Microsoft has confirmed its acquisition of the social coding platform Github in an all-stock deal worth $7.5 billion.
Microsoft has announced an agreement to acquire GitHub, the software development platform and web-based hosting service for version control using Git. The deal should close later in the year, and both parties have stated that GitHub will remain an open platform that is committed to supporting developers using any tools and deploying to any platform.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has written about the acquisition on the Official Microsoft Blog, stating that “Developers are the builders of this [digital technology] era, writing the world’s code. And GitHub is their home.” More than 28 million developers already collaborate on GitHub, and it is home to more than 85 million code repositories used by people across the globe. Many open source projects host their code on GitHub and also use the platform to plan project roadmaps, track issues, and collaborate via both issue tracking and code-driven discussions.
Nadella makes clear that “GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend”, and discusses the vision that 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 on “any cloud and any device.”
GitHub CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath has also published “A bright future for GitHub” on the GitHub Blog, and also states that Microsoft and GitHub share a common vision. Microsoft’s work on open source has inspired the GitHub team. Microsoft is a high profile committer to both git itself and open source projects hosted on GitHub. At QCon London last year Sam Guckenheimer, product owner, Visual Studio Team Services, shared the story of how Microsoft moved the Windows codebases from Source Depot to git, and in the process of overcoming inherent challenges around the size of the repository and files they created and released the open source Git Virtual File System (GVFS).
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