Re: GitHub has been acquired by Microsoft

[Karlin High]

On 6/4/2018 10:17 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> $7.5B in stock.

And their competitor GitLab promptly offered a 75% discount for one year 
of their paid plans. They're claiming a 10x increase in projects getting 
migrated onto their service.

<https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/>

> While I am not particularly happy that our issue/review
> migration plans got us stranded on SourceForge

Back in April their was a discussion about whether GitLab would be a 
good fit for LilyPond development.

<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2018-04/msg00014.html>

In there, I did not see a lot of input from major contributors with the 
current system. I kept thinking, "We'll hear from David K anytime now, 
with some important foundational insight everyone else is overlooking."

But some things that I did get out of that discussion was that 
SourceForge Allura's issue status tracking features should be equaled or 
exceeded by any new system, that single-patch commits are likely 
preferred to branch-merge commits, and that ideally the comments for 
issue-based discussion could be separated form code-review discussion.

Looking at GitLab's features, their "labels" for status tracking, 
single-checkbox "squash merge" setting, and "resolvable discussions" 
would at least have a chance of meeting those expectations.

And the GitLab feature request for Import from Allura still stands, with 
7 upvotes.

<https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/45007>

> Terms and Conditions for free project hosting already included the
> caveat that projects may be cancelled at any time for any reason.  For
> strategic projects like, say, Samba, ReactOS, Wine, LibreOffice and a
> few others that may in some respect be considered a thorn in Microsoft's
> side, this makes a platform choice of GitHub a quite less appealing
> option than it had been before.

Definitely a concern for those projects, I agree. But Microsoft has 
seemingly become much more accepting of Linux and open-source things in 
the past few years. With Azure Sphere OS they're even sort-of doing 
their own Linux distro.

Microsoft-watcher Paul Thurrott quoting someone from the company:

"Microsoft is a multi-platform company, and has been for years. We chose 
Linux as the OS for two primary reasons: 1) the size of the OS footprint 
and 2) needs of our silicon partner ecosystem. The custom Linux kernel 
found in Azure Sphere has been optimized for an IoT environment and 
shared under an OSS license so that silicon partners can rapidly enable 
new silicon innovations."

(paid article) 
<https://www.thurrott.com/internet-of-things-iot/156713/microsoft-choose-linux-secure-windows>
--
Karlin High
Missouri, USA