Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zxcvhjkl 2940 days ago
People base their expectations on past performance. And for MS it hasn’t been stellar. But there is no need for speculation; we will wait and see.

The problem is deeper than that though. Unless you were developing an Editor or a Git hosting service, you were not in direct competition with GitHub. Suddenly a lot of startups will find their private code hosted by a direct competitor. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I was them.
2 comments
kickingvegas 2940 days ago
Exactly. GitHub Enterprise under MS rule would be an epic conflict of interest for many customers who currently use it because MS could/would compete with them.

While it's not a complete 1-1 mapping, I keep thinking of Stac Electronics disk compression lawsuit against MS when it comes to handling source code:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

link
chris_wot 2940 days ago
Which makes see the wisdom of Gnome choosing Gitlab.
link
laumars 2940 days ago
Gnome is open source though so Microsoft wouldn't need to buy the hosting provider to read it's source.

To be honest, even with regards to private repos, I can't see Microsoft reading the source code because that would be a massive law case waiting to happen. What I'm more concerned about is Microsoft trying to integrate more of their own suite into Github. I'm also concerned about the future of Atom; which I specifically chose over VSC because it wasn't managed by Microsoft.

link
gsich 2939 days ago
If you have issues with that, then only self-hosting can save you.
link
laumars 2939 days ago
I already self-host personal projects but that is only part of the story since I cannot (and should not) dictate what solutions other people use. A pretty significant proportion of open source projects I have contributed to have been Github hosted so even if I don't use it for personal projects I still will need to use it if I want to continue to contribute to those other projects.
link
zeusk 2940 days ago
The same people also host their deployment with some of these corporations, who doesn't use either of AWS, GCP or Azure? Do you also have the same concern that a direct competitor possibly has access to your deployed code, API keys and is also in direct control of your production environment?

Not that because it happens, it is nice; but at-least at this point the source code access concern is more of a conspiracy theory if anything.

link
jtbayly 2940 days ago
Yes, major corporations have moved off of AWS for precisely this reason. (edit to clarify: They moved out of concern about a competitor hosting & having too much knowledge about their business.)
link
eli 2940 days ago
I'm not personally concerned but some big companies definitely are https://www.retaildive.com/news/report-target-opts-out-of-am...
link