Marco Massenzio
1 min readFeb 22, 2019

So the unlimited private repos (which, incidentally, have been available forever on BitBucket) is nice, but somewhat to be expected: I am sure Microsoft didn’t buy Github for its earning potential (I believe the company has been racking losses forever, and had no path to profitability either).

What really bothered me (and still does) is Microsoft’s past history of wrecking apps/services they acquired, so that they would only work with Windows/Office (Skype has been effectively first neglected, then killed on Linux, and is now largely irrelevant and close to unusable; Sunrise was a very neat calendar management app, but now only works with Outlook; etc.)

To be fair, they have definitely changed recently and seem to be genuinely committed to open source and (to a much more limited extent) at least less hostile to Linux — and, in any event, git is “safe from harm”.

Still, too early to tell: I’ll be really curious to see how Github evolves in a year or two, and whether it becomes a “point-and-click” only type of service (as is typical of Windows) or retains usability via shell/command-line (as is more customary for us Linux developers).

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Responses (1)

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I think private repos on GitHub are a huge improvement, independently from the motivation to do it (also I didn’t quite understand why mentioning BitBucket on this discussion about MS and GitHub improvements).
About Skype, do you even use it? I use…

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