Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unethical thing with it that will ultimately end up hurting me in the long run?

Because I feel like the answer to that is yes, and I can already see myself in the future writing something angry in the comments section of an article on HN that exposes some evil/stupid shit Microsoft did with this, or happened as a result of this.

I'm not against the concept of using a thin client for development, but it just doesn't seem smart to me do it in such a way where you have to place trust in a company that, throughout their entire existence, has consistently proven that you should not trust them, because they have no incentive to (and thus never will) act in your best interests. It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them.

The fact that they will be able to do it, is problem, we should not put ourselves in position to rely on their future morality.

Github at this point needs to be open source, atleast then they would be an easier way out.

Github does not need to be open source.

Open source needs to pull its head out of its collective ass and not hand over its entire workflow to private companies.

Github may be the single greatest execution of embrace/extend/extinguish in computing history.

Well, for starters, there is GitLab which attempts to do a lot of what GitHub does, while allowing you to self host it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab

In some respects, i'd say that it does things better, for example, GitLab CI seems way easier to use in comparison to GitHub Actions: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/

As far as alternative source code management platforms go, with some code review and issue management functionality added on top, there is also Gogs, which is a far more lightweight solution and better fits smaller deployments: https://github.com/gogs/gogs

It was also forked by the Gitea project, which is largely compatible with it but is also in active development: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

Oh and there's also GitBucket which also attempts something similar to these: https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket

Now, you can probably hook those up with Jenkins or most other CI solutions, but personally i rather enjoyed how Gogs/Gitea integrated with Drone, which allowed for container based builds (no more plugin hell like in Jenkins): https://github.com/drone/drone

Then, you can throw in some additional tools, for example, for code analysis you could use SonarQube ( https://github.com/SonarSource ) and for security scanning of infrastructure you could look at OpenVAS ( https://github.com/greenbone ).

Oh, and on the organizational side something like Rocket.Chat ( https://github.com/RocketChat ) or Mattermost ( https://github.com/mattermost ) for communication and perhaps OpenProject ( https://github.com/opf/openproject ) for project management.

And there you have it! An open source based workflow that allows you to do most of the stuff that GitHub would let you! Of course, concessions might need to be made depending on what your definition of "open" is and whether you're okay with certain features being restricted to paid tiers in some software; if you do have a problem with that, there's also the possibility of looking at some libre alternatives, though that might lead to the occasional half-dead piece of software that doesn't really have financial incentives for maintenance anymore on anyone's part.

That said, i believe that few choose this approach, because it's somewhat complicated to run all of that and all of the sudden you become responsible for your own SLAs, which many don't want. It's often the same reason why people just provision VPSes from AWS, instead of running their own servers in a server room. I think the amount of links to GitHub for open source above speaks volumes about the state of the industry.

I don't think that there's an easy answer to the implications of this, maybe people should just familiarize themselves with the concept of "Service as a Software Substitute", so that they're at least aware of the trade-offs that their choices have: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...