Microsoft is reportedly marking one of the biggest tech acquisition in 2018, buying the leading open-source software development platform GitHub.
People familiar with the matter told Business Insider that GitHub has been struggling to find a CEO since former CEO Chris Wanstrath announced resignation nine months back. The company has failed to generate profits. Microsoft might officially announce the acquisition earlier this week.
GitHub is one of the world’s leading software development platform, hosting 27 million developers who are working on 80 million repositories of code. The top tech companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, and IBM use GitHub to host and review code, manage projects, and build software.
In fact, over 1000 of developers from Microsoft itself use GitHub to write code for projects hosted on the site. GitHub has preferred Microsoft partially because of the impressive leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, said one of the sources. Microsoft was in talks to team up with GitHub, but ended up discussing on acquisition.
“The companies have had on-and-off conversations over the years, but talks have grown more serious in the past few weeks,” sources told Business Insider.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that computing has reached everywhere, and is embedded in places, things, homes, and cities. The world has become a computer itself. And if the world is a computer, the developers are a new seat of power.
GitHub is a primary vehicle for developers that allows them to collaborate and share ideas along with writing code. It is like LinkedIn for developers. The acquisition of GitHub will help Microsoft to bring its cloud and development tools to more developers.
Also read: Microsoft Cloud is up to 93% more energy efficient than traditional on-premise datacenters: Report
Terms of the acquisition weren’t known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.
Bloomberg tried connecting with Microsoft and GitHub but both the companies declined to comment.
