GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation (opens in new tab)

This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.

For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:

- being the no. 1 enemy of free software

- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share

- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite

- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)

- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)

The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.

Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.

In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.

Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.

I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.

I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.

Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:

- most servers were running linux

- most phones and tablets were running android

- people were buying tablets instead of desktops

- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC

- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source

Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).

So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.

And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.

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The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.

What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.

On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.

Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?

MAUI is a mess.

Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.

C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.

Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).

They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?

And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.

At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.

I'd say Microsoft buying GitHub was part of a strategy to not lose relevance in the world that moves slowly towards Open Source Software. Or put another way, the world moves in a direction away from Microsoft, and by capturing GitHub they can manipulate the outcomes that would otherwise have been adversarial to Microsoft interests. It's just like when Microsoft forked Java back in the 1990s, and later created .NET. The whole VSCode or Visual Studio thing... it's just Microsoft Word for software engineers, and the whole point is to create an ecosystem that locks people into the ecosystem.

To think in terms of what Microsoft does, you have to step back and look into economic theory, at least a little bit. There is this idea in economics about isolated economies, and integrated economies. For example, Europe or North America relies on cheap manufactured goods from China, and so China's economy is intrinsically linked (integrated) into the economies of Europe or North America. THAT is the idea of what Microsoft does. They start by adding value, a soft-dependency you might say, and then make moves to becoming a hard dependency... to put into terms of a dependency graph. Then they link to dependency graphs together GitHub into VSCode, OpenAI into VSCode, One Drive into GitHub or One Drive into Hotmail...

I'll say for sure, at least Microsoft has a strategy, unlike Google where they seem to have a lot of failed projects.

When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.

That happened three decades ago.

I'm going to re-post something that I wrote in 2022:

I'm a bit surprised at how many of my friends have jumped ship to Visual Studio Code, including those who are very much for free software. They have always been in the business of embrace, extend, extinguish[0]. People tend to forget how evil M$ used to be because recently they have seemed like a beacon for Open Source, but I think they are just still evil[1].

I think we're still dealing with the same Microsoft that we've dealt with through the 90s. They are not a champion of open source, and they are still up to their old tricks.[2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31966414

[1] https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

[2] https://social.platypush.tech/@blacklight/108719097530863121

These guys are extremely bad guys.

This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.

... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.

We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.

Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.

The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.

We shouldn't ignore the influence of trend, it's like the facebook in mobile era.

This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.

First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.

I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.

Dont get me started on Azure

I seem to remember a lot more .NET IDEs before .NET Core... This frustrates me.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...

Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.

I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?

Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?

Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?

I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?

... what?

They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.

If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.

- completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando"

- they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"

- built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo

- highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines

- good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters

- related to that, a strong "review environment" setup

- they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands

Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.

I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero.

I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.

I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).

At home I prefer fossil. It isn’t without rough edges but for the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.

Yes and no. If all you want is a remote git server then no, there's not. But there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a SaaS tool like GitHub.

NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.

YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.

Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.

I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.

Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).

But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.

If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!

I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.

Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."

Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.

Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.

I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.

Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.

I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.

Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is Github Copilot.

It is true these companies haven’t recouped anywhere near the $trillion they’ve invested in AI.

The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.

I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.

It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.

I find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.

I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc

But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.

That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.

It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.

Exactly, but this is just the nature of this technology. It can sort of fake human intelligence but not really. You can't count on it to do human work without supervising it so what's the point?

> “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory,” said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].

That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.

Some people think a github presence is important for their personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead now

We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with the next review.

It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.

Isn't GitHub's entire visibility and pervasiveness is entirely due to the OSS?

So, now they're basically saying to OSS, "so long, and thanks for all the fish"?

1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.

How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?

Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.

GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.

[0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...

I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)

We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway.

Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.

Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).

I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,

I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)

It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the code online.

I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though, and the options for viewing repositories are universally terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.

You have a very short privacy policy [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-scraping protection. What if anything is your users' expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties, including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out clearly in your privacy policy.

I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.

I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.

I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure and Power Platform

Im more concerned about random breakages. When you have org pressure to add features rapidly shit breaks. Stale would be best case scenario.

$ git commit

The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.

ah ok so the politics of power aren't of interest to you

> LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.

ah ok so the politics of power ARE of interest to you

what's goin on here man

Zed was born as a result, which is drastically better. Zed tried to go into the AI thing, then made it possible to use it without any AI stuff, which is good.

The features that will be prioritized will be AI not Git improvement

I’m trying to think of what a bare minimum SSH remote experience would look like. Could you do code reviews with a terminal instead.

I love the git SSH experience for speed, but I find myself using GitHub for the PRs & code review. It would be nice to have a self hosted , terminal-based solution

Microsoft's goal is to make money by making software or ~~selling~~ renting services. You are a cost center.

And what do managers do to cost centers? They outsource them, either to artificial "intelligence" or actual Indians.

By plagiarizing stolen code, disregarding its original license, they hope to make the former actually work.

And the hot take is that Azure devops, including git and the pipelines, is actually better. That Github yaml trash is just a pain.

Also Microsoft lost a big opportunity with Unity (not helping them updating .NET) and killing off XNA, two major ways how kids get into .NET.

That coupled with Unity's mismanagement, means indies are more likely to keep using C++ based engines like Godot or Defold, and losing yet another adoption vector. Yes Godot does support C#, but GDscript is winning the heart of indie devs.

It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.

Starting to? 30-50% of the HN front page has been consisting of articles about LLMs for months now, to the point that a user script to hide all AI articles vastly improves the experience.

If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren’t they likely to get replaced by something else that does the core thing better?

Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.

You’d think being a trusted source of truth for many critical codebases would be “enough”

can you elaborate?

After a decade of use I've seem some more cutesy porcelain popping up, but the commit-tree basic concepts have never changed.

The company I work at is using the same exact branching strategy I introduced when we moved to git, with essentially no discussion in the meantime.

Github documentation is already pushing primarily Azure, for example https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/deploy-to-... has 8 Azure links up front, then 1 link for AWS, 1 for Google, and 1 about Apple.

And don't forget that NPM is Microsoft property too, https://docs.github.com/en/actions/tutorials/publish-package... has no equivalent document for e.g. JSR.

Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?

Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.