commit: eaccd03ca4faad8ec755bbefa8fa901fc85b6a6a
parent 573b64df4ac08f0dec04872218152bd04609ed0a
Author: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2020 09:51:18 -0400
Microsoft plays their hand
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+---
+title: Embrace, extend, and finally extinguish - Microsoft plays their hand
+date: 2020-08-27
+---
+
+GitHub took a note out of the Microsoft "<abbr title="Embrace, Extend,
+Extinguish">EEE</abbr>" playbook when designing their git services. They
+**embraced** git, and then rather than building an interface on top of email
+— the collaboration mechanism that git was designed to use, and which is
+still used for Linux kernel development[^1] — they built their "pull
+requests" mechanism.
+
+[^1]: And hundreds of other projects, including git itself.
+
+They took terminology which already had meaning — "fork", meaning the
+creation a separate governing body and development upstream for a codebase, a
+rather large task; and "pull request", a git workflow which prepares an email
+asking a receipient to pull a large branch of changes from a non-centralized
+source — and replaced these decentralized, open systems with a completely
+incompatible system designed to keep you on GitHub and to teach you to
+collaborate using GitHub's proprietary tools. They **extended** git in a
+proprietary way.
+
+Microsoft knows a good deal when they see one, and picked up GitHub for a cool
+$7,500,000,000, after they had already done the completed the two steps in
+Microsoft's [anti-open-source playbook][0]. They joined the Linux Foundation in
+late 2016, after Azure failed to win people back to Windows Server, admitting
+defeat while simultaneously carving out a space from which they could project
+their interests over the kernel.
+
+[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
+
+Today, I discovered this article, "[Relying on plain-text email is a
+'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board
+member][1]", a title which conveniently chooses to refer to Sarah Novotny by
+her role as a Linux Foundation board member, rather than by her full title,
+"Sarah Novotny, Microsoft employee, transitive owner of GitHub, and patroness
+saint of conflicts of interests." Finally, they're playing the **extinguish**
+card. Naturally, a representative of Microsoft, a company which has long waged
+war against open source, and GitHub, a company which explicitly built an
+incompatible proprietary system to extend git, would have an interest in
+dismantling the distributed, open system that git was designed for.
+
+[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
+
+I represent [sourcehut](https://sourcehut.org), a GitHub competitor which does
+what GitHub wouldn't — interoperate with open, distributed protocols, and
+in the form of 100% free and open-source software. I agree that the UX of
+email-driven development could be better! But instead of investing $7.5B into
+throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we've [built interactive
+tutorials][2], [designed better mailing lists][3], [built web interfaces for
+patch submission][4], [implemented CI for emails][5] and [sent improvements to
+git upstream][6]. We're planning on web-based review interface, too. The result
+is a UX which provides a similar experience to GitHub, but without disrupting
+the established open ecosystem.
+
+[2]: https://git-send-email.io/
+[3]: https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh-dev/patches/4728
+[4]: https://sr.ht/_fUk.webm
+[5]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-07-14-setting-up-ci-for-mailing-lists/
+[6]: https://github.com/git/git/commits?author=ddevault
+
+*This* is how you improve the ecosystem, Microsoft. Take notes. Stick with the
+embrace, move your extending *upstream*, and forget about extinguish.
