This is a tired take. Can a company not legitimately improve their product/offering without this being accused at them?

If you are referring to GH being owned by MS now, it's 2020 for godsake. Can we move on from our fathers' trauma? MS has been damn good lately in support of developers and developer tools.

I get just as tired of reading this take as the next person, but I don't necessarily think we should do away with it - it'd be akin to ignoring history.

I personally remain very uncomfortable with how massive GitHub has become and how ~99% of software development happens on the platform.

There isn't much lock-in yet though. If you wanted to move a project from github to gitlab, you could move the code over with a few commands. Open issues and stuff could be moved over with a script. There isn't much 'network effect' that means your project would die on other hosting.

This is classic "it could be built in a weekend" syndrome, and I think we're all intelligent enough on this site to know that it's simply not true.

Furthermore, technology isn't the lock-in - it's the network, which you can't drag as easily.

Looking at the history in the wikipedia article that was linked in the GP post, none of the executives who used that phrase are with the company anymore.

Subtract the bare assertions and questions and your argument boils down to "it is $current_year, and Microsoft has been good lately." Which, I think you might agree, doesn't contain a lot to convince someone who remembers the bad old days.

To me, this isn't a real counterexample, even at the height of MS's EEE, it was never at the expense of developer tooling, it was at the expense of openness. In fact, improving developer experience was the primary lever MS used to achieve it.

How do you know the difference between being in an EEE scenario versus just being in a scenario where people keep working on their product?

When the open components that allow free interoperability with GitHub's competitors are replaced with proprietary components that don't.

Did that happen?

Just look at history.

Does that mean it _always_ happens? Or only sometimes?

I think the simple way of passive resistance is calling it "Microsoft GitHub".

And in a few iterations they will label git as "legacy".

This may be relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24420307

And wait until they claim it is to "improve the user experience" because they care about their users so much they need to protect them from the free and familiar tools they are used to.