Microsoft makes $7.5bn acquisition
Tech giant announces it has reached agreement to grab open source coding site GitHub
Microsoft has announced that it has agreed to acquire GitHub for $7.5bn (£5.6m) in Microsoft stock.
GitHub is an open source coding site which allows software developers to host their code in the cloud or to collaborate inhouse on projects. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of this calendar year.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said that the acquisition is in line with the tech giant's ethos of being a developer-first company and that it signifies Microsoft's "commitment" to strengthening this ethos.
"We recognise the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world's most pressing challenges," he said.
Though it boasts 28 million users globally and is the most popular open source code repository among developers, GitHub is not without its woes. Last valued at $2bn in 2015, the company lost $66m in the first nine months of 2016, according to Bloomberg, which first reported news of the deal last night. It has also struggled for months to find a replacement for CEO Chris Wanstrath. Microsoft corporate vice president Nat Friedman will now take his place as GitHub CEO.
Microsoft was quick to calm any worries of change that GitHub's community of users would have about the acquisition. It confirmed that developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects, and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.
Outgoing CEO Wanstrath, who will now become a technical fellow working on software initiatives, welcomed the news and said he was "thrilled" to be working with the tech behemoth.
"Their focus on developers lines up perfectly with our own, and their scale, tools and global cloud will play a huge role in making GitHub even more valuable for developers everywhere."