub and also to manage privately hosted/maintained Git repos) that's outside of Microsoft/GitHub's control. That itself will be the canary in the coal mine: if Microsoft changes GitHub to use some kind of proprietary changes to the Git technology, all those integrations will break and there will be a ton of outcry. That will be a sure sign that it's time to start looking for alternate solutions.

Git is different than the end-user things that Microsoft has acquired then subsequently messed with because it's developer centric so any kind of trickiness will be immediately noticed by developers who are already wary of them. Contributions to the Git technology will continue to go through the open source process they use now. If Microsoft attempts to alter this process, then again you'll have outcry in the developer community that Microsoft is doing something bad and it'll be time to start looking for alternatives.

IBM, who used to be a very proprietary company, is now one of the largest contributors to open source software. So in this respect it is possible for a leopard to change his spots so to speak!

My bottom line is that it's too early to tell what Microsoft will do, but that there will be plenty of very noticeable warning if they start doing bad things, certainly enough time to migrate to other solutions.

IBM, who used to be a very proprietary company, is now one of the largest contributors to open source software. So in this respect it is possible for a leopard to change his spots so to speak!

For what it is worth, Microsoft has been doing a bunch of stuff in the Open Source community lately -- releasing .NET source in support of the team that was doing Mono, and continuing that with even more of the framework. They have also started pushing out free tools such as Visual Studio to Mac and Linux.

I'm not saying MS is now an angel, and that they for sure won't do evil here, but they HAVE been trying to turn themselves around in terms of Open Source and the developer community. This is total speculation, but Microsoft makes EXCELLENT development tools on Windows and I think they see growth potential in expanding out their tools to work on other platforms. Perhaps they are saturated in the Windows dev space or something. Their Xamarin acquisition scared many in the developer community but support has actually increased for it AND it is now included for free with Visual Studio where before the license was pretty high (at least for sole developers).

SO, I say don't take an immediate negative view on this, just let it play out. It may turn out bad, it may stay the same. Heck, it COULD get better if MS happens to dedicate some resources to the Git open source development since Team Foundation Server is way better than Git IMHO, but also $$$ (note this is based on usage, so it may not be the underlying technology but the tools that are better). If they could either push some features down to Git or maybe just make tools to help, perhaps the community improves. Time will tell.

Adam