Pierluigi Paganini June 04, 2018

Microsoft has reportedly acquired the popular code repository hosting service GitHub, but at the time of writing there is no news about how much Microsoft paid for the platform.

Microsoft has reportedly acquired the popular code repository hosting service GitHub.

GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015, but at the time of writing there is no news about how much Microsoft paid for the platform.

“The software maker has agreed to acquire GitHub, the code-repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.” reported a post published by Bloomberg.

GitHub board decided to sell to Microsoft because of the leadership of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and his vision on the open source technology.

Github currently hosts more than 80 million code repositories, it has a privileged position in the software development community, the company that owns this platform could have strategic benefits from the knowledge of the projects that are hosted on the platform.

Of course, part of the open source community disagrees with Github move and is opting to switch to competitor services such as BitBucket or GitLab.

To those that have @GitHub accounts:

If @Microsoft buys GitHub… would you continue to use it? Or would you move your repositories to a different service?

— Bryan Lunduke (@BryanLunduke) June 2, 2018

Many development teams fear Microsoft could abuse its position after the acquisition gaining full access to the millions of private projects hosted on GutHub.

The code hosting service GitLab has seen a massive traffic spike after news of the deal, with thousands of projects and code repositories are being transferred from GitHub.

Updated on June 4

In a blog post published today, Microsoft confirmed that will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock.

“GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. 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 to any operating system, any cloud and any device.” reads the blog post.

“Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will assume the role of GitHub CEO. 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.”

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – code repository GitHub, Microsoft)

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