All the rumors have come to a close. GitHub, one of the world’s leading software development platform, is acquired by Microsoft at the price of $7.5 billion.
What’s GitHub?
Since its founding in 2011, GitHub has become an essential tool for developers and companies to host entire projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. GitHub has provided important resource for more than 28 million developers and has been the home to billions of lines of open source code. Up to now, more than 85 million repositories have hosted on GitHub.
Before the acquisition, GitHub is facing a dilemma between the popularity and profit. GitHub wins a good reputation among the enterprise users, individual developers and open source projects, however, it has never turned a profit. The company has decided an acquisition rather than an IPO.
Why is Microsoft buying GitHub?
Microsoft has struggled for the developers’ love for years. However, due to the past abuses, all the attempts failed. Last year, Microsoft killed its own GitHub competitor, Codeplex, in December and is now the top contributor to GitHub, Microsoft now has more than 1,000 employees actively pushing code to GitHub repositories.
Acquiring GitHub is a perfect fit for Microsoft’s ambitions to be the go-to platform for every and every developer need, no matter the platform. Last time, Microsoft learned it lessons in the Windows Phone, where its universal windows apps platform hasn’t taken off.
After acquired by Microsoft, what will happen?
GitHub will now be led by CEO Nat Friedman, the founder of Xamarin, who will report to Microsoft’s Cloud and AI chief Scott Guthrie. GitHub CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath will now become a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting into Guthrie.
Will Microsoft make the GitHub stay as separate as LinkedIn? The answers remains unknown. However, there is a signal that some of the developers are trying to move to GitHub’s competitors. GitLab claims it has been a 10x increase of developers moving their repositories over to its service.
The integration of these big companies and small startups certainly have to face a tough journey , but who knows what will happen in next moment.
