GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

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.

On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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)

> “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.

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.

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

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

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

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).

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.

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.)

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.

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”

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.

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

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

$ git commit

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

But yeah, github has been largely unaffected.

Never make a deal with the devil.