Microsoft announced, on Monday, that it has acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. GitHub is a leading software development platform where over 28 million developers share and collaborate.
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“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.”
Microsoft expects the acquisition to close by the end of the calendar year. According to media reports, GitHub raised $350 million in funding and had a valuation of $2 billion in 2015 prior to the acquisition.
Top things to know about GitHub:
- San Francisco-based GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Companies including Microsoft and Google, use it to store their corporate code and to collaborate.
- It’s also a social network of sorts for developers.
- Git is a version control system to track changes in computer files and coordinate the work between multiple people.
- It was originally created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 as he was developing a Linux kernel.
- GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos, which is back to the basics for Microsoft’s as began with market for software-development tools. In the early 2000s the company became critical of open-source program, the kind that is built in GitHub today, as it was a threat to its business model. However, under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is supporting many flavors of Linux and has used open-source models.
- Using GitHub for public and open source projects was free for users so far.
- It will operate independently in order to provide an open platform.
- Developers will be able to continue using the programming languages, operating systems and tools of their choice for projects.
- They will still be able to deploy their code to any cloud, device and operating system.
- Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Xamarin founder Nat Friedman will become the GitHub CEO.
- Chris Wanstrath, the current CEO of GitHub will become a Microsoft technical fellow and will report to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie about strategic software programs.
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