Microsoft Closes $ 7.5 Billion Purchase of GitHub Code Sharing Platform – TechCrunch



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After receiving approval from the EU a week ago, Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, the Git-based code sharing and collaboration service with 31 million developers, has been officially closed. The software giant based in Redmond, WA, first announced that it would acquire GitHub for $ 7.5 billion of shares in June of this year and that after the completion of the acquisition, he would continue to manage it as an independent platform and enterprise.

The acquisition is another sign of how Microsoft tries to woo the developers and presents itself as a neutral partner to help them in their projects.

Indeed, despite its proprietary, highly profitable proprietary business, Microsoft also has a number of other companies – for example, Azure, which competes with AWS and Google Cloud – that rely heavily on its impartiality for a platform or other. And GitHub, Microsoft hopes this will be another signal for the community.

In this respect, it will be an interesting credibility test for companies.

As previously announced, Nat Friedman, who was the CEO of Xamarin (another developer-driven startup acquired by Microsoft in 2016), will be the CEO of the company, while GitHub's founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technician working on strategic software initiatives. (Wanstrath returned to his position as CEO after the resignation of co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, following a harbadment investigation in 2014.)

Friedman, in a short note, said that he would take office Monday, and he also repeated what Microsoft had said at the time of the transaction: GitHub will be run as an independent platform and business.

This is critical, as the agreement has generated a lot of feedback from developers, many wondering if GitHub will become partial or more interested in Microsoft projects or products.

"We will always support developers in choosing their language, license, tool, platform or cloud," he writes, noting that there will be more tools coming up. "We will continue to create refined, fast and refined tools that developers love," he added.

One of these, he noted, will be the future development and investment in Paper Cuts, a project launched in August that, he hopes, will help solve some of the problems that its developer-users might have with the GitHub operation that the company itself did not have We did not intend to address any larger upgrades. The idea here is that GitHub can either help find workarounds, or become a feedback forum to determine what should be updated later on the site.

Of course, the need to remain neutral is not only to keep its 31 million developers (3 million more since the announcement of the transaction), but also to prevent them from turning to competitors GitHub, including GitLab and Bitbucket.

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