After a couple of days of rumors and speculations, Microsoft has officially announced that it’s acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion.
As per the company’s official blog post, Redmond has acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. After the obvious closing conditions and regulatory formalities, the complete acquisition process is expected to close by the end of the year.
As a result of this change Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and Microsoft Corporate Vice President, will be serving as GitHub’s CEO. In case you’re wondering what will happen to current CEO Chris Wanstrath, he’ll continue his work as a Microsoft technical fellow.
The blog post also mentions that GitHub will continue to serve independently and act as an open platform. “Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects,” it added.
In a statement, Microsoft CEO, who has been able to revive the company’s image in the past couple of years, has called it a step that’ll strengthen their commitment to “developer freedom, openness and innovation.”
After the deal closes, GitHub’s financials will be reports as part of Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment.
It’s worth noting how will the developer community react to this acquisition. There have been recent reports of developers flocking to competitor platforms like GitLab.
