Its been a week since we are hearing rumors about Microsoft acquiring GitHub, popular Git-based codeshare, and collaboration service. Yesterday, Microsoft confirmed that it had acquired GitHub. The price of the acquisition was $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. GitHub raised $350 million, and the company was valued about $2 billion in 2015.
Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion
Former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman and Now Microsoft corporate vice president will become GitHub’s CEO. The former CEO Chris Wanstrath will become Microsoft technical fellow and work on strategic software initiatives. Wanstrath has retaken his CEO role after co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned after a harassment investigation back in 2014.
“GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries,” Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch
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Hosting 85 million repositories and 28 million contributing developers, GitHub enjoys great popularity amongst developers and companies who host their code, entire projects, and documentation on the platform. GitHub is also being used by major technology companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Google. Competing with GitHub, Microsoft also launched Codeplex but later killed the project to become the top contributor on GitHub with over 1000 employees contributing to code repositories.
This is the second big acquisition of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. In 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion deal. LinkedIn has largely remained a separate entity just with some integration of Microsoft Office. Microsoft has promised that GitHub will remain independent and open, however, it is yet to be seen how Microsoft will expand GitHub’s enterprise services.
It is the second acquisition of Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft. Back in 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Microsoft is acquiring GitHub because it’s a perfect fit for its own ambitions to be the go-to platform for every developer, and every developer need, no matter the platform.
Yet at the same time, it’s worth remembering that Microsoft is now a member of the Linux Foundation and regularly backs a number of open source projects. And Windows now has the Linux subsystem while VS Code, the company’s free code editing tool is open source and available on GitHub, as are .NET Core and numerous other Microsoft-led projects.
