Microsoft buys GitHub,  world’s largest coding platform for $7.5bn

Microsoft today confirmed that it acquired Git-Hub, a popular Git-based code sharing and collaboration service for $7.5billion  in Microsoft stock. GitHub raised $350m and the company was valued at £2bn in 2015.

Former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman ( now Microsoft corporate vice president)  will become the GitHub’s CEO. Former GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow and work on strategic software initiatives.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson, “GitHub will retain its developer first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries”. In March 2018 GitHub has 28 million developers in its community and 85 million code repositories making it the world’s largest host of source code.

Git-repository hosting service founded on February 8, 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner,  a software developer, inventor and entrepreneur and active contributor within the open-source development community in the San Francisco Bay Area, named as one of the Fortune 40 under 40,  Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett and within the first year of being online, they had accumulated 46, 000 public repositories, 17, 000 of which were formed in the previous month alone.

The founders now own about 10 times more shares than Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, a stock deal equivalent to 73.8 million shares, half of which would pass to GitHub’s three founders with only Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates’ holding exceeding that of GitHub founders.