Microsoft Closes Its $7.5 Billion Purchase of GitHub

Microsoft has official closed its acquisition of GitHub, the Git-based code sharing and collaboration service with 31 million developers. 'The Redmond, WA-based software behemoth first said it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock in June of this year, and after the acquisition closed it would continue to run it as an independent platform and business,' reports TechCrunch. From the report: The acquisition is yet another sign of how Microsoft has been doubling down on courting developers and presenting itself as a neutral partner to help them with their projects. That is because, despite its own very profitable proprietary software business, Microsoft also has a number of other businesses -- for example, Azure, which competes with AWS and Google Cloud -- that rely heavily on it being unbiased towards one platform or another. And GitHub, Microsoft hopes, will be another signal to the community of that position. In that regard, it will be an interesting credibility test for the companies. Nat Friedman, previously the CEO of Xamarin, will be the CEO of GitHub on Monday. He says the site will be run as an independent platform and business. 'We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud,' he writes, noting that there will be more tools to come. 'We will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love,' he added.

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