Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub (bloomberg.com) 323
Bloomberg reports:
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Terms of the agreement weren't known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.
GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, use GitHub to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It's also a social network of sorts for developers. While GitHub's losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016 -- it had revenue of $98 million in nine months of that year.
On Friday, it was reported that Microsoft was in talks with GitHub about an acquisition. Now it seems like it's actually happening.
Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in. Here is a tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge.
Update #2: Already, we are seeing plenty of backlash over this news. One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.
Update #3: It's official. Microsoft has acquired GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B.
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Terms of the agreement weren't known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.
GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, use GitHub to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It's also a social network of sorts for developers. While GitHub's losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016 -- it had revenue of $98 million in nine months of that year.
On Friday, it was reported that Microsoft was in talks with GitHub about an acquisition. Now it seems like it's actually happening.
Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in. Here is a tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge.
Update #2: Already, we are seeing plenty of backlash over this news. One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.
Update #3: It's official. Microsoft has acquired GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well tat certainly explains this: (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the business model, inquiring minds want to know?
How long until you need a microsoft account to use github?
How long until commercial customers also need to subscribe to Office 365?
Given other activity by Microsoft, I wonder if Software Freedom Conservancy needs to step in and protect the Git mark.
(https://www.git-scm.com/about/trademark section 2.3)
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Oh just give micro shat your name address phone number and date of birth now and get it over with
You forgot SSN, employer and income and Credit card#.
$M needs it all
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Which is retarded since it conflates git and GitHub.
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$ man git | grep -A1 ^NAME
NAME
git - the stupid content tracker
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Maybe they shouldn't have posted as AC, since most people wouldn't have seen the comment to start with.
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You're right. What would I do without my daily dose of homophobic poetry and spam posts from India?
Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep seeing the same behavior that happened during the first dotcom boom - companies valued at stupid multiples of "earnings", including what are technically negative earnings, being valued far in excess of their worth. A company is only worth its future profits discounted at the rate of the next best investment of that money, minus its initial and ongoing investments. The longer it takes to return a profit, the exponentially more difficult it is to recover the initial investment. Only a fundamental change or an external factor like currency inflation can distort that picture into a supposedly rosy one.
Perhaps GitHub can have some of its cost structures reduced by riding on Microsoft's coattails. Perhaps there's some breakthrough that Microsoft can see with them, although I don't think there's a tremendous synergy there. The basic model has been there before (SourceForge), and it could technically be duplicated again by someone else. Many developers/repos will simply bail due to Microsoft's history of changing business terms. Heck, they rolled "Teams" out which is supposed to compete with Slack.
More power to the current owners of GitHub if they get bought out, as it's a great tool. I just think P.T. Barnum really was right, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop in this latest boom.
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It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable?
Because thanks to the magic of ToS that can be changed on a whim, Microsoft can just magik in a "all your codes belongs to us" clause.
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Because there is a difference between "you must pay 1 million dollars" and "That 1 million dollars you have given us for 'safe keeping' is now ours."
If they could work out the legal arrangement right, Microsoft's TOS change could be closer to the latter than former.
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Oh, Is it time for the meme redux? [xkcd.com]
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Re:Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:5, Interesting)
It remains to be seen how much Microsoft has paid for GitHub, but why pay anything if they're unprofitable
The classic Economics answer, is that you believe that it is unprofitable because it is poorly managed, and that you can do a better job of managing it to profitability. This usually means that you can integrate it with your existing businesses, streamline, and cut a lot of costs. This also usually includes massive layoffs at the purchased company, accompanied by folks jumping ship to look elsewhere for a job, before they are eventually fired.
IBM's ThinkPad business was unprofitable when Lenovo bought it. Lenovo turned it around into profitability.
Of course, there are often other ulterior motives. Microsoft bought Nokia because they thought Nokia built hardware would help Windows Phone be a success.
Microsoft was wrong. So they did what any other rational investor would do . . . cut your losses and let it die.
We'll see in about a year what Github's fate is . . . profitability . . . or death . . .
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. A lot of companies will acquire and keep running losses on those just to keep the market share, account information or some integration or whatever is actually "valuable" in the grander scheme of things. Some things just aren't expressed in money.
Microsoft has been chasing developers since Ballmer got forced out. With low cost or free development cloud infrastructure and free dev tools, hardware and software. They think the future is going to be in custom middleware in the cloud and they're betting big on it.
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:3)
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft just bought developer mindshare. And, I'll bet there is a behind-the-scenes migration of GitHub's hosting to Azure before 2019 as they can just use unused cloud compute resources that would be idle cycles otherwise to host.
What does that do to the cost model?
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:4, Informative)
> migration of GitHub's hosting to Azure
Interesting tactic. If I remember correctly from what my friend said that's a director at Mindtree that does support for Azure, they have over 700 services of which many basically see no usage. The list:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ [microsoft.com]
I guess if you can't get people to use your products, buying customers is your only choice. I just wish they would reduce prices instead. In our trial, we found that Azure was about 25% more expensive than AWS for our use case.
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:2)
They come out with new features all the time but are really crap at advertising them.
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:4, Interesting)
The cost model is you will see github called VIsual Studio Github 365 online. Sure you can use the web interface for free like Office 365 but the real goodies requires Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code if you are poor or on Linux.
We will see gVFS Git Virtual File System and backup utilities for larger projects and online collobaration tools added ... but they require a Visual Studio subscription to turn these on etc. But for simple things it will remain free.
This is what happened to LinkedIN. It is still free but if you want to post your resume or make networking connections with customers or talk to HR it costs $30 a month for the pro version etc.
Since MS submitted GVFS to Linus he can fork it and offer the same service for free with another provider if this becomes a problem.
Re: Why are unprofitable companies worth so much? (Score:5, Insightful)
GitHub is highly strategic. It's value extends beyond its revenue to its brand, its momentum, and its position at the crux of the exceedingly important developer demograpchic. If they mostly sit on it, they can use it to effectively push MS's FOSS projects over competitors that marginalize MS's own proprietary products.
What comes to mind for me is Node.js. It's one of the first really popular developer platforms to come around that really made Windows a second class citizen. MS has pushed their way into the community and found solutions to those issues, but it shows how MS is vulnerable in this space.
Especially since their biggest desktop competitor (OS X) is much more compatible with their largest server competitor (Linux), and aligned with the mobile OSes which actively undermine MS's position as a dominant player. It's a perfect shit storm for MS.
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Why are unprofitable companies worth so much?
I think the short answer is that if you have anything that's big and popular somebody will buy it and try to monetize it or integrate it into their portfolio. Consider it a way of buying access to a market, even if the app with a million users isn't making money it's a million people you could try to sell some add-on service to. And you wouldn't be cold calling them, the option would be there teasing you whether it's selling hats in TF2 or Azure cloud hosting. Unless the bubble bursts and nobody wants to ma
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Millions of repos suddenly cried out in terror (Score:5, Funny)
And were suddenly erased.
Goodbye then, Github (Score:4, Insightful)
Why hello, Gitlab
Re:Goodbye then, Github (Score:5, Informative)
I hear Bit Bucket is good too.
Both offer unlimited private repos.
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Bitbucket works pretty well, especially within the rest of the Atlassian suite. Of course then you're within a bit of walled garden as far as higher level interaction with the VCS, but it's still standard Git repos at the base of it, unless you go with Mercurial. It's free for a small number of developers in a private repo, and pretty cheap at scale.
Re:Goodbye then, Github (Score:4)
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Gitlab is a dumpsterfire on resources. It uses 12GB RAM and 0.5 load avg on an E3-1270v6 while *sitting idle*.
Self-hosted gogs [gogs.io] is the way to go. It runs on a raspberry pi or in the cloud on a $2/mo bargain basement VPS no problem.
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Gitea [gitea.io] is a fork with more features and security patches that has left Gogs behind.
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There is always Amazon CodeCommit...
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Yeah, no.
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For the company I work at, we were already running Gitlab.
Had already set up Gitlab for my personal private repos on a server I run for my personal projects.
Today I learned Gitea also exists. That could mean, even less resource usage.
It was nice while it lasted (Score:4, Insightful)
All Your Repos (Score:4, Insightful)
are belong to us.
Uh yeah... no (Score:2)
Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in.
Hey cool. The Digg of source code repositories still thinks it’s relevant.
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Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in.
Hey cool. The Digg of source code repositories still thinks it’s relevant.
They aren't relevant yet. This is the second chance. One of GitLab, Sourceforge, BitBucket or a completely new entrant is going to end up the winner. The question is, which one? Let's start the bidding war.
I believe the opening bid is GitLab with, "you can get a reasonable open source version of the bits of our web site you care about but without the statistics and other commercial features". Who's going to raise us a statistics module?
Brace Yourselves (Score:2)
Obviously.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's where my code won't be.
No way.
I've been kicked in the face, in a business damaging way, by Microsoft acquisitions. In fact a couple of times.
There's no way that my intellectual property, open source or not, will be under Microsoft control.
root canal bingo (Score:3)
Microsoft might not ruin this, but on their history, I'll actively have one foot out the door, rather than passively.
I was somewhat active on LinkedIn — until Microsoft bought it.
I was somewhat active on Goodreads — until Amazon bought it.
Because with these large corporations, you just never know what of retroactive TOS root canal is coming down the turnpike, on any given day.
Once these corporations get to a certain size, it almost takes radioactive blow-back from the community to deflect their course in any meaningful way. And I don't enjoy the galloping pony-swap for the duration as this plays out.
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GitHub is NOT an 'essential' tool for coders (Score:5, Insightful)
"GitHub is an essential tool for coders"
No it's not. It's a *useful* tool for *many* coders. Many other coders use other cloud-based source code control services - or none at all.
It's important that we be precise in our language, and stop resorting to hyperbole.
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Plonk
Private Repo Access? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft does acquire Github, does that mean that they will instantly have access to all the private repos from Google, Apple, IBM, etc?
Re:Private Repo Access? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody who puts a private repo on somebody else's server should always assume someone's stealing their code.
Will they kill off Atom? (Score:2)
Must suck for paying github customers (Score:5, Insightful)
The people I feel most sorry for are commercial customers of github paying for version control as a service.
Waking up one day to find out your competitor is not only hosting but has access to all your proprietary source code must royally suck.
I will wait and see what happens (Score:3, Insightful)
Given what Microsoft has done to Visual Studio as of late (support for building apps on Linux, Android, iOS and other platforms, major efforts towards making Visual Studio compliant to the latest C++ standards, open sourcing core parts of .NET and generally being much more developer friendly) I cant see a purchase of Github being the end of the world.
Let the Exodus Commence (Score:2)
They will have access to all the private repos (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly will start farming code and ideas from all those private repos. Probably quite a few MS competitors and suppliers of their competitors use Github. I've always thought Github was a secret gem for harvesting IP from.
Confirmation? (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah, no (Score:2)
One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.
Yeah, that'll have MS quaking in their boots. And if that doesn't work, we shall pout in your general direction a zecond time!
Pretty normal practice by Microsoft (Score:3)
Now they've decided they need something in that area they just go out and try to buy the market...
Re:Just moved everything off and deleted my accoun (Score:4, Insightful)
Same here.
But I'm a nobody, and my OSS project are of little importance. What matters the most now is migrating this [github.com] away from the Microsoft trap...
Re:Just moved everything off and deleted my accoun (Score:5, Informative)
That's just a mirror, the official repo is at kernel.org, while the real master is on Linus' disk. Anyone, Microsoft included, is allowed to mirror it all they want.
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This place is also loaded with people who feel that they must hate the thing that is currently cool to hate. Hipsterizing your every thought is an effective way to avoid actually thinking. Of course MS is not anywhere close to pure, but not pure evil either. They will tend to act in what they perceive their best interests to be. The key is to guess how they will perceive them. Satya seems to have a reasonably evolved view on such things, so I don't expect any truly stupid shit to happen. Of course, that's n
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This place is also loaded with people who feel that they must hate the thing that is currently cool to hate. Hipsterizing your every thought is an effective way to avoid actually thinking. Of course MS is not anywhere close to pure, but not pure evil either. They will tend to act in what they perceive their best interests to be. The key is to guess how they will perceive them. Satya seems to have a reasonably evolved view on such things, so I don't expect any truly stupid shit to happen. Of course, that's not always the case with any company, small or large.
This is Slashdot too. My name suggests anti MS hatred which was certainly true back in 2000. Many of us fled from Windows and discovered Linux and Slashdot took the mantra of the unofficial community site. So yes this is why you see such things.
I understand this makes people uncomfortable who are old enough to remember what MS did with COM/VB/Java/and Visual Studio 6.0 and below with VC++. MS is changing now as they are fighting tooth and nail to keep Visual Studio alive today with the onslaught of Xcode, A
Re:Just moved everything off and deleted my accoun (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft will 99 out of 100 leave Github alone. Like the Minecraft or LinkedIn acquisitions, Microsoft knows if they mess the community they will not get money out of it. Admittedly LinkedIn hasn't turned out super well, but that is LinkedIn's fault and not MS.
Kinda like Skype, eh? Don't worry though - nothing has ever been Microsoft's fault.
Re: Just moved everything off and deleted my accou (Score:3)
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They messed up on Minecraft, too, completely dividing the community by making incompatible versions. Not cool.
Other than keeping their installed user base firmly addled with Stockholm Syndrome, I can't come up with too many of their success stories.
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Let me put an image in your mind:
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
"developers! Developers!! DEVELOPERS!!!"
Re:dendad (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft believes in, "It it ain't broke, how are we supposed to make money on support contracts?"
Re:dendad (Score:4, Informative)
> Have they never heard "If it aint broke, don't fix it"?
You obviously don't remember Hotmail; before gates and company sank their fangs into it, that is.
Re: So glad (Score:3, Interesting)
Why does everyone expect digital/virtual goods and services to be free? And then those same people flip shit about the advertising and sales of submitted and extrapolated data about them. The resources to host this stuff, and do so reliably, quickly, and securely, is not cheap. The cost to continue improving it is not cheap. Explain to me, please, why you expect a whole lot of something for absolutely nothing.
Re: So glad (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everyone expect digital/virtual goods and services to be free? And then those same people flip shit about the advertising and sales of submitted and extrapolated data about them.
Y'all got any more of that good strawman? Who is this everybody?
The resources to host this stuff, and do so reliably, quickly, and securely, is not cheap. The cost to continue improving it is not cheap. Explain to me, please, why you expect a whole lot of something for absolutely nothing.
That is all beside teh point. This is Microsoft, they manage to turn things to shit very quickly. Perhaps they will raise GitHub to the quality of their Windows 10 updates, eh? I wouldn't be surprised if the first thing they do is require a Microsoft account to access anything as well.
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Well people who registered for github did supply some personal information, that is worth something. Plus along with that I am fairly certain by examining various repositories (including private) they can determine who are the better coders and can sell that information to head hunters.
So nothing is free
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Re:Go fuck yourself, SourceForge (Score:5, Insightful)
Sourceforge offers git, so it seems like a perfectly reasonable bit of self-promotion to add. And it’s not like Whipslash is removing mentions of the other possible places people might consider migrating to.
Z Shell’s home is on SourceForge. If I wanted to take the time, I could come up with other prominent SF denizens for you - but regardless it’s apparent not everyone shares your sentiments.
The current owners do seem to be trying to turn SF back into a useful home for open-source projects. It looks to me like they've removed most/all of the crappy behaviors put in place by Certain previous owners. It’s not the only game in town... but it’s a legitimate competitor again.
Re:Go fuck yourself, SourceForge (Score:5, Informative)
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It's good again now, thanks for fixing it.
One thing though, like Slashdot it keeps asking for permissions over and over no matter how often you decline. GDPR allows you to remember that preference with a cookie. Or just make it less intrusive than a full screen overlay.
Re:Go fuck yourself, SourceForge (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Go fuck yourself, SourceForge (Score:5, Funny)
casings works at github. The mandatory company hormone treatment makes him bitchy.
Re:Go fuck yourself, SourceForge (Score:4, Interesting)
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Z Shell’s home is on SourceForge. If I wanted to take the time, I could come up with other prominent SF denizens for you - but regardless it’s apparent not everyone shares your sentiments.
Z shell? That’s the best you could come up with? Hahaha.
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I like to use the current Z Shell on my Mac, and they recently pushed an update - so it was fresh in my mind.
(Why bother with the overhead - and sometimes version lag - of MacPorts or Fink just to keep a couple pieces of software around?)
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Re:Go fuck yourself, SourceForge (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Go fuck yourself, SourceForge (Score:5, Informative)
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Sourceforge fucked over itself by becoming an ad-infested, malware-peddling shithole. It’s cute that the people running it still think anyone cares.
Re:Bwahahaahahah (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sure. Just to make you alt-reich snowflakes cry like babies.
Re:Time to leave (Score:5, Funny)
You know what they'll put in the usage terms with regard to what you are allowed to do with your project?
You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
Re: Time to leave (Score:3)
Well shit. That's gonna seriously impact all my MIT licensed code on GitHub...
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It is easy to replicate git repositories. So easy it is a piece a cake compared to moving a cvs or another centrally managed repository. In git, every repository is equal whether it is local, on github, sourceforge etc.
Just replicate the repositories to your environment, then, just push it to a new remote. The new remote will have everything. I regularly do this to pull from our GitLab environment and push specific public changes to GitHub or other specific changes to companies git repositories. You can pr
Re: Time to leave (Score:3)
Microsoft already something a bit like Github called VSTS and so far haven't claimed any right to any code on there.
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It's admirable how you've responded to so many comments about the misdeeds of Sourceforge's previous owners.
But, like a guy named Hitler running for chancellor of Germany, you might want to consider changing the name. Now seems like an opportune time.
Some percentage of Github users are definitely going to leave, because they will never trust Microsoft. I'm certainly curious as to how big of a percentage A certain percentage of those will never trust Sourceforge, no matter how much you assure them that thin
Re:SourceForge (Score:5, Informative)
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Wrong. Your company did. Just because you're part of the new ownership that eliminated the practice doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Earning back good reputation for a brand is a hell of a lot more difficult than earning slashdot karma.
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Re:SourceForge (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:SourceForge Isn't An Alternative (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:SourceForge Isn't An Alternative (Score:4, Funny)
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Well having some kind of good git-repo mirroring would be a great start.