otis_inf

We are in the exact same boat. We've been with them since 2002 (when it was still SWReg). We should have switched back in August when they changed the agreement and postponed payment till 60 days. It sounded 'legit' but it should have been a red flag. Yesterday we made the final changes to migrate over to PayProGlobal, and had our first order processed this morning. We have no illusions we'll ever get the money DR/MyCommerce owes us. It all sucks, tho in hindsight we were too naive and trusted them too much. Never again.

They also kicked out Karl Peterson, who designed the first MVP logo (the diamond with the large MVP inside it) and wrote about 3000+ reply posts a year in various visual basic groups. The reason? He was a VB6 MVP and very vocal against VB.NET. Yes, you can't have the spear head of a community you just kicked in the nuts with a 'VB.NET' in the program that is designed to promote that successor tech, now can we...

I've been a C# MVP for many years before they didn't renew me because I was too critical towards MS' direction (this was before they OSS-ed .NET). When I was awarded, it felt like I received an award for my position in the .NET community. When I didn't get a renewal years later it felt like I didn't get it because I didn't fit into their marketing machine. It was fine by me btw. The free MSDN universal subscription is nice, but that's about it.

> ServiceStack has been a valuable contribution to the .NET community, and your continued development/support of it should defacto make you an MVP.

Yes, and back in the days when I received my MVP title, this kind of thinking was part of the criteria. Nowadays... no way. It started 7-8 years ago I think when they decided there couldn't be more than X mvp's for a given category and they wanted at least Y mvp's in a given region. So less in the west, and more in say India. While it's fine to make it a more world-wide program and recognize people in communities which are less known to people in 'the west', the criteria to accomplish this changed with it: if you started a user group somewhere in a region without an mvp and someone nominated you, you had a good chance becoming one.

This is all OK btw, if your criteria is about evangelizing. If your criteria is about 'the people who are the most skilled in ABC' then it's not. So this shift in who would receive the award changed the program.

Nowadays it's rather silly tbh. If you want to get renewed you have to fill in a form where you describe why you want to get renewed. wtf... it's an award you receive. Why would you need to tell MS why you'd want to receive an award you haven't received yet as they decide who gets it...

Or you know, Google could have emailed them, told them exactly that and waited for a response before pulling the plug on the servers.

While you make sense from Google's PoV, it doesn't from the customer's PoV. As google is a big corp, it's IMHO better to side with the customer here, as next time it might be you who's getting screwed over by Google/other corp.

Ironically, they let you know every time they can that you can contact your personal adwords sales person by phone.

I think they still are mainly focused on their ad business as the core of the company and cloud is something they 'do on the side'. For Microsoft, Azure is core business, it's the future of the company. If they fuck it up, they're dead. Google apparently doesn't see their cloud offering as their core business and therefore doesn't get the attention it needs.

- It gives then 'streetcred' in the OSS communities using GitHub. This goodwill is valuable.

- It allows them to peek into any private repo on GH right from their own office. All major players host code there, likely a lot of them in private repos too. Microsoft has a large trackrecord of 'me too' products (i.e. the ones released after the original from another company is successful) and corporate espionage isn't something that's just happening in the movies. This too could make things very profitable

- Developer relations across private repos could increase the value of linkedin profiles which in turn could make that more valuable.

But that's about what I could come up with. I seriously don't understand why one would spent $2B on github if it hosts your OSS stuff. Also, to make sure VSTS become more successful with an integration doesn't make sense to me: GH isn't the most profitable service out there and was losing money. Hell it might even go belly up sooner or later and VSTS would look to be a better alternative.

You missed a part:

> Note: the release/2.0.0 branch of the CLI repo is based on the upcoming v2 of .NET Core and is considered pre-release.

i.e. it's still preview (albeit 2.0.1).

> It only deploys to our development/CI environment automatically. Deploying out to the production tier is a button press still.

Ah missed / overlooked that!

> Code review is overrated.

Scientific research suggests otherwise though.

> or we may just post the commit in chat for review before we build out.

Isn't that 'after the fact', considering your teamcity polls the gitlab repo a lot, so a commit will trigger a build right after it, and if everything goes well, deploy it too?

So you have to know up front whether a thing is 'risky', but that's a subjective term.