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.
