Based on another article posted today on hackernews, microsoft is one of the big ones doing the most efforts towards complying to the new european privacy rules (GDPR) (https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/201...) and I also see them doing a lot of efforts towards opensource lately, so even though I'm not a huge microsoft fan nor working for them, I think a lot of prejudices that exist today are due to their history / legacy and therefor I would recommend to be a bit more careful when arguing that they are the devil and all their sub companies and tools have to be avoided at all cost

I would agree, current Microsoft is definitely not the same Microsoft that garnered a huge amount of disdain voiced in nearly any comments section of something that mentions them.

I, too, would write off anything created/owned/loosely related to Microsoft as being trash/corporate bullshit/inferior to literally anything else. When they released VSCode, I chuckled because why would anyone want to use a stripped down visual studio running in electron, don't they know it's going suck? However, after some time I would constantly be seeing praise from people about how good VSCode is (lol I can't believe M$oft is paying people to say good things about their editor online, right?!). Then, for whatever reason, one day I decide to download it, just to prove that I'm right and it's just yet another sub par Microsoft product being praised by fanboys.

And wouldn't you know it, I was completely wrong. VSCode is actually really, really good. If you would told me a year or so ago that'd I'd be using a Microsoft product daily (by choice), actually preferring it over other options, AND is open source. I'd have probably laughed at you because I'd never touch any of their bloated corporate spyware.

They're definitely far from perfect, I still won't touch Windows unless I absolutely have to, Skype for Business sucks (Mac), and from what I've gathered Microsoft Teams is a shitshow. But they're absolutely moving in the right direction (in some areas at least), and I'm not going to jump on every microsoft product now, but I won't immediately write them off either. Hell, I'm even interested in checking out .net core at some point.

The increased efforts/contributions towards open source should alone tell you that this isn't the same Microsoft. Which is why the GitHub acquisition didn't even phase me, nor am I deleting all my repositories, moving to GitLab, and then writing a blog post about how big bad microsoft is going to literally ruin open source.

Now... if this was still 80s Gates or Balmer's microsoft, I probably would be worried about GitHub's future. But, from everything I've read, Nadella seems likes he's a really cool dude.

Yes. VSCode is good. Skype for Business is a garbage fire.

While the panic about Microsoft moving in is ridiculous, GitHub is and always has been closed source, and monoculture is bad. I personally use GitHub primarily, but I wouldn't want to discourage others from seeking alternative solutions.

They're also working with ICE, the agency that imprisoned thousands of children.

So you know, there's that.

Tbc, Supporting ice /w Office and other legacy products. Not sure what the alternative is? Don’t sell Office and exchange?

As far as I can tell, the ICE facilities for children are refugee camps, not prisons. I don't know what the alternative is to temporarily house thousands of children, before they are taken back in by their home countries.

It's not as if all the children could be temporarily given to host families and kept safe----they're not actually part of the foster system, or intending full time stay in the US.

"[..] GitHub has always had a vendor lock-in with the user's issues and pull requests hidden behind a rate limited API [..] at least we want to be able to create a public backup of all our > 1500 issues and pull requests once a week"

Github rate limit: "5000 requests per hour"

Ok yeah I suspected this was a bit questionable.

5000 requests per hour, so they could have all their issues imported in less than an hour.

Why call this anything but just straight up FUD related to MS hate? I've been amused by the negative reaction to the acquisition, as if GitHub was somehow a charity before MS bought them, and overnight became the reincarnated as Darth Vader.

The way chriswwweb quotes the article is leaving out important parts. It puts emphasis on the "rate limited API" wording, as if that was the part that matters.

Let's take a look at what's missing:

> But independent of that, GitHub has always had a vendor lock-in with the user's issues and pull requests hidden behind a rate limited API instead of a proper export feature. And even if you managed to export it through that API, you can not host your own GitHub instance and modify it as you like because there is not even a partially open source version of it.

With gitlab, we have one API call to request the entire export, and another one to download it. Whereas with GitHub we need a script that queries the API for all kinds of information we would like to extract. Whenever GitHub changes their API, it needs to be adjusted. And there aren't many projects out there that do this. Besides running a full gitlab instance, the best way seems to be the "github-backup" project [1], and it can not keep up with GitHub's changes:

> Notes added to commits and lines of code don't get backed up yet. There is only recently API support for this.

But the part that really matters is that you can not run your own GitHub instance after you exported all the data with the API and your preferred script.

With the tools available today, the next best thing for us to switching from GitHub to gitlab and using gitlab's export functionality would be running a local gitlab instance that does the GitHub import once a week, and using that as fallback. But if you are willing to do that, then you might as well switch to gitlab completely, just like we did it.

[1]: https://github-backup.branchable.com/README/

Where can I see the rate limit? I tried https://api.github.com/rate_limit but I see a rate limit of 60 only:

    {
      "resources": {
        "core": {
          "limit": 60,
          "remaining": 58,
          "reset": 1530102452
        },
        "search": {
          "limit": 10,
          "remaining": 10,
          "reset": 1530099950
        },
        "graphql": {
          "limit": 0,
          "remaining": 0,
          "reset": 1530103490
        }
      },
      "rate": {
        "limit": 60,
        "remaining": 58,
        "reset": 1530102452
      }
    }

https://developer.github.com/v3/rate_limit/ https://developer.github.com/v3/#rate-limiting

You're not authenticated to the API. You can see by going here: https://api.github.com/user

> For API requests using Basic Authentication or OAuth, you can make up to 5000 requests per hour.

> For unauthenticated requests, the rate limit allows for up to 60 requests per hour.

https://developer.github.com/v3/#rate-limiting

In a bit of bizarre cognitive dissonance or intellectual dishonesty on my end, I have publicly told people that I am ok with Microsoft's purchase of Github, but have moved all my projects over to Gitlab.

It's not that I think Microsoft will do a bad job (and the issue isn't about Microsoft specifically) it just made me realize something that I logically knew but never thought about: Github can be bought, and it's a near-monopoly.

We take advantage of a seemingly altruistic service like Github, but I now process that they're a for-profit corporation, and there is no reason they couldn't exploit that fact. While I don't think they would do this, Microsoft could easily deprioritize projects that compete with their products, or surround popular releases with adware (like Sourceforge did a few years ago).

Gitlab is a for-profit corporation as well, so they're not immune to this, but the difference is that I can easily run my own Gitlab server if I really wanted to, or fork the project and make "Tombert's Cool Gitlab Competitor" whenever I need to. Inherently, Gitlab has created its own competition, which I think can shield a bit from my concerns.

Also, I've grown to really like the Gitlab interface; maybe that's a good enough reason to switch.

Always good to see PostmarketOS getting some publicity.

I need a break from work and research, so I'm planning on finally trying out drebrez's LVM branch on my old Nexus 7 this weekend. I might also look into what it would take to get a HTC One (m7) booting.

It's great that the space is getting more independent of one big player, but there is no need to make a fuss out of it anytime a project moves.

If you think that GitLab (the company) is any better for your data than GitHub (Microsoft) you are incapable of understanding economy and capitalism.

> If you think that GitLab (the company) is any better for your data than GitHub (Microsoft) you are incapable of understanding economy and capitalism.

LOL that's quite the generalization. How about the argument that with GitLab you don't have vendor lock in since you can export and run your own instance at any moment? Seems like a compelling reason for GitLab to be a better place for your data.

How would exporting to a different server work in practice?

Wouldn't every single user have to create a new account in the Gitlab instance running on the new server?

Yes, but if I own a company, and Gitlab does something that we don't like to our project, I could conceivably run my own on a Digital Ocean droplet or AWS or Azure or something, so that my developers don't have to radically change the way they work.

Granted, Github has Enterprise, but that's proprietary, and I like that there's no need to worry about license fees and whatnot with Gitlab.

This is a good way of knowing which companies and projects are managed by brats.

I mean if making critical decisions about who you want to trust, where you want to store your code and data, and how you want to operate your day to day business, based on an evolving market is being a "brat" then yeah.

I'm not expecting GitHub to change much, if at all, but part of an open internet is people and companies being able to choose how they want to do things.

Using the #movingtogitlab hashtag does make it feel a bit brattish. FWIW I'm on (self-hosted) Gitlab, not GitHub.

The reasoning isn't "it is owned by Microsoft"; that is just a trigger. The reasoning is thoroughly mentioned:

"[..] But independent of that, GitHub has always had a vendor lock-in with the user's issues and pull requests hidden behind a rate limited API instead of a proper export feature. And even if you managed to export it through that API, you can not host your own GitHub instance and modify it as you like because there is not even a partially open source version of it."

I'd love to see Microsoft turn the tables and open source (at least partially) GitHub. I don't think it'll happen but it'd certainly get some interesting responses.

To give you some context, I'm coding lots email templates for living and on daily basis we're dealing with Outlook 2016 bugs some of which are as old as IE5. Yes, Internet Explorer five. For example, if you have a TD less than 18px high, it will be push to be 18px high, unless there's font-size set. These kinds of bugs were squished on IE6. Hatred to Internet Explorer was one of the main reasons devs hated M$. Now, IE is gone, web devs live happy lives with React and us, email devs still code in tables and use VML hacks just to set background picture (ahem, of a table cell).

With the above context, I'd say M$ may be different now compared to before but it's changing only because it has to and only because they reap what they sow. Previous seeds grew.

Speaking about V$Code, there was so much hatred in GitHub when peeps asked maintainers to allow users to customise the blue status bar that I think I saw true "spirit" of that company. See for yourselves: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1884 - some juicy posts have been deleted/edited since though

PS. I moved all my 80 Open Source libraries to BitBucket and haven't looked back since. I applaud all others that migrate out of GitHub.

> See for yourselves: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1884 - some juicy posts have been deleted/edited since though

obviously can't tell about the edited ones, but there's not a single "juicy" comment by someone from Microsoft there IMHO? I mostly see external commenters misbehaving.

Wouldn't Bitbucket have the same issues as Github at this point? The issue to me comes down to the fact that Github can be bought, not necessarily who the owner is.