Microsoft has announced today that its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub is now complete. The company stated its intent to acquire the company back in June and now the deal is done; Microsoft owns the developer platform.
The company has said that they plan to leave the service independent of the larger company; this is a similar strategy to what they have done with LinkedIn. That being said, you can expect that the service will now be fully integrated into everything the company offers and for developers who use the Microsoft stack, this should make DevOps easier as well.
In the announcement of the closing of the acquisition, Nat Friedman, who will now run the company, states:
GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business. This means that GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.
Following the announcement, reaction to the news was all over the board with some, who are still stuck in 1993, viewed this as Microsoft destroying competition. But for those who have been following the company during the past few years, especially as it has embraced open source methodologies, view this as a positive thing for the ecosystem and expect Microsoft to only enhance the offering.
Following the announcement in June that Microsoft would acquire the company, the platform has added 3 million developers to its userbase which now stands at 31 million. If there was truly fear that the platform would collapse under Microsoft’s control, the business realities do not reflect the twitter conspiracy theories.