Microsoft Buys GitHub

It’s a big deal. Literally.

$7.5 billion is nothing to scoff at, even when Microsoft was scraping in around $90 billion in 2017.

GitHub, the world’s leading development platform is currently in its latest stages of being bought by Microsoft.

What is GitHub? We’ll give it to you in one sentence:

GitHub is basically a Google Doc for code.

That has to be a record.

In more technical terms, it is the largest code repository in the world, and allows programmers from literally anywhere to write their own code, work on it with others, have complete strangers view and edit it (with owner permission of course), give feedback, send ideas, and blah blah, you get the picture.

Since GitHub was founded in 2008, it has amassed over 28 million users, and its largest clients are a few companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and of course, Microsoft. What this acquisition means for competitors like Apple we have yet to find out.

The acquisition seems well received on both ends of the deal. The CEO and Founder of GitHub, Chris Wanstrath will become a “Technical Fellow” at Microsoft, and Nat Friedman will become the new CEO of GitHub.

The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, made a point to emphasize that Microsoft wants to be respectful of the GitHub community and keep developers as the top priority and maintain an open platform. We all know how much LinkedIn changed after Microsoft purchased LinkedIn, right? Well, not that much at all really. And that’s what we hope will happen with GitHub. We’re likely to see strategic business moves that will favour Microsoft, but they aren’t going to do anything drastic like cut Apple off from using the service. They didn’t do that with Sony users playing Minecraft (which Microsoft also bought), so we’re not too worried about seeing anything like that happen with GitHub.

GitHub is a product that we choose to use for all of our open source programming at ROI Media Works. We’ll be following any new updates on this acquisition closely and will let you know about any new circumstances as they appear.