Linus Torvalds is probably clever enough to create something like that. The Linux kernel sure could take advantage of it.

I think sometimes people forget that one of the main features of Git is that it’s decentralized. You don’t need Github; just push your repo to a different remote.

Everyone that clones the repo (usually) has a full copy of it, including all history, and theoretically you can clone the repo directly from their copy. Of course, that’s often not practical, which is how we ended up with these centralized services.

The main issue with losing a Github repo is the auxiliary non-Git-powered features of Github, like issue tracking.

They lose money from it (people that used to pay for an account to get private repos no longer need to) which is why Github didn’t do it when they were independent.

Plenty of open-source projects that I use are happy with them though. I see far fewer projects using Travis CI and AppVeyor these days for example.

Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use

Free private repositories, Github Actions, and Github Packages are all pretty useful though. All of those were added under Microsoft’s ownership. Actions got a head start because it was built on top of Azure DevOps infra that Microsoft had already created.

I get the Pro version for free since I’ve worked on a few popular open-source projects. I’m using it in VS Code and it’s helped me write code for systems I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve used it to summarize the architecture of open-source projects so I understand how to contribute new features. The autocompletion can be pretty good too. I also use it to review my code.

We use Claude Code with the Opus 4.5 model at work, and it’s quite a bit better, but I don’t want to pay that much for an AI model for personal projects since I use it so infrequently.

Are you including Github Copilot in that count? Technically that’s a Microsoft product. It’s probably the only Copilot that’s actually useful.

Unfortunately they no longer include elaborate Easter eggs like that, since they adopted a security policy around 20 years ago that forbids them. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-no-easter-eggs

I don’t know many people that still call it “Microsoft Office”… They usually refer to the individual apps they use (Word, Excel) rather than the suite as a whole.

Some people just call it “Microsoft” (“please install Microsoft on my computer”), especially if they’re on MacOS where it’s the only Microsoft software they use.

Some people assume it’s part of Windows since they’ve only ever used computers that have had it preinstalled.