Microsoft will acquire Github

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github

I thought it may be interesting, since the majority of Julia projects are hosted there.

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Oh wow, had no idea… I wonder what the consequences will be…

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https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgId=1

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@lobingera I don’t understand! Why are people importing into github? Shouldn’t they be taking their stuff out of there?

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*gitlab

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Ah, now I understand. So the site is monitoring how many projects are imported to gitlab from github. Thanks! I really wonder what is the take on this from people that have worked a lot on Julia. @kristoffer.carlsson care to share?

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My own personal opinion is that we should just wait and see. My guess is not much will change but if things turn out to be bad, it shouldn’t be too bad to migrate to something else, e.g. gitlab.

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All your rebase are belong to us

                     Signed:
                     Bill Gates
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Stupid question, and I guess I should read the source Luke. the answer will be illuminating though.
Given that METADATA.jl is itself hosted on Github, how easy would it be to move to another hosting site?

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I’m not a developer, so i don’t understand why you would migrate, even if Microsoft acuired Github. What might be bad?

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Note the “if” in my post.

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I just posted this here because I think it is relevant, not to suggest we need to take any immediate action. Just what medical professionals call “expectant management” or “watchful waiting” :wink:

With Pkg3, I expect it will be easier to use other platforms, eg Gitlab, Bitbucket, or a self-hosted Gitea.

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Here are the official announcements:

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:fearful:

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With the new package manager Pkg3, it should be a perfect opportunity to also transition the default to gitlab, right? Might as well

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I don’t understand what this means. That the registry should be hosted on gitlab?

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It means that a transition can be made, since there is already a package management transition happening anyway, so it could piggy back onto that transition by moving the main Julia repos on there and recommending gitlab instead of github for hosting. Basically, one could take advantage of the momentum of already changing the package system, people are already expecting a change anyway. Just an idea.

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Julia only relies on git, not github specifically. Therefore, the only issue here as far as Julia concerned is what site hosts the repos of specific packages. In principle, “switching” to gitlab is trivial, just open a repo there.

As much as this news horrifies me, like @kristoffer.carlsson it’s not clear why you’d take immediate action. For all we know GitLab will be acquired by Alphabet and wind up being even worse.

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Gitlab is also open-source. I think even that the business model is similar to Julia’s one. Isn’t it?

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My bet is only good things will happen:

  1. GitHub’s code will be open sourced like GitLab’s.
  2. Better with more features free plan (Like having non public repositories).
  3. Faster back end hardware delivered by Azure.

Probably they will offer also some integrations to MS world related products (Like building and submitting MS Store applications, better Windows CI, etc…).

Let’s not forget, the biggest commercial player in the Open Source World (Namely having the most projects) is MS.

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