Microsoft Officially Announces Planned GitHub Acquisition for $7.5B

Software giant Microsoft just announced that it was working to acquire the online coding platform GitHub for $7.5 billion. The deal is expected to be concluded later in the year and the payments are going to be in stocks. Once the acquisition pulls through, it will augment Microsoft’s development capabilities, especially with regards to its artificial intelligence pursuits.

As a popular community and repository for programmers, GitHub is used by individual coders and entire companies alike, The Verge reports. The platform was valued at $2 billion back in 2015. Clearly, this figure has gone up since then. Either that or Microsoft just really wants to get its hands on GitHub.

In any case, one of the biggest benefits of the acquisition to Microsoft will naturally be the development resources that it will then have at its disposal. GitHub is where developers and brands host many of their projects and unique codes. Even tech giants like Apple and Google use the platform to host their own works.

Currently, there are about 28 million developers contributing to the growing repository of codes on the site, which has since reached about 85 million. One of the top contributors to GitHub is, in fact, Microsoft itself.

With this acquisition, the platform is also finally getting a new CEO since its previous one, Chris Wanstrath, has been looking to retire for some time now. Going forward, the site will be led by Xamarin founder Nat Friedman, Microsoft said in its announcement. Friedman will be directly under Scott Guthrie, who is the Cloud and AI chief over at Microsoft.

As for what the software giant plans to do for the immediate future of GitHub, it seems it is content to keep the format the same right now. Microsoft also notes that it wants to empower the developer community by maintaining the open-source format.