GitHub could be acquired by Microsoft

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 06/03/2018 11:51 PM, Anton Fediushin wrote:
> 
> What's your opinion about that? Will you continue using GitHub?
> 

The obvious question is "Will MS use evil/strongarm shenanigans with 
GitHub?"

That would've been the one and only right question if this were the 
90's. (And the answer probably would've been, "Duh, yes.")

But, while I am somewhat concerned about that possibility (mainly in the 
long term), with modern MS I think I'm really more concerned about 
GitHub being marred by bone-headed ideas and/or sheer ineptitude. Way I 
see it, that's kinda been MS's main MO the last decode or so. (Heck, 
their games and OS divisions can barely even count numbers. 
One...three-hundred sixty...one again...eight...point one...ten...)

Let's face it, evil or not, when MS touches stuff, how often do they NOT 
wind up damaging it one way or the other? Sometimes maybe, but not usually.

I don't think this is a "sky is falling" omen for GitHub (...although 
there WAS codeplex...but then again, codeplex was kinda inferior to its 
competitors anyway). And I don't think there will be any immediate 
problems (even MS isn't that stupid, and if they are...it'd take time to 
implement anyway).

But, based on MS record, I do think it's likely there will be some 
facepalm/WTF moments for GitHub users down the road. The big questions 
are "What?", "When?" and "Will they be promptly reverted/mitigated?"

I've always felt GitLab was better than GitHub (in large part because 
they're sensible enough to support self-hosting), so it's tempting to 
use this as a great reason to move to GitLab. I won't though, unless 
MS-GitHub starts doing things that irritate me. Then I probably will.

In any case, I've always thought it was absolutely sick that that even 
though GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/Launchpad/etc. all provide basically the 
same features on top of the standard ***distributed*** version control 
systems, they are all completely incapable of talking to each other or 
acting as interchangable viewers on a single set of common project data. 
So much for the "distributed" in "DVCS".

What I've ALWAYS felt we needed, and even moreso now, is a tool to 
commoditize these "VCS Plus" services. So we can just FORCE the choice 
of GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab to be "Whatever frontend the user prefers", 
and everything gets cross-synced and interlinked, etc., and bring the 
"distributed" back to DVCS, rather than chaining each project to a 
centralized walled garden.

Keep in mind, if we had been commoditizing and decentralizing repository 
hosting, issue tracking, PRs, user accounts, etc. right from the start 
like we should've been, then this MS buyout of GitHub would've been 
entirely irrelevant to everyone outside GitHub itself. That's what 
happens with single points of failure. And the reason VCSes even went 
DVCS in the first place.