zlacker

>>ig0r0+(OP)
Well, this is amazing! I never would have thought the Microsoft acquisition would have these kinds of results! Congrats to Nat and the GitHub team (and by extension Microsoft) for making this possible!

I wonder whether this is a result of market conditions, or whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort, or whether it's something else. I hate to be a cynic given how much good Microsoft + GitHub have been doing lately, but what prevents this change from being rolled back?

Congrats again! I love using GitHub and look forward to many happy years shipping code on the platform.

>>yingw7+R1
I feel like anyone who lived through the 90s could have expected "these kinds of results".

Git is open source and widely supported, which doesn't benefit Microsoft. By causing GitHub-specific features to be an essential part of a "modern" or "industry standard" git workflow, they can capture more marketshare/attention, and cause alternatives to be sidelined. This requires removing all friction to entering the proprietary ecosystem, including purchasing. This, along with the acquisition of NPM, is the "embrace" part.

The next will be an expansion of GitHub and NPM's featuresets in ways that are only accessible via branded, first party tools (i.e. not git/ssh/yarn). GitHub has already made some inroads there prior to the Microsoft acquisition with of course the ubiquitous PRs as well as GitHub Issues and Actions. I imagine the ability to check out GitHub wikis as git repos will probably eventually go away to further this.

The last part ("extinguish") is turning off support for non-firstparty tools like git-via-ssh, .patch URL support, issue collaboration via email, yarn, et c. By the time they do this, few people will notice, having acclimated to the entirely-proprietary ecosystem they've been incrementally subjected to.

The goal, as always: a Microsoft editor (VS Code or Atom), editing code in a Microsoft language (TypeScript/.NET/whatever), signed off via Microsoft review software (GitHub mobile), publishing to a Microsoft website (GitHub/npm), running CI on a Microsoft VM (GitHub Actions), pushing code to a Microsoft datacenter (Azure).

It's simply a moat to prevent open, unfettered competition in any intersection of the vertical. Any weak spots (such as GitHub signup friction) are to be subsidized as they will yield benefits when later used as a cohesive whole in an anticompetitive fashion.

>>sneak+68
Luckily history has shown that competitors still exist in a world where Microsoft tried hard to “extinguish”. macOS and Linux still exist, Chrome is the most popular browser (not IE), and most people who use Windows are fairly happy with it. You can try to point to Microsoft’s past behavior as proof that the future of GitHub is dystopic, but I don’t think their past behavior was particularly effective at snuffing out all competition and forcing people into their ecosystem. I suppose this is a matter of opinion, but I think being scared of GitHub sliding into terribleness does seem to be in the realm of paranoid conspiracy theories. Even if it does happen, git will always exist and there will always be alternatives.

>>amiant+LB
> I don’t think their past behavior was particularly effective at snuffing out all competition and forcing people into their ecosystem

I still buy a Windows license to play video games. I don't want to use Windows or buy a Windows license.

Of course, I could always choose to not play video games, so technically you're correct that I wasn't "forced" into their ecosystem. But I'm still there and I don't want to be. This is a direct result and present day residual benefit of their anticompetitive practices over twenty years ago. These are very long games that they play; you don't make hundreds of billions of dollars by accident.

>>sneak+lV
It seems that video game APIs require lots of investment, and Valve has worked on their version of Wine and other stuff which is quite successful at running Windows games on Linux, so you've got that option - giving your money to Valve through Steam. Or you can also get a console.