# Future of Github?



## Spartrekus (Oct 27, 2018)

Hello,

I am curious what users may think about the future of Github (drawbacks and advantages, Microsoft future strategies for Github).

Good luck !
Best regards


----------



## Crivens (Oct 27, 2018)

That looks like it contains a lethal dose of Disney. Hazmat hoods up and go to orbit.


Sorry, could not resist mate


----------



## Beastie7 (Oct 27, 2018)

The future is that we're fine using Subversion.


----------



## tingo (Oct 27, 2018)

Unless Microsoft rocks the boat in a negative way, Github will continue - until it eventually will be replaced with something else sometime in the future (this is the way of all things).


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Oct 27, 2018)

Crivens said:


> That looks like it contains a lethal dose of Disney. Hazmat hoods up and go to orbit.


It shows Microsoft's focus. Home users entertainment and their games. It's why I always say I can never understand why professional software companies would EVER consider writing their programs to run on Windows. It's a mark of insanity.


----------



## Crivens (Oct 27, 2018)

Microsoft being Microsoft, I'd keep my eyes peeled for any EULA or such coming around. I still have a local copy of their attempt to gain all rights and everything of anything being mentioned on hotmail.


----------



## ShelLuser (Oct 27, 2018)

At this point I'm not worried to be honest. Microsoft has a bad reputation for sure, but that doesn't mean that everything they do is also bad per definition. For example: I've used Codeplex for a while and it was a pretty decent developers community. Provided ways to host open source projects and no nasty EULA's or other weird agreements. This is the main reason why I'm still in full support of GitHub.

Some people live by "Microsoft = evil" and I can most definitely respect that, but I also think that the mantra is often being applied a bit too excessively, definitely too much for my taste.


----------



## obsigna (Oct 27, 2018)

Since the announcement of Microsoft taking over GitHub I see this nagging "Create your own GitHub profile" bar. Typical Microsoft, they are not able to make anything discreet, it must be nagging and gross. And yes, I have my own account, and yes, I logout after did my work on it, and I never won’t login only for looking-up something, and I hate Microsoft for suggesting exactly this in order they can track me, FYI.


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Oct 27, 2018)

obsigna said:


> And yes, I have my own account, and yes, I logout after did my work on it, and I never won’t login only for looking-up something, and I hate Microsoft for suggesting exactly this in order they can track me, FYI.



That doesn't sound much different than Google. I don't have a Github account but I do have a Google account so I can use their webmaster tools. I log out when I'm done, would never do a search when logged in or use gmail and use startpage.com when possible for a search engine.


----------



## sidetone (Oct 27, 2018)

Trihexagonal said:


> That doesn't sound much different than Google. I don't have a Github account but I do have a Google account so I can use their webmaster tools. I log out when I'm done, would never do a search when logged in or use gmail and use startpage.com when possible for a search engine.



Apart from Duckduckgo, Startpage or Qwant, I sometimes choose a web proxy from proxy.org to use Google. I also use php to ping website sitemap updates to google, instead of from my computer, but other Google tools can't be used this way.


----------



## xtremae (Oct 27, 2018)

For such a low quality shop (msft), this is hardly a surprise.


----------



## obsigna (Oct 27, 2018)

Trihexagonal said:


> That doesn't sound much different than Google. I don't have a Github account but I do have a Google account so I can use their webmaster tools. I log out when I'm done, would never do a search when logged in or use gmail and use startpage.com when possible for a search engine.


When I open https://google.com/ for searching something, I do not see a grossly nagging bar asking for creating an account - this is a Microsoft attitude.


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Oct 27, 2018)

obsigna said:


> When I open https://google.com/ for searching something, I do not see a grossly nagging bar asking for creating an account - this is a Microsoft attitude.



No, Google has a friendly unimposing blue button with the inviting message "Sign In" in the upper right corner. Almost subliminal in its unobtrusiveness and presentation...

That's what I'd go with if I was them and my motto was "Don't Be Evil".


----------



## obsigna (Oct 27, 2018)

Trihexagonal said:


> No, Google has a friendly unimposing blue button with the inviting message "Sign In" in the upper right corner. Almost subliminal in its unobtrusiveness and presentation...
> 
> That's what I'd go with if I was them and my motto was "Don't Be Evil".



If Yahoo would have had an unimposing search entry page, then we would not be in the unfortunate situation of a quasi monopole in the internet search business. This is why I used Google in the initial days. When I searched for how to solve an ordinary differential equation (for example), I was not interested on the greatest and finest fart of any royal baby in the world, nor on any other news from the rainbow press.

One major design rule is, design has to be oriented to the function and not vice versa. This idiotic "Create your Account" bar serves no other function than being annoying. To Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, if you can’t hold on being evil, at least don’t be a PITA.

That said, I didn’t come even close to discuss any attitude of Google, you raised the topic. I am not in favour of them, and I am trying hard to avoid any services of them. I use mainly Quant as my daily search engine. For example the following might give you an idea on what can be done in case we don’t want to stay in small talk mode only:

[FONT=Verdana]Googles Blind Spot[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana]Geo-blocking at the Firewall[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana]Thoughts on Google Analytics and Targeting[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana]Spam-Sperrzonen im DNS des FreeBSD-Home-Servers[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana]Kein Google, keine Cookies DSGVO fahr' zur Hölle![/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana]AdSense Account Deactivation[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana]Ist Tracking denn wirklich notwendig?[/FONT]


----------



## rigoletto@ (Oct 27, 2018)

I partially moved to Bitbucket. Currently, I have my stuff (nothing notable in fact) on Bitbucket, and I keep GitHub for relationship with third party stuff.


----------



## rorgoroth (Oct 27, 2018)

Men, Women and Children...

Fear not, I have come to spread the Good Word about our Lord and scm-aviour, self-hosted Mercurial!


----------



## yuripv (Oct 27, 2018)

Wasn't github ever that way WRT the icons and stuff?


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Oct 28, 2018)

If you guys are so scared of everything, why don't you just run your own server?


----------



## rigoletto@ (Oct 28, 2018)

I don't think this is something related with fear but: "why do I support a Microsoft product when there are (better) alternatives?"


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Oct 28, 2018)

obsigna said:


> Since the announcement of Microsoft taking over GitHub I see this nagging "Create your own GitHub profile" bar.



I'm honestly not trying to be argumentative, but I just looked and I didn't see that MicroSoft banner on any Github page I tried, and I tried to see it. I enabled all the scripting it asked for, maybe uBlock Origin blocked it.

Now I did see the overwhelmingly nauseating OctoCat...


----------



## Criosphinx (Oct 28, 2018)

I didn't knew that the Github mascot was an Octopus until now. I love the irony now that Microsoft owns it.

Might as well use this one:


----------



## Crivens (Oct 28, 2018)

That's a Hexapus at most. </nitpick>


----------



## sidetone (Oct 28, 2018)

The tentacle reaching Jolly Roger is  ironically missing a warning about piracy under it (and their terms of use disclosures):


> "Don't pirate OURTM opensource software, by punishment by cephalopod. We reserve the right to collect personal information to sell to the highest bidder. It is not our business, the purposes it is used for. We are not responsible for our business partners and we respect their privacy."


----------



## Crivens (Oct 28, 2018)

Information is not atomic, so no "selling to the highest bidder" but to everyone who has two farthlings to rub against each other.


----------



## shkhln (Oct 28, 2018)

Criosphinx said:


> Octopus


Octocat


----------



## Crivens (Oct 28, 2018)

This one comes also to mind. Plus, who else thinks that guy looks like Bill Gates?


----------



## Spartrekus (Nov 3, 2018)

I believe that close source software is not good for education. Students learn to use close source software.
Using close source software ?

Github is for developers, and well, Microsoft should not have taken github.

Furthermore, In general, Microsoft should let opensource community doing its good.


----------



## rorgoroth (Nov 3, 2018)

Spartrekus said:


> I believe that close source software is not good for education. Students learn to use close source software.
> Using close source software ?
> 
> Github is for developers, and well, Microsoft should not have taken github.
> ...


Github itself is closed source, that's the whole reason a lot of Fosspots love free/open alternatives like gitlab. 

Also Microsoft bought it, not just took it and they already used it extensively to publish all of their open source work.


----------



## Spartrekus (Nov 3, 2018)

rorgoroth said:


> Github itself is closed source, that's the whole reason a lot of Fosspots love free/open alternatives like gitlab.
> 
> Also Microsoft bought it, not just took it and they already used it extensively to publish all of their open source work.



Gitlab is kinda bloated website. If it likely better to stay away from a web browser and Git alternative, and widely use svn.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Nov 3, 2018)

I like Bitbucket (Atlassian products in general). It is closed source but apparently they bundle the source code with the enterprise _packs_.


----------



## kpedersen (Nov 3, 2018)

Rigoletto said:


> I like Bitbucket (Atlassian products in general). It is closed source but apparently they bundle the source code with the enterprise _packs_.


We actually used Atlassian Bamboo and Fisheye (I think). We needed to make some changes to better integrate with our requirements at the time but Atlassian were not happy to allow us source access to make these changes. Luckily since it was all written in Java we could send it through Jad and recover a 100% usable source dump of the code and tweak it to our specs. I believe this was legal too. To integrate with existing systems, reverse engineering is legal (in the UK at least).

One of the more controversial changes we made for convenience was to strip out the DRM so that we could spin up instances for testing quickly. Again, I believe this was legal because we didn't use their tools, we just spun them up to test our systems.

Nowadays we actually just use scm-manager and Jenkins to avoid the bullsh*t


----------



## rigoletto@ (Nov 3, 2018)

I knew about their source code bundle from someone who was supposedly to be well informed. I guess now they maybe just bundle from certain price point.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Nov 3, 2018)

There is also Coding, a _Chinese GitHub. _Never used it neither I have interest to, including because I can't read any Chinese. But based on its surface looks good for Chinese people.


----------



## Spartrekus (Nov 3, 2018)

what about having a free, opensource, FreeBSD server to power a GIT server? 
Someone having a spare computer for this (using FreeBSD) ?


----------



## ralphbsz (Nov 3, 2018)

And a team of 5 people working full time to babysit it?  Once you set something like that up, people will rely on it, and will get very upset if it breaks.  So you need support people who can fix it when it breaks, even at 3AM.  And you need someone to manage it, upgrade and look for trouble (storage management, backups).  And you need to curate the content; the moment someone uploads legally questionably content, you need to do the right thing.  And since you can't do the right thing fast enough all the time, you need money to pay lawyers, because you will get takedown orders (often quite justified, sometimes not).

And then you need to pay for hosting, reliable storage, with off-site backups, and bandwidth.

My guess it that it would take an annual budget that's measured in M$ to do right.  How will you fund that?  Sell ads?  Ha ha.  Take enterprise customers and sell them a premium service?  That market is full of competitors.


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Nov 4, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> My guess it that it would take an annual budget that's measured in M$ to do right.  How will you fund that?  Sell ads?  Ha ha.



A guy I hadn't seen in years just asked me the other day if I've ever made any money off computers. When I told him no, he told me about all the clicks he was getting, how it was such a great way to make money and should look into it 

I told him what I thought of it but wasted my breath.


----------



## kpedersen (Nov 4, 2018)

Spartrekus said:


> what about having a free, opensource, FreeBSD server to power a GIT server?
> Someone having a spare computer for this (using FreeBSD) ?



This is IMO the correct solution but only for individual developers. For example I have a simple server (actually svn rather than git because I like svnserve and git has no equivalent) that gets backed up to a few other servers at 3am.
Anyone who works on my projects will be given access and the only dodgy part is if they try to commit at exactly 3am, it might have a corrupted backup until the next day (I really should lock / disable the server during the backup but worst case scenario is I lose a day of work).

If this was for a corporation or for the public, as ralphbsz pointed out, it I cannot guarantee (or more like, will not guarantee) the robustness or uptime unless this was my full time job (which I would never let it be XD).

So for individual developers, they should really host their own and for corporations they should have full time employee(s) who manages the corporate VCS server.

I personally do not quite see where these big public VCS services (like GitHub) actually enter the equation to be honest. I don't believe the "cloud" holds any value. For open-source projects, GitHub may seem great but for GitHub, open-source projects are the last thing it really wants.

<ramble>

So that leads me to believe Microsoft wants control over some key platforms:

Linked-in - The professional portfolio website
GitHub - The development portfolio website
? - The tool for developing software easily to stick on a portfolio

So it is probably looking into controlling IT professionals portfolios and is perhaps dreaming of being able to "discredit" those developers / professionals who don't buy into its stupid ecosystem. And I think it is trying to control these outposts in a similar way that Apple gained a foot hold by getting kids and students addicted to "incorrectness" at a young age. So it can lie, brainwash and indoctrinate the large majority of the industry.

So my prediction is... Microsoft, for their next purchase is going to want to obtain a "trendy" development tool that a massive proportion of slightly more naive developers (read: shite developers) use to try to show off their "coder skills" as a portfolio piece. By doing this, Microsoft will get them under their thumb. In the hobbiest / game industry that is an easy choice. I think Microsoft will purchase Unity 3D (i.e the new Adobe Flash). Whether or not the hobby industry holds any value for Microsoft is another matter. Have a think about what "crappy" developers use in order for them to masquerade as "good" developers in your specific industry, and I think this might be a candidate for Microsoft's next purchase based on their current direction.


----------



## Sevendogsbsd (Nov 4, 2018)

tingo said:


> Unless Microsoft rocks the boat in a negative way, Github will continue - until it eventually will be replaced with something else sometime in the future (this is the way of all things).



Something overly complicated, hard to use and ugly


----------



## obsigna (Nov 4, 2018)

[QUOTE="kpedersen, post: 405592, member: 5532“]...
So for individual developers, they should really host their own and for corporations they should have full time employee(s) who manages the corporate VCS server.[/QUOTE]

Yes, for my closed source projects I maintain Subversion and Git repositories on my own in-house server, I do not trust the cloud for this.


----------

