Pentagon furor may have distracted Google in the offer to buy GitHub – BGR

The Google Cloud CEO conceded Wednesday in San Francisco that many people suspected that the Mountain View IT giant had been beaten by Microsoft to buy GitHub, a $ 7.5 billion deal.

Speaking at Fortune's "1945-2000" event "The Night of the Most Powerful Women", Google Cloud's director, Diane Greene, noted with nostalgia: "I do not know what's going on." would not have thought of buying them, but that's OK, "according to a report Bloomberg This comes after accounts like that of CNBC earlier this month that noted that Google and GitHub were

It should be noted that Google's interest in the purchase of the service was also caused by a major internal shot in the form of protests – a Google contract with the Pentagon for the work related to artificial intelligence.

A few thousand Google staff members signed a petition demanding that the company be kept out of the "war business" with the company. Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to analyze and make sense of dron sequences

Greene finally told employees that the company would not renew the contract, which could have diverted Google from a possible acquisition of GitHub. Other factors have probably included the affinity of GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Greene – an influential figure who also sits on the board of directors of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. and has been directing his cloud effort since 2015 A bit of shadow yesterday, hoping that Microsoft could keep the code repository "totally neutral". Some 85 million repositories are hosted on this service to which nearly 30 million developers contribute, as well as technology giants like Amazon and Facebook.

The latter reaffirmed his commitment to GitHub, with a spokesman for Facebook saying The Verge that "as long as GitHub remains a good place to share our projects and collaborate with the open source community, we let's continue to use it. "

According to a report that provides a bit more context for the purchase of GitHub, both Microsoft's Nadella and soon CEO GitHub Nat Friedman made it clear that GitHub will be run as an independent effort from Redmond's mother ship. "LinkedIn has been cited as an example, although Microsoft may regret the comparison." Following the acquisition of the social media platform in 2016, Microsoft mined the data for its own purposes, which is exactly what worries the developers. "

In the meantime, a competitor GitHub – GitLab – announced this week he is moving to Google's cloud platform. The race, in other words, continues.