The funny thing is I was working on a pitch to get Atlassian to buy them so they don't end up in Microsoft's hands. I thought integration with a repo company would be good since they could cross-sell it for code understanding and maintenance. Then I see this article. (sighs) At least I got it right on the type of company that would grab them.
I'd push something else for security, though, to complement it. RV-Match is my favorite commercial one because they built on a formal semantics for C, it's set for low false positives, and they open source a lot of stuff. They have something for Java and smart contracts, too. Past that, what's good depends on what language you use.
Just a small fraction of the industry's ongoing software development is done in C. Obvious, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla still write a lot of it, but you don't acquire a whole company to address 4-and-change customers.
They'd have them retarget to what's popular post-acquisition in my concept. Especially among their paying customers. Keep adding languages or just useful things for it to look for.
They were kind of a default since there's only a few huge ones. Main win: it's not Microsoft. MS already has lots of internal tools from MS Research they were wasting. They probably couldve built Semmle themselves. They're also a known patent troll. I don't know if Semmle's methods are patented, though.
I'd rather a company like them not acquire them in favor of one that is constantly developing new services with no attempts to financially drain 3rd parties. Not to say good won't come out of Github integration given huge number of projects in it.
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The funny thing is I was working on a pitch to get Atlassian to buy them so they don't end up in Microsoft's hands. I thought integration with a repo company would be good since they could cross-sell it for code understanding and maintenance. Then I see this article. (sighs) At least I got it right on the type of company that would grab them.
I'd push something else for security, though, to complement it. RV-Match is my favorite commercial one because they built on a formal semantics for C, it's set for low false positives, and they open source a lot of stuff. They have something for Java and smart contracts, too. Past that, what's good depends on what language you use.
Just a small fraction of the industry's ongoing software development is done in C. Obvious, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla still write a lot of it, but you don't acquire a whole company to address 4-and-change customers.
They'd have them retarget to what's popular post-acquisition in my concept. Especially among their paying customers. Keep adding languages or just useful things for it to look for.
Security problems aren't interchangeable between languages, and C has a very particular set of concerns that don't translate.
Why would Atlassian be better?
They were kind of a default since there's only a few huge ones. Main win: it's not Microsoft. MS already has lots of internal tools from MS Research they were wasting. They probably couldve built Semmle themselves. They're also a known patent troll. I don't know if Semmle's methods are patented, though.
I'd rather a company like them not acquire them in favor of one that is constantly developing new services with no attempts to financially drain 3rd parties. Not to say good won't come out of Github integration given huge number of projects in it.