In case you hadn't noticed, for the last few days my website has been completely ad-free. Yup, that's right!
One of the original features of my website was the sidebar, and it's original purpose was to serve ads to users on my website and make a bit of money. Some months I would make as much as $40 which covered my website costs. But from last Monday I have been trialing out not running ads on my website at all and I'm quite happy to continue this.
Statistics now show a trend that people are less likely to trust a website if it has ads on it, so it makes sense. On top of that, after looking at my own website advert analytics I have noticed more people have ad-blockers than don't - so it no longer makes as much as it used to. So really, there's no point in me continuing with ads.
Just a few days ago I was saying how Microsoft is becoming one of the tech greats again - Windows 10 finally feels like a decent OS (although it never will be macOS or Linux and will always have flaws at it's core), their cloud platform is really quite something, opening the .NET library to everyone and making it cross platform and their awesome work with the latest version of Microsoft Office. Then they pull a stunt like buying GitHub.
Microsoft has always been very committed to GitHub since apparently they made the most contributions to repositories, which is nice to see, but it's sad to see a company, whose CEO once referred to open source as a cancer, whose main products are all proprietary, paid for, non-open source, buying a company who is committed to making open source a big thing.
Of course I use GitHub - who doesn't in the software development world. I have my own private repositories where I store the latest versions of Dash and ZPE amongst other software but from my point of view, particularly from the point of view of integrity, I am worried about the future for GitHub. If Microsoft pushes new restrictions as they have done in the past (for instance, the shutting down of the new free, non-Microsoft developed Halo 3 remake on PC) then GitHub may not be the place for open source developers to put their faith into.
I'm not being critical of Microsoft here, by the way, I'm just pointing out that I don't think their $7.5 billion purchase was the right move for the community.
