You know, when Boeing let the MBAs run engineering, several hundred people died. It doesn’t seem like any other companies have learned from this.
Boeing wasn’t the first, and really they did learn. They learned they could make tons of money off killing a company and get away with it
Private Equity summarized
- Have a project works well
- Amass a massive community with lots of goodwill
- Project gets bought/merged/under new management
- new management destroy everything that attracted the community and goodwill
- ???
- Somehow, not profit
I wonder where it’s gone wrong. What would it have cost github to keep operating decently for the vast majority of small users, and still have a business side?
I wonder where it’s gone wrong. What would it have cost github to keep operating decently for the vast majority of small users, and still have a business side?
Why would Micro$oft keep project that doesn’t bring more and more profits? Github is no longer a product in itself for them. It’s a platform to sell Azure and Copilot subscriptions.
github is not a collaboration platform for them. It’s an AI service. just look at who are they reporting to since the CEO left last year
Microslop bought GitHub for the training data. That’s it. That was the whole point.
The funniest part is that their model is considered to be rather shit-tier.
What? Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018. ChatGTP was released 4 years later. The AI boom wasn’t a thing when MS was buying Github and no one was thinking about using it for data back then. Cloud was big thing in 2018 and MS bought GitHub to integrate it with Azure and sell computing to people using github actions.
And they said years earlier at dev meetings: Microsoft is about data. Harvest all you can. Hence the linked in purchase. They may have not known chatgpt was around the corner, but they did believe that the value is in harvesting as much information as possible.
no one was thinking about using it for data back then
Everyone with any foresight whatsoever has been thinking about using every source of data since the Babylonians were taking census 6000 years ago.
*“training data”.
Before LLMs there were all manner of systems “trained on data” back through “expert systems” of the 1990s and beyond.
Having direct access to all the code definitely gave Microsoft business data about which languages were being used, and how, most popularly, and by who.
And you think MS dropped $7.5B to get the data stackoverflow publishes every year for free?
Of course owning data from the most popular development platform was useful to them but they didn’t buy to get data to train “expert system” or LLMs. They wanted to have direct contact with huge numbers of developers so they can sell them their products.
Google Voice was also a service designed to gather training data for speech to text / text to speech services at Google. That’s why it was free. The advent of LLMs just gave it something else to plug the data into. The Microslopening of GitHub, at its core, had similar motivations. Having effectively full backend visibility of all content on the (at the time) centralized service that damn near everyone who publicized their code was using to publicize their code was a valuable business proposition even before they shoved it all in to a training set.
We’re talking about using code to train models which wasn’t a thing until LLMs were able to generate code which was after they bought GitHub. I’m pretty sure in 2018 they weren’t looking at GitHub as source of training data. It was a way to get developers to use their tools. Everyone was using Github and MS wanted to market their products to them. First Azure, now Copilot.
LLMs are just one way to monetize the data. I would bet hand over fire that Microsoft used the data as soon as they bought GitHub.
Yes but they specifically said “training data” which implies their use in LLMs. I agree they wanted user data, same as with linkedin, but I doubt they were thinking about “training data” in 2018.
They probably could have put a few MS ads on the website for Azure or w/e and actually made a profit. Otherwise, they could have just left it alone, it wasn’t hurting or competing with them.
Honestly it was helping them. Add in another hoop for me to jump through for open source/indie projects and I’m just going full Linux, especially with all the effort I keep having to go through to keep windows how I want it. Like windows is genuinely becoming as much if not more effort and headaches than Linux for me. I’m also running out of windows only games, once these last couple communities die I’ll probably never look at anything msoft again in my life all because of the companies constant anti-user decisions.
I never understand this: Linux has always been the reliable and manageable one. Windows has always been the flakey corporate nonsense. It is the one that causes me headaches. Every since XP came out.
Games, well that’s a fair point.
Microsoft did the same with Skype, but the tech, dont install new ceo or leadership, run it into the ground
On step 6, the long-term investors certainly don’t profit - but the private equity firms invested in buying up big companies often do. They’re the ones aggressively taking over, cutting costs all over, and selling as soon as the result causes the stock price to jump as they showcase record profits; usually because it will take time for the structure to fall apart.
It is not the Microsoft way!
Forgejo is the best alternative. They are also working on ActivityPub support, so different Forgejo instances can communicate with each other.
Codeberg is one of the many Forgejo instances.
Love the idea of a federated github, but I could only find this list of instances,
and from my basic test it looks like the search doesn’t bring up projects from other instances? Unless I’m doing something wrong.Read my comment again.
They are also working on ActivityPub support, so different Forgejo instances can communicate with each other.
They are working on it. They haven’t enabled it yet. And afaik the only thing that works atm is favorite count.
You can track progress here:
https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md
edit: atm it seems like these are done (despite the last two not being marked as such, I guess the roadmap is a bit outdated):
- federated star
- federated unstar
- federated user activity following
Oh, my bad. I was confused. I assumed ActivityPub was some specific sub-app rather than a general communication protocol. That makes sense. Would still be good to get a list of instances.
Do you want a list of Forgejo instances in general or specifically ones that have this experimental federation enabled?
General, assuming you think most will enable federation in due time. I’m just looking for the most appropriate place to join with.
Just go with Codeberg.org then.
You can move your repos elsewhere sometime later if you want to.
more FOSS projects NEED to get off github. there’s been countless things I’ve stopped using because I refuse to open another github account to simply post an issue or contribute to something.
So waiting on Kitchenowl to return to existence for example. Considering switching to Mealie at this point
I’m sorry, but these like ultimatums that people gave themselves are kind of ridiculous if I have an issue and the developer only uses GitHub I’m gonna post the issue on GitHub and get the issue fixed for myself and everyone else I’m not gonna use some purity test and be like oh let’s not fix this issue just because I can’t stand the parent company like Jesus fucking Christ you go touch some goddamn grass
k.
A mistake in the article: ghostty is not “nearly two decades” old. It’s like two years old. I think the author saw that the ghostty developer had been on github for that long, and assumed that the ghostty project had been going the whole time.
It’s great to see popular projects moving to alternatives.
how many vibe coding incidents will it take for microslop to learn?
I was thinking of joining GitHub back then, but the announcement that MS is buying it put me off. I was right from the start.
Codeberg.org is your friend.
Is it possible to make repos without going to their site yet?
mkdir myrepo cd myrepo git initElite hax.
Looool, touche. What about registering that repo, pushing it (ie not updates/changes), and/or deleting it? Do i need a js-supporting browser for that?
You probably need to use their website to register an account (its Anubis protected, for good reasons), but once you have an auth token their API is pretty good. There’s even an Emacs package (fj.el)
git init /
Yes, but you’ll need to login through terminal
Left github months ago. Fuck that star greed. Everyone experienced enough to code and git has the power to run a forgejo instance on it’s own. Or simply go to https://codeberg.org/.
Even my employer, otherwise eager to gargle Microslop balls as deep as they can (Ooh, look! Another option to replace a third party tool with Microslop! Also, because apparently so many people still haven’t accepted the lord and saviour into their hearts, let’s aggressively market the utility of Copilot and offer more crash course introductions!)…
…are hosting their own Gitlab instance. I won’t say it’s perfect, but apparently we used Github in the past and have since moved away.
Start migrating elsewhere folks
codeberg will do.
Gitlab maybe? (someone already said Codeberg)
I recently started out in Codeburg. It’s a little bit user hostile; there were things I knew I should be able to do, but finding them was too unclear. It took a little bit longer to figure out, but it’s worth it to not use a MS product
but it’s worth it to not use a MS product
Agreed
Downhill ever since they removed the horizontal merge graph from the classic Desktop, then closed an issue about it because too many people were affected.
Soo, they vibe-refactored a perfectly fine working product?
And then speedran loosing all of their customers. It’s no longer reliable. Businesses can not have downtime when you are paying idle employees. Now we get to watch them hemorrhage customers until they die.
Got smacked with the pull request incident banner yesterday and now I’m actually considering to just move all my random personal repos to GitLab lol.
I’ve been putting off spinning up Forgejo at home because I really need to clean up my homelab design (really abusing quadlets to the point where it would be easier to just do K8s), and I already know I’m gonna immediately waste all my time setting up a dumb CI/CD pipeline that looks really cool but just makes a big mess every time I commit a mistake because I am not in the mood of setting up a monkeychain of pre-commit hooks at home lmao.
lol. they really are speedrunning their end, aren’t they?
They’re going to try and buy all the right politicians to remove the competition so you don’t have any choice.
I migrating to GitLab (my own hosted instance) or I plan to move to https://codefloe.com/
FWIW, I switched to self-hosted GitLab in Docker when Microslop borged GitHub and found it to be resource hungry and slow. Seems like it’s just a wrapper around their unoptimised, monolithic, warts-and-all enterprise product with a few flags changed.
And it’s entirely dependent on the ongoing goodwill (and competence) of GitLab, ie. subject to “we’ve altered the deal; pray we don’t alter it any further”.
Migrated it to a Gitea container soon after, which is light and fast. If I was making the same decision today, I’d switch to Forgejo, but that’s more of an ideological position than technical or UX one versus Gitea.
