Microsoft has acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion

Microsoft has Acquired GitHub for $7.5 Billion

Microsoft has acquired GitHub for $7.5 Billion!!

Microsoft confirmed on Monday (June 4, 2018) that it has acquired GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform for $7.5 Billion.

GitHub was first introduced in 2005 by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. It is the largest software developer’s community that has more than 28 million individual developers collaborating on GitHub and it is home to more than 85 million code repositories used by people in nearly every country. GitHub carries a functionality of making a change-log or history of all changes made to their code while developing a specific project. It is used by big tech companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and IBM to store their corporate code and privately collaborate on software, however, Microsoft is one of the top contributors to the web-hosting service.

According to the official announcement post, Microsoft is the most active organization on GitHub with more than 2 million “commits”, or updates, made to projects.

Microsoft has been a developer-focused company from the very first product to date. Building a bold technology so that others can benefit from it and build more technology is the main motive that Microsoft carries. The company looks forward to empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, according to Microsoft. The company is also committed to empowering the IT professionals to gamers.

This is not the first attempt to buy GitHub by Microsoft. Earlier in the year 2016, Microsoft attempted to buy GitHub when GitHub was raising the second round of funding. However, GitHub, back then, denied the rumors. And yesterday, after two long years of attempting, Microsoft has acquired GitHub for $7.5 Billion.

In the blog post, Microsoft announced three clear opportunities it sees ahead with the newly bought GitHub:

  • Microsoft will empower developers at every stage of the development lifecycle. GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will 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.
  • Microsoft will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub with their direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services.
  • Microsoft will bring its developer tools and services to new audiences.

GitHub is widely used by the developers in WordPress communities around the globe. Similarly, the Nepali web developers use GitHub to track the change-log or the history of all the changes in coding to develop one fine project as well. Since almost all the significant projects developed in WordPress are committed in Git, it is really important that we stay updated on the latest news of GitHub being bought by Microsoft as the changes that come along with this acquisition might affect the project-commits in WordPress.

Microsoft is the name that has almost always created heated arguments in open source communities. And the company buying something that is so closely related to the open source is definitely expected to bring a plenty of backlashes.

What do you think about this acquisition? Will you still be using GitHub after it being purchased by Microsoft? Let us know your thoughts in comments.

News Source: MicrosoftThe Hacker NewsTech Crunch