Microsoft is buying GitHub, will repositories be removed?

[DOS]

Microsoft is buying GitHub. As this Wired article asks, what will they do with "controversial" code? I see that there used to be some "OpenNT" code on GitHub but it seems that those repositories no longer exist; I assume that probably didn't happen in just the last few days though. Is there any other Windows-based code on GitHub that people here are interested in? If so perhaps you should be cloning the repositories now.

[Darkstar]

It's not "controversional", it's outright illegal. But of course MS could have removed those repos before if they had cared, so they might be able to stay up for a bit. But don't hold your breath, for illegal stuff a "less-public" repo (or even a self-hosted one) has always been the better solution...

[SistemaRayoXP]

Also another problem could be that several big companies like Facebook or Google host some closed code in GitHub, and with MS being the head on GitHub, they could do whatever they want with this code, and take advantage of this. Of course I don't expect this to be very probably to happen because I've seen that MS has become a bit more friendly with Satya Nadella as CEO

[nixie]

My guess is they're just trying to position themselves as being friendly to open source, perhaps as the first step in a total corporate shift. Anything illegal could already be handled by the courts and questionable material will just change hosting providers, making a buyout kinda pointless.

[MrFreeman]

Smells like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to me.

[nixie]

Smells like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to me.

Windows was never taken seriously on tablets or phones and Linux is becoming a real competitor in the pc gaming arena.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish seems to have already failed..

[louisw3]

Smells like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to me.

Windows was never taken seriously on tablets or phones and Linux is becoming a real competitor in the pc gaming arena.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish seems to have already failed..

It really has. Instead of beefing up the POSIX personality on NT 3.1 to run Xenix/SYSV i386 binaries (iBCS) they just pretended that UNIX was going to die, and that it didn't matter. It was a hard call on one hand, as by forcing UNIX people to port to Win32, it got them onto NT eventually. *HOWEVER* by not running UNIX binaries, it let people bypass NT for 'production' workloads, and letting the cost of things like RHEL take the place or things like UnixWare/OpenServer. Not to mention the other critical mistake of dropping the Quick languages.

Microsoft forgot who they were, and priced themselves out of a generation of college kids, and as they didn't learn MS products, they deployed what they knew they could use for 'free' or 'cheap', and an entire ecosystem has grown up independent of Microsoft. Just as Windows Phone stagnated, they lost the smart phone market the moment the iPhone was announced. Then they lost the tablet market, and if that wasn't bad enough they also tried and tried to win gaming and lost the gaming momentum of DirectX on PC, by not having a competent store place, letting Valve take that from them.

They are making big inroads on cloud services, make no mistake, and even though they gave up the PC for gaming they made a significant investment on the xbox.

Monopolies in this industry look powerful and like they will continue forever, but the truth is the industry just moves too fast. Nobody morns Digital, or IBM.

[JackArchive]

by not having a competent store place, letting Valve take that from them.

They somewhat did back then for a while with Games for Windows Live, but I can understand why you omitted that. How its client was notorious for being a bug nirvana along with the tarnished reputation Vista had since launch kinda made people forget that Microsoft once wanted to actually compete in the space of PC game distribution platforms.

[louisw3]

by not having a competent store place, letting Valve take that from them.

They somewhat did back then for a while with Games for Windows Live, but I can understand why you omitted that. How its client was notorious for being a bug nirvana along with the tarnished reputation Vista had since launch kinda made people forget that Microsoft once wanted to actually compete in the space of PC game distribution platforms.

Oh I didn't forget it, I just omitted mentioning it. But it really goes to show how fickle Microsoft is that when it's hot, it's hot, and otherwise destroy all evidence it ever existed.

But Microsoft gives up some wars far too early, I'm surprised they held onto Bing and the Xbox.

Remember"plays for sure"? Or any of their so many attempts to make a music player? They just recently failed again with groove.

[JackArchive]

Remember"plays for sure"? Or any of their so many attempts to make a music player? They just recently failed again with groove.

Windows Media Player was kind of a childhood staple for me, but a lot of people didn't know about the fact that one was able to buy music in WMAs at the time. Even I can't recall ever seeing someone literally ordering music encoded in Windows Media back then, as all I can remember WMP do is play music you ripped from your CDs and video files and that's about it. There appears to be quite an ambition regarding Windows Media as a proper format for digital media retail. In fact, one film I have that released on DVD in 2004 has a version of the film in WMV in full HD interestingly enough, but I digress as it's better to save that topic as its own separate discussion than going too off-topic here. One thing I can say is that "Movies & TV" still sells somewhat, so yeah Microsoft is hit-or-miss regarding digital sales.

[AlphaBeta]

Also another problem could be that several big companies like Facebook or Google host some closed code in GitHub, and with MS being the head on GitHub, they could do whatever they want with this code, and take advantage of this. Of course I don't expect this to be very probably to happen because I've seen that MS has become a bit more friendly with Satya Nadella as CEO

They certainly don't host confidential code on GitHub. They're not that stupid and have self-hosted repositories for that.

[MrBurgerKing]

Microsoft has taken down source code and anything that uses their names the quickest. They'll probably go after the projects that can hurt their bottom line next, like any tweaks that enable features in Windows Home that are reserved for Pro/Enterprise i.e. turning off ads & info collection in Windows 10. It will definitely be easier for them now that they have direct access to everything.
Large tech companies definitely have custom internal tools for software development. Still, many vendors use MS for web hosting since it comes down to who can do it the cheapest.

[Sword7]

I heard that some developers moved to GitLab after Microsoft acquired GitHub. I have my own projects on GitHub.

[yuhong]

MS even used a link to OpenNT in their own articles:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/srd ... -analysis/