Update, Monday morning: Microsoft confirmed the deal, announcing an agreement to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock.
Microsoft has reportedly agreed to acquire software development platform GitHub. Bloomberg reported Sunday that the acquisition could be announced as soon as Monday.
Why would Microsoft want GitHub? Developers, developers, developers ― and the cloud
GitHub, valued at $2 billion as of a 2015 funding round, is a popular code repository hosting service used by many developers and big companies including Facebook, Airbnb, SAP, IBM, and many others. GitHub said it hosted 80 million code repositories as of March of this year.
Microsoft is one of the top contributors to GitHub, and the companies touted their collaboration on stage at the Microsoft Build developer conference in Seattle last month.
Acquiring GitHub would be the latest move by the Redmond company into the world of open-source development. The company aggressively recruited a series of open-source developers and developer advocates to join its ranks last year. Microsoft has increasingly worked with open-source technologies and projects, and it has largely allowed its recent acquisitions to continue operating independently, but one big question is how Microsoft’s competitors, many of them heavy GitHub users, will react to the deal.
I got an email from one my client who is @Github private repo business customer. They want to move out of Github to a personal GIT server hosted either in AWS or Google Cloud. They fear that Microsoft might get insight into their codebase. Small startups/business do not trust MS.
— nixCraft (@nixcraft) June 3, 2018
This is likely to be one of the top questions facing Microsoft and GitHub when the deal is formally announced.
Business Insider first reported Friday that the companies had held talks about a potential acquisition, but that report said it wasn’t clear if the talks were ongoing. San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been looking for a new CEO for the past nine months, is unprofitable, Bloomberg reported.
Microsoft isn’t commenting. The purchase price hasn’t leaked yet, but given GitHub’s last public valuation, the acquisition looks to be one of the largest deals by Microsoft under Nadella. Microsoft’s largest acquisition to date was its $26 billion deal for LinkedIn, the business social network.
