Microsoft completes $ 7.5 billion acquisition in GitHub

The acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft has received regulatory approval and is now official. Microsoft has announced the completion of its $ 7.5 billion GitHub hosting and development service acquisition on Oct. 26.

Regulators from the European Union have approved the acquisition of Microsoft GitHub on October 19.

Microsoft announced plans to buy GitHub on June 4, 2018. At that time, officials said Xamarin's CEO, Microsoft, Nat Friedman, would become the CEO of the San Francisco-based development platform. GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath has agreed to become a Microsoft Technical Fellow as part of this agreement.

The reaction of developers to the idea that Microsoft becomes the steward of GitHub has been mixed. Some, noting the changes in the business since Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, said they believed Microsoft would provide a good home to GitHub. Others said that they were always suspicious of Microsoft and were considering moving away from the platform once Microsoft took control of it.

Microsoft officials said the company's intention was to keep the platform and languages ​​independent of GitHub. Microsoft officials said that they intended to treat GitHub's acquisition essentially as if it had acted with LinkedIn, which means that it would let it run independently.

A few days after Microsoft released its plans to acquire GitHub, Friedman said, "We do not buy GitHub to turn it into Microsoft, we buy GitHub because we believe in the importance of GitHub. developers and the unique role of GitHub in the developer community, our goal is to help GitHub become better GitHub and possibly help Microsoft to look a little bit more like GitHub. "

"We will start by focusing on the daily experience of using GitHub and doubling our paper reduction project," Friedman said in a blog post announcing the finalization of the acquisition. "We're going to improve baseline scenarios like search, notifications, issues / projects, and our mobile experience, and of course we're excited to make GitHub stock widely available."

When it called for the first quarter results of fiscal year 19, on Oct. 24, Microsoft officials had announced that they were expecting the upcoming close of the GitHub acquisition and had already incorporated the impact of the operation, in terms of accounting and integration, into its outlook for the remainder of fiscal year 2019.