Microsoft has officially
announced its intentions to acquire
GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform where more than 28 million developers learn, share and collaborate to create amazing products. According to Microsoft, this move is focused on empowering developers with proper tools to help them achieve more, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
GitHub
GitHub is a vast code repository that has become popular with developers and companies hosting their projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. It has also been the backbone of remote hiring of developers all over the world, allowing people in different continents collaborate on a project and bring it to life.
Microsoft is reportedly the top contributor to the site with more than 2 million commits and more than 1,000 employees actively pushing code to repositories on GitHub. Microsoft even hosts its own original Windows File Explorer source code on GitHub.
The service was last valued at $2 billion back in 2015 but Microsoft will acquire the company for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. The actual deal will go down by the end of the calendar year.
As part of the terms of agreement, GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for developers everywhere. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud service (Amazon, Google, Azure) and any device.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will step in as GitHub CEO. GitHub’s current CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will move on to become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie.
Check out more details in this
public presentation.
