“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” said the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, in a press release. “We recognize 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.”
Microsoft says that GitHub will still continue to operate independently.
Today Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5B by issuing about 73 million new shares of stock.
At the same time the stock gained roughly 0.9% to $101.70 per share, that gives a market cap of $781.151B.
781.151*0.009 = $7.030359 billion
= Today's acquisition was almost free
— Kenneth Auchenberg (@auchenberg) June 5, 2018
Chris Wanstrath, Github’s current CEO (who is planning on stepping down); cofounder and “single largest shareholder,” is expected to receive $1.5 billion in Microsoft stock, giving him billionaire status. Microsoft and GitHub investors are also expected to benefit from this purchase.
In Boulder, The @Github and @Microsoft offices are across the street from each other. In response to today's acquisition they are showing love notes to each other. #Coloradotech is awesome! (Photos from @nicolerenee3810) pic.twitter.com/dJYmmHrMuj
— Scott Pantall (@scottpantall) June 4, 2018
On the flip side, as Motherboard reported, the acquisition was met with mixed feelings from developers and around 13,000 projects have left GitHub for GitLab. One report says that bitcoin developers are moving platforms en masse and calling this acquisition “the beginning of a long painful road of [GitHub- toward [obsolescence].”
Microsoft is purchasing @github. R.I.P. Open Source.
— GeoSn0w (@FCE365) June 5, 2018
But, as put by Ars Technica writer Peter Bright, GitHub needed to be bought and Microsoft was not the worst choice.
“The Microsoft of today is a company that understands and embraces open-source development, both in the strict technical sense of publishing source code and in the broader sense of community-driven, collaborative development. The movement appears to be genuine, and frankly, that’s not something that we should find altogether surprising: there’s a hell of a lot of programmers working at the company, and many of them are users or contributors of open-source software themselves. They get it; it was only a matter of time before the company did, too.” — Peter Bright
