Tech News

Microsoft Acquires GitHub

Microsoft has acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion (https://news.microsoft.com/?p=406917 ). The acquisition brings financial stability and leadership to GitHub. On the other hand, Microsoft gets access to 28 million developers who use the platform.

Nat Friedman, the cofounder of Gnome, will become the CEO of GitHub. GitHub's current CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, to work on strategic software initiatives.

"Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub, we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness, and innovation," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. "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 says GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for developers in all industries.

According to the press release, developers will be able to use the programming language, tools, and operating system of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system or cloud platform.