Anil DashIn roughly the past half-decade, Microsoft went from nowhere to overwhelming dominance of text editors with VSCode, ownership of majority of code hosting (and open source dev) with GitHub, ownership of the dependency stack used by most devs with npm, control over the most popular single language with TypeScript, and is trying to position copilot and ChatGPT as inevitable parts of the future dev process. Nothing negative for the ecosystem will come of this, as the last half century teaches us.
Michael Engard@anildash It’s so frustrating, because I genuinely love a whole bunch of those tools—I practically live in VS Code—but I can’t ignore the little voice in my head that knows they’ll all betray me sooner or later.
Sören@michael @anildash I’m not sure there’s anything deeper going on than “we want to sell subscriptions and will make it extra easy for devs to be interested in buying them”
• “I like GitHub at home; let’s convince my employee to buy GitHub Enterprise at work”
• “boy, deploying my code to Azure is so convenient”*
etc.
(ICE is also a big GitHub client, which is a bummer)
* it sometimes feels like Azure is the only *real* driving factor behind .NET Core’s existence
@chucker @anildash Oh, I agree. I’m not conspiracy-minded about it. This is more just Google Reader-style fear that the products I really like as they are will inevitably be killed, mutilated beyond recognition, or (perhaps most realistically) evolve in a direction that increasingly benefits their owners’ business objectives at the expense of user experience. That tension is always with us, though I do think it’s exacerbated by the oligarchic upswing we’re living through.
@michael @anildash I would indeed watch out for a classic 1990s’ MS EEE strategy
Embrace: embrace git as a useful tool.
Extend: extend git into GitHub with capabilities like an issue tracker, pull requests, etc. Increasingly entice developers to rely on GitHub specifically, not git.
Extinguish: eventually make GitHub incompatible with regular git.