Monday, October 29, 2018

On Friday, US-based technology giant Microsoft confirmed acquisition of software code hosting and version controlling website GitHub. The announcement was made by Microsoft via their official blog, which also mentioned Nat Friedman was to become new Chief Executive Officer of GitHub.

Microsoft had announced plans to acquire GitHub for a price of 7.5 billion US dollars (USD) on June 4. On October 19, the European Union’s regulators approved the acquisition. According to the June announcement, Microsoft was to pay the amount in stock.

After Microsoft made the announcement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted, saying, “I’m thrilled to welcome GitHub to Microsoft. Together, we will continue to advance GitHub as a platform loved by developers and trusted by organizations.”

In a GitHub blog titled “Pull request successfully merged. Starting build…”, Nat Friedman said making the platform “accessible to more developers around the world” as well as “[r]eliability, security, and performance” were in “top of mind for” them. He also stated, “GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business” and “will retain its product philosophy”, keeping “its developer-first values”. He also wrote today was to be his first day as GitHub’s CEO.

Friedman was previously the CEO of Xamarin, a software company that allows developers to create native iOS, Android and Windows phone applications written in the C# programming language. Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016.

According to Friedman’s blog, GitHub is used by more than 31 million developers worldwide. Technology giants including companies like Airbnb, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft itself have been using GitHub for their open-source projects. However, on May 31, days before Microsoft announced plans for GitHub acquisition, desktop environment software GNOME completed moving from GitHub to GitLab, another software code sharing, hosting and version control providing website, a competitor of GitHub.