Tech Giant Microsoft Announces Its Acquisition of the World’s Leading Software Development Platform GitHub
June 04, 2018
Huge news in the programming and business world today as Microsoft has announced a $7.5 billion deal to buy the code-sharing service GitHub. GitHub is the world’s largest source code host, with over 28 million users and 85 million code repositories. The deal was organized by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and GitHub CEO and co-founder Wanstrath, which also established that former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman would become the new CEO of GitHub. The acquisition makes a lot of sense for both GitHub and Microsoft.
GitHub, while incredibly popular with most programmers, has been struggling to turn a profit for several years. Bloomberg even reported that the company lost $66 million in the year of 2016. Going under the wing of Microsoft will allow the company to stay financially afloat for many years to come. Microsoft hopes that owning GitHub will make the company much more desirable to programmers across all platforms. The company even claims to already be the world’s most active contributor to GitHub, with over 2 million repository commits from the company.
Microsoft Embracing Open Source?
This is Microsoft’s biggest and most recent push in the direction of embracing open source software development. Although in the past Microsoft has opposed using open source products such as the Linux kernel, in recent years under the leadership of Nadella the company has been increasingly involved with the open source community. This has included the open sourcing select Microsoft programs such as PowerShell and the Microsoft Edge JavaScript engine. The company has even brought their SQL servers to Linux.
For now, there are still many questions regarding how GitHub will operate under Microsoft’s ownership. How will GitHub interact with Microsoft’s Azure cloud hosting services? How will they deal with competitors on GitHub such as Apple developers? How much will Microsoft commit to open source projects? Until these questions are answered, it will be very interesting to see the operations of GitHub in the future.
Call Now!
