This weirded me out, but the Dockerfile [0] reveals how this just pulls together a bunch of linters. A nice convenience to have taken care of, but nothing groundbreaking or closed-off. I guess this still counts as an "Extend" step, though.

[0]: https://github.com/github/super-linter/blob/master/Dockerfil...

Fun fact : it runs a shell script of "only" 2300 lines : https://github.com/github/super-linter/blob/master/lib/linte...

Serious question: what should a company like MS do in that position ? I think this is a nice feature and it's useful, it's also open source and MIT licenced, so in other word, it's an open as it can get. Is there anyway for MS to not making you uncomfortable apart from just not adding any new feature ?

I mean I would do the exact same thing. Consolidate dev mindshare around the organization. That doesn’t mean I have to like it!

Indeed and I wasn't criticizing you, this was a legit question: Is there a way in that situation to continue improving while not creeping out users. I guess the answer is to do it for long enough without screwing your users like MS did in the past.

I guess the extreme would be to spin off Github into a non profit like a Mozilla, but dedicated to improving software tools and keeping them open source.

MS only owns GitHub, not git. Likewise, MS doesn’t own docker, Linux, or, as other comments have mentioned, any of the actual linters in the image. I don’t really see the problem, unless you’re actually developing inside the MS / .Net ecosystem.

Definitely. Side projects, fine. But I'll never use a pipeline that's coupled to my VCS hosting solution for anything production facing. Did it before and not only does it make it tricky to move to another VCS host, but your ability to release is held hostage by their uptime - which isn't super reliable.

It’s MIT License. You’re free to fork.

Yeah but only MS/GH have the resources to maintain a viable project here. Little old you and me aren’t really going to reasonably fork something and have the time to maintain it.

Hm, I wouldn't say so for the superlinter specifically. If you actually look at the source, it doesn't seem particularly hard to maintain.

As if licenses mean anything. What exactly does forking by you?

the ability to use an old working version if the maintainers make breaking changes - which will at least buy you enough time to move to something else

I guess you've never worked in a .NET shop before? Or the days when everyone just developed on Visual Studio on Windows, before Macbooks for developers was a thing?

Yes I’ve worked in MS shops, even written Win32 code. I learned a monolithic dev ecosystem was what I personally did not want. So that pendulum swung more towards OSS...

I think most developers would agree that "open source has won". I feel the aspect of it that you're focusing on here is the ability to choose the best-in-breed tools, and to be able to swap each one out individually as better options arrive. If Microsoft's approach with its open source tooling is to follow that mindset, I'm not concerned. If it isn't, then eventually people will either move on to other tooling or fork it.

Now, if we're saying that Microsoft should be spending more of their time on interop and portability but chooses not to prioritize their resources on that, then that just falls into the category of common complaints that people have with all open-source projects and what the contributors choose to spend their valuable developer hours on.

I am starting to feel this way about just git.

How so? Don't get me wrong; I dislike monocultures and wish hg/fossil were more popular, but git is open source, portable, and totally supports distributed workflows.

Yep. I'm not a giant fan of the way GH is currently moving. GH is slowly becoming what Atlassian wish it had.