There are still downsides to GitLab.com, itās less free-as-in-free-beer than GitHub.com (I understand that GitLab is doing a great job of being FOSS and paying their bills whilst still being mostly free for their hosting) and apparently this is incorrect. I doubt Microsoft would suddenly lock away all FOSS repos? Would that even be legal? So for those who want certain features and donāt have cash, GitHub.com is possibly the better option. Though thereās also a risk that Microsoft follows suit with GitLab.com and makes certain features paid even for FOSS projects, and then GitLab wins simply because itās FOSS and can be forked if necessary or self-hosted.
I think Iād like it if Canonical moved everything (including snappy) to GitLab, maybe a self-hosted instance of it, but equally I know theyāre trying to be friendly with Microsoft so maybe this would be against their business interests
The most interesting part is at the end that blog.
āOnce the acquisition closes later this year, GitHub will be led by CEO Nat Friedman, an open source veteran and founder of Xamarin, who will continue to report to Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie; GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath will be a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting to Scott.ā
I donāt think there is any difference: GitHub was proprieratery, it stays the same. I donāt see any move for FLOSS projects from Microsoftās side or it will be a deal breaker for the greatest GitHub assets: the amount of developers there.
Then, companies are hosting their own private repos on GitHub because most of open source librairies and projects are there, and so, devs are used to it.
Admittedly thereās probably little difference other than a bit of uncertainty as to the futureā¦ still, I think this is a reminder as to why using FOSS projects like GitLab (where possible) is probably a good ideaā¦ With proprietary projects if they do something you donāt like, thereās nothing you can do, with FOSS, the project could be forked and the original version often uses a much more open development model that allows users to voice concerns (and devs to answer) in a public fashion, which can alleviate dissatisfaction in the first place.
āReporting toā means in other words, one takes commands from the guy, who one is reporting to. Chris Wanstrath was the CEO and co-founder of GitHub, but is becoming just a technical fellow under orders. Orders are orders, you either follow orders, or leave.
As a CEO, one gives orders, but as an employee, you get orders.
"This week Microsoft announced that it is purchasing GitHub for $7.5 billion in stockā¦ The bottom line: This is pretty good news for the world of Open Source and we should celebrate Microsoftās smart move. "
Jim Zemlin
The Executive Director at The Linux Foundation.
āProprietary software vendor buys centralized proprietary software to share free software. Great news!ā
In all honesty, since Microsoft also owns VSCode (which is a big deal; pretty much all web devs use either that or Atom ā¦ which is GitHub and now Microsoft anyways) they only need CI/CD integration and they provide a full-blown, competitive proprietary platform that competes with FLOSS (i.e. Linux + Docker + Kubernetes + GitLab + <insert-editor-here ā¦ atom is dead>). This is dangerous to say the least. And, I know, VSCode is Open Source, but not Free as in Freedom (youād have to use the Code OSS build for that: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code.oss) and includes proprietary extensions that will most likely be integrated with GitHub soon. You know what this sounds like? Embrace-Extend-Extinguish! Embrace Git, Linux and Containerization, add some little proprietary addons (i.e. issues, pull requests, live editing (Atom Teletype)) that make the experience just a tiny bit better, make everyone use it by setting them as the defaults (and praising them as āteam servicesā or āmicrosoft flavored gitā ā¦ whatever) and lobbying, then start providing discounts for cloud hosting (see Amazon Linux as an example), and then stop following open standards and ābranch outā of FOSS. There are reasons why everything (or next to everything) that Microsoft produces is MIT and not GPL-3.0/AGPL-3.0.
What I canāt fathom is why the executive director of Linux Foundation says āthis is pretty good news.ā In my thinking, whatever MS buys is not good news FOSS, if that is any way connected to FOSS.
Iām neither a programmer or developer, but as a consumer Iāve observed Microsoft behaving like the proverbial 500-pound gorilla using its weight to move markets. The US Justice department characterized Microsoftās strategy as EMBRACE, EXTEND, EXTINGUISH.
This strategy was applied to HTML where Microsoft-proprietary ActiveX extensions were included in Internet Explorer (and bundled in Windows.) As web developers began to take advantage of the features, we began to see notices āThis web site requires Microsoft Internet Explorer to function properly.ā The premier web browser at the time was Netscape Navigator ā I paid $80 for my copy, and a month later Netscape became freeware as Mozilla to compete with IE.
I also remember that Microsoft Office applications claimed to support Open Document Standards for interoperability, but in practice document conversions to non-Microsoft Office applications were full of problems because of proprietary code embedded in Office documents ā ruining the Open Document Standards (I experienced this in Word and Excel formats.)
Microsoftās strategy for gaining market dominance is complex and long-range. Any spot-analysis would only be speculative. Iād like to add here, however, that I donāt consider Microsoft āevilā as many people feel. I believe that this is simply the natural behavior of corporate entities, much like what we see in the biological world. FWIW, the E-E-E strategy might provide an interesting insight applied to the Open Source industry.
BTW, thanks to Abhishek Prakash of Itās FOSS for the Wiki link.
Further to this discussion, thought Iād point folks to this A regular show about MSFT and OpenSource. Might be interesting for those of us that still view MSFT as the big bad monopoly. My how times have changed.