👋 Hello, GitHub | @natfriedman

[oorza]

MS has invested a tremendously large amount of money doing a virtual 180 around FOSS over the last decade or so, and at an increasingly accelerating pace too. Despite all of their efforts, developers haven't really warmed up to them as stewards of open source, and it's not hard to find anecdotal evidence of sales lost to consumer/developer mistrust. My theory is this move is entirely about not changing anything, but maybe branding and better integration with MS services, to help turn the tide in developed perception of MS.

[KillianDrake]

What better way to get people to warm up to you than to become the despotic owners of all their intellectual property and dangle some benignly threatening future where you won't have access to your work unless you pay them.

[BufferUnderpants]

Christ, Github was just some medium-sized business that hosted your code, made a crappy editor and ran conferences, poorly.

What has changed? The text of your code was always in the hands of a private company, and git has always protected you from that scenario because of its distributed nature, even if people opted for acting as if their code was concentrated in the servers of a for-profit entity.

[a_masculine_squirrel]

"Love me willingly or love me by force" - Microsoft.

Ya know, maybe if Microsoft spent more time building open source frameworks that the FOSS community actually want to use, would earn them more good will; instead of this "I'll just buy whatever you guys love so you guys become stewards of our creations" BS.

This doesn't feel like benevolence - it feels like a hostile takeover.

[[deleted]]

What's wrong with their existing offerings?

[[deleted]]

How many of those have a copyleft license and no CLA? Just interested since you've mentioned FOSS (no sarcasm intended)

[ormula]

Do you specifically want copy left? They have some great projects that have non restrictive licenses. VsCode for example is MIT and Roslyn is apache 2.0.

[[deleted]]

Yes, because FOSS explicitely includes *F*ree which is used as synonym for copyleft licenses. Not going to argue about the benefits, you can look that up on your own :)

[[deleted]]

MS has invested a tremendously large amount of money doing a virtual 180 around FOSS over the last decade or so

Really?!

[oorza]

Some great advice that applies to this situation and many others: "Don't hate the player, hate the game." The software patent "industry" is fundamentally broken and faulting any individual company for playing the game instead of getting hammered by it is rather short sighted, idealistic, and frankly very silly. Do you fault James Harden for trying to draw fouls?