On 05/06/2018 13:56, Lars Noodén wrote: > Actions speak louder than words.
They do. It will be interesting to see how their "stewardship" of GitHub works out. >> Their revenue going forward depends on playing nicely with open source. > Their revenue does not yet depend on helping FOSS, but it does depend on > people repeating that untruth that it does. As I see it, it's not a matter of "helping"; it's a matter of working well with open source for their (Microsoft's) own benefit. And in the world we're now in, MS's revenue certainly does increasingly depend on being able to play well with open source. In my view, they 'like' open source now because they have to. > M$ will screw up GitHub both on purpose and by accident. Take a look at > Nokia, Hotmail, and Skype. Politically they can't mess with it right > away while people are watching, but expect the claws to come out within > two years of acquisition after people have time to forget. Time is > needed, recall what Ralph wrote about TTL of societal knowledge. I think it is implausible to believe that they would screw it up on purpose. As things stand (now and for the foreseeable future) that would simply not be beneficial to Microsoft for all sorts of reasons. Remember that they have bet on GitHub as a centre to develop and promote their own open source projects, projects that are absolutely key to getting developers to write for the Microsoft ecosystem (which now extends to Linux, Mac, Android). Nevertheless, I can imagine them screwing it up by accident, perhaps my meddling. They have specifically said that they won't meddle. Time will tell. We'll see. I think GitHub is very different to Nokia and Skype. Nokia and Skype were acquisitions carried out in a different (Ballmer) age and were badly handled. In particular, Skype suffered from meddling and excessive integration with other MS products that alienated its previous user base. GitHub just isn't the same sort of thing. As for Hotmail, what's wrong with that? It still exists in the form of Outlook.com and it's massive, isn't it? Hotmail is surely a success story, or am I missing something? -- Mark Rousell
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