As of today, GitHub is officially owned by Microsoft. Exactly one week after the European Union approved the acquisition, GitHub’s CEO Nat Friedman announced that the transaction has now been formally completed. In the blog post, Friedman again emphasises the promises made by Microsoft in June, when it first expressed an interest in the code platform.
In the blog in which Friedman announces the news, the CEO writes that GitHub will continue to exist independently as a community, platform and company. This means that GitHub will continue to put the developer first, differentiate itself and remain openly accessible. Friedman also states that GitHub will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform or cloud.
Little changes
When the $7.5 billion acquisition was announced, some users were afraid that Microsoft would change the policy and functionality of GitHub. Where it is now the tech industry’s main platform for open-source projects, developers feared that this would come to an end.
But as a whole, most people don’t seem to worry much. The number of users of GitHub has grown from 28 million to 31 million today since the acquisition. Microsoft is therefore going to change relatively little in the first instance. The company focuses primarily on improving the interface. According to Friedman, one of the priorities is Project Paper Cuts, which aims to streamline the user experience based on feedback from the community.
Longer term
In the future, developers will have access to more Microsoft products. CEO Satya Nadella stated when the acquisition was announced in June that GitHub would be integrated with more Microsoft products. The acquisition was intended to bring Microsoft’s development tools and services to a new audience.
Part of the long term is also Microsoft’s quest to make money with the platform. GitHub already offers a subscription service for this purpose and came up with GitHub Actions earlier this month, which can automate certain parts of projects. Finally, Friedman started his first day as CEO today. That position was previously reserved for co-founder Chris Wanstrath, who is now working as a technical fellow for Microsoft.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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