The rumors were true in the end, Microsoft acquires GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. And that’s not all, Chris Wanstrath is leaving and Nat Friedman will be taking on the role of GitHub’s CEO.
This agreement is expected to close at the end of the calendar year.
Once the acquisition closes, GitHub will be led by CEO Nat Friedman, who will continue to report to Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie; GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath will be a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting to Scott.
According to a blog post made by Chris, Github has been looking for a new CEO for a while:
We have been searching for a new CEO for some time and found in both Microsoft and Nat a partner we believe will strengthen and grow the GitHub community and company over the next few years.
Nat Friedman, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, previously co-founded Ximian a company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform and was acquired by Microsoft back in February 2016.
Over in Redmond, Washington, Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO also made a blog post regarding the acquisition.
He talked about the future of Github under the Microsoft Corp. umbrella saying that Microsoft will empower developers at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
The @github Boulder office is right across the street from the Microsoft office. We just put this up in our window. pic.twitter.com/C9O9VpZR5v
— Nicole Hubbard (@nicolerenee3810) June 4, 2018
Since the rumors started, developers on Twitter started sharing their concerns about this acquisition
What is wrong with #Microsoft acquiring #GitHub : https://t.co/3gzjSmxeaL , Call me old and cranky but I won't forget what's behind the friendly facade.
— jmattheij (@jmattheij) June 4, 2018
And the hashtag #movingtogitlab became popular since many developers started moving their code from Github to Gitlab, another Git-repository manager.
We're seeing 10x the normal daily amount of repositories #movingtogitlab https://t.co/7AWH7BmMvM We're scaling our fleet to try to stay up. Follow the progress on https://t.co/hN0ce379SC and @movingtogitlab
— GitLab (@gitlab) June 3, 2018
And it didn’t take too long before people started making jokes as well about this acquisitions such as:
Wow that was fast. pic.twitter.com/KGjfd6AM3L
— Brandon Kelly (@brandonkelly) June 3, 2018
If Microsoft actually buys GitHub. pic.twitter.com/GcicxrJVYW
— Daryl Ginn (@darylginn) June 2, 2018
