Microsoft Acquires GitHub
+
+
+ • Microsoft Acquired GitHub in 2018-10
+ • … but Microsoft was always very excited about
+ non-copylefted FOSS
+ • They've been trying for 30 years to reduce the amount of
+ copylefted code in FOSS.
+ • GitHub was the obvious partner to help them do it.
+
Follow-Up / Talk License
I have a keynote about another interesting topic tomorrow: diff --git a/what-bkuhn-was-going-to-say.md b/what-bkuhn-was-going-to-say.md index 385d672..28fcaaa 100644 --- a/what-bkuhn-was-going-to-say.md +++ b/what-bkuhn-was-going-to-say.md @@ -146,7 +146,6 @@ that, by the time AJAX and Web 2.0 came along, there was not enough leadership to move an old PHP+HTML application to the more interactive and modern looks that users were demanding by the late 2000s. [ switch slides ] - ## Preston-Warner: Slide 4 Enter GitHub, founded in October 2007. GitHub from its very founding learned @@ -188,3 +187,24 @@ proprietarizing it, they chose proprietarization *every* *single* *time*. [ next slide ] +## Microsoft Acquired GitHub: Slide 5 + +Ultimately, Microsoft was a perfect match for GitHub. [ Karen should say: ] +I once spoke at Microsoft and asked them publicly apologize for calling the +GPL a cancer back in 2002. The main feedback I got from high-ranking +Microsoft employees was a “How Dare You Even Ask!?!?” kind of response. + +Microsoft, and indeed most proprietary software companies, are not our +friends. They don't want to help us make more FOSS (not copylefted, anyway). +GitHub is much smarter than SourceForge. Instead of pushing advertising into +FOSS (as SourceForge did and failed), Microsoft offers GitHub as a +loss-leader product for FOSS developers, so that they are trained. + +Bradley mentioned that he presented his capstone undergrad project at an ACM +conference in 1995. Every single attendee was given a gratis copy of +Windows 95. (Bradley confirms that this is the only Microsoft license of any +kind that he's ever agreed to.) The point of Microsoft's methods are clear — +going back decades: get people addicted to our proprietary stuff by offering +it gratis at first, and then finding ways to sell add-ons. + +While we don't like the term, Bradley calls this “free as in cocaine”.