Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Not about OpenMW? Just about Morrowind in general? Have some random babble? Kindly direct it here.
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Thunderforge
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by Thunderforge »

drummyfish wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 19:02
Thunderforge wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 18:27 And a certain type of people just want to play Morrowind on a Mac, or play multiplayer Morrowind, or take advantage of any other features that vanilla Morrowind can’t provide.
Yeah, let them play it. We're talking about development which requires some more responsibility.
I choose to develop for OpenMW because I want to play Morrowind, especially on my Mac, and I want to make it the best tool that others can play too. I hope that doesn't somehow mean I'm less responsible just because I think that concerns over Microsoft are overblown.
drummyfish wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 19:02
Thunderforge wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 18:27 To put it bluntly, I would rather stay on GitHub and risk whatever imaginary evil Microsoft does than switch to another platform, or self-host, where we will have fewer developers that will hinder the growth of the project.
Overall it sounds like you've accepted that MS can simply buy you and have already given up. You might rather want to get involved in proprietary game development then - they target the largest platforms, hire the best devs, have the best of everything without caring about the consequences or the context other than market.
Got me there! I work full-time in proprietary software development and in the past have worked in proprietary game development. It gives me a nice job to support me and my family and enough of a work-life balance to contribute to OpenMW in my free time. I'm not really sure what that has to do with me being okay with using GitHub under Microsoft, but yeah, I take no shame in doing a job that provides for my family while doing OpenMW development on the side. These two things don't have to be at odds.
drummyfish wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 19:02
Thunderforge wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 18:27 I just want OpenMW to be created on whichever platform will attract the best developers.
For whatever the cost? Josef Mengele probably wanted to just make the best medical research he could too.
I guess Godwin's Law holds true. Can we please discuss Microsoft acquiring GitHub (and more importantly, what that means for OpenMW) without bringing up the Nazis?
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psi29a
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by psi29a »

Let's just try to be pragmatic where possible and keep our politics from driving up our blood pressure. We're all here to work on OpenMW for different reasons, so please keep it civil. :)
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by AnyOldName3 »

AFAIK the main MS product is still a closed OS that's basically malware that forces upgrades to new version and can't do basic things others OSes have been capable of for many years now. With the occasional pieces of software they open they're just buying support of open-source community and getting devs they don't have to pay.
Current builds of Windows 10 only have one major flaw from a user's perspective - the potential for the telemetry that Microsoft collects (and then uses to ensure that future updates actually improve things) to be more detailed than people might like. It's supposed to be anonymised, but that doesn't necessarily mean that someone couldn't reconstruct the missing parts if they tried. However, I don't think they're collecting any more data than Google or Apple or Samsung would collect when you use a smartphone, even if loads of smartphones use Android, which is approximately open.

The forced update from older Windows versions was only a real issue because it broke quite frequently for the first month until they patched it and because people kept closing the notification box without clicking the 'no' button. It shouldn't have been automatic until it was reliable, but then there's no good way to test something on millions of configurations and something breaking ten times in a million is enough to generate a big noise when the install base is as big as Windows'. Regarding smaller Windows updates becoming forced, that's mostly because a huge portion of Windows complaints and bug reports were coming from people who'd disabled updates because they were annoying

I'm not sure of anything I've ever needed to do that I'm unable to do on recent versions of Windows that I can in Linux as my text document of things I want Windows to include is now just things that I can't do in Ubuntu, either.

If you're claiming that Microsoft making more of their software open is just them trying to buy goodwill and gain free developers, then it's very hard to say that this doesn't also apply to every other for-profit company that makes use of and creates open-source stuff, and it's not practical to say the likes of Red Hat are bad for open-source.
Gates giving money to charity is basically him saying he's so rich he can't even spend the money and so he'll rather buy some publicity and an image of a good folk. It has nothing to do with software ethics but it seems to be working very well to somehow convince people he has good intentions.
Fair.
If you're asking me to choose the lesser evel, I'd rather choose none, whatever it means. But I understand people can often justify wrong choices this way.
I, for one, would rather Microsoft bought out GitHub than GitHub made me pay to contribute to open-source software or just simply disappeared one night without warning and made me lose all the stuff that's only on there.
Well then it's gonna be forked because you know, you can do this. I'll leave for the fork then. Or should we rather let the perfect be the enemy of the good and say if we can't achieve 100 % victory it's better to not try at all?
GitLab is more resilient against running out of money and everything going away forever than GitHub, but it's not like they can do a database dump and let another site mirror it if they go bust. Not everything on the site is open, even though the infrastructure it relies on is.
Yeah, let them play it. We're talking about development which requires some more responsibility.
Thunderforge was talking about development. He's an OpenMW developer and was describing his own situation. I'm in a similar boat - despite being someone who'll go for the open-source version of something when it's equivalent, the thing that drew me to OpenMW was its potential to free Morrowind from the shitty programming of Bethesda Softworks engineers and allow greater modding capabilities.
For whatever the cost? Josef Mengele probably wanted to just make the best medical research he could too.
I sort of have the feeling that we're in a post-Godwin's-law society now as there are a bunch of people openly defending what the Nazis stood for, but lots of the unethical 'medical' research they did was mostly focused on how much you could torture someone before they died and the scientific method was employed so poorly that the data gathered was worthless. Anyway, I'm going to ignore the bad example, because otherwise there's a decent point here.

The main problem with this point is that so far, there has been literally no cost and it's not certain that there ever will be. With Microsoft owning GitHub, we've gained the guarantee that it will only ever stop being what we need if it's actively sabotaged, and while there's a bigger risk of it being actively sabotaged, it might still be something that never happens.
Overall it sounds like you've accepted that MS can simply buy you and have already given up. You might rather want to get involved in proprietary game development then - they target the largest platforms, hire the best devs, have the best of everything without caring about the consequences or the context other than market.
Unless people literally take to the streets and have a communist revolution, corporations will always be able to buy what they want and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. Any version control system where we have a central repository hosted by a for-profit entity is as risk of corporate meddling, so in a few months, something eviler than Microsoft buys GitLab and sticks everything behind a paywall with literally no warning or a non-net-neutrality country suddenly has all its ISPs announce that they no longer support Git traffic. This is business as usual for businesses, but that doesn't mean that everyone except you is jumping out their chairs to go and sell their souls.
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Thunderforge
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by Thunderforge »

scrawl wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 20:25 I'm curious. Why do you think a self hosted instance will result in fewer contributions? You can sign in to different gitlab instances using the same account (OAuth), so there's no hurdle of creating accounts or anything like that.
The majority of developers today have a GitHub account, so there is no additional setup to contribute code. Already there are enough accounts for this project between the forum, wiki, and bugtracker, and adding a repository account on top of that is another hoop to jump through. Admittedly, in 6 months if virtually all developers have GitLab users, that may be a non-issue, and if we can somehow tie the forum, wiki, bug tracker, and repository accounts together into a single signup process, I could probably live with that.
scrawl wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 20:25 In any case, I could even turn this around and speculate that fewer 'drive-by' contributions from people that could hardly be bothered to create an account otherwise will drive up the quality of submissions and result in less work for the maintainers.
This is probably a more substantial concern for me. While we would have fewer "drive-by" contributions, I think that we will proportionally have fewer new contributors who might become core contributors. In my own case, I contributed to OpenMW about a year ago because it was fairly easy to contribute via GitHub. I continued to contribute because I was getting notifications on GitHub about OpenMW where I was contributing to other stuff. I am concerned that self-hosting would be isolating ourselves from new developers like me. I'm also concerned about additional workload that comes with self-hosting, and would prefer a public GitLab repository if we must move from GitHub (although to be clear, I would prefer staying on GitHub unless Microsoft actually *does* something that is evil to GitHub).
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Zini
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by Zini »

The majority of developers today have a GitHub account, so there is no additional setup to contribute code. Already there are enough accounts for this project between the forum, wiki, and bugtracker, and adding a repository account on top of that is another hoop to jump through. Admittedly, in 6 months if virtually all developers have GitLab users, that may be a non-issue, and if we can somehow tie the forum, wiki, bug tracker, and repository accounts together into a single signup process, I could probably live with that.
But that is really more an argument against leaving GitHub than for self-hosting. We are currently considering mirroring to GitLab. If we were to move to GitLab, we could probably do the same in the opposite direction.

As for sign-up, most likely we would fold at least the bugtracker into gitlab. Chances are the move would result in less sign-ups, not more.
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werdanith
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by werdanith »

Thunderforge wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 18:27 And a certain type of people just want to play Morrowind on a Mac, or play multiplayer Morrowind, or take advantage of any other features that vanilla Morrowind can’t provide.
I don't see a contradiction to what I said. Presumably you considered running Morrowind under different types of emulation, or getting a windows machine, and using tools such as MWSE/MGE to expand its features and found the solution inadequate. You wanted more control than what Bethesda gave you, namely what OS you can run it on and in what way you can expand its features, so you took matters in your own hands.
You don't have to be an RMS fanboy to see the practicallity of open source and operate essentially under the same motive with other devs.

Similarly this debate is about the extent that github is or will become an inadequate solution to hosting the project and as is apparent the sensibilities and priorities vary between developers.
Chris
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by Chris »

Thunderforge wrote: 05 Jun 2018, 18:27 No. The Microsoft of 2018 is not “the definition of proprietary software”.
I don't see them being very keen on the idea of supporting open APIs like Vulkan and POSIX, as they continue to push their proprietary DX12 and WinAPI solutions. They don't even support a version of C that isn't over two decades old, despite the amount of non-Windows software that uses it. Essentially any standard they don't have control over isn't a standard they're very interested in long-term.

And lets not forget the circus that is the Windows Store and UWP, which they continue to push as well. A fine example of modern Microsoft. Make no mistake, Microsoft is a publicly-traded multi-billion dollar corporation with a duty to make money for their shareholders. Any semblance of playing nice with open source is simply due to them determining it'll increase profits over other options. Once other options become more a more viable way to make money, there's every indication Microsoft will take it at the expense of open source.
Sooner or later, GitLab is going to have the same problem. I doubt the projects that are being moved from GitHub to GitLab were the ones generating any money. Within the next few years, GitLab too will either have to find some magical new source of revenue, get bought out, or close up shop.
Finding a new source of revenue isn't something people take issue with. Plenty of open-source-focused groups have revenue streams (it's not as if Red Hat and Canonical operate on a $0 budget or make money out of thin air). Selling ownership of your business to a corporation with a massive track record of shady tactics and who has been an opponent to open collaborative innovation isn't the only way to get money.

It's great that you think Microsoft has turned over a new leaf and is genuinely interested in playing fair with open source. Many other people have fair reason to be very wary. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
davidcernat
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Why has scrawl vanished from GitHub?

Post by davidcernat »

Right now, the OpenMW contributors page looks like this:

Image

I get a 404 error when trying to open up scrawl's GitHub profile:

Image

When I look at comments he has left on pull requests, like on this one, he shows up as the "ghost" account:

Image

What's going on? Is GitHub just bugging out?

Edit: Nevermind. It looks like he has really deleted his account:

Image

Edit 2: This was originally a different thread. It has since been merged into "Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion"
Last edited by davidcernat on 06 Jun 2018, 08:39, edited 1 time in total.
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psi29a
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by psi29a »

For those interested: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW

I'll be setting up a mirror shortly where we mirror between GH and GL (bi-directional), so that those that wish to keep doing things on GH are more than welcome to. Those who wish to work on GL are able to as well.
NullCascade
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Re: Microsoft Buys Github for $7.5 Billion

Post by NullCascade »

This thread is the biggest facepalm I've ever seen. Holy shit, it's like reading a Tumblr meltdown. Calm down and write some code, and stop being such fear-mongering, community-splintering Software Justice Warriors.
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