By Pascal Oparada
Microsoft today announced the acquisition of GitHub, an online Git repository hosting platform for developers. The tech giant coughed out $7.5 billion for the acquisition.
In June Microsoft announced it was in talks to acquire the the platform.
Today the company announced in a blog post the completion of the acquisition and laid out plans for the future of GitHub.
“GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently, and remain an open platform,” Microsoft’s post says.
Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin — a cross-platform development company that Microsoft acquired back in 2016 — is taking over as the CEO of GitHub. In a GitHub blog postalso published on Friday, Friedman echoed Microsoft’s vision for the platform’s future
“GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business,” wrote Friedman. “As the world’s largest developer community, GitHub brings together over 31 million developers to create, collaborate, share, and build on each other’s work. Our vision is to serve every developer on the planet, by being the best place to build software.”
GitHub is a Git repository hosting service, but it adds many of its own features. While Git is a command line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface. It also provides access control and several collaboration features, such as a wikis and basic task management tools for every project.