GitHub needs no introduction. The world’s largest code repository is acquired by Microsoft. The GitHub acquisition stacks up as the second such big deal after Satya Nadella took reigns of Microsoft in 2015. As part of the deal, Microsoft is paying $7.5 billion in the form of stocks for the company. Hopefully, the deal should be completed by the end of this year.
Microsoft acquires GitHub
GitHub has been the go-to option when it comes to developers and larger companies that are hosting entire projects. Apart from the code GitHub also takes care of the documentation and code. As a matter of fact companies like Apple, Amazon and Google use GitHub. As we talk 85-million repositories are hosted on GitHub and nearly 28 million developers are contributing to it.
Interestingly Microsoft themselves had a GitHub competitor called Codeplex. Last year Microsoft decided to pull the plugs on Codeplex and they themselves shifted to GitHub. Microsoft now has more than 1000 employees who are pushing their codes and using Github for their repositories. With this acquisition, Microsoft is also expected to earn some brownie points when it comes to the developer community and the overall open source scene. It is quite likely that this acquisition will inspire other companies to bring their business to GitHub.
“We will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services.”- Satya Nadella.
On the other hand, Microsoft needs to work hard in order to gain the trust of developers and other smaller companies. Generally, such companies are wary of larger organizations. It might so happen that the developers may migrate to the GitHub rivals.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has set sailing in a different direction and is currently pushing open source technology. They have been very open about welcoming Ubuntu on the Windows 10 and recently they had announced efforts aimed at helping advanced open source licensing.
